Before I left for San Francisco, I asked my ex-husband if I should continue the experiment on the Left Coast as sort of a ‘control’ city (yeah, this is the first time I’ve ever thought of San Francisco as ‘controlled’) or just take a few days off and have a vacation from everything. He suggested the continuing, which was what I was leaning towards. It made packing easy. Black jeans, black t-shirts, black pullovers, a sweatshirt and denim jacket. Black boots. Done.
For the eight years I lived in SF, I mostly wore the unisex uniform above, which is a simple way of adapting to microclimates in a relatively temperate region. When I moved back down to New Orleans last year, I took a large back pack, abandoning most of my clothes on the back porch of my last apartment. It quickly grew too warm for the ‘uniform’ and I realized skirts and tank tops breathed easily, and I could bike in them. My superpower of ‘Find cool shit on the street’ was turned up to 11, and I’d often discover unexpected vintage treasures on yard sale excursions with my favorite transvestite. An 80 year-old fortune teller gave me some flamenco skirts and crimson lipstick. I quickly amassed a surreal, eclectic wardrobe, which I viewed as reflective of my environment. I truly felt like I was part of the landscape, and was just beginning to learn to live like I was art, every day was theater, and the city was my stage, when I got the letter that brought me to Chicago. I wasn’t ready. When I returned to SF to retrieve my remaining belongings, I left a whiny message with my transvestite southern belle: “My glittery girl drag doesn’t work anymore!” But I was determined to hang on to some of that vibrancy, that freedom I’d tapped into, and came to Chicago in the midst of a heat wave with a wardrobe cobbled together from two different worlds, neither of them working in a world where winter is cold and comes early, where lawns and nails are neatly manicured, and very few houses are purple.
Black jeans and t-shirts feel like a costume in Chicago. I like the simplicity and consistency, but when I wear it, I know it’s for this project. When I left S.F. it was after a financially and emotionally draining year and a half, and I was convinced the city and I got all we could from each other. So I was surprised at how easily I slipped back into the uniform, how quickly I reassimilated to San Francisco, how...natural it felt. The weather was sunny and warm the entire time I was there (even in the Haight!), and in four days of walking around in just jeans and a t-shirt, I only got two comments, both by cashiers (one Caucasian female, early 20’s and one Middle Eastern male, mid/late 20’s, both who just said “Nice tattoo.”) I got cruised by a mohawked babydyke and a couple of aging hipsters, but for the most part, I was anonymous, which I wasn’t in New Orleans and aren’t in Chicago. I realized that anonymity is one of many things I took for granted about San Francisco; along with the prevalence of extreme body mods to the openness and visibility of various communities. In San Francisco, I can identify as a gender-neutral, polyamorous, queer and be surrounded by people who understand and accept what that means (as well as the fluidity of those designations). Conversely, I’m recognizing that permissiveness can be restrictive. In San Francisco, I was free to just be; I never had to examine what being meant socially, politically, or interpersonally, or how those identifiers function outside insular communities. Now, you bet your ass I am.
There's more I've been thinking of on these topics, but I gotta clock out and meet my old roommate for coffee.
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