A History of Sexual Preference by Robin Becker

A History of Sexual Preference

We are walking our very public attraction

through eighteenth-century Philadelphia.

I am simultaneously butch girlfriend

and suburban child on a school trip,

Independence Hall, 1775, home

to the Second Continental Congress.

Although she is wearing her leather jacket,

although we have made love for the first time

in a hotel room on Rittenhouse Square,

I am preparing my teenage escape from Philadelphia,

from Elfreth’s Alley, the oldest continuously occupied

residential street in the nation,

from Carpenters’ Hall, from Congress Hall,

from Graff House where the young Thomas

Jefferson lived, summer of 1776. In my starched shirt

and waistcoat, in my leggings and buckled shoes,

in postmodern drag, as a young eighteenth-century statesman,

I am seventeen and tired of fighting for freedom

and the rights of men. I am already dreaming of Boston—

city of women, demonstrations, and revolution

on a grand and personal scale.

                                                       Then the maître d’

is pulling out our chairs for brunch, we have the

surprised look of people who have been kissing

and now find themselves dressed and dining

in a Locust Street townhouse turned café,

who do not know one another very well, who continue

with optimism to pursue relationship. Eternity

may simply be our mortal default mechanism

set on hope despite all evidence. In this mood,

I roll up my shirtsleeves and she touches my elbow.

I refuse the seedy view from the hotel window.

I picture instead their silver inkstands,

the hoopskirt factory on Arch Street,

the Wireworks, their eighteenth-century herb gardens,

their nineteenth-century row houses restored

with period door knockers.

Step outside.

We have been deeded the largest landscaped space

within a city anywhere in the world. In Fairmount Park,

on horseback, among the ancient ginkgoes, oaks, persimmons,

and magnolias, we are seventeen and imperishable, cutting classes

May of our senior year. And I am happy as the young

Tom Jefferson, unbuttoning my collar, imagining his power,

considering my healthy body, how I might use it in the service

of the country of my pleasure.