Wigged out over Hedwig-- a flashback with feeling for the back row. (Exaggerated for emphasis)

Summer 
Dallas, TX
2001
I'm dating a guy with major Dalla-tude who drives a Mercedes.  I am pleased as punch with myself for commandeering the sterling silver link bracelet he had been wearing before leaving it behind on my nightstand. I took it to a jeweler and had  a link removed to fit me then presented him with the extra link in a Tiffany's box.     I considered  it well within my right to declare such antics because I thought sass was synonymous with class.
 "That's what happens when you don't call me back., I sneered snidely sassing back to the banal bore with a barely concealed twinge of bitterness.   The bloke was buff with a bulge where it mattered but we hadn't gotten beyond first base because I wouldn't automatically give it up for guys I had hopeful designs on being husband material.  It was a different set of guidelines than the ones I reserved for the sleazy screwing I succumbed to in the shadows with shady guys named Spider who shagged me with nothing but spit and sweat to use for lube.
It was a torturous cycle predicated by a barrage of benzos in place of booze hot on the trail of a deluge of dick instead of dope that I had sworn off to save face.    I did it all because I believed he was out there for me.  My missing piece to the big O, my soul mate,...my other half was out there in the universe if only I could find him.   

When  the cinematic rock opera that was Hedwig and the Angry Inch debuted  on screen that summer,  John Cameron Mitchell's  opus transcended the totality of my training in  transcendental matters and spoke to my truth while confirming my suspicion about the transitive nature of binary gender polarities as total social constructions and about as tangible as meth smoked off tin foil for the weight it wielded in veracity.   Hedwig blew the lid off everything I had been lied to believe about the social constraints that society sews us into while simultaneously strengthening the truth I had suspected of existing all along.   As a self-loathing sissy seeking satisfaction in sketchy places to boost my self-esteem, I needed to believe that there was a stronger side to  my  soul out there somewhere.

In the Origin of Love, Hedwig explains that in the beginning of time, there were three sexes (berdache, anyone).  S/he had me at three because all I could think about was the way ancient Native American-French indigenous tribe members had exalted those of their group who didn't fit into a strictly binary code of gender. Those who adopted feminine ways in the face of their male features were placed on an exalted plane of spirituality.  Later they were whipped and turned out as prostitutes but I related to their hooker status as heroic and harbingers of my own homosexual sex trajectory.

And there were three sexes then

One that looked like two men
Glued up back to back
Called the children of the sun
And similar in shape and girth
Were the children of the earth
They looked like two girls
Rolled up in one
And the children of the moon
Were like a fork shoved on a spoon
They were part sun, part earth
Part daughter, part son
The origin of love

John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask wrote Hedwig against a backdrop based on Plato's Symposium myth which explained our lost souls as some scabbed over after effect of a vindictive act of a vengeful set of gods. 

Now the gods grew quite scared

Of our strength and defiance
And Thor said
'I'm gonna kill them all
With my hammer
Like I killed the giants.'
But Zeus said, 'No

You better let me
Use my lightening, like scissors
Like I cut the legs off the whales
And dinosaurs into lizards.'
Then he grabbed up some bolts
And he let out a laugh
Said, 'I'll split them right down the middle
Gonna cut them right up in half.'
And then storm clouds gathered above
Into great balls of fire
And then fire shot down   

From the sky in bolts
Like shining blades
Of a knife
And it ripped

Right through the flesh
Of the children of the sun
And the moon
And the earth

And some Indian god
Sewed the wound up into a hole
Pulled it round to our belly
To remind us of the price we pay
And Osiris and the gods of the Nile
Gathered up a big storm
To blow a hurricane
To scatter us away
In a flood of wind and rain
And a sea of tidal waves
To wash us all away
And if we don't behave
They'll cut us down again
And we'll be hopping round on one foot
And looking through one eye

In essence I understood the moral of the story to say  we were damaged from the get go. After the patriarchal gods grew pissy, they threw a hissy fit and cut us all down to a size they could control.   We were doomed to wander in the desert as incomplete halves of a whole like tumbleweeds without a bed of soil to take root. We were fucked.     

It fit in with the notion of the primal wound concept that I had adopted and adapted to my little lost cupcake connection to the orphaned adoptees of which I had once been one.  Adopted as a baby, gender-queer and kooky were ways that set me apart from the mainstream but  I used them as testaments to my innate alien nature and as evidence that the pain in my soul was so great it cut a straight line down through the heart....and I was off and adrift in the gospel of Hedwig's lyrics by Stephen Trask

The last time I saw you    

We had just split in two

You were looking at me
I was looking at you
You had a way so familiar
But I could not recognize
Cause you had blood on your face
I had blood in my eyes
But I could swear by your expression
That the pain down in your soul
Was the same as the one down in mine
That's the pain
Cuts a straight line
Down through the heart
We called it love

That pain cut such a straight line down through my heart but was it what  I would call love?  I didn't know what love really felt like but I recognized its power and propensity to produce pain.   Love wasn't what couples called  making love that was really just fucking,so what was it?   It was all an egocentric existential crisis of faith in my highlighted head with a shampoo and set signature style. 

