When I was seven, I wanted a Barbie doll. I know, I know. It’s a total cliché. So many gay men have childhood Barbie doll stories of their own. But we were living in isolation from one another, unaware there were other boys like us everywhere, so sharing these stories can be therapeutic. Reclaiming my Barbie doll desires makes me feel less alone, less of a freak, even all these years later.
A girl friend of mine had the full Barbie works: the carrying case, the shoes, the tiny plastic hangers, and all the outfits. I’d go to her house on Saturday afternoons and be enthralled by her collection. Jealous, too. I didn’t think it was fair we always had to play with her dolls. She could be bossy about what the Barbies were and weren’t allowed to do. Unfortunately, this meant I was forbidden to grind Barbie’s and Ken’s smooth, plastic crotches together. I wanted nothing more than to level the Barbie playing field by showing up for our next play date with a stocked carrying case of my own.
One day, my mom and I were in the toy section at Woolco. I asked if she could buy me a Barbie doll. I pointed one out on the shelf, the doll’s blue eyes gazing blankly from behind the plastic shield of her box. I don’t even think she was a real Barbie, but a knock-off. I must have thought I stood a better chance of getting the discount version.
“Oh, Brian,” my mom said dismissively. “Don’t be stupid.”
“Please?” I asked, batting my eyelashes. I had recently written in a school report that I had the second-longest eyelashes in my family, so why not use them to my benefit?
“Absolutely not.”
“But why?”
“Boys don’t play with dolls.”
I pleaded with her. I may have even managed to work up some tears. My parents had had me later in life (“We had too much Captain Morgan rum the night you were conceived,” my mom would often say), and from time to time I’d use this to my advantage. Older parents were easier to wear down. I usually got what I wanted if I persisted hard enough. But my mom, for once, held fast, and pulled me over to the aisle of boy toys.
“Look, they have bags of plastic soldiers,” she said encouragingly.
We ended up getting a Dracula doll that day. Although he didn’t come with an assortment of shoes, it was a compromise I was forced to make. Unfortunately, he terrified me, and I had to keep him out of my bedroom at night.
That day in Woolco, I had received a very clear and concise message: my wanting a doll was preposterous, akin to asking for a leprechaun. In my mom’s denial, I started to formulate an equation. It wasn’t that she was refusing me the Barbie so much as she was refusing me. I understood then that the things I desired, the feminine toys that brought me pleasure, were wrong in the eyes of the people who loved me. My parents weren’t cruel people, far from it, but their job was to protect their boy. And, to them, this meant correcting behaviour that was deemed socially wrong, abnormal, or inappropriate. It meant putting me in my place. I remember I had a beautiful violet betta fish with fins that swirled like silk. It swam in solitude in its small bowl and had to be kept apart from other betta fish or else they would attack one another. My dad told me once that the fish would only grow as big as its glass bowl allowed, and this is the best way I can describe what my seven-year-old world felt like.
When I picked up one of my friend’s Barbies the following Saturday, I felt a new shame as I fitted Barbie’s white pumps onto her arched feet.
Some years later, when I was maybe twelve or thirteen, old enough to know better than to ask for dolls, a young boy brought a Cabbage Patch Kids doll to church. There was a part of every Sunday service where the minister would call the young children to gather at the altar steps for a talk about the kindness of Jesus or the value of sharing or the importance of obeying adults. When he was done, the children would walk back down the aisle towards the basement where the Sunday school classes were held. It was an endearing moment, the adults in the congregation smiling at the children as they passed. I was too old for Sunday school by that time, so I stayed in the pew, and I remember the moment the young boy passed me with his doll. He was around seven, the same age I’d been when I asked my mom for a Barbie. He simply walked past, not seeming to have a second thought about the doll he was carrying in his arms, or anyone’s reactions to it. It was so matter-of-fact. And then he was gone and I was left sitting there, sandwiched between my parents, to endure the rest of the service, holding only the printed church bulletin in my hand.
