32 #2
The ironweed is coming in early, and I thought I saw some along our back also…
But no one apparently thinks that is important for a wedding.
And you know, it actually worked. Look, Mom, Claire, and Carmine care about this stuff, so I am more than willing to step aside and allow them to have their day.
Me? I am marrying the woman I want, and I am marrying as the woman she wants, and the rest are trappings.
I do not need the social wedding. I am allowing it because it removes me from a place that I am not comfortable with, and that is called dating.
Now, before we go into this, Carmine is the love of my life, and I want, I really want, to marry her.
But I also do not want to be in the date world, as many of us call the constant pressure to have these romantic, to someone else, not to us, dates or whatever with some other A-lister,
and to be in the tabloids every week speculating who that one is dating this week and what happened to the one that that one dated last week.
I do not want to play that game. I am not interested.
But even more important, I am not prepared to think about being a woman who is dating, most likely a man or a combination of men and women.
I simply do not see myself in that role.
And I do not want to be seen in that role.
Every model, and I do not care about the age, sex, ethnicity, size, or anything about that model, becomes public property in the sense that someone, somewhere is going to fantasize about him or her.
That goes with the truth. Athletes are the same.
Cheerleaders, even members of Congress. Someone fantasizes about you if your photo is on the TV, in someone’s magazine, or on the billboard they pass on the train coming into work in the morning.
We sell our bodies, guys. I am not a model because I had a 4.3 in high school, and I have one single B from my mother for all of my college credits.
She, my mother, says that the B gave me modesty.
I say it gave her a topic for endless storytelling at University parties: “I gave my child at sixteen a B grade for a class on Pornography in Literary Fiction in the 21st Century.”
I was technically a sophomore in credits, and that was all I needed to sign up for the class.
You should have seen Dr. O’Connor’s face when I showed up that first evening.
It was a night class. It was really worth the B grade.
Anyway, those three are having the time of their lives doing something that I can only screw up.
I do not know what I want, nor do I have an opinion, and forcing me to make choices and have opinions is going to screw up those who do know what they want and do have valid opinions.
So it behooves me to go photograph wildflowers and allow them to do what they do best.
But I dropped the ball there, did not I?
I deliberately went off track and avoided what you wanted me to say and talk about.
And that is not fair to you, the reader.
OK, here is the truth. I do not know a damn thing about dating as a girl.
I really did not know a damn thing about dating as a boy.
Now, a hook-up with Suzzie after a football game is not a date.
That is just sex play. I could talk about my sex play as a male in a culture that was playful about sex.
But that is not what we are talking about.
And that is before Carmine. I had never really dated anyone, as a boy or a girl.
And I have never once been with a man, kissed a man, or considered doing anything with a man.
I have nothing against men. I am, as a card-carrying female of the species, very young, have no developmental history, and am not interested in men. I am, however, and have always been, attracted to women.
And that truthfully could have been where some part, not all, but some parts of the “I am Shannon, male, cisgender and heterosexual” mantra came from.
I do not think that a cisgender heterosexual male would ever allow themselves to be feminized in a month and then appear on the runway at Bryant Park unless there was something deeper that had not been explored and seen.
I know I did not see or explore it, but I still feel that something had to be there. Otherwise, I would never have allowed my father, of all people alive, to talk me into implants. Nope, that would never have happened. But it did, and I did.
So why?
Again, I want to marry Carmine, and let’s not beat that dead horse anymore. It is not going to move on its own. Carmine and I are soul mates and far more, and I do not write about that aspect of our lives and never will. OK?
But I do not want anyone else to be linked romantically to me. I do not want my fans to think, “Oh, she did this so that she could get into HIS pants, and what was wrong with being a gay man anyway?” when that is what the tabloids would have focused on.
I do not want that. I do not know how to deal with that.
And Carmine and I discussed that wedding at length, and the reason we both, not me, both of us, decided to do this route was so that we, Carmine and I, could control the dialogue.
As long as we, Carmine and myself, have the perfect lesbian marriage that was pulled, one and photographed, there are no creases for the rot to take hold.
And if we control those creases, we control two mental issues: my mental health and interference in our marriage and decisions.
If you control the platform, you control the rhetoric on the platform. Hitler invented that, actually.
And this wedding is our control of the platform that we will perform on, and our family is all aware of that.