I think my parents are starting to get a clue about Ursula, too. They were helping me move the last of my stuff out of my old place, and I noticed a big DRAG BOOK sticking out of one of the boxes they'd packed up! It was some fat pink book with big painted queens all over the cover, the kinda thing that'd make any parent suspicious. I'm sure they've also wondered about litle details like my shaved arms, and the various cosmetics I've accidentally left in plain sight once or twice when my folks dropped by for a visit. I just know that one of these days when mommy and daddy are dropping by I'll screw up and leave a size 12 high-heel lying around! Of course I'm tempted to just tell my parents the truth & be done with it, but that's NOT a good idea. I love my mom & dad, but they're not too cool about some things; just recently drag queens somehow came up when I was talking to my mom, & she went into this big bigoted rant, it was loads of fun to listen to. I doubt my parents would disown me if I told them all about Ursula, but it would be this HUGE family trauma with lots of tears and hollering and sleepless nights for all concerned. Considering how these days I only see my parents once or twice a month (they live way out in the desert,) I think I'm doing us all a favor by keeping my shameful proclivities a secret. Unfortunately the more Ursula invades my life, the less I have to talk about with my parents when I do see them. I'm so busy trying to remember everything I CAN'T talk about that I don't have much energy left to think of stuff that I CAN talk about. My parents must wonder why I've been gradually shutting them out of my life. We were so close once, and now every conversation is strained at best and downright painful at worst. I wish I could tell them the truth: we're losing each other because I love them too much to hurt them by letting them see who I really am.

10/4/98
Well, we're settling in to our new place fine... other than the car crash we got into earlier tonight just outside our driveway. Some old lady plowed into us. The damages were fairly minor & no bones were broken, but we're plenty rattled. Our place is great, it's got a zillion rooms & it's nice & cool even in the summertime. It's kinda like a Jetsons house, you push a button & dishrag racks come sliding out've the walls.

I have a new email pal, a cantankerous young author named Revered Tom. I first met him when he sent me a vicious parody of my online diary: "First I went to this club and then I went to that club and then I went to another club and then the next day my boss yelled at me at work, don't you HATE it when that happens, so that night I went to another club and I met this guy he was SO cute and now I'm in love and the next morning I'm not in love anymore. Don't you HATE it when that happens?" He made Ursula sound like the biggest airhead in the world! I did think it was pretty funny, but it was so mean! It was riddled with errors, too... like I never said I was in love with any boy but K! Linna doesn't count. Even if she's got a penis, she's still all-girl. & I yelled at my boss, not the other way 'round! Anyhow, that first email was certainly a strange way to try & win a girl's heart, but then that's how so many of you boys operate... when you like a girl you can't resist pulling her pigtails, flipping her skirt up, spilling ink on the front of her dress. Quite sad. Tom was a handful to begin with, but now I've tamed him & he treats Ursula with proper respect. He's actually quite the little gentleman - he even requested a song for me on Music for Nimrods! OK, I asked him to do it, but he picked just the RIGHT song. All Tomorrow's Parties. Isn't that great? It's so Ursula!

10/15/98
K was out of town this weekend, so on Saturday night I drove down to San Diego to finally meet my email buddy Rev. Tom! On a whim I decided to go in drag, which turned out to be a pretty major mistake. I didn't get there until late at night, and when I arrived a big jock party was in full-swing in the courtyard of Tom's apartment building. Tom met me outside & led me through the crowd without incident, but I'll never forget the feeling of all those drunks gawking at me. They must've thought that Tom was bringing some big tranny hooker back to his place! Hopefully they just wrote me off as a mass hallucination.

Once I got inside, I felt like the biggest dope in the history of the planet; I'd dressed up in this big shmantzy prom dress and driven halfway across the state just to sit around for an hour or two and talk! The absurdity of it hit me all at once, & I had a pretty bad case of nervous giggles. Our little visit went fine enough once we settled down, but then on my drive home I got stopped by the border patrol! I had paranoid visions of being strip-searched, buggered senseless, & thrown in some 6x6 cell with a bunch of blood-thirsty banditos who'd cut me open and feast on my entrails like they were albondigas, but I got lucky; the cop just gave me a blank stare and waved me on. Mi vida loca!

