🌷☹ 𝓐𝒹𝔳Ẹℕт ｐＲᵒ𝐜εＳรｉό𝐍 𝐨𝒇 ｑù𝒆𝒆𝓝𝕊 🍭💝
Valley R. Lee
Paula says I frown too much. “Hunny, how can you be in a place like this, with a face like yours, and look like that?” she says, scooping green chicken enchiladas onto six dozen paper plates. We’re in the basement of the church, which houses a little hall and kitchen (two hotplates, a sink, and whatever equipment we bring from home) where we feed people facing food insecurity on Wednesday evenings. “I watched all my friends die in the ‘80s, you know, right here in this building. Count your blessings—you get to prance around all sissy in your little dress and stockings, girl. Fags in dresses these days need to celebrate what we did for your generation… You overcooked the chicken again.” She’s right; she’s clocked me. I am, for one, a living fag in a dress. I am certainly not happy, and the chicken is nearly inedible. I paid enough for a face like this to be told I’m doing bad by it, I think to myself, how affirming. I know what she’s really hinting at, in the same way every woman aches for the supple features of her brood. Going under the knife in your adolescence grants results far more natural than having to wait until you’re of an age—when one might be able to scrape the money together, biological clock ticking—and that’s not to mention the quality of the work she would have had access to in the ‘80s. Not that I would ever say a word of this to her, she’s a lived woman in the flesh, absolutely commanding each set of eyes in her presence to pay tribute, her advanced age irrelevant. I do think about her, and her friends—what this place was like in the ‘80s—quite a lot. It’s one of the main reasons I am here, actually. The church doubled as the first hospice care for people suffering with HIV, of anywhere in the world. At a time when churches especially—but also hospitals—were shutting their doors to the poor young people suffering with this new, biblically implied affliction. This parish in the middle of the Castro started to tend to and subsequently bury their own community. Now, a beacon of faith and comfort for trannys and fags seeking divine love and compassion.
Recently, I’ve had this little feeling that I am not doing what I ought to be, nagging behind my ears. I don’t know how else to describe it, other than as a deep, metaphysically unreachable itch, far inside my being. It reminds me very much of having my face rearranged—as Paula likes to complement me for—said in a longing jest. When undergoing facial cosmetic surgery, your features are moved, removed, sutured together, split apart, pulled every which way; all to fulfill the aesthetic desire of the ideologue sculptor wielding a blade—and of course the aching soul of the anesthetized girl on the table. With your bones shaved to perfection, every hair neatly in place, you are born anew—with a cup of chocolate pudding in your hand—inside a fragile shell that is in equal parts too sensitive and dull to the world, all at once. This is the feeling I live in now, and have felt in perpetuity. The threshold of my perception is tense, unstable, a man could dip his little finger within its surface and it will spill up and over again and again, as some of my regular clients have grown all too skilled at doing. While this is all true, it’s in the sense that I feel this way while watching my body out in the world from a tv set, where it is all too easy just to change the channel if I find the programming unacceptable: stuck in a Tenderloin hotel room with a man in a chastity cage? Change the channel. Removing my bandages to tend to the various incisions and staples I earned as a prize, carefully balancing a hot cup of coffee on my head, did not set off the alarm bells of my sleeping cells. My healing-numb nerve endings moaning and writhing in their whiplash, speculating their purpose if any at all is left—yet blind to their simulated danger. I felt the phantom absence of my dull senses conceptually—but only just—my brain screaming at my unconscious cells: You don’t fear the heat of the ceramic, neither the mass nor its precariousness balanced motionless on top of you? Be in the world!
My most recent answer to this lifelong bout of dissociation (which has not been cured with the checking off of each procedure on my list, I may add) has been to be right here—with Paula, the queens, the Most Holy Redeemer, clients, whores, beggars, Our Lady Of Sorrows, fags, nuns, chasers, criminals, widows—anyone and everyone looking at their little life on their little tv set, fervently changing the channel at the first sign of the intolerable plotline. The pageantry of liturgical reverence, the iconography—the connection to a culture and way of being which makes me feel so small in the world—lets me know I don’t have the answers, that I don’t know anything really. So if I can just be quiet and learn about these people, their way of celebrating the mystery of life, pain and sorrow; maybe I can find peace here, too.