The memory of this boy and his doll has stuck with me, even almost forty years later. His was a reality I never knew. Sometimes, the smallest moments are the most emblematic, especially if those moments provide a self-reckoning, a mirroring of the boy you weren’t allowed to be.
I wonder who we could have become, Snuggles, if boys like us had been celebrated rather than corrected. If our femininity had been encouraged at a young age. If the alternative scene in Woolco that day had been my mom insisting I get the Barbie.
“It’s about time you had your own,” she might have said, proudly.
What effect would that have had on me? Can you even imagine a world where we were simply allowed to be—free of the self-consciousness, the constant correction, the sense of being wrong? Imagine who we might have become, how vast the world would have seemed to our young eyes. Think of all the years we wouldn’t have lost mired in confusion and darkness, the energy we wouldn’t have wasted trying to deny who we really were.
Imagine how kind we would have been to ourselves. And to one another.
The good news, from my end, is that “straight-acting” is no longer a phrase in my purview. I’m on the other side of that bullshit now. “Straight-acting” is one of those terms I rarely think about these days, like “popular” and “cool” and “fat-free.” I’m not preoccupied with whether people think I’m gay-acting or not. And who cares if they do?
I’m inspired to see the rigid binaries of masculinity and femininity being questioned by the emerging generations. And I’m grateful that the constructs of gender are loosening. The more we’re able to define ourselves, rather than being defined by others, the more authentic we are and the more we’ll shine. And isn’t that something we all deserve? To burn brightly in an overcast world? To feel contentment on our own terms and not have to worry about the pieces of plastic we choose to play with?
To be honest, Snuggles, sometimes I feel like I’m a bit late to the conversations around masculinity and femininity, that the time I grew up in and its constrictions have been too ingrained in my perceptions of how I see myself. It isn’t as easy for me to dismantle ideas of gender as it might be for someone younger. I will always feel a weight of “wrongness” on my shoulders. I’ll never know what it feels like to truly be myself, unconfined, wide open.
I don’t think I’ll ever know how big I could have grown.
Sincerely,
HI.
SAW YOUR AD IN THE NEWSPAPER.
NOT BAD!
I’M NOT A PRINCESS OR A SYLVESTER STALLONE TYPE, BUT I LIKE TO THINK I CAN HOLD MY OWN.
THERE’S A GOOD CHANCE I’M OLD ENOUGH TO BE YOUR DAD. BUT LIKE I SAID, I CAN HOLD MY OWN, SHOULD IT BE REQUIRED.
LONELINESS CAN BE CURED WITH A
GOOD DINNER AND BOTTLE OF MERLOT.
WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?
CALL ME.
REG
Dear Reg,
Do you really believe that loneliness can be taken care of that easily? I mean, it always seemed more complicated than that. To me, anyway. Especially when I was twenty-one. Loneliness was a garment I wore. I’ve never had anything fit me more perfectly.
But after rereading your letter, I realize how much I’d screwed up. All those years of loneliness and all I needed was a bottle of Blue Nun and a chicken cutlet? If only I had known that in 1992. How much less lonely I would have been, not to mention I could have saved myself sixty-five dollars on that stupid ad. Happiness had been
within reach all along. I just needed some cutlery and a corkscrew.
Oh, I’m only horsing around with you, Reg. I don’t think you meant that loneliness could literally be cured with wine and a good dinner. After all, you were replying to my ad, which would imply you were a bit on the lonely side yourself, if you don’t mind my saying. And we’ve all seen what happens when you rely on food and booze to cure anything. You find yourself waking up in the gutter, the rain pelting down on you, mascara running, your belly flopping over the waistband of your too-tight jeans. It’s a nice idea, though, isn’t it, to think that whatever troubles us could be so easily fixed.
If only loneliness was that simple to cure.
