A Body, Undone

by Christina Crosby

  This sort of “soft butch” style was not, however, to be taken seriously, because we were lesbian feminists who thought that asserting masculine/feminine anywhere, by anyone, was a patriarchal dead end. