A feminine popular girl who I knew from childhood was out, identifying as bisexual, but we never really spoke too much. As I became out more and more publicly, she was on me like flies onto manure on that band bus, and I was on her as fast as our adolescent hands could travel. We were butch/femme to the extreme with extreme, extreme denial. The first out couple ever in our high school. Once we were together the harassment got much worse. One time when I was out running in my neighborhood, a car of guys sped by really fast and threw packets of mustard that exploded at my back. They yelled “DYKE” and sped away. Guys pushed into me when I picked her up from parties. Telling me they had something for her I could never give her. Shooting weapons into the air, looking at me with threatening eyes. Cars sped by me as I huddled on the curb at the side of the street, the cars so close I could feel the shape of the wind change when their side mirrors passed. Drunk and dangerous, the men and almost-men in my town. She didn't understand this. Not then. She was the object of their attention. She was gorgeous, fun, and flirty. She was their ex-girlfriend. Whenever she wasn't within two feet of me, it was open season. For our prom she wanted me to wear a tux. Begged me. I told her no tuxedo, knowing such a confident display of my masculinity just might be the last fight I ever got to fight. It was their territory and I was so, so close to finished with it. I wore a pantsuit that looked like a skirt when my legs were together, a baseball cap, and tennis shoes. A comfortable compromise. A halfway way of survival I had learned the hard and harassed way.
Part 2: New York, New York
I wish I could say the biggest shock of my first year at NYU was the subway and all the gay people and the amazing time I had. But honestly, the biggest shock was an intense, dangerous class and regional difference between me and my East Coast peers that made my education in white male and middle-class privilege the real focus of my thirty-thousand-dollar scholarship education. I tried to find community at mixer after mixer and meeting after meeting. Fleeting, these connections. And frustrating. And fake. If this rich university is giving us ten thousand dollars to spend as we please, WHY is it important for you and ten of your closest ex-one-night-stands to watch Queer As Folk and eat pizza every night? Um … what about the queers our age getting rounded up by police every night three blocks away at the piers because they're not white and rich and don't have an entire floor of a building to do their flirting and communing in? What kind of community is this? And how should I know who Ani DiFranco is? Does she play on Clear Channel's radio stations? No? I thought not.
I was consistently confronted with the question: Are you butch? No, I would always answer without a second's lapse. I came out in rural Ohio. My girlfriend and I spent weekends cuddling safely in front of the women's bookstore on lesbian movie night. A very androgynous, anti-SM, anti-porn, Second Wave lesbian feminist bookstore. Butch was a bad word I couldn't unlearn for myself at first. I wore only men's clothes, I shaved my head, I had a feminine girlfriend, but I couldn't take that word as my own. In some way, I felt I hadn't earned it. The day I started reading Stone Butch Blues, kind of by accident, I didn't leave my bed for class and barely to go to the bathroom the entire day. I lay on my pink husband pillow and cried and cried and cried until at the end of the book I was curled underneath the toilet of the bathroom dry-heaving and bawling and talking nonsense. So much of her story I identified with, either by living through it myself or seeing my life in hers if I had been born even twenty years earlier. I was terrified for my life and my future and the fact that a way of being so despised in the world felt so right to me. So honestly true. I started drag-kinging and reading more about gender. I walked right up to my trans-girl friend who asked frequently if I identified as butch and said with hesitation, “I think I understand now why it was so important to you for me to be butch. I can't call myself butch because I feel like I haven't earned the badge, you know, been through enough yet to be butch, but I think it's the closest thing to me at this point.” She smiled and hugged me. Said, “I knew you'd come around.”
The first and only summer home in Ohio from college I had a smart crew cut and a baby face. I wanted to work a fast-paced highpaying waitressing job, lay low, mourn the loss of my first girlfriend, and get back to New York as soon as possible. I was more depressed that summer than I have ever been and I hope ever will be. I was fighting with my parents for the first time ever about my gender expression. My underwear, my body hair—anything that made it clear to my mom that I wasn't “outgrowing” that tough tomboy stage. I could NOT get a job, despite qualifications. People would look at me, furrow their eyebrows, and say sorry as I turned to walk past the Help Wanted sign to my car. I ended up working three part-time jobs that summer, two with people with mental retardation and developmental disabilities, and one at Steak-N-Shake making about two dollars and fifty cents an hour in tips. I was too rattled over whether or not I was passing or learning to weather the comments and reactions that now roll off me like rain. At that time in Toledo, Ohio, I was frighteningly convinced I was just one drunk angry asshole guy away from saying goodbye to this world in some fucked-up kind of queer martyrdom. And the saddest part was sometimes I thought I deserved it. I lost thirtyfive pounds that summer. I sat up many a night just typing nonsense on my keyboard. My mom tried to get me to go to therapy, but I was petrified of having a homophobic therapist or a therapist who was going to diagnose me with Gender Identity Disorder, put it permanently on my record, and have free rein in submitting me to homophobic, transphobic “therapies.” This felt especially risky with the “wide range” of options my father's health insurance at the Dodge-Chrysler plant offered. Eventually, my mom said if I found a therapist I could trust she would pay the fees, even though my family really couldn't afford such luxuries. My ex-girlfriend's mom recommended a former college-buddy therapist who she knew was a lesbian. I went for two sessions. The first one she told me all about her breakup with her partner and how badly she needed me to stay in counseling for her financial security. Once we got down and dirty with my “problems,” instead of diagnosing me with Gender Identity Disorder, she recommended I just go to the gay bar of my youth and a softball game that weekend and it would all be fine. She said I just needed to meet some “ladies.” I sat with my mouth gaping. Did she just recommend— for my severe depression and anxiety over gender dysphoria and fear of queerbashing—that I go to a dyke bar and a softball game and meet some nice ladies? I knew in that moment that my time there was finished and I could not survive there anymore. She was not my people, and my own family, my people, could not be my people. I hitched a ride with a co-worker headed east a few weeks later, weeks earlier than my planned return to New York City. I promised myself to never look back—a promise I thankfully wasn't meant to keep.
Once back in New York, I began talking with my friends and my roommates about all this “gender” stuff. One friend and roommate came out as trans within a few weeks of school starting back up. Two transguys had started school at NYU and had immediately become part of our crew of masculine people assigned female at birth. A week later, on my way to class, two towers full of thousands of people fell and burned fifteen blocks from my dorm. I covered my face with the football jersey I was wearing and stood in awe as blood-streaked people and my own soot-covered, terrified roommates stumbled uptown and stumbled over bridges and into the deepest kind of hell I never could have imagined. We called it “the day the world ended.” And really, it felt like the day my world ended and another began. A sad, confused state of privilege and disadvantage. Damage to a place that was not my own but was. A world of shock and sadness and losses too heavy for one body or one city to hold. My little genderqueer posse and I, banned from returning to our home, wandered the streets for days. We sat through Hedwig and the Angry Inch four times at the Union Square movie theater on day two. A cool, filtered-air place to be. A momentary distraction from ongoing confusion and sadness. A relief from dangerous, choking air. A sick, sick movie-mirrored metaphor for the beginning of a journey to find a
gender, a class, a racial, and a political identity that held some kind of honor and truth in a world that had obviously lied too deeply to trust.
Once we had housing again, we began eating out of the Dumpster as our primary form of nourishment. We thought of it as a way to not consume in a world that depends on our consuming (even though our use of the waste depended on surplus creation for consumers). It was a way to balance out our racial privilege (even though not everyone in our posse was white, somehow this was consistently overlooked, as was how privileged it was to feel proud about eating out of the trash) and our class privilege (even though I and others were choking on the reality that we came from working-class and poor homes and attended a super-rich private school that depended on our silence about this fact). Our studying time suddenly centered around when Au Bon Pain dumped trash bags full of donuts, bagels, and pastries, or the fast-food sushi place put its sushi trash on the curb. Nights were spent sitting on a small kitchen floor, eating dry bagels and talking about gender and feminism and telling stories to laugh off the damaging pains of socialization and abuse as gender-variant kids and teens. One of the guys who was new to NYU said to me one night in private, “You know, I'm not really comfortable calling you she.” And so, the he pronoun was born, and I adopted it, thankful to have an option and a relief from the question that had been trying on me so hard the months before and even more intensely following September 11. The name and pronoun change was sent through my classes to my teachers, and on and on.
I always knew I was gender-variant, but I also knew deep in my core that I was not a man, or male, a boy, nor was I meant to be. Being “he” gave me a relief and space from the damaging girlhood and teenage time when “she” and “girl” were consistently used as markers to reinforce how “off” I consistently was in hitting the gendered bull's-eye. I dove into the transmasculine community, hungry to find answers to how I, a young, white, working-class, gender-variant person attracted to women could survive safely and truthfully and honestly in this world. I heard and adopted and threw off all kinds of words and considered very seriously chest surgery and various hormonal options. Some days I thought I wanted to pass, but it was those few days out of the week when I'd walk behind a woman and she'd rush ahead and look frightened, or when I considered my relationship to my beloved in women's-only spaces, that I knew passing for the rest of my life as a boy or man was not right for me.
Eventually, as I healed from the abusive gender binary trauma of adolescence and girlhood and began healing from childhood sexual abuse, I felt more and more comfortable identifying as a woman. And the intense longing for my tits and hips and body to be invisible faded. I realized I didn't hate my tits, just how the world interacted with them. A kind of misogyny I learned about in my women's studies textbooks began jumping out at me in a mutated form, at first in slight, then monumental ways within the transmasculine community I was trying to call my own. Girls and femme women were props, markers in which to measure the contrast of masculinity. It seemed the community had something invested in me being on “their team.” Even when I requested that my friends add “she” into the mix of “he” they were calling me, I was still he, him, and one of the boys, time and time and time again. When at a queer or trans event, almost always upon meeting someone new, I would eventually be asked, “So, when are you transitioning?” The Second Wave feminist bookstore Saturday-night circle discussions came back to me and I began to wonder, What's so wrong with a woman being a woman like me? Why are we so terrified of things feminine we have to keep them at a distance and silenced? What other kind of oppressions does this look like? What other times in our queer histories does this look like?
