The Element of Surprise

A queer comic drives nine hours to perform at a Texas open mic, only to have the set complicated by the unexpected appearance.

Before my pre-planned backwards fumble onto the stage where I pretend someone pushed me against my will, I took a peak through the red theatre curtains to preview the audience. It’s a typical looking crowd. If anything, a bit drab. Swaths of white men with receding hairlines and the kind of style you’d find inside a Vineyard Vines catalogue. Then sprinkles of women, very few of color, most not accompanying the men but by themselves. At least no one I knew was there. Still, I was disappointed. I always anticipated an audience of, mostly, people I could see myself becoming friends with or even dating. That includes men to account for the fantasy world where I’m straight and the purely aesthetic regard I’ve held for them up to this point suddenly turns sexual. But mostly friends. I reminded myself that I was performing at one of the many bastions of White America, Lumberton Texas. I still don’t know why I’m doing this. Driving nine hours from my home town to the first open mic that would have me isn’t exactly the kind of cool-factor I strive for. Plus I’ve always been afraid of this kind of public performance. The kind where I have to recite something from memory and demonstrate a talent in exchange for immediate feedback. There was no hiding or benefit of the doubt. I knew exactly what failure would feel like. When they called my name, the freckled and energetic act before me left the stage. The size of the room made the crowd appear much more vast. Fifty and something, maybe. I fell onto stage as planned, strategically eliminating the fear of unintentional embarrassment. Then my face got hot, I clenched some part of my body, I think my jaw, and I stumbled into a start. “I don’t think I have pretty privilege.” I was pleased to get a decent amount of snickers at my opening line. I shifted back to steady my nervous swaying and tried to ignore the vibrating eyes taking me in with questionable resolve. I took them in too, but only as part of my act. I met their looks with a face of deep contemplation, like I’d actually believed I’ve been led astray about my looks this whole time. Then I jumped back in. “I know I don’t have pretty privilege… right? No, definitely not. There’s too many Pedro Pascal’s in the world. I know I don’t because people don’t hold the door for me when I’m 40 feet away. That shit happens to hot people. One time, I was an arm’s reach from a door…nothing. I followed the guy inside and I just said it… “Are you racist?” This was on my Catholic college campus and he turned around, suspiciously slow, and said, ‘No, homophobic mostly.’ I said ‘Just homophobic? You’re good.’ There’s worse things you can be at a Catholic university.” At this point the room reverberated with a confident dose of snickers. I was just relieved not to choke on any words. My mind kept nudging me with the reminder that my set-ups were far too drawn out, and that the handful of stone faces in the audience were only sticking around for the chance to murder me at the end of the night. “And let’s be real, you can’t tell I’m gay. You probably just thought I’m a girl who lost her way. But you’d be wrong on all accounts. I’m actually a they/them who found themselves… Don’t worry: she/they. The set would only become gayer from here, so the few laughs I got from this were my smoke signal. I took a pause, a sip of water, and a glance at my notes on the stool beside me. This was when the last face I expected to see snuck her way into the back row and locked eyes with me. Erin and I met Junior year and up until a month ago, were each other’s number one confidants. I forgot that I had mentioned the show before our falling out. It must have been at that graduation dinner. It’s all jumbled details to me now, but something about not visiting when I said I would. She didn’t sit down but leaned against the back wall. I returned to my paper, not to reference but to settle myself. I’ve had this thing memorized for a month. I recited it only once in front of my mom. I considered doing it in front of Erin but I wasn’t nearly ready for a peer-level critique. But suddenly, I felt the weight of the chance I’d now been given to impress her and prove… something. I decided not to look at her until I powered through. “I actually didn’t become a readable lesbian until I developed a friend group of all men. Not by choice. They’re just easier to convince. And really you don’t have to try, like at all. When you tell them something like ‘I never learned how to be a friend because all my quote on quote friends turned into my bullies’ they’ll kinda just nod at you and ask what kind of pizza you want later. It’s weird how quickly you lose the gay element of surprise when you roll up to the function with 7 dudes and you kinda just look like the twink who doesn’t go to the gym with them. It wasn’t like I chose this life, like to get girls or something… I’d never even talked to a girl like that before I met them. I was just a little gay Mowgli from The Jungle Book and they were the pack of wolves that raised me. They taught me everything I know, if you couldn’t tell.” I paused, hoping that they would come to some appropriate conclusion about the masculine qualities of my appearance and behavior. The blank stares promised nothing of the sort. “I used to think being deflowered meant losing my virginity but I quickly learned it actually meant getting the rose colored glasses ripped from my face and seeing women for what they truly are…. objects.” I’ll let you guess how the crowd responded to that one. I wasn’t totally displeased, whether my irony was received or the laughs came from discomfort. “I definitely assimilated to their behaviors at the beginning. I started saying the word “bet” which never once entered my vocabulary prior. But at the end of a copy, you find yourself. That’s what a great designer named Yohji Yamamoto once said. And when I found myself, they actually started learning from me. At that same time I was becoming very politically radicalized. I was deep into leftist theory. I was correcting them when they said “I don’t have a problem with trans people.” I let that sink in before the kicker: “I don’t know, it just didn’t feel like radical support to me.” The laughter that followed this one caught me kind of off guard, but I think it was mostly read as a vindication for an ostensibly right of the aisle audience. I suppressed the smile curling up my face. I read somewhere that indulging in your own jokes cheapens the effect. “After a while I looked around me and I started to wonder, where are all the women? I got a little tired of the nonchalance.” Serendipitously, after this line was when I realized Erin had left, or at least wasn’t where she once was. “I needed someone I could wail to about women stuff. Like periods and… you know?! So I started going to the library more…to meet women friends… I would either open with, ‘If you were a book, you’d be a bestseller.’ or ‘You must be a bestseller, because I can’t stop reading you.’ Both of them … failed. But I was saying the last thing they were expecting. So in that way it worked. I got my element of surprise back! Somehow they were shocked when I told them I was gay. And when I started hanging with women is when I really learned how to flirt. That’s like 60% of female friendship. The rest is... I’m figuring it out. And that’s the one thing I can’t really teach my guy friends. Cause you either have pussy privilege or you don’t. After this final line, the host took their sweet time returning to reclaim the microphone. It was just enough time to overanalyze the volume of claps and scan the room for Erin. When I spotted her, she was near the front of the stage by the exit doors. I checked my texts before making my way to her.

“Not a single joke about me. I should’ve known.”