10/7/98
Poor K came home from her trip with a nasty sinus thing going on. She hadn't been feeling at all well for a week or two before the trip, but this has REALLY knocked her on her ass. We're still praying we can make it to Dragstrip, this month's theme sounds so fun: Pirates! All of a sudden, I have this all-consuming passion to get a wench outfit, some luscious burgundy number with lots of petticoats and lace and spectacular cleavage. K has an impossibly sexy-sounding pirate-boy outfit all picked out, I MUST see her in it! even if she IS sick, I'll wheel her to Dragstrip on a hospital gurney if I must! I honestly don't think she'd mind, she's just dying to go. Let's hope fate cuts us a break on this one.

10/21/98
Well, this last Dragstrip was memorable, to say the least. I was kissed by a boy for the first time in my entire life, & another boy almost RAPED me! K was still sick, but she kept telling me she'd feel less guilty if her illness didn't keep me from going, so around 11 p.m. I tucked her in and left for the club. Once I got there I hung around with the Nimrods people for an hour or so, that was neat, but I spent most of the evening just drifting from one end of the club to another, trying to look cool and glamorous instead of lonesome and miserable. I lost count of how many times I visited the ladies room to touch up my lipstick. I was really bummed that no boys were trying to pick me up. No, I wouldn't have gone for it, but I still wished somebody would at least TRY! I kept thinking about how really beautiful girls never have to be alone if they don't want to be; they can hardly keep people away! The club was mostly full of non-drag gay boys looking for other non-drag gay boys, but I still couldn't help but feel that the reason nobody was talking to me was because I wasn't pretty enough. I felt like I was in high school again, only this time instead of being the weird boy who's too shy to ask anybody to dance, I was the tall, homely girl who spends the entire evening on the dance-floor by herself. I was just about to leave when these three queens came up to me and introduced themselves. The one who did most of the talking had been hitting the sauce a little bit, but we seemed to get along pretty well. We were talking about Bewitched or something when I realized that his two friends had disappeared, and all of a sudden he seemed to be standing awfully close to me. He was giving me this hungry little grin, and just as I thought, "Oh my God, he's gonna KISS me", he did. I was stunned, but I felt myself go all swoony, & I was seeing stars & stuff. K had been too sick to get near for weeks, and I had a LOT of energy corked up. Also, I hadn't kissed anybody but K for SIX YEARS, so I have to admit that it did have a certain novelty value. And, as I said, I'd never kissed a boy before. I was completely straight my entire life, never so much as looked at a boy, and then about a year ago - BOOM! - suddenly my brain was full of naked boys with hard-ons. I'm still mostly into girls, but I've had some damn potent fantasties in the last few months... fantasies which still didn't quite prepare me for the reality of being kissed by a real, live boy. It was wonderful, for a few seconds, and then suddenly it was HORRIFYING! K is everything to me, yet here I was kissing some stranger in a skanky club... on a night when K was home sick in bed! What's more, the way the kiss made every square inch of my body tingle pretty much eliminated any lingering doubts I might have had about my sexuality. I think I'm bi. I still can't get used to the idea. I've always heard that nobody "turns queer" overnight, but I sure seem to have turned bi overnight! I keep trying to convince myself that I've always been bi, and that I must have just been repressing it before, but it sure doesn't feel that way. It feels like I went to bed straight and woke up a whole new person, a person with this weird, puzzling hunger for manflesh. It was already tricky enough dealing with my often-overwhelming attraction to girls, but I don't even LIKE boys much, so I sure don't want to want them! My life has suddenly gotten a lot more complicated.

All of this junk was going through my mind in the few seconds that the kiss lasted, but the thing that was really making my brain do somersaults in my skull was the fact that I had seen a couple of K's friends at the club earlier. What if they saw me being kissed by this queen, and they told K all about it?? What would K think? Maybe she'd think I was having an affair! She wouldn't know that I'd just been standing there when this crazy queen walked up and planted a big wet smacker on me! Yikes! I gently pushed the queen away and told him I was seeing somebody, and he countered by telling me that he was MARRIED! I said no a few more times, until he finally got the message. Then his two friends re-materialized as quickly and mysteriously as they'd vanished, and they all left the club together.

