by Vivek Shraya
* * *
—
DESPITE YOUR WIDE BUILD, no one would classify you as a jock. Your fluffy, curly brown hair hints at tenderness, as do your hands, ever full of books. Also, like me, most of your friends are girls. Cautiously coming into my queerness, I am learning the necessity of collecting and interpreting meagre clues of acceptance as a form of survival. I’m also looking for signs and studying behaviours to determine if there are others like me. Might you be attracted to boys, too? Maybe I’m not the only one?
Every week, I look forward to the five-minute break between Science and Social Studies when you and I will cross paths in the hallway. Like a skilled vixen, I will pretend not to see you until the moment right before we pass each other. Then I’ll lift my head and stare into your green eyes for three potent seconds. You always stare back, as if you too have been counting down to our special weekly exchange.
I casually quiz a mutual friend about you.
“He’s such a sweetheart,” she says.
“Yeah, he’s pretty cute,” I confide. She’s one of the few people who knows I’m gay, though I’m not yet reckless enough to use the word. Maybe she’s the keeper of your secret too.
“Oh. You like him?”
“Well, I don’t know him or anything.”
“I didn’t know how to tell you this…”
“Tell me what?” I ask, though I want to say, “I knew it!”
“He told me you’re always staring at him.”
“He said that?” Although it wasn’t quite the revelation I had anticipated, for a moment I’m pleased that you know who I am, that you’ve spoken my name aloud, and that I hadn’t simply imagined our exchanges.
“He also said he’s going to beat you up if you don’t stop.”
“Oh.”
I can’t summon any other word or sound to articulate the shock of having my belief in our mutual attraction crushed and simultaneously finding out that you want to hurt me physically. You want to hurt me so much that you’ve sent a warning through our friend. I avoid our hallway for the rest of high school, and even now I avoid making eye contact with other men, even if they’re colleagues or peers, never again trusting that visual communication provides a reliable clue (or is even permissible). What might be cruising can also be contempt.
The internet tells me you’ve moved back to Edmonton after your brief time studying in New Zealand. You’ve forged a respectable name for yourself with your own physiotherapy clinic. Every so often, I still masturbate to you, thinking about what a good man you are now, restoring human bodies with your hands and care. Your career coupled with your baldness suggests you yourself have been rehabilitated—you are wiser now, having shed your youthful misguidedness. Maybe you would treat me too. Instead of asking me to fill out standardized forms where I list my ailments and shade in the parts of the human outline where I have pain, you would simply and sincerely offer, “I’m sorry.”
Other times, I touch myself thinking about our hallway exchanges, despite your repulsion for me, or worse, because of your repulsion for me. I tell myself that this act is a form of revenge, that this is how I reclaim my power. But when I’m not feeling as confident (or delusional), I’m afraid that this is actually how I express my self-loathing. I’m also afraid of the ways in which the threat of violence from men has shaped, or even damaged, my sexuality. How many sexual desires and fantasies are formed out of potential or actual male violence? Or rather, to what extent is sexuality shaped and constrained by childhood experiences of male violence? What might desire feel like if the construction of sexuality didn’t take place in tandem with childhood experiences of violence from men? Would I have been as allured by your soft curls and passion for reading had I not already experienced the violence of other boys?
* * *
—
AFTER RECEIVING AN IMMERSIVE education in high school in the necessity of camouflage as the only reliable means to persevere, I decide to mask myself as one of my attackers. This assimilation into manhood is my true transition. For most of my late teens and twenties, I pay close attention to how men around me behave, note even the finest detail, and stringently copy them. I devour men’s magazines to retrain my fashion-experimenting self and learn what clothing is acceptable. I stop wearing colours except for blue, grey, and black. I push my voice as low as it will reach, speaking in a new, flat monotone, and wear a frown to match.
For added support, I crown masculine mega-icon of the era Tom Cruise as my role model. Aside from his universal popularity (and the protection it promises), he displays a range of characteristics in his movies, from courageous to caring, that seem accessible enough for me to mimic. I even take up running. From then on, if I can’t imagine Tom Cruise saying, doing, or wearing something, I won’t say, do, or wear it either. But when a friend offers me a receptionist position at his hip hair salon, I immediately say yes, despite Operation Blend In, because of the scarcity of summer jobs.
You are the other receptionist, and you’ve been given the task of familiarizing me with my duties. You’re gentle with my learning curve, patient even as I fumble when replacing the paper roll in the cash register. This is likely why I’m surprised to discover you’re straight. I decide to disclose my undertaking to you in the hope that you’ll share your expertise. You’re overjoyed to do so, which only confirms that I indeed require fixing.
“Most gay guys walk like they have something up their ass,” you begin. I watch you walk stiffly down the sidewalk, bum raised as though you need to go to the washroom.
When you return to where I’m standing, you continue, “Straight dudes walk widely, legs pointing in either direction, shoulders dropped.” You generously demonstrate for me again, walking like a slightly more energetic zombie.
I attempt to mimic your stride. After years of treating every sidewalk and hallway like a runway that I strutted along with my head erect, loosening my body feels foreign.