This desire to slip within the walls of an organized group with clearly defined structure, which can protect me from others and also myself, has been the theme of my life thus far. I was born into it, a child of The United States Military Industrial Complex: my birth and rearing a preplanned necessity for more bodies on the front line. Before departing for the Middle East, to liberate American oil from freedom hating savages, my father knocked up my mother of 20. This was potentially his final gift to the world, should he succumb to the bullet of an Iraqi soldier. He sadly did not die, instead suffering the much more tragic fate of coming home to find his beloved son a soft, dainty child—preferring the company of baby dolls and fairy costumes to the hardened life of a soldier—as he was meant to be preparing for. Stood at attention in a throng of adolescent bowl cuts aligned neatly in little rows—my dick and testicles pressed earnestly inside of my body—held there with tape and every pair of underwear I owned, I knew something was wrong. It was not I who was wrong, but the world I found myself a victim of. I craved a different kind of structure, as a reprieve from the oppressive structure I was drowning in, but structure nonetheless I needed it to be. I ran away from home at 15, stopped eating animal products and swore off all substances. I slept on the living room floor of various squats and punk houses, eating ramen packets and Taco Bell bean burritos. I remember, one winter it got so cold in the uninsulated apartment I was sleeping in, that my frozen eyelashes sealed my eyes shut. I loved it, for a time. There were rules, a dress code, social conduct, politics! A countering voice to the cold uniformed guards of my military school, a voice telling me I was real and valid. I played in a power violence band, proselytizing in dingy basements the urgent need for veganism and worker solidarity. The hard questions of how to live my life had been answered for me. I still have the faded XXX, scraped into my thigh, that I put there with a guitar string and pen ink, as a memento of my search for knowledge. In this new iteration of my wandering about, I am still proselytizing in basements, but have traded my 1965 Fender Bassman tube amp for a ladle, a rosary, an apron and a strict weekly itinerary.
Despite Paula’s strict requirement of culinary perfection, the Wednesday supper is happily eaten, prayers are said, pamphlets distributed. Bill, an ex-firefighter with a fentanyl addiction, only slapped my ass once tonight. “Good to see you sweety. Say, want to buy this old guy a drink?” The crowd is ushered away, and we’re left to clean up precipitously, as we are already verging on being late to the evening mass. Tonight I am in charge of collections and also the procession of the cross. I wash myself in one of the micro living quarters in the building—meant to be occupied by nuns—where I also keep a tiny wardrobe. Quickly, my outfit is assembled: a cream-colored billowing maxiskirt, slit halfway up the side, adorned with puffs of lace which give the appearance of my torso gradiently fading into a soft little cloud. This is paired with a simple long sleeve bodysuit of a similar color, overtop of which is placed a slouchy walnut toned cashmere vest, a strategic inclusion so as to hide my broad shoulders. Finishing off the ensemble is a pair of black Italian leather block healed loafers a client bought me recently. I take my position at the edge of the altar and readily await my cue, to carry the brass crucifix over the threshold, parading its glory to the mass of vagrants and crossdressers we espouse.
Paula and the queens are always 30 or so minutes late to mass, at which point I am seated attentively awaiting their performance: A whispered, syncopated procession of lace, fur and silk. An effortless gradient of texture, draping downward from the veil around their levitating lived-in bodies. They’re adorned with details of the liturgical colors of Advent: stacked amethyst rings, little violet bows around necks—with matching scrappy hounds in wool vests—trailing behind Paula’s Feragammo pumps. She’s the ringleader, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I am deeply afraid of her. The Queens file into the open pews around me, forming a half-moon shape, so as to sit alone but be within whisper range of the group. Before taking formation, each hands me one squirming, half-blind mutt at a time. “Watch her, dear. I need to talk to Jeanie—that girl owes me money.” There is an unspoken understanding that I must assume the role of babysitter, coatcarrier, errandgirl. I am the youngest to join this parish, to the bewildered entertainment of the queens, but since I’m here I must earn my place. They‘ve all been coming here together for decades, few of them were raised Catholic, instead marrying men in big old families they’ve since outlived. “It’s the estrogen hunny, it stops time in its tracks—just make sure to get your balls chopped off,” Paula told me “Paolo just dropped last year, bless his soul. And he was my 3rd!” Paula and Paolo, I repeat to myself mentally, a half dozen times. Paula and Paulo, Paula and Paolo Gaetano.