Now, this is where things get WEIRD. I was standing there in the corner, still feeling kinda dizzy, when this huge, good-looking, really muscular guy walks up & asks if I'm OK. He was dressed all in black and looked like a bouncer, so I figured he'd seen me kind've pushing the queen away before and he'd assumed I'd been assaulted or something. I said I was OK, and he gave me some gum... and then, after about five seconds of chatting, HE started kissing me! I pulled away, but he was all over me, with his giant hands pulling me up against him and his big, dry lips all over my face. It felt like a grizzly bear attack. I REALLY didn't wanna make this gigantic face-sucker mad, so I kept trying to politely decline, but he was relentless, "all hands" as the girls say. It was so weird, because the whole situation was EXACTLY like some cheesy tranny fantasies I've read online, and even had myself on occasion: Giant gorgeous guy, in a club, won't take no for answer, etc... he even had an English accent, although Lord knows if it was real. In those stories it sounds like this big erotic thing, but the reality was AWFUL, and it was made worse by the fact that if K's friends were watching me, they were now gonna tell her that I'd been hanging out in a dark corner kissing TWO different boys! K was gonna dump me for sure now, and I hadn't even DONE anything.
I really had to struggle to get free of the guy. I'm probably about two feet taller than you are, but this guy was still a LOT bigger than me. He kept grabbing my wrist in his big gorilla mitt and pulling me back towards him, kind've half-pleading and half-telling me to stay. His tone wasn't exactly threatening, but trust me, I found out the hard way that being completely at somebody else's mercy is only fun as a game. Several times he suggested that I should meet him behind the stage... so he could pump me full of HIV, I guess.

The idea of trying to REALLY fight back by kicking or biting him or whatever never occurred to me, I was simply too afraid. I used to be a real juvie once upon a time, I got in fights in high school & all that, but in recent years Ursula has taken over to such a degree that I've become quite a delicate creature. These days I don't think I COULD fight if I wanted to! I've gotten so in touch with my feminine side, if somebody so much as called me a bad name I'd probably burst into tears.
I don't know how long I struggled with the guy, but it seemed like hours. I just kept saying, "No, please..." in this sickening little voice, and praying that would be enough to make him let me go. Just when I thought that even HE must have been getting tired of listening to me whimper, he took my hand and shoved it right on the bulge in his jeans. I tried to yank back my wrist, but he held me firm. Then I felt this really weird pressure between my buttcheeks: It was the index finger of his other hand, and he was trying to ram right it through my skirt and up my ass. THAT did it, somehow I found the strength to finally break away from him.

Once I got free, I ran over to the remaining Nimrods (safety in numbers, you know) and hung around with them for awhile, making sure not to look around the room too much for fear of spotting my new boyfriend again. My car was parked far away, and I was honestly scared to leave by myself! I told Empira the basics of what'd happened, & she was very sweet about it, she kept saying, "Oh, you poor dear," and she offered to walk me back to my car. It was funny, because earlier in the evening EMPIRA had actually been groping me quite a bit! Empira gropes everybody though, and somehow her gropes always seem so cute & harmless, like when a kitten rubs up against your ankles to get attention. I can't explain the difference, but it was night and day, believe me.

When I got home I paced back and forth all night, feeling bad nine different ways at once. I suddenly understood why so many girls feel so guilty after they've been raped; a voice in my head kept saying, "well, what'd you expect? You dress like a whore, you get treated like one! What did you put all that makeup on for? Before he grabbed you, weren't you wishing some boy would hit on you? You were ASKING FOR IT!" I'd fought to get away from the guy, but I was afraid of him, so maybe I hadn't fought hard enough. This was just from being pawed a little, I can't imagine what I would have felt like if I'd actually been raped.

I thought about waking K up to tell her the whole story, but I also wondered if it was better not to say anything. After all, maybe her friends hadn't seen anything! I'd just ignore it, and maybe this whole nightmare would go away.

Finally I had to face the fact that even if her friends didn't tell her, I'd never be able to keep a secret like that from K. I'm too used to telling her all the sordid details of my crazy life. When we woke up the next day I told her the whole story, and she amazed me by being completely cool and casual about it, even when I confessed that I'd actually enjoyed the first kiss. "Curiousity is natural," she told me. I'd thought she was going to be mad at me, but she was actually furious with the goon who had pawed me!

"I wish I'd been there," she told me. "I woulda kicked his ass!" That was so adorable it almost made me cry; it was the man in her, coming to the surface and wanting to protect me. She was wonderful, even if she couldn't resist waggling her little index finger at me and saying "Maybe NOW you have some idea of what real girls go through!"

I don't know how many sit-coms I've seen where a girl fights off some horny jerk in the backseat of a car. I've been that horny jerk myself once or twice. I've never raped anybody, but when I was a screwed-up teenager, there were nights when it took a lot of "no's" before I listened. I never imagined I'd know what it feels like to be that girl in the backseat. You feel very, very small, and there's this huge, heavy person on top of you who knows you're scared, and doesn't care. Maybe he even likes it. If you're lucky you get out unhurt, and then you go home and you wash off what's left of your makeup while trying not to look too closely at the face in the mirror. I still envy women, and I wish just for one night they knew what it was like to be an ugly, miserably horny boy that nobody wants to screw, the kind of boy girls actually laugh at when he asks them out. But I also wish every boy could spend a night as that girl in the backseat.