I was hyper focused on the notion of finding that soul mate and wasn't above executing chicanery to seek out that zig to my zag.  

The Dallitude dude was pretty in a subdued Dallas masculine overlay that I was growing impatient with for the lack of overtures he implemented to lay me. That issue coupled with the overarching  ultimate act of passive-aggression I had yet to pull off with the purloined bracelet was still stinging when  I opened the passenger door of my four door sedan to let the Dallitudinous douche in as was the custom for dating Dallas dudes who deigned to be gentlemen with an ounce of chivalry did.   Settling into the driver's seat, I turned on the ignition and John Cameron's Mitchell's voice filled the interior the way I wanted the air conditioning to envelop us to no avail.  

The anecdote of the angry inch was out cried in acute angst ridden accusatory anarchial octaves.

Hedwig shrieked,  "It's my first day as a woman and already it's that time of the month. 

 

"

Those were the first words to cut the awkward silence existing between the douche with tude and me.

Dallitude went from blase to boiling like a bee got up his butt.   

"What???    ARE YOU LISTENING TO?   That's disgusting!!!!!", he  vexed.   

He seemed livid to the level that I had been living with since the weekend he left me alone fixated on the fact that we hadn't even fucked or fornicated for that matter which reminded me that I was only holding out to ride the bitch seat in his Mercedes and earn my place in the finer circles of Dallas faggotry.  That would seal my fate and ferret out my soul mate but the gerbil fetish wasn't my thing.  It was Richard Gere's fantasy lost in folklore.    This is what I was thinking while he bitched me out like a shrill shrew.. 

"What the fuck??, I replied?   Dude,  It's a metaphor.! (I laughed it off but it was the moment I knew) that  despite his picture perfect pecs and propensity for priapic perqs he was anathema to my amazing attributes and not the husband I had held him up to be in hyperbolic hysteria. 

I kicked him to the curb but regretted for years after that I hadn't dropped the "I'm not that kind of a queen" routine and just groped his gonads for good measure.  As if that's all it was ever about.  (Well, that's  the sum of the reality I've created for myself in the man department.  Isn't that all they're good for?)

The heat in Dallas scrambled my scattered and frayed emotions even more so than normal and the weekend days were devoted to the cult of myself.   I was younger than springtime and twice as exciting.    I was all about the boy and determined to devote whatever time it took to find that missing part of me even if  I had to go under cover at night which paved the way for a new pastime of prowling construction sites just to find variety in public sex venues 

I knew I would have to leave this decadent island of self-devotion come Fall but I couldn't imagine what it would entail.  

Of course  we know that 9/11 changed everything and threw the world into a tail spin. Suddenly  chasing boys and dicking around with dick dancers in dimly lit dives seemed incredibly. discordant with the real deal that really mattered.   

 I  left Dallas in less than a month after the attacks and spent my first Xmas back in the Bay area in the Berkeley baths but this time I was working as a research interviewer for UCSF Center for AIDS Prevention.  

Got  my own AIDS in April 

 Fourth of July marked the end of a fling that was the ultimate culmination of all the guys i had ever overestimated as saviors when I had the power to save myself all along.    I had my heart broken even though I was still unconvinced that I  had really felt love having no idea what it felt like.   

The rest is history.     

This is why I cannot hear those Hedwig songs without  crying.  

In a bittersweet melancholia, I  cry for my expired youth,  for the pain  I put myself through, for all the things I wish I had learned by just listening to what was in front of me without having to go through hell to finally get it--

Not that it's important to anyone but the story of myself...but to recap, that summer in Dallas with Hedwig on screen marked the end of my innocence.  It was before  HIV, before I had really suffered to the depths I was yet to sink, before I had seen the elephant so to speak.   Trite, trivial and traipsing the divide between twink and tranny.    

Today, at 41, I'm a bit more self-actualized.  I am still devoted to the cult of myself but only in the way in which my soul is bolstered standing alone with  my ego, id and Freudian slips.  I will never, ever devalue myself as an individual nor look to a phantom missing link to complete my soul.    

 I am complete all by myself.

That being said...

I'd give all that up in an instant just to be Neil Patrick'  Harris Broadway baby because he is the dreamiest as Hedwig.

John Cameron Mitchell was a like soul sister kindred soul but NPH is the Tommy Gnosis

of my true self.     I'm afflicted with Stendhal syndrome in the presence of superior talent like superstars soaring on gossamer wings of wonder would feel like in my midst.

And now that Andrew Rannells is taking over as Hedwig,  I would devote my undying devotion to him too despite my stalwart breathless partnership with NPH.   Because those boys are so beautiful, I could spend the rest of my dull life desperately trying to measure up to what they represent as the personification of all that is perfect in love and life even though I will probably never experience it for real.   Have I learned nothing in these 14 years?

"But two days later the hole closed up. The wound healed and I was left... 

 with fantasy and fabulous fags to serenade my soul to dream.