It’s been a while since I’ve been catcalled by some jackass in a passing car, but it just happened a while ago, and in front of where I work no less. 

I’d just ducked across the street to the little student coffee hutch in Bloomberg to get a bagel, since the cafeteria here was out by the time I got in.  I was walking back toward the crosswalk when I heard a car behind me beep its horn and saw the driver motioning me to go ahead and cross.  Most of the drivers here are friendly to pedestrians, probably because this being a university campus there are so many.  Drivers that hate navigating a ton of pedestrian crosswalks have plenty of alternative routes.  Anyway…so I start crossing and then I hear the passenger shout out something at me.  I didn’t quite catch it, but the driver, a young guy looked really embarrassed.

Probably, it was something like "Get a haircut!" which I got tired of sometime back in 1973.  I thought I caught the word "hair…" anyway, but I’m still not sure.  At work, I wear it in a ponytail that I’m pleased to say goes halfway down my back.  Long hair is high maintenance stuff, and if I didn’t have the thing for long haired males that I do, mine would be as short now as as most other American males’ (alas, alas…). 

The point being, hair like this is work.  It has to be brushed constantly…and after a nice drive in the countryside with the windows down and the moonroof open it’s a mass of knots I have to carefully detangle.  Showers with me are three-fourths hair care and one-fourth the rest of me.  When the conditioner I use suddenly goes missing on the store shelves I panic.  I take pride in my hair.  It may look unruly because it’s never cut, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t get a lot of TLC.  It gets tons.  It’s my mane.  Grey streaked now though it is.  People have been known to enjoy running their fingers through it.

So…Get Over It! 

Last time I got catcalled was last summer while I was walking out of the Lambda Rising here in Baltimore’s little gay neighborhood.  But that time it was "Nice ass!".  "Nice ass!" is always welcome.