Handsome

by Holly Lorka

I turned around and there they were: two hundred people standing up and cheering for me. I’d been at home all day puking and having diarrhea about what I was going to do that night, and then this. They were cheering and crying! The cheering and crying of my childhood dreams! The tears poured out of me. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever felt—cathartic and moving. I’d shown these strangers all the scary and shameful parts of me, and they loved me for it. That night was the catalyst for a lot of these stories. It was also the catalyst for me getting back up on stages. Not to tell jokes, but to tell real stories. Now when I’m lucky enough to again get cheering and crying, I know that I’m finally aimed straight arrow at my destiny. That feels incredible.

  I’ve since gone back and watched video of my comedy sets. What I see when I watch is someone who is throwing a voice, jumping and waving hands around, doing everything possible to distract everyone from seeing who is actually standing on that stage: a quiet, shy, sensitive girl/boy full of insecurity and in desperate need of love. It makes me sad. I want to scream into the screen, “Just stop it and be yourself!” But I guess there had to be some mysterious shards of glass and crying first.

  During my mojo-free winter, about the only friend who would spend time with me was my buddy Kathrin (God bless you, Kathrin). One afternoon we were sitting around drinking beer and talking about our lives. She told me a story about how she grew up in an affluent neighborhood in Connecticut where she felt like an outsider. She was dealing with the same kind of shame that I was, dreaming the same dreams of having a big life. She would walk the streets of her neighborhood, lonely, hoping a shiny Mercedes would pull up next to her, roll down the window, and offer her all the fame and fortune she dreamed of.

  What we both thought we wanted was fame. We thought fame would be the magic bullet to make people like us. But what we realized when we were talking that day is that what we actually wanted was to be free of our shame. We wanted someone to tell us that we were okay the way we were. I said to her, “Kathrin, no one is going to pull up alongside of us in a nice car and roll down the window to offer that to us. The only thing anyone in that car would likely offer us is money for a hand job.”

  I don’t want hand job money, and not just because it would be a shitty, Indian sunburn, discount hand job. It’s that I don’t need fame or superstardom anymore. What I want is to be a person who stands in my truth and is loved, or not, for exactly that. I want this for all of us. We are all little monsters struggling with our shame and self-loathing. If we’d all tell the truth and show our real selves, we’d realize that we are all basically the same, and none of us are alone in our struggling. We could all stop pretending and finally show up to cheer and cry for each other together. And anyone who wanted a hand job could probably get one for free!

  bedpost confessions, april 12, 2012

  Tammy’s shirt was up, pushed up as high under her arms as it would go. It was August and her skin smelled like the sun that was shining outside. The shades in the trailer were drawn against the afternoon glare and I had her there in the dark, up against the door. There was a mirror on the outside of it, and in its reflection I saw myself nervously exploring what was under her shirt with my hands and mouth. I was nervous not only because I knew that what I was doing was wrong, but also because I feared our parents would come back from the lake to check on us to make sure I didn’t have my best friend, Tammy, pressed up against the closet door with her shirt up and my mouth all over her virgin parts. We were four years old.

  It started as an idea Tammy had. “Let’s play boyfriend and girlfriend,” she suggested. I didn’t even know that was a game, but you bet I was going to play. I was most definitely going to be the boyfriend.

  Ever since I can remember anything about my life, I’ve known I was supposed to be a boy. It wasn’t a decision I made in my head; there was no logic, no reason to it. It just was. I identified with the boys on TV, and I was particularly obsessed with Fonzie. I wanted his awesome life, and I fantasized about having a motorcycle, muscles, and a fist that could jump-start a jukebox. I’d sneak into the bathroom and with a wet comb try to coax my hair into a blonde pompadour while giving the thumbs-up and saying “Hhhhheeeeeeyyyyy.”

  I only wanted to play with my brother’s toys, Matchbox cars and GI Joe dolls. I wanted to wear boy clothes, in particular white T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up and cowboy hats. When my brother and sister and I played house, I always wanted to be the dad, which was fine with my brother, who always wanted to be the dog. I couldn’t ever imagine being a girl, especially during make-believe when I got to choose what I was.

