This week’s column is about going to a Tenderloin dive trans bar with Hacker Boy, my adopted mother Theresa Sparks, and adopted aunt Cecilia Chung. It was sooo much fun! But as I expected, I got some really evil mail about this one — I’ve noticed that if there’s one thing that brings in the hate mail, it’s trans women. So first thing this am, I was getting mail that told me I wrote “trash” and that I was too ugly to write about sex. I also got some really nice emails saying that this column was a beautiful historical record, and that Divas is a favorite they were glad to see written up.
It was my Mother’s Day column, of course. And fittingly, today the San Francisco Police Commission elected Theresa Sparks its President (video), making history. I wasn’t expecting this! Yaaaayyyy!!!!!
Snip from my column:
The dank and sleepy downstairs juice joint was just the first floor. The girls led me upstairs to the next floor, where a decidedly younger, hipper crowd was congregating around another bar and a loud dance floor. I would never have known it was there from my cursory cruise downstairs. Finding it too loud, we continued to the third floor, with a much homier, almost hotel-bar atmosphere with a big-screen TV, a pool table and a warmly lit wooden bar with couches off to the side. Ripped couches, but still.
We ventured one more floor up, but, sadly, the karaoke room was closed. For a minute I wistfully imagined a rip-roaring, cosmo-soaked night with ultra-femme, big-boobed trans girls singing karaoke. Mind you, my ideal of hot, fleshy females wasn’t downstairs, but it certainly materialized on the upper floors.
By the time we settled on the third-floor bar with its tall, skintight-catsuit-clad femme fatale barkeep and overly weathered couches, I couldn’t decide if I was underdressed or overdressed (read: too much clothing on), or if I should just shut up and drink. I chose the last one. Sitting with Sparks, Chung and a cute boy, there was no want of attention by some of the most beautiful, jaw-droppingly sexy, curvy, femmed-up girls I’d ever seen.
One of the Divas dancers who stopped by before her set, Christina, made a trip to Mitchell Bros. look like a trip to a … trans bar. She smiled and grinned and teased her mom, Cecilia, while we all ogled her crazy-curvy rear cleavage — she was wearing a rhinestone thong. Cecilia admonished her: “You ride the bus like that? With your ass hanging out?” Christina smiled and sheepishly replied, “Yes.” Cecilia deadpanned, “Aren’t you worried about germs?”
We sent our male companion to the bar for drinks, as only he merited the heavy pours from the flirty brunette barkeep, whose entire look made Hefner’s stable look like, well, a stable. Then we made our way back downstairs to the bar with the most attitude — where the step-up stage and its glitter curtain promised us choreographed, costumed, lip-synched striptease shows performed by the girls of Divas.
Link.
