Crossing the Hawthorne Bridge is like déjà vu; I’ve done this all before. The water below is dark, cold, and shimmering in the fading light of the summer day, the air, a cool and crisp breathe—the dying ephemeral release of all the tempered energies of the day. I belong here.
I’ve only been to Portland twice, but each time I visited I felt as though I were returning home. It’s not much of a secret that I have a bit of a “freak” side—but that’s the beauty of Bridge Town: everyone has a “freak” side, but no one is afraid of laying out for all to see. Portland is still clearly inundated with images of the now-standard ideals of beauty in their storefront windows and billboards and magazines, but taking stock of the people on the street none of bombarded images of socially constructed beauty seem to have had much of an impact. There are men and women of virtually every body type, each seemingly perfectly content within their skins. Whether or not they are is a different matter entirely—but each of them exudes this confidence in their own appearance that is frankly refreshing given the commonly pervasive obsession with an impossible ideal of femininity. Understandably, I fall in love with almost everyone I meet walking through the city streets.
There’s a strange dialectic of comfort and insignificance that I feel within the shops and streets of Portland. While in places like Pullman most people are focused on—even intimidated by—my height, tattoos, dyed hair and multiple piercings, in Portland I blend into the woodwork. This must be what it’s like to be “normal”? That’s not to say being in Portland equates to a complete lack of recognition; folks in the coffee shops and stores were always more than eager to talk to me; merely being in Portland erases that “freak factor.” The tall tattooed tranny carries no novelty here. She is just a person.
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