CHER:  Mr. Hall, I was surfing the crimson wave, I had to haul ass to the ladies'.

MR HALL:  I assume your referring to women's troubles, and so I'll let that one slide.

- Clueless, 1995. Amy Heckerling.

Alright so here is the latest development: I’m fairly sure I have a menstrual cycle. And even though I am fully aware I am missing all the necessary parts, namely: a uterus, vagina, matching sets of ovaries and fallopian tubes, and well pretty much the entire female productive system; I am still certain this is the case.

how else am I to explain my painful cramps, hormonal surges and emotional breakouts each month? And PMS? Bitch please. They don’t call me ‘princess’ at work for nothing.

So after much hard-thinking this past weekend, I came to the conclusion that I have gaymenses. Allow me to explain. But like any good story of sexual development, first we must return to my childhood past.

At a young age, I learned that I was not like most of the other boys in school. This revelation first came to me in grade four, when my teacher selected me to provide a guided-tour of our school, to a new girl who had just joined our class. With characteristic enthusiasm, I took her to all my favourite spots, including the library and counselor’s office. Wrapping up the tour four hallways later, she turned to me just before we returned to class and asked, “Are you a girl?”

Immediately I replied "No" to her, wondering what school she had transferred from that gender was so ambiguous. Making a special point to show her the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles splayed across my chest, I interrogated her as to why she would ask me something like that.

“I don’t know,” she said casually, innocently shrugging her shoulders. “You are just not like the other boys I know.”

It wasn’t until junior high that I realized she was actually right. While failing sports - and pretty much every other “male rites of passage” course the school had to offer - I passed home economics with flying colours. The only student to graduate from my grade-eight class with top marks in cooking and wood-working, there was no question I would make the perfect housewife when I grew up. Fast-forwarding through the tragic mess that was my “all boys” “Catholic” high school experience, it was not until University that I began to truly embrace my atypical gender. Abandoning any hopes of following in the same footsteps as my father, I opened up the internal flood gates on a tidal wave stained crimson, and got set for the ride.

What grade-seven boy didn't have pictures of Sarah Michelle Gellar and the Spice Girls plastered all over his wall?

Now back to my gaymenstrual cycle. So it seems that for an average of six to eight days each month, my hormones follow a similar flow:

• For the first two days it starts off light, evidenced only by the fact that I am a touch more sensitive than usual. I begin to cry at movies I never shed a tear at before, and notice men who, under normal circumstances, would never show up on my radar.
• On the third day things get heavy. Flooded by hormones, I can barely control myself. Tearing through my closet in search of the tightest jeans I can find, I leave the apartment howling like a cat in heat, ready to be pounced upon at the nearest sight of man.
• Forty-eight hours later I am a different story. Breaking into tears at the grocery store for no apparent reason I turn into an emotional wreck. Returning home with a box of red wine, I text my BF Lady J that I will be alone for the rest of my life and should probably just start spinstering now.
• Then, magically, one hangover and 24 hours later, I am fine.

So far my research on the field of “gaymenses” has yielded no results. Even Wikipedia, which generally can be relied upon for everything, has nothing to say about the pressing subject. Because of this, I have decided to become the principal investigator in this psycho-sexual developmental instrumental temperamental (k now I am just rhyming) aspect of gay male life. For the next twelve to eighteen months, I will use myself as a test subject and record each monthly hormonal tidal wave as they occur. In the meantime, I have begun to control my surges using a mixture of Hendrick’s Gin and St. John’s Wort as a do-it-yourself form of gay-birth control. 

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