Once the floodgates of communication had been opened, I found myself unable to close them. One post on social media became a dozen, then two dozen, then three, mostly discussing the Frid and their planets. Humanity was just as curious about me as I was about them. I set up a separate email account, and soon it too was flooded with questions from academics who ranged from historians and anthropologists to physicists and mathematicians. They provided research papers, resource guides, and textbooks so thick they made my desk creak under their weight. Someone even promised to send me an entire print copy of Encyclopedia Britannica, which I did not ask for and did not want but could not refuse.
I realized on the third day of this onslaught, when Sandra had started giving me a wide berth because she could sense my irritation, that I had misclassified myself as an academic on Earth. The truth was that I was much more akin to a human journalist or a travel writer. And I wanted to actually travel.
The university proved helpful: they had connections to other institutes around the world and had a whole team that helped students travel overseas. It was easy enough to put together an itinerary with them. And yet I still wasn’t in a car or on an airplane on my way to the other side of the world.
I didn’t have a good reason why I wasn’t on my way, but I did have two mediocre ones. The first was that everyone I talked to said that I should wait until spring to go anywhere because the winter holiday made traveling unpleasant. The second was that when I asked Sandra to help me plan which countries to visit and for how long, she had gone pale and quiet for almost fifteen minutes. I reasoned the least I could do was make sure she had steady employment until the beginning of the next semester.
So when the last week of October came, I was still in California, corresponding with academics and journalists and learning all I could about Earth. I had taken several trips to San Francisco and San Jose, and I was confident in human public transportation. True to Sandra’s warning weeks ago, I had met several humans who looked capable of mugging me, but so far, I had been lucky.
The first time I came back from a weekend-long exploration of the city with a book about the history of immigrants in San Francisco and a box of chocolates in the shape of a trolley car, Sandra stared the whole time I asked questions about the city and wrote up the experience.
“Did everything go okay?” She asked. “I thought you wanted someone to go traveling with you.”
“Everything went well except that I meant to go all the way to Haight-Ashbury. I got distracted.”
She smiled just a little.
“I’ll go back next weekend,” I said. “Eventually I want to see the inside of your ‘inescapable prison’ Alcatraz.”
I expected her to grimace, but instead, her eyes lit up, and she leaned forward. “I would love to visit it again. I haven’t been there since freshman year of undergrad.”
My ears shivered, half in interest and half in delight. “Then join me,” I told her, “and if you know anyone else who would be interested, invite them along.”
She did, but in the end, even Sandra didn’t come with me to Alcatraz. She caught the flu and couldn’t leave her house, but insisted I go anyway, which I did after she told me that Raymond, her boyfriend, was going to stay with her. Alcatraz wasn’t anything to write home about anyway. The most interesting thing about it was the stories in the audio tour, but those are not mine to share.
During the last week of October, I asked Sandra what the English word “Asexual” meant, as I had seen it in several online sources.
She shrugged a little. “It’s a sexual orientation. I think it’s when you don’t have sexual attraction at all. I don’t know. I might be wrong.”
“Interesting,” I said, baffled that they had felt the need to name a lack of something.
“Oh! That reminds me: You still haven’t talked to the LGBT people on campus.”
“I did forget that,” I admitted.
She looked around at the ever-growing stacks of reference materials and my desk and made a decision. “Come on: I’ll show you where they are.”
The Gender Equity Resource Center was tucked into a corner of the larger student union building on campus. I had noticed it before many times: it was the room with the rainbow in the window. But now, the rainbows were joined by cutouts of colorful humans riding broomsticks, pumpkins (a type of large orange fruit that matured in the fall), and a parade of black cats with multi-colored eyes.
Sandra hesitated outside the propped-open door as if encountering an invisible barrier.
“What is it?” I asked her.
At the same time, a male voice with a soft lilt to it said, “Sandra! Come in. It’s been a while.”
“Hi, Oscar,” She said tightly.
I peeked around the doorframe and saw a broad, soft human man wearing a plaid shirt buttoned all the way up and a pair of black-rimmed glasses. He looked like the room around him was trying to squeeze him down to size.
“Oh,” He said, and smiled one of those terrifying reflexive human smiles. I tamped down my reaction and stepped up next to Sandra.
“Oscar,” She said, “this is Dron Acharya. They wanted to talk to you.”
“Good meeting,” I said.
“Hello,” Oscar chimed, “come on in out of the door. The bisexual support group is starting soon, so it’s going to get crowded in here.”
I stepped over the threshold, but Sandra stayed put. “I’ll go, if that’s alright, Acharya.”
“Of course,” I said, “go do what you need to.”
“Are you sure you won’t stay for a cup of tea?” Oscar asked.
“No, thank you,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Archie.”
I looked around, confused, but there was no one else there. I realized she meant me.
“Well,” Oscar said, “Acharya, was it? Please come in. What did you want to talk about?”
I listened to Sandra’s footsteps recede down the hallway. “I’m not entirely sure,” I said, “I was told you could tell me a bit about human sexuality and all that goes along with it.”
Oscar led me into the resource center, to a small table in the back corner. There was a small tea and coffee station on the counter, and he turned on the electric kettle before he replied. “Sure: I can give you an overview. I’m not a historian or anything though.”
“That’s fine. I’m more interested in the modern view than the historical one.”
“I figured. Do you want a cup of tea?”
“No, thank you.”
He put back one of the paper cups.
“Is there a reason Sandra doesn’t want to come into this room?” I asked.
