Another important problem I’ve noticed here is the lack of lesbians. I noticed this problem, I realized, as I was looking at the lesbians who are staying in the very front and center of the central-most part of the beach. As I noticed them, and noticed that, perhaps, one lesbian couple, that is so obviously a lesbian couple, who are so visible on the beach, may be sufficient, I also remembered that I had already noticed them previously, as they are unavoidable, since they are camping in such a central location and swimming in such a central location, only I couldn’t figure out what they were when I saw them, as I had not yet expected to see them here.
The first time I saw them, they lay side-by-side at the edge of the water, as I was getting in, with their curly, short, black hair shorn into mullets, one of them wearing wrap around shades and the other in goggles. I felt repelled as we hit one another’s stares, because I was very self-conscious and angry at everyone else for their censure regarding how much clothes I was wearing, and to the very edge of the water. They lay at the very edge of the water, (inside the water) shoulder to shoulder, shorn curly head to short curly head, and stared up at me with an impudence I immediately imputed to their being adolescent boys, since that is who they most then resembled, with their breasts hidden in the water, and only the most impudent, most boyish, and most adolescent parts of them showing, their shoulders and ass-cheeks, although, even as I had this thought, that they were adolescent boys, their open sexuality, embedded in their impudent gazes, and their proximity to each other, shoulder-to-shoulder, like little boys, was discordant and uncanny. I rushed to get out of their gaze, even as I realized that it was the only way that they gaze, at everything and at everyone, since you cannot gaze so impudently without it being the only way that you gaze. When I noticed and recognized them—this time, from below—from the shade of a hummock that forms after 4 PM (the shade, not the hummock), where I sit in the shade while everyone else sits in the sun, since everyone else has come to beach for the sun rather than for the shade, I realized that the lesbians were the same boys that I had seen in the water, and that there were indeed lesbians on the beach, even as I was thinking, as they gave me the thought, that there were no lesbians here. It feels complicated to explain why I need lesbians, especially these lesbians, who likely have nothing but contempt for me, if they see me or think about me at all, which they likely do not. To begin, I am not a lesbian, neither sexually nor visually. But if I were to want to be seen and to be recognized, it would only be by these lesbians, who I believe would be the only ones capable of seeing me and recognizing in me something kindred, something that is their own, even though I am not kindred nor one of their kind.
I am not Greek and I am not a boyish lesbian or at all a lesbian although, for all of my feminine voluptousness, my voluptousness itself is masculine, not in its form, but in my arrogance and disgust as I carry it, as I feel it, although I do not have a sense of what it looks like or how it feels when lesbians, or these lesbians, or any lesbians, or anyone sees me. I think I look fearful, soft and pink, while I think they look impudent with their thin, tan, boyish bodies, boyish only because of their haircuts, for they otherwise have the same bodies of all of the thin, tan young women who always come to these beaches, the likes of whose bodies I’ve never seen anywhere else, although it could be because I have not seen so many naked young women’s bodies all in one place anywhere but here, where they all look the same to me, except for these lesbians, whose bodies are different because they have shorn their dark, curly hair, which the other women wrap in scarves. I have also started wrapping my hair in a scarf, but only when no one can see me. What I hope that the lesbians see, in my body that is the opposite of their bodies, my skin that is unlike their skin, in my red hair and soft white body, in my neurotic full-body covering that is an affront to their nudity, is my impudence, and my arrogance and my disgust, and my boyishness, to have such hips and such breasts, and to have such white skin, and to be in a hat and sunglasses, and shoes, and even in glasses, and to be in the shade and to be alone, which is the one thing I really am quite surprised not to see more of: women alone. Like the lesbians representing sufficiently the lesbian presence on this beach, I must sufficiently represent the presence of women alone. And although we are opposites, they are women-with-women and I am a man-less-woman, I hope that this would make me recognizable to the lesbians as kindred and one of their own. We are the only adult women with goggles.
What I would tell the lesbians, with great embarrassment, and, hopefully not tell the lesbians, but only telegraph it to them telepathically, is that although I am not a lesbian, I did once date a lesbian. And with that lesbian, we had the same soft white body, although she had small breasts and a huge ass, and I have huge breasts and an unremarkable ass. And it was indeed that lesbian who taught me the greatest sun-paranoia, whose sun-paranoia rivals only the sun-paranoia of middle-aged Korean women, and whose equipment, although it was made of strange rags, was as elaborate and overwrought as that of the middle-aged Korean women who walk small laps around suburban forest preserves in veils and gaiters and special coverings just for their elbows and wrists. In the unbearable heat and humidity of the Chicago summer, my girlfriend biked in white gloves, a shrug over her shoulders and arms, and a long scarf that she wrapped herself in under her wide-brim hat, and, after I gifted it to her, a full-face sunshield, taking the place of her gigantic sunglasses. It was under her influence that I began wearing pants and long-sleeved shirts to the beach, and scarves under big, wide-brimmed hats, an outfit I called my beach burka. And this was what, at that time, distinguished us, visually, as lesbians. That we were two women of the same shape and size, paradoxically dressed at the beach. Although even then, as I am not now, I was not a lesbian. What I should really tell the lesbians, although I might never tell them, is that my closest friends, who I will sometimes refer to as my wives, although they are married to one another and not to me, and, in their marriage, they are broken up, they are indeed lesbians and the people to whom I feel closest and the most kindred. And as I call them my wives, to myself, not to them, while not being married to them, and they call themselves wives, as they are, although they are broken up, they are lesbians and I am not a lesbian. And it is, in part, the fact of their being two women who are married and broken up that makes them typically lesbians, and it is, in part, the fact of my being friends with them and not married to them that makes me typically not a lesbian. But these distinctions, in certain lights, appear subtle.