“Slower! You aren’t in a rush!” you coach from the sidewalk. “Take up more space!”
* * *
—
A FRIEND AND I are celebrating Edmonton Pride by cheering from her balcony every time we see someone on the street draped in rainbow paraphernalia. My own attire is rainbow-less, evidence of the progress of my masculine conversion, but I feel adequately flashy in my white Fruit of the Loom tank top and extra-bulky royal blue cargo pants.
“I hope you don’t mind, but I invited a friend. He’s gay too,” she says after her buzzer rings.
“Cool,” I lie, and sip my water, maintaining my composure.
Aside from generally preferring one-on-one interactions over the claustrophobia of group socializing, meeting another gay man in Edmonton is particularly nerve-racking because there are so few of us. On the rare and hallowed occasions when we do collide, we’re often expected to be attracted to one another or to sleep together. Friendship alone is never a possibility. I especially can’t afford to be choosy. My brownness turns out to be a form of queerness in and of itself and makes me too queer for gay men.
When you arrive, I reach out to shake your hand. You aren’t particularly attractive, but I appreciate your thick raspberry lips. These will be useful if we do have to fuck.
I’ve never been able to shake off how you greeted me: “Sweetie, you need to eat some food! Get some weight on you!”
When I look at photos of myself from my late twenties on, I feel mournful about how much my body has been shaped by men. Through my interaction with you, and my subsequent immersion into gay culture, I quickly learn that gay men will find me desirable only if I’m muscular. Simultaneously, I learn that it’s partly my skinniness that makes me appear gay to straight men. In both instances, my thinness amplifies my femininity, which is consistently seen as a loathsome quality that needs to be eradicated. Gaining weight becomes a miracle solution to both my problems. Consumption is a key to masculinity. In grocery stores, I observe what foods men chuck into their carts and fill mine with the same, hoping to eat my way to
a body like theirs. For years, I gag down pounds of meat and gallons of protein shakes. I lift weights despite incurring injuries, hoping to be both wanted and left alone, all the while reprimanding my body for not conforming, for never quite looking buff or white enough.
What would my body look like if I didn’t want affection from gay men and protection from straight men? What would my body look and feel like if I didn’t have to mould it into both a shield and an ornament?
How do I love a body that was never fully my own?
* * *
—
I HAVE ALWAYS FELT out of place in gay bars. Teeming with buff, bearded boys in jerseys and baseball caps, these spaces sometimes feel no different from straight sports bars, once you swap the hockey on the big screens for gay porn, crank up the Lady Gaga, and throw in a drag performance. But even in a large city like Toronto, dance parties and bars are the predominant locations for establishing queer connections or even just being queer safely.
One night at a popular queer dance party, my friends and I are huddled together, showing off our slick moves to one another. My body bounces to the beat—until you pinch my bum. I turn around, but the almost-midnight dance floor is too packed for me to determine who has grabbed me. I re-enter the music and resume dancing. Then you do it again. And again.
“Someone keeps pinching my ass!” I scream to one of my friends over a Destiny’s Child song.
“That’s a compliment!” she screams back. “Someone likes you!”
I try to swallow the compliment. Someone likes me. This is a good thing. I recall a memory from the gay bar in Edmonton almost a decade earlier, when a cute boy had squeezed my nipple as he passed me on the stairs. I remember my best friend and me celebrating this moment as a victory. Years later, this “validation” doesn’t have the same lustre. I stay for a few more songs before I say my goodbyes and leave the bar, alone.
Why is being touched by strangers—strangers who refuse to identify themselves—a form of flattery? Being brown, bisexual, and feminine, I have longed to feel seen and desirable in gay bars, and as a teenage brown fag, this kind of random touching felt like all I deserved, all I could aspire to. But when the momentary visibility fades after someone conveys their interest by pinching me, I inevitably feel devalued and dehumanized.
Over the years, I’ve come to expect being groped in gay bars. Complaining about this unwanted touching is often deemed sex-negative, un-queer, or even homophobic. Touching in gay bars is generally seen as an acceptable form of cruising and supposedly pushes against the repressiveness enforced by heterosexism.
I’ve also witnessed gay men grabbing women’s breasts many times on the dance floor. When asked to stop, some have responded, “Don’t worry, I’m gay. I’m not into girls.” Not being into girls, however, is sometimes less about sexual preference and more about disdain. Is grabbing women’s breasts a way to make women feel unsafe and therefore keep them out of gay bars? When gay men have discovered I was dating a woman, many have declared how repulsive they find vaginas. Where is the line between supposed “playful touching” and grabbing women’s body parts as a manifestation of hatred, if not exclusion? Why is this different or more acceptable than violence enacted by straight men?
This gay permissiveness also generously extends beyond the body. When I’ve tried to maintain other boundaries with gay men, such as providing a new friend an email address instead of a phone number, I’ve been called pretentious or offensive. This is because queerness is associated with freedom from boundaries. Thus, any boundary is inherently un-queer. And yet this entitlement has only reinforced my cautiousness with gay men.