  When Tammy offered to let me be her pretend boyfriend, you bet your ass I did it. How did I know, at four years of age, what boyfriends did to girlfriends? Well, I certainly had a good idea about what to perpetrate up there under her shirt, and it was the best make-believe EVER. I don’t remember it being sexually erotic. My plumbing couldn’t have been all hooked up yet. But enjoy it I did. Because for however long we were hidden away in that dark trailer, I got to be a boy. With a girl. And even though I was only four, I was digging the hell out of it. Fonzie had nothing on me that afternoon.

  As I got older, I realized that I had a serious problem: make-believe was not real life. It dawned on me that who I was on the outside and who I was on the inside didn’t match. I didn’t just want to be a boy. I knew I was a boy, except where everyone could see. All the rolled up white T-shirts and cowboy hats wouldn’t change it. I was named Holly, I had to wear curlers in my hair every year the night before class pictures, and I had to take gymnastics in PE with the girls instead of baseball with the boys.

  What happened? What was wrong with me? Everyone else seemed to be just fine with who they were. My brother certainly matched. You could tell because he was gross and didn’t mind drinking out of a water bowl on the floor when we played house. My sister was happy to have long hair and wear pretty clothes and curlers and be the mom. I was jealous and confused and keenly aware that I wasn’t right, not just because I was the only girl in class who couldn’t do a goddamned cartwheel. All of it was just humiliating.

  My mom was Catholic, and she taught us that God made things how they are and that we could have anything we wanted if we just prayed about it. This was God’s fault, then. I knew all those scary prayers they taught us about dying before I woke up and having my soul taken, and I used to lie in my bed saying them over and over to prove to God how good I was. Then I’d plead with him to work his God magic overnight and let me wake up as a boy. I’d pray so hard, with my eyes scrunched closed and my hands forced together with an urgency that could not possibly be ignored. Please, God, please. In the mornings I’d wake up and lie absolutely still to see if I felt differently. I’d wait as long as I could before I opened my eyes to check.

  The disappointment was new and crushing every single time. God hated me. He did this to me. Before I was born, he switched me into the wrong body and was certainly punishing me for something by not changing me back. I was obviously the only one in the world this had happened to, and the shame of that was overwhelming. I knew and God knew that I was a monster. But no one else was ever going to know, I vowed, because no one could love a monster.

  Time went by, and I used my secret boy-ness to win at softball and basketball and fights with boys on the playground. I started being immensely interested in girls—their bodies, their hair, and the way they smelled. Some of my friends were growing into their pretty selves, and it made me feel funny and nervous to be around them. I watched Hart to Hart on TV and thought Stefanie Powers was the most magnificent girl I’d ever seen. She played Jennifer Hart, who was a freelance journalist who never wrote anything because she was too busy flying on jets with her husband, played by Robert Wagner, to solve cases of espionage and murder. When criminals tried to give her shit, she shot them with a tiny stylish pistol that she kept in her purse. When she kissed Robert Wagner, a bomb went off in my pants that sent tingling shrapnel throughout my body. I didn’t un
derstand what was happening. I mean, I was supposed to be watching handsome Robert Wagner when they kissed, right? And fantasizing that I was Stefanie Powers, like a normal girl. But instead, I couldn’t stop staring at Stefanie Powers and feeling funny. I officially started fantasizing about being Robert Wagner, wearing a white tuxedo jacket, driving home in my green convertible Mercedes after solving just slightly interesting criminal cases with my beautiful wife, who would of course let me kiss her in our castle.

