an outside more than merely an exterior to an interior

Midtown Miami, the Carnival Center, Scott Turner Schofield's 'Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps,' after the performance has taken us through a series of ever-ambivalent identitarian permutations. We are smoking on a balcony, clutching glasses of free wine and doing our best to avoid the gay and lesbian bourgeoisie schmoozefest happening behind plateglass, feet from us, as we lean over the railing and seek human forms in the windswept, meticulously bricked no-man's-land which passes for a courtyard (although, really, of course, it is a magnetized repellant homeless-rejector), tell stories about our respective and disparate difficulties with crowds. With us, on this balcony, are some queer kids from Pridelines, kindredly intimidated by the crowd, the tax bracket, and the potential cruelty of a question and answer sesh where the predominatly normatively sexed audience interrogates STS. Not necessarily disastrous or uncomfortable, but tendentiously walking the tightrope. Or so I think, accustomed to assuming misbehavior, misrecognition, and invasiveness mild and otherwise in such situations. A presumption in bad faith, perhaps. Elaborate defense strategy.

Note to self: underestimating the productivity of uneasy engagements, no matter how scripted, may be a mistake.

But back to the bad faith, the feeling of being elsewhere and otherwise -- on the balcony, sketchy and uncomfortable, framed against the flood lit palm trees, a shadow.Thoughts, again, as ever, about intelligibilty and excess. Moreover, paralysis. To stake it: this 'I,' determined by engagement and interpellated in so many different, various, and half-realizable ways -- boy, girl, queer, otherwise, butch, femme, etc etc ad nauseam -- how can I trust this crowd? How can I revel in the potential of affixation? How do I refuse the tendency to back out, to run? How, in short, to trust?