Street Fashion – SF – Castro – Badlands

Image by Jasper Gregory
www.jasperswardrobe.com for more gender and fashion blogging.

The two are playing with female-butch. The inspiration seems to be schoolboy fashion. One is playing for the night and the other is experimenting with gender daily. I like the look, it is clean and is a bit mod chic.

I met these two and three of their friends at Badlands the other night. Badlands is a very cruiser gay men’s video bar in the Castro. I shake my booty there to top 40 pop. I go there in part because it is completely accepting of my femmier outfits. I have never seen the dancefloor empty, so I can lose myself in dance. I go and dance with faghags and lesbians. Unfortunately the guys cruise really really hard there. i have not slept with a guy since I was a teenager. The male body is and and masculine energy just do not turn me on. If only I were gay! That seems a lot easier than being trans.
So anyway this particular night the guys were cruising so hard I felt like prey. Usually I turn away if a guy will not redirect his energy. If that fails I move on the dancefloor. Some guys interpret that as playing hard to get. When I said I wanted to be treated like a woman this was not what I had in mind. Crossing the street at night to avoid guys hanging out on the corner was not a top priority either. That night when I turned away I felt like I just ran into the next predator. My boundaries were totally getting crossed. I felt disoriented and powerless. When I spotted a group of five queer girls next to me I fled to them for refuge. I felt very, very relieved.
They created a a safe space and let me hang out in it. It was sweet of them. I learned a tip for dealing with over-enthusiastic men on the dancefloor. one girl told "you always need a freind to dance with. You just make an agreement that you can dance with each other to lose some guy." She also said to "make a friend quickly when you are going dancing alone, so that you can watch each other’s backs like that." Makes sense. I makes me wonder if this is the kind of thing that girls teach each other in high school.