In a month, I’ll be moving out of my current apartment and into a smaller one. Less rent (which is a big plus when you’re saving up for a potential move elsewhere) and less space (which is great when you’re a solo act).

I’m going to start the big move by packing up my bookshelves. I have a lot of books, and since they’re not used everyday, they’re the first to go into boxes.

Atop one of my bookshelves is one of my favorite possessions: a pair of cherry red five-inch platform heels, size 14 wide with ankle straps and cute little bows decked in very faux diamonds. They’re the shoes I wore when I played Hedwig in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” last year at a local theatre. In a mid-size south Louisiana town with not much of a serious theatre community to speak of, you can be a 6′ 2” fella over 240 pounds and play Hedwig. It’s an example of ignorance being bliss.

We attempted to buy shoes somewhere in town, but that mission was aborted after the incredulous looks from saleswomen and an assortment of really ugly shoes in my size deterred me. (Apparently, women with big feet are expected to be ashamed of their boats, not sex ‘em up.) So we went online and found a pair in my size at a website that specialized in shoes for strippers.

My cherry red platform beauties beat out – by a very slim margin – a pair of acrylic platforms with lights in the soles. And from the moment I put them on, I loved those stripper shoes, ankle straps and all, no matter how much they hurt, no matter how hard they were to walk in.

I loved them because they were transformative. The sort of schlubby guy who went through his day in jeans and sneakers being vaguely self-deprecating and socially awkward could go to the theatre, put on those shoes and be a rock star. He would stand differently, walk differently and most of all feel differently about himself – because let’s be honest, no one messes with a 6′ 7” guy with a German accent in a miniskirt, right?

I felt fabulous.

And I know, you’re going to groan because I used that word. Fabulous. It’s a word that makes all those guys who use the self-descriptive term “straight acting” in their Manhunt profiles roll their eyes in dismissal. But I like the word, I’ve always liked it, and it was never to me a fey word. It was always a deeper, richer word that expressed something real about the gay sensibility and how we exist in the harsh and unforgiving world around us. It was a word that expressed power, fortitude, resilience.

I’ve been thinking about fabulousness a lot these days, because fabulous is what I want to be as I weather this change in my life. I want to feel like that 6′ 7” vaguely Teutonic man in a miniskirt as I walk through a very difficult breakup and a massive upheaval of my life – not the schlubby self-deprecating sneakers guy. He’s fine and all for regular days, for Mondays in my cubicle, for Friday nights at the movies, but for the big stuff, for the big changes, he’s too small, too malleable, too easily swayed, easily broken.

Fabulousness, to me, is a way of facing loss, of facing absence. It’s facing the empty space on the other side of the side of the bed and saying, “That space is beautiful, a vessel for possibility, a waiting space for someone out there in the world.” It’s looking at the prospect of a very big unknowable leap into untested waters and saying, “I’ll jump, and I might fall, but I will look great while falling, I’ll fall gracefully, limbs perfectly akimbo, my face relaxed and serene, my back arched, and it’ll look like I fell on purpose, not because I didn’t know what the hell I was diving into.” Fabulousness is being scared out of your mind but doing it anyway, dressing yourself up in the fear, walking your butt into the center of the room and showing it off as though you never looked better.

(Fabulousness is discursive, obviously. And a little rambly. But fabulousness doesn’t give a damn and keeps writing on anyway.)

You may not like it, you may balk at the word, but the gay community knows fabulousness. We’ve been perfecting it for years, turning straw into gold, wearing our wounds like accessories, riding on the back of a cruel and unjust history as though it was what we intended. We have faced loss with grace a thousand times over, a thousand thousands, we have demonstrated it in ways large and small for decades, in the lives of great men and women who have shouted their truths from rooftops and in small unseen lives that never revealed themselves to anyone.

We learned, somewhere along the way, that pain and injustice and bigotry and defeat were as malleable as clay, and we could shape them into anything we wanted. And in our wisdom, we shaped them into our activism, a ferocious beating heart that drives us to assemble, to march, to organize, to write, to yell, to do whatever we do in the face of opposition.

And we shaped them into those red platform shoes, thank God. Because I love ‘em. I don’t wear them anymore, but I do love ‘em.

They’re my mojo on rough nights. They’re there when I need them. They’re a reminder.

When you’re five inches closer to Heaven, anything is possible.