I don't know what I'm going to DO with my newfound bisexuality, exactly. I guess me & K have some talking to do, but I know I'll never do anything to jeopardize being with her, and I'll never keep secrets from her. As long as I live, K is the only woman, as well as the only man, that I shall ever love.

10/25/98
As huge as that last entry was, there was one important detail I left out! When I got home from the club around 2:30 a.m. or so, I was in such a state that I felt like I had to talk to somebody IMMEDIATELY. Since the Rev. Tom is often awake until the wee small hours, I took a chance & called him. As it turned out, he'd gone to bed hours before, & my call woke him up & scared him silly. He listened to me rant for a minute or two before suggesting that I write it all out in an email so he could answer me first thing in the morning, so that's just what I did, & I think it must've been the LONGEST email I ever wrote! The next day Tom wrote me back a great letter, ALMOST as long as the one I'd sent him, that was full of the kind've sound, grown-up advice I really needed to hear. He sometimes refers to me as his big sister (he's older than me, but I guess I'm "big" because he's about half as tall as I am), but Tom really was just like a big brother to me during this little trauma. He held my hand, told me everything was going to be OK, & just about did everything but send me off to bed with a cookie. Hell, he probably handled the whole mess better than my REAL family would've! Bless you, Reverend Tom.

Well, today was a splendid change of pace; Me & K went clothes shopping on Melrose (it's been FAR too long since we've had the chance to do this) & we ended up walking out of this one vintage store - Aardvark's - with BAGS of neat stuff. K got all kinds of boy stuff, including a cute tux coat, & I got two gorgeous ballgowns, one a dusky burgundy & the other a screaming purple. They look kind've Cinderlla-ish, but slutty. I'm going to wear one of them to the Fetish Ball next weekend, & K's gonna be a little Vampire Lestat goth boy. I know I won't have to worry about any crude advances from strangers this time; if anybody gets near me, K will BITE 'em!

11/1/98
Eek, this year is slipping by so fast! I've got a birthday coming in early January, so the end of a year always has an especially depressing signifigance for me. The year ends, then BOOM, I'm another year older, and everybody gives me crappy January birthday presents. They've already given me the best stuff for X-mas, so for my birthday I usually just get pencils and socks and stuff.

If I seem exceptionally blue this evening, I've got good reason: Music for Nimrods has been cancelled! Apparently Dan had some guests on who spilled a soda or something, so KPFK up & fired him. Obviously, they were looking for a reason. They've been cutting back on all of their old and/or controversial shows lately. %$^#@&^%!! I'm gonna really, really miss that show... besides, I was kinda hoping to be a guest again soon!

Well, our Halloween festivities went off reasonably well, although I wouldn't say tonight was one of our greatest excursions. We spent SO much time getting my dress ready... K was obsessed with making sure everything was just right! She spent all morning driving around to stores getting fabric & stuff, then in the afernoon she came home & got to work sewing. I tried to help, but mostly I just got in the way. The final result was pretty impressive, I must say; a big burgundy velvet ballgown, with lots of pettycoats & a hoop-skirt I bought off Ebay for ten bucks. I made a reasonably fetching countess, I think, and K was a GREAT little vampire count, with a total 17th century costume, including a sword, and sideburns! We had to park far away and wait in a long, LONG line outside, but once we got in we did see some neat costumes; an Asian Wonder Woman, a Dominatrix Unicorn, a Bug Lamp (he was wired up head-to-toe with lights, he looked like a one-man laserium show). I was such a delicate creature in my dress; stairs were hard to manage, as was sitting, or manuevering throgh a crowd, and I was so BIG, people couldn't help but bump into me all the time. I felt like a New Years Day float; huge and flowery and brittle. We were so naughty, we found a secluded corner and K did all kinds of crazy things to me, she peeled back my petticoats like the petals of a rose, exposing the tender pink bud within. Now my brand-new dress is all rumpled, & you can bet it'll need dry-cleaning.

There's always so much CLEAVAGE at these things, it makes me want real boobs so bad. One of these days, I just gotta get my chest pumped full of baloney juice. A while back I read about this stripper who had rubber sacks put into her tits that she can inflate by squeezing these little pumps in her armpits. That way, she can have itty-bits tits or GIANT boobs, depending on her mood. It sounds kinda scary and Clive Barker-ish, but it also sounds fabulous! That way I could have big boobs, but I could put them away when I had to go to work or visit my parents. THAT's what I want for my birthday!