Paula Gaetano: Wish, as her most revered friends refer to her—is a Castro Queen of the utmost importance and glamour. A glittering darling of street matters, even at the age of 64 (a number given to me improperly, copied on a church email detailing her upcoming Cleopatra themed party) she heartily dominates authority over her domain, which has been under her reign for longer than I have been alive. Matters of faith and adultery, for her, are one and the same. Both of which provide her the authority and benefits she has come to demand from the world. I’ll leave the exact nature of her position and importance vague for now, and will return once we have gotten more acquainted with her story. She is a bony figure of five and a half feet, if I were to guess. She has the appearance of once being taller, mightier—age has deflated her just so—leaving her slightly crumpled inward. This deflation only adds to her ferocity, transforming her into an ethereal, fairytale-like character. The decades of cross sex hormones mythically preserve her form, similar to that of an elf rather than a human. My mind's eye sees her shimmering, silver hair, slithering patterns along her back—sprung to action by the upward jutting of her chin to the ceiling—so as to look down her nose through her vintage Chanel frames, upon whoever has become deserving of her cold gaze and merciless remark. This is the version of her I was most accustomed to, for the better half of a year of our familiarity. I see this posture even still, in my dreams—as though it is the gaze of The Madonna herself—appearing from the heavens with a great holy scrutiny, to observe my transgressions. Over time I have come to surmise the reason for such a hardened gaze, firstly—lest we forget—she is but a transexual. For this reason alone she is to be forgiven of her curtness. Moving through your days being a beautiful absurdity upon the earth is a feat I wish on no one, ever, therefore she is to be eternally forgiven and understood. She was born a child of the Sierra Nevada (the exact location being a mystery, although she was very proud of her home, being Mountain People of the Sierras is something we would later come to bond over) in 1960 and given the name Liam. Considering we are dealing with matters of transexuality, let us be aware that depending on the time within an individual's life, different names and manners by which we refer to one are used—this is simply a truth that cannot be ignored and it is in fact insensitive to act like every doll doesn’t have a past. Liam was the offspring of absent parents, his father and mother dying shortly after his birth of what the village would call a traffic accident—but secretly was far more sinister—strangling their bloodline till after Paula’s departure from this earth.
The hundred-and-change year old hall refracts the rose tinted tones of the location appropriate vestments of Gaudete Sunday: the third Sunday of Advent where the priest is donned in the most delicate shade of pink, and asks us to reflect on the approaching joy of the soon-to-be celebration of the birth of our Lord. He beckons this message to us all, against the backdrop of a 12 foot tapestry of Our Lady of Guadalupe—which with age has all but faded her features to an indecipherable barrage of pinkish flesh tones, adding to her mystique—her beauty determined by the set of eyes gazing upon her face. It’s like this I find myself most days: paying the homily no mind, transfixed on the head of Our Lady With No Face.
Let’s start with a chic fox eye—assuming the cadence of the twink of a surgeon who worked on me, mixed with reverend Lovejoy from the Simpsons—a la Bella Hadid, but with all the buccal fat we can muster. If anything, I want those cheeks soft, absolutely bulging with flush—gauntness is death, hunny—to live is to praise HIM. We’ll suck some fat from her ass and pump along the cheekbone—yes, don’t worry, we’ll have enough for a pit stop at the lips too… The orbital bone could use some light contour work, just a few millimeters would really snatch that gaze. After all, the weary sojourner peering lovingly into the cunty mug of Our Lady allll starts with the eyes—that’s what draws you in: she simply must be serving gaze of the hieratic boots. Don’t even get me started on the jaw, my God! She could swallow us up in one bite with that sheet metal chomper. Sparks will be flying in the O.R.—let me tell you—it’ll take more than a prayer to debrickify this one. I’ll have to resort to such measures they’ll usually only perform on you in Thailand, but it’s worth it for the most precious Our Lady. I tenderly braid her hair as she inhales deeply the anesthesia, assuring her all expenses are covered by the church. Before she knows it she’s rebirthed anew—pudding in hand—finally ready to perform her sacred archetypal role of Holy Virgin, consoling mother, remade in the way I need her to be most now: product of a catty surgeon, like me.
“Hey, girl, do your job! I thought you were good at taking money from men in pain.” I’m out of the operating room, Jeanie’s big nose and beady eyes inches from my face. “Which reminds me—I’ve got a client who likes you. That won’t do, bitch, who do you think you are stepping all over my livelihood?" Hurriedly I’m out of my seat, more so to avoid Jeanie’s garish screeching than for collections. I know the client she’s referring to already, and she’s totally full of it. We may have both been picked up by him, but he calls her an old clown, a man in a dress—nothing I’d ever have the heart to tell her. The alms are collected and handed to Paula for blessing, I return to my seat and brace myself again for the wrath of Jeannie. Our Post-Op Lady With No Face smiling down at me all numb and high.
Valley R. Lee is a writer based in San Francisco. A child of the Sierra Nevada, she spent years working in vineyards secluded deep in the forest, where she first encountered a profound sense of faith and connection to mystery. She eventually parted ways with her rural life to immerse herself in a spiritual community and write about her experiences. Her work explores themes of identity, spirituality, and transformation.