Terminal 5, New York City

It was at the fifth “YASSSS!” that I began composing a tweet. What else is one to do in a trying situation than mentally write never-to-be-sent social media posts? I craned to see Dev Hynes on stage at the best-loathed music venue in Manhattan, this hellmouth of Hell’s Kitchen: Terminal Five, never again. I was also thinking, though, that there might be some kind of pun potential in this imagined tweet — something about there being a special place in Hell’s Kitchen for straight white dudes yelling like queer black people. I didn’t even reach for my phone. I’d only regret it.

You were packed behind me in the crowd, a head or so taller than me. I knew your height without looking because every time you yelled I felt the force and volume of your voice in my ears like a rush of water from above, specifically, like the dumping and pounding of a heavy, sand-clotted Atlantic ocean wave. “YyASSSS queen.”

Through bobbing heads and shoulders, I snatched little glimpses of Dev Hynes fireworking around the stage, and thought about stardom and Paris is Burning, the phrase executive realness. In the tight tectonics of the crowd I’d lost my husband and turned to see he was trapped a few bodies back. He saw me and wiggled his fingers. And now that I was looking behind me, I thought I might as well glance at you, too.

You were not some Caucasian bruh in a trucker hat. You were a tall, elegant black man in a cream polo neck with extraordinary ear tips, pinched and elfin, and a straight broad plane of shoulders, which you dipped and circled with such assurance that I thought this had to be your profession. Your shorter white friend beside you flipped his straight, shoulder-length hair around, unceasing, as though that were the specific, albeit lesser role that he had been assigned for the evening. Later, your companion would be a useful landmark as I tried to locate my friend in the crowd. He’d reply: “I’m over to the side, away from the hair flicking boy.”

I smiled at you, and then past you at my husband again, a dorky, rueful sort of smile, as if he might intuit the whole reversal that had just gone on. He reached an awkward hand up and over someone’s shoulder to make contact with my equally awkwardly stretched fingers. “Oh hey,” you said with warm consternation as you noticed this slightly pathetic moment. You said it with the considerate frown of someone who regularly rights small wrongs, like the best-loved kindergarten teacher who hushes down squabbles, firm and fair. “Let’s swap,” you said, and you were already shifting and ushering me past you, delivering me to him. Like a true queen.