I think everyone wants to be objectified, just a little bit. Not dehumanized, stripped of personhood. Not coarsely, not cruelly, but seen as an object of desire, a thing worth having. I remember hands on me like I was a side of meat the first time I went to a gay bar. Or, the first time I went to a gay bar with the intention of being touched, seen, desired. I was 19, and it was a real bash, the occasion of a charity benefit. It was a converted warehouse space in the heart of Austin, Texas, and the walls were hung with distasteful sculpture, gaudy Warhol-esque portraits, and woodblock prints of tied up men, faces contorted in some kind of ecstasy, some kind of agony. On the little patio outside ivy crawled up brick walls, penned in on three sides. It wasn't my first time sneaking into a venue on false pretenses, but it was my most audacious—a friend and I talked our way past the door without showing ID, with the cover story that we were last-minute replacements for the no-show models on the guest list. He ended up on stage midway through the night, posing like he was born for it while artists sketched and sculpted him. I melted into the crowd, tearing off the nametag that labeled me a model as soon as I was through the front door. I was there to be seen, consumed even, but not laid bare on the page quite like that. I avoided the bar—the drinks were free and IDs were being checked at the door, but what if someone asked? The trays going around the room, carried by fit young men in jock straps, covered in plastic shot glasses shaped like genderless asses and filled with something neon and strong, those felt safe, and I stuffed the glasses in my pockets like a magpie building a nest out of souvenirs. Yellow, orange, red, all the colors of a sunset, all equally candy-colored and whiskey-strong.

On other nights, I had talked my way past doormen or jumped fences to see punk bands at venues that had never heard of "all-ages," or to meet up with near-strangers who didn't know how young I was, or just to get drunk somewhere that wasn't my living room. This party, though, this event, was my first time going somewhere for no reason other than that it was gay, and loud, and full of people. I don't remember how I was dressed, who I spoke to, but I remember the feeling of moving from the gallery to the bathrooms to the dance floor and being watched, assessed, considered. I remember being cornered out on the patio by a man with cigarette-breath, kissing him until the stale air inside was better company. I remember being touched on my shoulders, my waist, my ass, hands made invisible by the dim lights and press of bodies. The feeling of being wanted was stronger than the shots.

When we talk about the male gaze in film, we are often talking about the eye of the camera. Not everyone is familiar with the concept, but everyone understands it intuitively. The camera, usually wielded by men, imposes straight male patterns of desirability on the subjects, usually women. Megan Fox in Transformers, walking by the side of the road, the camera's eye that of a bus stop lecher, dragging from her feet to her face, lingering molasses-slow on her hips, her tits. In the theater, the camera becomes the audience, each of us implicated in its gaze becoming ours, its desires becoming ours. What we talk about less, as a society, is the way men look at each other, the way gay men look at each other and themselves. Queer flirtation is substantively different from straight flirtation; with queer sexuality there's a level of risk, a physical threat, inherent in face-to-face interactions with someone whose sexuality is unknown. Straight people are socially permitted to interact with each other flirtatiously in public spaces, and while a straight person approaching a stranger or acquaintance might be seen as uncouth, they will rarely be seen as deviant. A man can approach a woman at a bar, and he might get laughed off, but rarely accused. The same cannot be said for queer people. The risk of engaging in flirtation with a straight homophobe is simply too great, so much flirtation has to take place subtly. Looks and codes develop, ways of communicating covertly that those not receptive to it might not notice. Robert Yang, queer theorist and game designer, writes in his essay "The Tearoom as a record of risky business" about the difficulty of assessing risk while cruising public restrooms. The visitors to tearooms—as the sorts of public restrooms you find in campsites and rest stops were called in the 60s and 70s—developed complex rituals of stance and eye contact to ensure mutual consent without stating anything explicit; an explicit offer could be punished. There's a difference between someone looking at you and someone cruising you, making eye contact with their zipper already open, looking you up and down. Assessing. Considering.