I’m nattering. I realize that. But I’m stalling, you see. There’s something I need to tell you, something important, and I’m not sure how to begin or where to start. It’s a sordid tale, but I think you might be up for it. You sound like the all-ears type. So rather than continue to beat around the bush, I’ll just come right out and say it.
When I was nine, I stopped shitting.
It wasn’t because of cheese or a lack of fibre. I wilfully stopped myself from crapping. The urge would come over me, strong spasms racking my body like an accordion being squeezed, and I’d furiously fight back as if I were waged in a battle where I was the priest and my turd was the devil.
I don’t know what triggered this phase in my life. I don’t recall a traumatizing toilet episode or ever having a bad public restroom experience.
As you likely know, you can’t not shit. At least, not for an extended period of time. There are repercussions when you try to stop your body from doing something it deems necessary. Every now and then, the shit would win. (Later in life I’d come to learn this lesson more succinctly.) Mistakes would happen, and I’d leave evidence of my lost battles in my underpants. I was horrified, of course. But this only intensified my need for secrecy. To let anyone find out would have meant disaster for me. So, like any logical child of that age who is crapping himself would do, I tossed the soiled underwear behind my bedroom dresser to keep my secret safe.
This went on for some time. Although I can’t remember exactly for how long, it was long enough for my mother to notice my depleting underwear supply. She started to get suspicious when putting away the laundry.
“I don’t know where his underwear is going.”
I overheard her say this to a relative. It was the summer of 1980, and we were visiting my dad’s family in Saskatchewan. My family would make the drive out there every few years. I’d complain of being bored before we’d even pulled out of our driveway, my teenaged sisters would load up on their eight-tracks and paperbacks, and the trunk would be so crammed that the back bumper would scrape against the asphalt.
In Sarnia, my only extended family was my uncle, my mom’s brother. He’d come to our house every other Sunday for dinner and bring his laundry for my mom to do, along with a large rolled-up tube of tabloids and magazines for my sis-ters and me, including the National Enquirer, Star, Us Weekly, and People, as well as the comics section from the Saturday edition of the Detroit Free Press.
I don’t think my uncle actually read any of the magazines he brought us. Buying them provided him with an excuse to go to the downtown variety stores he’d frequent, as well as the coffee shops, to chat it up with the girls behind the counters. He was a “confirmed bachelor,” to quote my mom.
“Mother ruined him,” she used to say. “No girl was ever good enough for her boy.”
He never moved out from the tiny bungalow where he and my mom grew up, and since the death of my grandparents years earlier, the house had become part of my family’s folklore, shrouded in mystery. No one was allowed inside. The blinds and curtains were always drawn, the windows never opened. That house, in my mind, was like a fortress, sealed off to the outside world. As a child, I was obsessed by the enigma of it. The closest I ever got to seeing its interior was when my dad would drive me over at Halloween to trick-or-treat.
“What do we have here?” my uncle would announce, quickly slipping through the front door and pulling it closed behind him. “You supposed to be some kind of pirate, Brian?”
I’d desperately try to get a glimpse over his shoulder as he came out, but he was always too fast for me. For an overweight man, he was remarkably agile. He’d toss a couple of Halloween Kisses into my pillowcase (a treat worse than getting an apple, if you asked me) and then the moment would be over. I wouldn’t have another opportunity like that for at least another year.
We all knew that he was a hoarder (back then, hoarders were referred to as “collectors”), but were there other things inside that bungalow? My blossoming writer’s imagination ran wild. I knew the only way we’d ever get access into that house was if my uncle either died or had to be moved out. When he was eighty-seven, the latter happened. He had a fall in the kitchen. A neighbour called my mom, who called the paramedics. My uncle would never return to live in that bungalow again.