  When my mom told us about how babies were made, she said that a man plants his seed in the woman he loves and then that makes a baby. Sex sounded an awful lot like farming. I imagined rows and rows of tiny babies sprouting from the earth while chickens scratched around and Charlotte spun webs in the barn. But how I really learned about sex was when I had my first sex dream. In it I was a boy with a penis. I put it into a girl and sex happened. It was glorious and so much better than farming could ever be. Now I understood what all those funny feelings were about, and I wanted more than ever to not just be a boy but also to have a penis, so I could do that with it in real life. This made me even madder at God for messing up my body. It was bad enough that I couldn’t ever grow sideburns, but I never saw the whole penis thing coming. The only good news was that I was incredibly creative and became very skilled at imagining that I actually had one. I started thinking about having sex like that all the time. Poor Stefanie Powers. I bet she didn’t get any sleep in 1980 because in my dreams I was busy all night long sticking it into her.

  I knew puberty was coming, and I couldn’t bear the thought of it. Growing breasts and getting my period was the antithesis of anything I wanted for myself. I remember sitting around on a Saturday afternoon when my sister ran into the house and up the stairs, calling for my mom. A half hour later, my mom marched dramatically down the stairs, demanded everyone’s attention, and announced, “Your sister’s a woman now.”

  I looked up from the game of Connect 4 my brother and I were playing and thought, What? She was only up there for a half hour. I had just seen her, but now a half hour later she’s suddenly a woman? Is this how it happened? I was doomed. I imagined the arrival of womanhood would be like a house fire, swift and unforgiving, leaving my childhood dreams of muscles and pompadours in carbon ashes scattered in the upstairs bathroom.

  I battled puberty with all my might, all my dreams, and all my prayers. But puberty, as it always does, won. It knocked me, defeated, into the upstairs bathroom on a sunny afternoon after I got my period in front of the entire freshman softball team. If I wondered if God hated me before, now I was absolutely certain of that fact. My father, who was the only one home that day, did his best to console me. Poor Dad. He had no idea the extent of the issue. I wasn’t just crying because I was embarrassed or because I had cramps. I was crying because it was done. I was officially a woman. God was never going to change me back, and there would be absolutely no more praying about it.

  I tried to accept my fate. I tried to pass. I crept through high school, faked liking boys, and tried to carry a purse, all the while knowing that it was a ruse. At night I had dreams that I was a boy having sex with girls. During the day I’d wait for everyone to leave the house so I could turn on the Playboy Channel and hope it would unscramble long enough to make out a blow job scene. The hole where I was stuffing my secrets was getting deeper and deeper. I still hadn’t told anyone. How could I? While what was happening inside of me made for some exciting nights in my bed, it certainly wasn’t okay with me. It was wrong—bad—and I hated it. I hated myself for it.

  I wondered how I would be able to live like this. Even if the issue was that I just liked girls, it was still unacceptable. The only thing I knew about being gay was that it was going to be hard, I was going to hell, and I was going to have to be a softball coach. But my issue was obviously much bigger than just liking girls. I was also stuck in the wrong body, and I had zero cultural references for that. The only exposure I had to anything approximating a display of gender dysphoria was a Duran Duran video. I stayed silent and did my best to keep my invisible penis at bay during many uncomfortable slumber parties with my pretty friends.

  I made it to college with my secret and became so good at passing that I suffered a brief brush with prettiness, thanks to an epic perm and my sister’s wardrobe. I met a man whom I liked very much, who wanted to marry me, and I thought that maybe things would get better. If I couldn’t have a penis, at least I could have decent sex. Sure, he looked nothing like Stefanie Powers, but I was so horny by this time that it didn’t matter. Maybe the dreams and fantasies that battled with my reality would disappear and leave me alone to be normal like everyone else. I was desperate to believe it could.

  Photo by: Unknown

  I got a job waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant. The uniform they gave me to wear was a dress, a billowy off-the-shoulder señora dress with puffy sleeves. I also had to tie my legendary hair back with an enormous yellow bow. I put it all on and went to work. Despite the outfit and all the years of trying to deny and suppress and kill off what was inside of me—despite the prettiness—there was still enough boy in me to make me seem like one giant Mexican cross-dresser. I lumbered up to the tables with my hair and my dress fluttering out behind me and said, “Hola!” I scared the shit out of the customers. It was too much for them, and it was way too much for me. The two days I spent working at that job, coupled with the sensational sex dreams I was currently having about a girl in one of my college classes, rubbed all the warring pieces of me together hard enough to make a crack just big enough to show how silly I looked, how silly I felt.