Oscar sat down across from me, dunking his teabag in the water. The smell was herbal and pungent. He shrugged, “The same reason why a lot of people feel awkward coming in here: she doesn’t like to think about herself as a member of our community. Not because she’s a bad person; just because it’s complicated, and she wants her identity to be simple.”
“Are human relationships complicated?” I asked, mentally preparing myself to learn a long courtship ritual.
“No,” Oscar said, “we’re pretty straightforward, at least here in the United States of America. If you like someone, you try to spend time with them and go on dates. If you still like them after spending time together, you might have sex, or move in together, or get married. The tricky bit is who we’re attracted to.”
I took out my pen and began taking notes. With my other hand, I gestured for him to continue.
“Does your, uh, species have a concept of gender?”
“That word doesn’t translate, so it’s safe to say no.”
“Okay… do you mind if I draw on your tablet?”
I handed over the pen.
Oscar scooted his chair over to be next to me. He drew a line and wrote “masculine” on one end and “feminine” on the other. “So, most people—excuse me, most humans—choose to act or look in specific ways that communicate whether they’re a man or a woman. Women are usually more feminine, and men are more masculine.”
“And most relationships are between a man and a woman,” I said.
“Or so they say,” Oscar said, “gender is a spectrum, just like biological sex and sexual preference. But we have some names for different orientations. Men who are attracted to women and women who are attracted to men are heterosexual, literally ‘different sex.’” If they’re attracted to the same gender as they present, they’re homosexual. Homosexual men are called gay, homosexual women are called lesbians. These are all the polite, proper words for this, you understand?”
“Yes,” I confirmed. “though I should confess I don’t have any kind of experience labeling types of sexual attraction. No species I’ve come across has really cared before.”
“We didn’t for a long time,” Oscar said, “at least, I don’t think so. But some time in the past few thousand years, someone decided to start prosecuting Queer folks instead of venerating us, and it’s all been downhill since.”
“I see,” I said, wondering if this was mythologizing by a prosecuted minority or historical fact. I wasn’t sure I could devote time to it. I would leave it to human scholars for now.
Oscar briefly went over the history of homosexual prosecution in the USA, and then said, “and then there are transgender folks, who identify as a gender that doesn’t align with their biological sex at birth.”
“Oh, I’m familiar with that concept,” I said. “though having a word for it is new.”
He smiled softly like I had just brightened his view of the universe. “That’s actually comforting. Maybe there’s a future for us out there.” By “us” he meant queer humans, not the whole human species.
“So your acronym,” I said, “LGBT stands for…”
“Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender,” Oscar said, “and then there’s QIA: queer, intersex, asexual. There’s also a plus at the end. LGBTQIA+.”
By then, the early arrivals for the bisexual support group were making their way into the lounge.
“Hi, Oscar,” One of them said, then, “hello, Dron Acharya.”
“Hello,” I said back to them, pleasantly surprised they recognized me.
“Hi, Acharya!” Said a familiar voice, and I looked up to see Iris, who I had played hide and seek with as a learning experience not two weeks ago.
“Hello, Iris,” I said, “Are you attending the group meeting?”
“Yup,” She swung a chair around so the back was towards the table and straddled it. “I wanna spend more time around my people than last semester.”
“Archarya and I were just talking about different gender identities,” Oscar said.
“Yes,” I returned to the topic. “What does intersex mean?”
“Someone who is intersex is born with a sexual phenotype that is neither male nor female, but somewhere in the middle.”
I worked hard to disguise my interest, but I could not suppress an ear quiver.
“Usually, when a baby is born intersex, the parents and doctors determine what the baby’s hormonal sex will be and surgically ‘correct,’” Oscar made air quotes around the word, “the genital presentation. Lately, people have been waiting until the child can decide for themselves.”
“I see,” I said, “you’ll be happy to hear intersex people aren’t rare either. Though, again, I am perplexed why humans feel the need to name a thing like that.”
“We didn’t,” Iris chimes in, “but pretty much all the words we use to talk about ourselves started off as slurs, insults, and medical diagnoses. We had to claw them back.”
Oscar is nodding a little. “If you want the full history, there are a couple books I’ve heard good things about.”
I shook my head, “Thank you, but no. I was curious about the way humans approach sexuality, but it’s not my primary interest. I’m more curious about things like how you interact with the environment, what animals you keep as pets and which you think are dangerous.”
“All animals are dangerous,” Oscar said with the tone of a teacher reciting a lesson from memory. “Humans are the most dangerous. We’ll hunt all the others and even ourselves.”
“Even your pets are dangerous?” I asked.
“Yes,” Iris said, “I got bitten by a dog once. It sucked.”
“What about those?” I gestured to the window and the row of little black cats.
“Cats will fuck you up,” Iris said, “if you piss one off. They’re perfect predators.”
That was alarming, considering all the images and videos I’d seen of cats and kittens looking soft and harmless. I hat thought they were scavengers that humans domesticated by happenstance, not predators they had purposefully fed.
“Some people say black cats are bad luck,” Oscar said, “that’s why we’re using them for Halloween decorations.”
“I see,” I said. I already knew a lot about Halloween as a celebration.
“Yeah, and we’re all black cats in a way, aren’t we?” Iris said.
“Iris…” Oscar didn’t even bother to continue. Iris was watching me intently with a wide manic grin. The look of a human dead set on doing something foolish.
“black sheep, black cats. The difference is that we eat meat.” She stood up and dragged the chair over to the forming circle.
“Young gays,” Oscar said to me in a conspiratorial whisper, “always so dramatic about the smallest things.” He laughed, and I flicked an ear in amusement.