I was homeless for a month in January in New York City. Standing on stoops of friends' houses late into the night, ringing the buzzer and hoping they'd answer so I would have a place to sleep that night. Crashing on couches until someone became so obviously overcrowded in their one-room studio that I knew it was time for me to leave. Friendships got damaged, and I became cynical and untrusting of a community that supposedly had my back. I was so ashamed that I had failed the American Dream. The wonder-daughter-makes-it-big-in-New-York-City-out-of-the-cornfield-auto-factory dreams all smashed into little broken bottle bits at the curb I sat on. There was nowhere to go to. No trust fund or a little cash Dad had set aside for the day when I didn't make it out okay. So I did what I do best—packed up my bags and ran away.
I left the city and followed love. I worked too many crappy underpaying jobs to mention. I didn't make it many more times, a few hungry and cold years. I always landed on my feet, and it seems I finally made it out of the downpour. I've created a life that has room for more than struggle. I've developed values that have room for more than guilt and rage. I'm twenty-three now, technically still a “queer youth.” My skin weighs heavier and my heart and hands bear more scars in contrast to the bouncing sixteen-year-old with fast hands on the band bus. I'm finally calling myself a butch now. I guess I earned those patches. Like some sick genderqueer version of Girl Scouts. And this is only the short version.
All You Need Is Love
by Stefanie Davis
My sister is transgendered. There, I said it. It's strange that those words become so awkward any time I try to say them. I have recently been able to say out loud that she is gay, but that was with my GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance), so it doesn't count. I don't know why I can't say it—wait, I do know. I can't say it for fear of upsetting my parents.
My sister's birth certificate says Jessica on it; she likes to be called David. I am not fazed by the name nor am I fazed by other people calling her “him.” It gets tricky when they call her my brother. I can't say I see her as a “girl,” but she's not my brother. I guess in some ways it would be easier to say brother, but that would not go over well with my parents. They are accepting, for the most part. They love her partner and have no problem with the whole gay aspect, but when it comes to the transgendered part, it gets tricky. My mother has the most trouble with it. She worries that my sister was forced by other people to “label” herself as Trans. She blames herself by questioning how she raised my sister. Last but not least is her disapproval of the name choice, David. She hates it. She wanted her to choose a name that was more like the one they chose for her, such as Jess. This is where it gets tough for me because I get caught in the middle.
I can still remember this one fight my mom and sister had that happened around the time my sister was coming out. I was young at the time, maybe nine, and I didn't really know what was going on, but they were both crying and I wanted to comfort them, both of them, which was very hard to do when I only agreed with my sister. I went to my sister first and let her cry on me. Then, feeling guilty for not helping my mom, I wrote her a note explaining my opinion, but still trying to make her feel better. My mom rejected my letter, closed the door on me, and continued to cry.
I can understand how hard it is for my mom—I mean, she is the mother. My sister grew inside of her, but I wish that she would remember how hard it must be for her “daughter.” My father is not much help either way; he doesn't like to talk things over, he would rather pretend that they don't exist. So here I am, the younger sister, trying to find a way to please everyone.
I call my sister Truffy, short for Trufflebeast, a character she made up as a way to not use Jessica and, I have a hunch, to tell me what was going on. I try to avoid pronouns but I tend to stick to female. I have heard from my sister's old advisor and from her that I was so great and supportive when she was really miserable coming out. All I can say is love. I don't care what gender—or sex, for that matter—Truffy is. I will always love her or him. The person who is my best friend and who I love unconditionally is always going to be there. I can't say it isn't hard, but I am never ashamed or angry with anyone but myself for not being able to say what I need to. I have gained many new friends through the Gay-Straight Alliance at my school who are not there to judge and are able to help me. I want to be there for
Truffy no matter what, and I know that my mom will always love her even if she is never able to accept “David.” Every time Truffy goes into the women's bathroom and is asked whether this is the women's room, my mom is there to stand up for her, and she's always ready to be a mom. It's never easy for anyone, especially not for Truffy, who has to put herself out there every day and believe in herself no matter what anyone says. But I have the easiest job—all I have to do is love, and that is more than enough. I hope that everyone will be able to do the same because it really is easier to love than to hate.
That Night
by Matthew Mayo
It's 1 a.m. when I finally arrive home.
For the past week now I have spent the nights with you, unable to leave your embrace. I don't know quite what it is about you that makes me feel this way, but I know that I never want it to go away.
At first you were afraid, and I understand. I don't think many people we know would understand this—that it is possible for two boys to say “I love you” to each other and mean it.
I think, though, that as long as we know what we mean to each other, it will be okay.
For the first time tonight, our bodies have touched. I never thought that something could be so … beyond words. I never thought that a moment in time could be so special that I would carry it with me for the rest of my life.
I never thought that I could ever be so in love with anyone.
You have brightened my world. And this I will never forget.
I reach the door. Unlocking it, a familiar odor fills the air, burning my nostrils.
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