“This is the story of my body,” I concluded as that first monologue came to an end. “I hope that you can one day tell yours.” For the rest of the night, I described how my body, and the self that came with it, was so different from other bodies, especially after I realized that I could easily be perceived as a woman if I didn’t have a penis, and more than that, I grew not to care whether I was a man or a woman, that I could be both or neither. But having been born with a penis, I imagined my rectum as my substitute vagina, a body part that gave me access to some of the womanhood I did not experience in my daily life. It’s through this creativity that I combatted the embedded inequalities between men and women. I ended the show by inviting members of the audience to address the inequalities of gender through fucking, as I brought out a chrome vibrator to emphasize how technology can augment our body’s destiny. I sat on the trunk from which I had emerged and began to penetrate myself as the lights dimmed, so the act was invisible to the audience even though I performed it for real, a shocking spectacle out of context but also the show’s only fitting conclusion.

I graduated shortly after Dancing Deviant’s run and froze the experience with those football players in my mind until I came back to Cambridge twenty years later for reunion. In a marble-lined reception room at the Barker Center, a building that was only being built while our class was at Harvard, a large, grinning blond man came up to me and introduced himself as Tom.

“You’re the Dancing Deviant guy, aren’t you?” he asked.

“Girl now,” I replied, “but yes, I am.”

“Can I introduce you to some friends? We all saw your performance.”

I followed him to a group of seven or eight similarly large, similarly broad men, some of whom still possessed muscled physiques, others rounder. These men took turns thanking me for doing my show, telling me how much it helped them be more tolerant of queer people, how it opened their minds. Later, one of those men took me aside and told me how his younger brother came out to him a few years after graduation, which was a huge crisis for his conservative black family.