One of my students ran her fingers through her tangled, blonde California-girl hair, and announced, “I’m from Malibu. I don't walk."

She survived the hike. At the top of the rock formation I circled the students around a jojoba plant and explained that jojoba is an ingredient in many beauty products. Immediately, the girl from Malibu recognized the name from her conditioner bottle. “You’re a delight! Such a delight,” she said to the plant.

WHIPTAIL UTOPIA BY CHASE EDWARDS 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 26

In Joshua Tree, California, I learn that unisexual, all-female whiptail lizards reproduce lady lizard clones of themselves. On an environmental science course I watch a lady whiptail mount another lady whiptail, and a fellow instructor explains to me that the all-female lizards dry-hump each other in order to lay clutches of fertilized eggs. Another instructor overhears this and boasts that the lizards take turns playing the dominant party. He says that the lizard being humped experiences a rush of baby-making hormones and these hormones enable her to fertilize her own eggs, through a process called parthenogenesis. “They’re lesbian lizards,” he says, and I want to know more.

Once upon a time, on a busy San Francisco street, I copulated in my van with a go-go dancer named Chris. Sprawled on the backseat, breathless, he whispered into my ear: “I’m really a lesbian.”

“Huh?” I replied, also breathless, grinding against his leg and pulling his pink t-shirt up and over his head.

Years before, in college, people sometimes called him Chrissy and celebrated him for winning—four times in a row—the town’s annual drag show. I knew of him back then but wasn’t, at the time, interested in his radical blurring of gender lines. But after five years in a controlling relationship with an older, extremely straight-edged man, I became interested in less conventional gender roles and pursued Chrissy.

“A lesbian,” he said again, flicking his long tongue in and out of my mouth, “trapped in a male’s body.” With his muscular arms around me, I nuzzled his neck—wanting to understand. Then, we rolled off the narrow bench-seat, onto the floor.

Even for drunken van-sex, it was pretty bad. We flopped back and forth, from bench to floor, our feet occasionally kicking my clothes out of the crates stacked near the sliding door. But despite our lack of orgasms Chris marked his territory before leaving, placing his lime green panties over the headrest of my driver’s seat.

“So you’ll remember me,” he explained, darting out of my van and onto the dimly lit street, where he stuck out his bottom lip in disappointment because the collapsible bed in my van was broken and we couldn’t spend the night together. My cousin lived just a few blocks away, but I knew her three uptight law school roommates would not appreciate two drunken creatures groping each other in the middle of the night on their couch. And I couldn’t go to his place in Oakland because I had a meeting on this side of the city first thing in the morning.

“When you finally move here I’ll be a dancer in the Castro,” Chris said, puckering his lips and blowing me a kiss. Then, he scurried off to the Bart station and left me blushing on the curb.

It was the third time in less than eight hours that Chris made me blush. The first time, he batted his long eyelashes and said, “I’m crushing on you,” as the sun set over San Francisco Bay. He raised his left hand in the air and with an effeminate flip of his wrist announced that we must find a place with decent margaritas. After the margaritas, on our long walk across town to my van, he held my hand and told me about his future child-rearing plans.

“I will tell my son that it’s okay if he’s straight,” Chris said. “I want him to understand that I support his decisionseven if he’s straight.”

I smiled as he bent down to kiss me on the cheek

“You’ll tell our daughters the same thing,” he said, and I turned the color of a blooming calico cactus in a sunscorched landscape and, despite my fierce opposition to motherhood, promptly started ovulating.

Normally, I explain my aversion to baby-making like this: at age 12, I swore off the idea of ever having my own children as I watched my middle-aged mother balloon out to 200 pounds while pregnant with my brother. Sometimes I also add that pregnancy made her smell funny, but there’s more to my no-babies oath than that. The truth is my father was unemployed, miserable, and not paying attention to my mother, so she produced my brother as a last-ditch effort to save her unhappy marriage (when my sister and I get her really drunk she actually admits this). Nearing menopause her estrogen and progesterone levels roller-coastered, her biological clock took over, her financial logic blurred, and nine months later Keefer Edwards popped out. According to both of my parents, they never talked about the decision to have my brother, but my mom wanted another baby so one night she pulled off the condom and pounced on my father.

Only weeks before my date with Chris, Mom filed for divorce. For the first time in twenty-eight years of marriage she stepped out of her passive gender role and used her evolved mammalian brain to assertively address her unhappiness. My father responded by calling her a cunt. Keefer watched his drunken parents throw things, break glass, scream.

His older sisters, who used to be the mediators and protectors, were on opposite sides of the country. The soap opera devastated him—he’s been plagued with undiagnosed headaches, backaches and stomachaches ever since.

This is what I’m trying to say: although I believe conventional love is terribly depressing—especially when tainted with reproduction and gender-specific responsibilities—I found Chris’s statement about baby-making so bold for a first date, so ultimately flattering, that, well, I blushed all the way down to my toenails and wondered what our children would look like. Without hesitation, I fell absolutely in love with him.

Several days after my romantic evening with Chris, I returned to Joshua Tree National Park to teach fifth-graders from Los Angeles about desert ecology. At night, as yucca moths flew from plant to plant depositing their eggs into the ovaries of white yucca flowers, poking the flowers’ stigmas with their pollen-coated chins, I continued to flutter over Chris. In the morning, while the oldest of the moth larvae ate their way out of the succulent green fruitwombs of the yucca, I hiked my students several hundred feet up a pile of granite boulders and told them stories about life in the desert: the parasitic relationship between the mistletoe and the cat-claw acacia, the highly adapted bladder of the desert tortoise (they urinate crystals), and the mutually beneficial partnership between the yucca plant and the moth, two organisms that cannot survive without the other.

Before the hike one of my students ran her fingers through her tangled, blonde California-girl hair, looked at the rock formation ahead of us, batted her eyelashes at me and announced, “I’m from Malibu. I don’t walk!” Then, she stuck out her bottom lip looking for sympathy—a splotch of marshmallow from last night’s campfire caked her tan cheeks, and dirt and mustard coated her designer jeans.

She survived the hike. At the top of the rock formation I circled the students around a jojoba plant and explained that jojoba is an ingredient in many beauty products. Immediately, the girl from Malibu recognized the name from her conditioner bottle. “You’re a delight! Such a delight,” she said to the plant and plopped down on the ground beneath it. She looked content after that, lying on her stomach with her chin in her hands and thinking about the well-deserved shower she would take in several days. The other students sprawled on boulders and gazed past her, past the jojoba plant, to the ground 200 feet below, where the yucca trees and tents looked like green dots and the world appeared flat for miles.