I want that dog in me

"There is a kind of connection that I sometimes have, with certain people, a way of trust that only comes with people who have what I always think of as a butch heart. That's not quite right. Some of them don't identify as butches; some, in fact, hardly identify as anything even in the same zip code. But's it's a very boy way of being bigger than, a sturdy and quiet way, taking care of everyone around you as best you can, always trying to fix it, always stepping up to do the crap job that gets no recognition, and also of being so gentle, so generous, so nonjudgemental of other people, believing that they are doing their best.

Is that sexist? I don't mean it to be. I mean to describe this way of some masculine things, so different in its energy from other ways of caretaking. In Yiddish, this is referred to as being a mensch, which also means a man. There's a part of me thatr wishes I could separate it entirely from gender, and another part which sees it as exactly right that this is gendered, that there are ways of butchness that are composed of the best of masculinity and leave all of its borrish excesses behind.

But I met this butch, a handsome writing with a toughness about him that I recognized as the result of his life for the forty-six years before he and I crossed paths, a toughness that even still showed an underlying playfulness. That he had been able to keep that place alive and tender in the hardness of life made him light up my eyes as someone who would know some of the things I knew, someone who would honor the same places in me, and we started talking. Talking turned into flirting, and flirting turned into intention. We made a date to spend an evening together seeing what our combined toughness and playfulness might mean when we took our clothes off, a kind of old-style faggot good time without a lot of expectation about who might or would do what, to or for whom.''