(S)he Bop!

As the afternoon
progresses into evening, people get up from their
blankets on the grass, wander over to the
shed-turned-makeshift staging area, mingle with
friends, or scarf down a Vietnamese sandwich from a
makeshift Bánh mì stand. Spontaneous, ambisexual
make-out sessions erupt. Puzzled neighbors peer down
the driveway.

And because it
doesn’t really matter how you identify here, there is
a sizable number of female lesbians, male gay men --
even some straight people.

“When I
came out, I’d never met someone who was a feminine
queer,” says femme-lesbian-identifying Sarah
Adorable, of Olympia, Wash.-based Scream Club.
“All my role models were butch girls, and
that’s it -- I felt very unaccepted, like I
wasn’t actually a genuine gay person. [Increasingly],
you don’t have to be defined by a ‘he’
or a ‘she’ -- you can accept both, and
you can go back and forth, and maybe the identity you have
right now isn’t the one you’re gonna
have forever.”

As she talks, a
girl with a necktie fashioned out of a maxi-pad walks by.

After dark,
Samson takes the turntables and, in a wry nod to the crowd,
segues her DJ set into a song that most people here probably
weren’t alive to hear on the radio: Deniece
Williams’s “Let’s Hear it for the
Boy.” The energy is high; the crowd screams and
proceeds to kick up even more backyard dust into the
humid Austin night.