* * *
—
AFTER MY THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY, unbeknownst to me, I start inching my way toward transness by gradually and cautiously reclaiming my femininity. I attribute this shift to my characteristic fatalism, which is intensified by a now-or-never mentality. Reviving the flair for fashion I had once renounced, I begin wearing “feminine” attire and accessories, like large earrings and animal-print leggings. On this particular night, on my way to sing at a Tori Amos tribute event, I’m wearing striking zebra-print tights.
As I wait for the bus at the corner of a busy intersection, a car slows down at the red light. Then the passenger window rolls down. You fling a used paper cup at me. As the light changes to green, you yell “Tranny!” and your car speeds off.
* * *
—
WHEN YOU START ENTHUSIASTICALLY sharing and retweeting my social media posts, it doesn’t immediately occur to me to be suspicious, as I typically am whenever a man shows me kindness. I’m surprised to be on the radar of someone with your stature in the music industry. After over a decade of being unsigned, I hope this means that you might be interested in representing me at the label you work for. Your public support, both as an industry leader and as a trans man, feels like a genuine act of community building.
“Do you think Vivek might be trans?” you had asked one of our mutual musician friends. When I hear about this conversation later, I don’t perceive your question as presumptuous or intrusive. Instead, your inquiry feels like benevolent foresight, as though you see something in me that I am still trying to uncover.
Our mutual online joking eventually edges into flirtation, though it’s mostly you flirting and me being bashful. Admittedly, I appreciate the attention. When I begin transitioning, I observe early on the sharp correlation between the rise in my feminine expression and the decline in my desirability to men. Given that we live in different cities, your interest in me seems harmless and boosts my confidence at a time when I feel most ugly.
So I hear you are a TOP apparently, you DM me one night.
OMG. I’m startled by the unusual boldness and mockery of your implied question. I try to guess who might have shared this private detail with you, and in what context.
The grapevine. Not that I admit to inquiring. So are you a mommy in your relationship or something?
I’m the daddy, actually. So are you in an open relationship with your girlfriend? Asking about your relationship is my attempt to take control of the conversation and ignore the ridicule in your question.
Oh that depends on her mood. I don’t know.
What does that mean?
Whatever she decides it means, depending on the day. But I’m a simple man. Me and my penis are just looking for someone to perform oral sex on. Listen to me have feelings about my penis, Vivek.
What a dude. Why are you talking to me about your penis?
So what kind of a top are you? Besides one who wishes she had a real man to dominate her?;)
At this point, I nervously begin to defend my sexual preferences in a lengthy and now embarrassing-to-read explanation. Intermittently, I continue to try to redirect the conversation by asking you questions, but you always manage to bring the focus back to me. I finally cave.
Well, in our online interactions, you’re the top. Happy?
I go to bed unhappy that I’ve disclosed as much as I have and that I didn’t step away from my computer sooner. As time passes, my regret turns into familiar feelings of betrayal and foolishness. How foolish am I for believing that your support meant you were genuinely interested in my work, that your transness made you superior to other men I had known? It didn’t prevent you from speaking dismissively about your girlfriend or my sexual desires under the assumption that you know what I want more than I do. It didn’t prevent you from using your power in the arts and trans communities to eventually push me into an obviously uncomfortable conversation.
Shortly after this exchange, perhaps when you realize you would never top me, and given my subsequent distancing from you, you stop publicly supporting my music.
* * *
—
IN JUNE, A GROUP of friends and I take part in the annual Trans March. Although I’ve participated in previous years, this march is particularly significant because I’d come out as trans just five months earlier and was also named a grand marshal
.
Wearing a pale peach dress with a matching lip and bindi, I march down some of Toronto’s busiest streets with over ten thousand trans and gender-nonconforming people and allies. I experience an unusual and magnificent shift in my body. For a brief thirty minutes, I am released from fear. I forget about men.
As the march dissipates, my mood remains buoyant—until you bump into me at the crosswalk. After passing, you turn around and step in front of me.
“Why did you touch me?” you scream in my face.
“I didn’t touch you,” I respond quietly, containing my bewilderment.
“You fucking touched me!” Your face propels closer to mine, and your voice swells louder. Although I don’t know you, I intimately recognize the sound of hatred.
“Actually, you bumped into me.”
“DON’T FUCKING TOUCH ME!”
Because of the Pride festivities, I am surrounded by queers who witness your verbal assault and eventually defend me. What might have happened had it not been Pride, and had there been no other queers around?
Although this exchange lasts less than a minute, you effectively jolt me back into my trained state of fear, my rightful place. Trans people aren’t afforded the luxury of relaxing or being unguarded. Mere steps away from “the world’s largest trans march,” trans people are still seen as perverts who touch strangers at crosswalks.
* * *
—
I MEET YOU FIVE YEARS before coming out as trans, the day after our lesbian best friends sleep together. They decide to see each other again at my Pride performance, and you tag along. Registering your beard and plaid shirt, I read you as straight. When you stand aloof with your arms crossed throughout my set, I become annoyed by your presence. Do you know where you are? Don’t you know it’s Pride? Later that day you follow me on Twitter, and I’m surprised, as I always am when straight men show any interest in me or my work.