I started taking hormones in 2017, started wearing my closet-full of dresses out in public, on nights other than Halloween. I shaved off my beard, grew my hair out, learned how to blend my eyeshadow and contour my cheekbones. I learned from a girlfriend how to use orange lipstick on my jaw to mask the faint blue tinge of whatever facial hair electrolysis couldn't fully eliminate. The arc of my twenties, a decade that lined up almost perfectly with the 2010s, went from twink, to jock, to femme, to futch, a label I always call a joke made up by lesbians when straight people ask me what it means, but which I secretly adore. I have a complicated relationship to gender, a complicated relationship to the idea of “passing,” as though being mistaken for cis is my highest calling, but I can at least look the world in the eyes and say “I am a woman.” Most of the time, the world listens. Some of the time, it agrees.

The ways that gay men look at you, watch you, when they want you can be crude, sometimes. Frightening, if you're not accustomed to it. Despite that, being cruised carries a level of subtlety that's always made it feel safer and less threatening to me than when it comes from straight men. Gay men look at me like they’re hungry for me a lot less frequently than they used to. When I haven’t hidden my beard shadow as well as I like, when my clothes are a little too bulky to see the shape of me, they do, and the looks are still a little flattering, but it’s not thrilling, not electric like it used to be. They're missing information. They see a version of myself that hasn't really existed for years, the version of me with an M-for-male on her driver's license and a deep well of discomfort kept under lock and key. I always want to walk right up when they’re watching me, cruising me, break the thin membrane of plausible deniability and say, "if you knew what you were actually looking at, you'd be a lot less interested." I never do.

For much of film history, rules similar to covert code of cruising applied to depictions of queerness. Replace the threat of homophobic violence with the threat of critical failure and economic hardship and the reasons are apparent; directors wanted to show themselves off, without falling afoul of the heterodominant studio system. Even in recent years, queer sexuality is largely portrayed subtextually. Many people have written about homoeroticism in the Fast & Furious franchise, but the analysis is often sharply lacking, cheap clickbait articles that rarely go further than crude jokes that run like, “See, they’re big men, and they have big muscles, and sometimes they hug so, probably they're gay, I think.” If we look a little deeper, there’s a deep, rich seam of homoerotic displays; the men of the Fast & Furious watch each other, they gaze at each other with the same deep, sublime reverence that they look at their cars, their prize positions. My favorite example of this is in the second movie, 2 Fast 2 Furious. Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) is attempting to woo Monica Fuentes (Eva Mendes) who's embedded with a drug lord. There are worries that she's "gone native" and they're relating to each other in the struggles of being undercover. O'Conner deploys a maneuver he calls the "stare and drive", driving aggressively with his piercing blue eyes locked on the person in the passenger's seat, rather than the road. His childhood friend, Roman Pierce (Tyrese Gibson), notices this and seems upset, saying “he got that from me.” Are we meant to believe Roman instructed him explicitly in this? Perhaps that Brian sat in the back seat taking notes while watching Roman use it on someone else, some other woman? These explanations strain credulity; the simplest is that Roman did the “stare and drive” with Brian himself. When Brian turns his gaze on a woman, Roman seems hurt, betrayed, as much by this as by their criminal past.

I leapt into the trans4trans dating pool as soon as I came out, but when my presentation shifted from simulation of a man to approximation of a woman, the eyes on me changed, too. The subtleties and ceremonies of gay cruising gave way to the leering gaze of straight men. My first night out in a dress, I spent the night at a bar I like, watching the intricate mating dances and assessments of queer people under the scrutiny of a straight venue. On the bike ride home, three different men cat-called me. One of the men was polite, the second was aggressive, the third was drunken and incomprehensible. I went from flattered, to afraid, to angry in three quarters of a mile. It’s not as though I didn’t know what I was getting myself into when I transitioned—I’d spent enough time riding home with women or staying up late swapping stranger danger horror stories to expect catcalling. I wasn’t a stranger to it, either. Wolf-whistles, esoteric and explicit pet names, even just a “hey there,” loud enough, with the right inflection; hang out in gay bars long enough and you’ll hear them all. It is—it was—a thrill, powerful and dangerous, every time. I was prepared for catcalling, and the strange mix of feelings that come attendant. I wasn’t expecting to feel affirmed, a kind of bone-deep sense of being seen, and I wasn’t prepared for the depth of the fear. I love that creepy dudes see me as a woman, enough to see me as desirable, as an object of desire. As much as I hate to admit it, I love that I pass.