  Right there, amidst the smell of fried corn chips and the sound of accordion music, I decided that denying everything about who I was on the inside just wasn’t worth it anymore. I’d had enough. At that point I only had the courage to decide to be with women; I couldn’t yet face anything about my gender. I hoped that just being gay would be enough.

  So Hella Gay

  Photo by: Suzy Webber

  I got my amazing perm cut off, broke off my engagement, and had sex with a girl. It was the first time since that afternoon in the trailer with Tammy that I had another girl’s shirt up, and this time all of my plumbing was working. Touching and kissing parts of her that were definitely not four years old was almost overwhelming. That night in her bed was the hottest thing I’d ever experienced in my reality, but it was still no comparison to my sex dreams where I was a boy, sometimes sticking it in, but mostly getting blown by all number of beautiful women.

  While I gave myself permission to by gay, I still had a big secret that I intended to keep. I went on for years hiding the boy that lived inside of me.

  It’s not like there wasn’t plenty of talk about people struggling with this same issue. I’d seen Jerry Springer a few times and I knew I was no longer alone in how I felt, but I was so used to feeling like a monster, wrong and ugly and ashamed. I didn’t want sex and relationships with girls to go away because I told the truth. I kept silent. I was still going to be a girl, dammit. Even in bed.

  That all changed the night a girl gave me my first blow job. It started as an idea she had. “Let’s play blow job,” she said. Well, not exactly, but she had this fantasy of blowing a girl, so she took me to the adult store and let me pick out any penis I wanted. Of course, I chose the black one.

  Once I figured out how to put it on, with its intricate menagerie of straps and buckles, I felt an immediate shift in my insides. I had a penis, and it certainly wasn’t make-believe now. When this sweet, dirty girl put it into her mouth, my life changed forever. She was there on her knees in front of me with her red hair and brown eyes tilted up at me. With the smell of the vanilla candles and her Calvin Klein perfume all around us, she gave me the longest, slowest, most tender interracial blow job I could ever have imagined. For those twenty minutes, everything except the kaboom kaboom of my heartbeat in my ears went away. And though I couldn’t feel it physically, I could feel it electric in every other way po
ssible. I had suddenly gotten the one thing in life that I wanted but had given up total hope on. I finally got to feel at home in my physical body. It was the most amazing sexual and nonsexual thing I’d ever experienced. Life could finally match my dreams.

  That night, without knowing what I was doing and without it being my idea, I consented to accept the boy who lived inside of me. It was as if I had a precious twin who had been unfairly banished from my kingdom at birth, who had been wandering alone and tired and scared for thirty years, who was now suddenly allowed back where he belonged. That girl blew my lights out and turned all the lights on inside of me at the same time.

  That was the beginning of me admitting to others and becoming comfortable with who I am. My evolution has been a slow process, beginning with just the sex part of it, with strap-on sex toys and girls who liked to play with them. Over the course of years, I began letting it also spill over into the rest of my life. Like fashion. I started shopping for clothes in the men’s department at Target and Nordstrom, because fuck you, señora dress. This part of it took a lot of my courage. For a while I felt like everyone was staring at me and judging me as I picked through the masculine button-downs, jeans, and even men’s underwear (boxer briefs!). I had no problem buying a big black dick for myself at the sex store, but shopping for men’s clothes was making me nervous? Silly.

  I went to the gym and tried to grow some muscles. I got called sir a lot in public restrooms (thanks for noticing, ladies). I started getting my hair cut at a barbershop. Oh, my God, this one was big. Every time I go, I sit in the chair and giggle excitedly at what I’m doing. When I talk to the barber about it, he or she is always so proud of me. Though I don’t have sideburns, I do have a sharp part and a fade that’d make David Beckham jealous.

  One recent summer Gillette sent me a razor for my birthday as an advertisement. On the box it said, “Happy eighteenth birthday, Holly. Welcome to manhood.” Squeal!