Issue 00 — Welcome to the Diary

There's a Sunday morning specific to Los Angeles that nobody warns you about. The kind where the light comes in gold and unhurried, the neighborhood is quiet for once, and you're standing in your own kitchen — a kitchen you gutted and rebuilt yourself, by the way, with your own hands and a truly unreasonable number of YouTube tutorials — holding a coffee that's already going cold because you got distracted thinking about a woman who stopped texting you back on Thursday.

No reason given. Just Thursday, and then silence.

This is where we begin.

My name is Alex. I'm in my early forties. I'm a third-generation Mexican woman from SoCal who spent twenty years building a career in film and television, mostly reality TV, which means I have seen things. I bought my first home six years ago and have been renovating it room by room because apparently I needed a second full-time job that also covers me in sawdust. My nails are always done — short French manicure, don't come for me. I do not own a cat — I have a dog, Luna. In this dating pool, that is a personality trait whether I like it or not.

I present soft masc, which in lesbian dating means I am too masc for the femmes who want femmes, and not masc enough for the femmes who want butch energy. I am, as far as the algorithm is concerned, a genre of music people haven't discovered yet. I'm also 5'3", which I am completely at peace with. The women I date are less at peace with it. I show up unbothered. They do the math. This is a pattern I have identified and have not yet figured out how to solve.

I have great taste in women. They are, almost universally, lipstick femmes who look incredible and want something slightly different than what I am. I have been described as charming, emotionally available, and — my personal favorite — "not what I usually go for, but." The "but" is always doing a lot of work in that sentence.

The film industry has spent the last couple of years actively falling apart, which means I am currently trying to find a wife and a career simultaneously, in Los Angeles, while also finishing my hallway. I'm telling you this not for sympathy but for context. This is the backdrop. This is the lighting. Every story I'm about to tell you happened against this specific and chaotic scenery.

So. The Soft Masc Diaries.

This is a newsletter about dating in LA as someone who exists confidently in the in-between. It will be funny because it has to be. It will be honest because there's no point otherwise. It will occasionally be a little devastating, but I'll always tell you before the end so you can brace yourself.

I've been collecting these stories for years — from my twenties when I was figuring out who I was, through my thirties when I thought I had it figured out, and into my forties where I have fully accepted that figuring it out was never the point.

The stories are real. The names are changed. The cats were not harmed, even though they were present and I was not thrilled about it.

Come back weekly. I’ll have something to tell you.

— Alex