The First Time

Our friend Hannah McKnight talks about her early experiences in public:

The first time I went out en femme I went to The Townhouse (now named The Black Heart). The Townhouse is/was the oldest LGBTQ+ bar in the Twin Cities and is almost a rite of passage for a girl like me. It’s usually the first place someone like us goes to. Although it was the first time I left the house dressed, I don’t really think of it as the first time out as I went from my home to the parking lot to the drag show to back home. No one batted a false eyelash at a girl like me. It was about as safe as it gets. And thank God for that. When you go out for the first time it’s helpful to go someplace like that.

The first time I went out during the day and went somewhere that wasn’t an LGBTQ+ bar was when I had a dress altered. ...This was also a fairly safe adventure as I only went to one place and interacted with one other person.

It took a few more months to work up the courage to take the next baby steps. But in retrospect they weren’t baby steps, they were huge, huge strides and struts forward. Why did I want to go out? I was tired of being in my living room. I wanted to experience life en femme. I wanted to stop for heels while wearing heels. It was nothing more (or less) than that. Once I decided to have this experience, I needed a plan. Where would I go? Eventually I decided on getting coffee in Uptown [a neighborhood in Minneapolis where twenty years ago was a lot hipper, a lot cooler, a lot more independent than it is now...the gay friendliest part of the Twin Cities].

No one cared. No one looked at me. Well, sure, they looked at me similar to how you look up when you notice someone is near you, but it’s not as if people were gawking or staring at me. Just a girl out for coffee.

I opened the door to the coffee shop and the cashier greeted me, I ordered my coffee, gave her my name, and a few minutes later the barista called out for a vanilla latte for Hannah. I thanked her, she wished me a good day, and that was that. It was a new world, I had accomplished something small and mundane and life-changing. And it was easy. It wasn’t a big deal. I did it.

I learned a lot on my first time out, and when I went out for the second time, I realized how much more I learned than I had originally thought. The second time I went out was a few months later. I was encouraged and emboldened by my first adventure and I had naively assumed my second time out would be just as wonderful. It wasn’t. I went to the same mall as my first time and I had a lot more stares than I expected. I couldn’t figure it out but I realized it might have to do something with my outfit. I wore a tight bodycon dress with knee-high boots. I looked cute, but perhaps a little… spicy for the mall on a Saturday afternoon. Or maybe not, perhaps there was a store giving discounts to Rude People Who Stare At Transpeople that day. It’s impossible and pointless to speculate what people are thinking.

I learned that you need to dress for the occasion, for what you’re doing, for where you’ll be. This is not to say you can’t dress cute or wear heels but perhaps I was dressed for a nice dinner out or for cocktails, not for the mall. I drew less stares the first time out because I looked like a girl on her way to work. I learn something about, ah, something, almost every time I go out en femme. Most times I go out are wonderful or at least uneventful. Rude comments happen but they don’t happen often. No matter how many times I go out, there’s still apprehension, fear, and excitement.