I hate the fear.

I wasn’t a stranger to fear, either. If you’re visibly gay enough to get cat-called by men, you’re visibly gay enough to get beer cans thrown at you from the windows of passing cars. One night in my early 20’s I was walking home with a friend—you learn fast not to walk home alone if you can help it—with a twelve-pack of Pearl under my arm, minus the six or seven we’d already drank. We were waiting to cross the street, and a black sedan plastered in college sports team stickers stopped at the red light, its tinted windows rolled up. My heart sank when the window rolled down. Someone from inside hollered “faggot” out the window, the opening salvo. I forgot how to shut up, too drunk and young and angry, and yelled back, telling them to fuck off, keep driving. They escalated, throwing a half-empty can at me, close enough to spatter cheap beer on my boots. My aim was better, and my cans were still full.

In the strangely named Fast & Furious—the fourth movie, distinguished from the first only by the amputation of an article—Brian O’Conner and Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) are reunited, three full movies after their separation. Dom’s main drive in the movie is twofold revenge, at Brian for his past betrayal, and at the drug lord responsible for the death of his long-time girlfriend Letty (Michelle Rodriguez). Letty is replaced almost immediately, with Gisele (Gal Godot), a woman with whom Dom has precisely zero chemistry. He never responds to her flirtation with anything other than amusement. In her essay “It starts with the eyes,” critic Jennifer Smith identifies their first scene together as revealing; Gisele asks Dom to describe his perfect woman, and he lists qualifications that fit her not at all; someone with piercing eyes, who isn’t afraid to get engine grease under her fingernails. This description fits Letty, maybe, but Smith argues it fits Brian even better. While Gisele makes half-hearted attempts at flirting with Dom, his relationship with Brian is rebuilt. They work together as partners, working through their tension and misunderstandings like bitter exes forced to reconcile by circumstance. They tease each other. They take care of each other. At the climax of the film, Dom is given a perfect moment of catharsis as Letty’s death is reenacted, with Brian in her place. Another film might have put Gisele there, giving Dom the chance to save a different woman, but this movie needs it to be Brian. This is the culmination of Dom’s forgiveness made manifest, and it’s no accident that he finds catharsis in saving Brian, trapped in exactly the same circumstances as the love of his life, elevating his no-longer estranged friend to the same level. These movies are tied up in the love men have for each other. They may not be explicit, but their eyes say more than their lips.

When I started wearing dresses, I started carrying a knife. I started watching for a different kind of threat. When men catcall each other, grab each other’s wrists, waists, and asses in the crush of a dance floor, or follow each other into bathrooms, they’re on equal footing. Sexual violence exists among gay men, but by and large, the power dynamic is playful, ebbing and flowing. The subtlety of queer courtship puts a soap-bubble thin membrane around leering, staring, grabbing, cruising. Plausible deniability means denial is possible. I'm still afraid of homophobes and transphobes with half-empty beers in their cars, but despite too many close calls with their kind, they never felt like a threat I couldn't handle. Now, I'm afraid of men with desire, desire that twists too easily into cruelty. Simple rejection can be enough to turn a leering stare into a closed fist, to say nothing of the reaction some men have to finding out they're interested in a woman like me. I haven't learned to sit with the fear just yet, how to protect myself from it. So, I protect myself from the men, instead. I carry my knife strapped to my thigh under the hem of my dress, and I wear my bike’s u-lock like a carpenter’s hammer tucked in my belt.

On the Importance of Looking