Diary

Last weekend I went to a theater festival in Rotterdam. The festival had a very original format: 61 actors performed on several locations inside buildings along a street in Rotterdam.
The audience was free to walk the street and ask the actors to do their monologue. So each time they did their act for a small audience of 1 to 6 people inside a room -- quite an intimite setting for a theater play.
I was there with Julia and two very close friends and we went from building to building. We saw about a dozen of acts in one afternoon.
Most of the monologues were about the misery in the lives of the charaters that were enacted. And that made some of the performances seem a little too similar.
But there were acts that were remarkable in one way or another. One act was particularly interesting to me because of the subject matter. It was played by a guy in the age of sixty and it started something like this:

Everybody is a story. Each one of you standing in front of me is a unique story.
I am a story to. A lot of stories, really.
But there is one story I would like to tell you.
That is a story of me -- in a dress!
He told us he had been involved in a radical gay movement at the end of the seventies. They called themselves the 'Rooie Flikkers' ('Red Faggots') and they often dressed up as women for fun, but also to make a political statement.
Instead of assimilating in the society like most homoseksuals tried to do in those days, they stressed the fact that they were different from, or even better than, heteroseksuals.
When Anita Bryant did her anti-gay campaign as a reaction to the human-rights ordinance that passed in Miami-Dade County in Florida, many people in the Netherlands were worried and a large Anti-Anita happening was organized in the Amsterdam Orchestra Building under the name 'Miami Nightmare'.
The 'Rooie Flikkers' took even more radical action. They appeared en masse at a streetcar stop in front of the building, all dressed in frocks and skirts. They managed to shock the audience that felt comfortable to demonstrate against Anita from a safe distance, but was not able to cope with sight of transvestism yet...

I liked his story, but I was very curious whether he would notice anything special about me. After all I used to look like a guy in a dress myself until recently and I am still getting used to being accepted as a woman wherever I go.
If he did notice, he hid it very professionally.
Our friends were also convinced that he never knew how closely his story was related to mine. And throughout the afternoon they noticed how well I was accepted everywhere I went. They had noticed only one guy who stared at me as if he had seen a ghost.
It looks like I am really beginning to blend in as a woman in society. That feels absolutely great, I hadn't thought it possible for a long time!