Embracing Violent Sensations: Self-Destruction & Monstrosity in The L Word

In the spring of 2006, one of my lovers wanted to experience what it would be like to cross-dress in public. Having been assigned female at birth (AFAB) and having spent the majority of her life subscribing to a hyper-feminine expression and embodiment, her endeavor was to understand, for at least a moment, the affective aspects of passing as a man. Upon her transformation, she decided to go out to a local gay bar as a “test run” for her passing ability and to confront her own discomfort with expressing gender variance in public. Angles, located at the corner of Seaside Avenue and Kūhiō Avenue in Waikīkī (an area highly populated by tourists), was the gay bar of her choice, and one that would be conceivably a “safer” environment than attending a straight bar if she was unable to successfully pass as a man. To honor her request that I accompany her on this adventure as her “lady” counter-part, my more “feminine” accoutrements stood in stark contrast to her baggy jeans, long-sleeve button-down shirt, baseball cap, boots, and masculine, rugged aesthetic. Once we arrived at Angles and settled down for drinks with friends, my lover candidly expressed a sense of freedom that she attributed to how others at the bar responded to her current masculine expression. In a predominately white, cisgender, gay male bar, the performance of her masculinity was revered and desired. Her “success” with passing as a gay male was not just the result of her accurately performing a generic or normative version of masculinity; rather, it was also attributed to how she was being racially encoded as Latino by the other patrons. Although she has a darker complexion and is Irish American, she was able to appear and be coded as a young cholo by other white, cisgender gay men – several of whom hit on her and made remarks regarding the racialized otherness of her masculinity. Here, most of these men interpreted her racialized otherness as a product of the performative aspects of her masculine aesthetic. Among these white gay men, the fantasized brown body is often tied to a specific aesthetic that my lover was able to achieve in this moment, but would have been unattainable for her as a white woman. The circulation of a shared imaginary about the fantasized