Which, I realized, was for the best once I finally stepped inside. If you’ve never been inside a hoarder’s house, Reg, it’s an eerie experience. The house was silent, but everywhere I turned, all I saw was noise. The chaos was overwhelming. I was waist-high in a sea of baseball hats, books, magazines and newspapers, plastic grocery bags, and folded shirts still in their cellophane packaging. How had he lived like this all these years? I looked at the solitary fold-out chair positioned in front of the television and was struck by sadness. He had this entire house, and yet he’d only allowed himself a few square feet of unrestricted space. Even his bed, a tiny twin mattress, was pushed against a wall in a room filled with towers of paperback books and records.
My uncle had become trapped by his shuttered world, his secret terrain. I could only assume that to live within that chaos, day after day, meant that, at some point, he must have stopped seeing it.
He’d become a prisoner of his own creation.
There were no hoarders on my dad’s side of the family. In Saskatchewan, the view was as flat and far-reaching as your eye could see. There were aunts and uncles whose houses we were allowed to go inside. And talk about cousins—more than I could shake a wheat sheaf at! First cousins and second cousins and people I was told were my relatives but it was hard for me to establish a meaningful connection to them. The notion of forming family ties was too complicated, too overwhelming. At times it seemed as though I was related to everyone in the province.
My paternal grandmother also lived there and she was the embodiment of everything you’d want a grandmother to be and look like: snow-white curls, pleated dresses and blouses with bows, terracotta-coloured stockings, and black shoes with square heels that clicked on her kitchen floor as she went to load up plates with more homemade chocolate chip cookies.
That summer of 1980, we had driven out for my cousin’s wedding. It was important for me to make a good impression while we were there. My insecurities made me sometimes feel as though we easterners were being judged by the relatives. As if my dad’s side was taking stock of how George had done by his move to Ontario. Sizing up his family. Our manners. Our weight. Our car. I couldn’t help but be self- conscious around them. Since I only saw these people every few years or so, it was hard to sink into the rhythm of these relationships, to show up on their doorsteps and act naturally. Not that they were ever anything but kind and welcoming. But they were all familiar with one another, all part of the same flat landscape, while I had to reacquaint myself with them on every visit. And I had to be as charming as possible. I didn’t want who I was, or whatever my deficiencies and oddities, to reflect poorly on my dad.
Which is why my mom’s comment about my missing underwear hurt me so deeply. Why was she revealing this? Was she intentionally trying to humiliate me? And how did she even get on the topic of her child’s missing underwear in the first place?
“It’s a complete mystery to me,” I heard her say to my
cousin’s husband. We were sitting in my aunt’s living room, the air thick with cigarette smoke and chatter.
I wish certain moments of my life had been captured on video. I’d give anything to see my expression when I heard those words leave my mom’s mouth. I’m sure I looked like Drew Barrymore in the film Firestarter, right before she sends a flaming fireball to blow something to smithereens.
In fairness, my mom didn’t know about my dirty secret. And really, can you think of a dirtier secret? She might have thought I was nonchalantly throwing my underwear out the window, offering them up for birds to use for their nests. Or I was hiding them around the house, like Easter eggs, for people to find. I could be a prankster like that. Reach into the flour canister and suddenly it would be, “Oh, Brian!” Maybe I was mailing my underwear off to children in need. That wouldn’t be much of a stretch, would it? Children can be very charitable at that age.
How could my mother know what I’d been doing, even though the awful truth was right there, under her nose?
(Okay, I’ll stop with all the double-entendre stuff, Reg. You’re likely already pouring your second glass of Merlot.)
But when you’re nine, you don’t stop to think rationally about these things. You don’t consider that maybe your mom’s comment wasn’t malicious or that her end goal wasn’t to humiliate you. It was just a mother talking shit (sorry) about her kids, as moms do. Especially after having to deal with them around the clock on a two-week family vacation.
Naturally, I screamed at my mom after this betrayal. Not in front of the relatives, of course. In spite of my rage, I had more self-command than that. I unleashed the demon later, when we were alone in the basement of my aunt’s house.
“Why did you say that about my underwear?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I heard you say my underwear was missing. You’re trying to embarrass me.”
Missed Connections Page 3