11/27/98
Just don't even ask. Jeeziz Christ, I am in one BITCHY goddamn mood these days. In the first place, my health troubles have taken another maddening turn: I keep going numb in my hands and feet. My doctor says it's carpal-tunnel syndrome from all the typing I do from my job, but I don't do too much typing with my feet. Actually, she insists that the numbness in my hands and the numbness in my feet are COMPLETELY unrelated. I'm no physician, but her theory does sound a tad fishy, even to me. It's really scary, and I'm convinced I've got a big brain tumor or something. I'm gonna end up a drooling drag queen in a wheelchair someplace... I'll need to have an attendant come in to put my false eyelashes on me.

Oh yeah, November's Dragstrip was... fine. No, we had fun, it was just a kinda blah night. The dance floor was waaay too crowded with kamikaze slam-dance jerks & hardly anybody we knew showed up, but we still managed to have some fun. The theme was 1 Million Years BC, so we went as cave-people hipsters, with K in a leopard-print shirt & me in a leopard minidress. K did make one SEXY little cave-man, and I thought I made a pretty nifty cave-girl, if I may say so. K bought me the prettiest coat -- long and black and velvety, and it went with my outfit SO well. That boy knows how to win a girl's heart, no foolin'.

12/16/98
It's so funny... there are nights we look forward to for weeks, we buy special outfits and plan everything out, and then the night FINALLY comes and it's nothing too special, we come home feeling disappointed. Then there are the nights, like last Saturday, where we REALLY don't feel like going out, and we dither and argue until the last minute, and then when we finally drag our butts to the club we have a fantastic time! We've both been so blue lately, and there's been all kinds of silly health and career crap going on,and the prospect of getting all dolled up to go out to Dragstrip just sounded like a lot of work. We sat around for like an HOUR Saturday evening saying, "Do you wanna go? I'll go if you wanna go, but I don't know if I wanna go. Do you wanna go?" Finally we decided that we'd feel really crappy if we missed the party, so we threw some outfits together from stuff we had around the house. K went dressed up like a GIRL! That boy is getting kinky, no? She was dressed like one of Santa's little helpers, with a little red dress and a Santa cap. She looked like an elf from one of those old Rankin/Bass X-mas specials. Too cute! I wore a long, elegant, skintight, green velvet gown, with a long string of tiny white X-mas lights wrapped around my body underneath the dress to light me up. We came up with the idea right as we were walking out the door, and the effect was really pretty. There was only one time during the whole night when the lights caused any problems -- while we were dancing I felt something slip, and I realised my lights had come loose and they were hanging out the back of my skirt and dragging behind me like a big ratty tail. I dashed off to the ladies' room to make repairs to my infrastructure, and soon I was ready for action again.

Most of the Nimrods gang was there,and we spent so long hanging around with them that afterwards we worried we'd made big pests of ourselves. Dashelle seems to be coming out of that post-cancellation funk, and she was looking ravishing as always. She is SUCH a flirt, it always makes my head spin. Dash's utterly lovely girlfriend, Katie, told us about this crazy medieval castle-thing she's built in her living room. Apparently it's about the size of a coffee table, and it sounds amazing. Hearing about it has gotten us re-inspired about or own wacky home decoration project. We're decorating each room like our house is a big theme-park, with different "lands". The computer room is our trashy sci-fi room, full of rockets and Frankensteins and K's Star Trek toys, while the bedroom is the gothic, Haunted Mansion-like area, the bathroom is the Atlantis room, and the backyard is the Exotic Jungle Bazaar, with wicker chairs and little statues and a big steamer trunk covered with stickers. When we're done, this place should look so neat we'll have to charge visitors admission.

Um... where was I? Oh yeah, Dragstrip! Well, it was great overall, but there was one spooky moment when the guy who mauled me a few months ago (see above) showed up. As soon as I saw him I tried to kinda hide behind K, but it was too late, he'd already seen me. He hovered around for a minute, standing just a few feet away from K, but then finally he got the message that I wasn't interested in a second date & he took off. Whew! Just seeing him again scared me silly, but once he was gone it wasn't long before I'd forgotten he was even there.

K never fails to surprise me! Normally I have to pout for days to get her to dress up really girly, but this time it was all her idea. I love stepping out with my man, but it was fantastic being lesbian girlfriends for the night. By the end of the evening we were both so covered with lipstick that we looked sunburned!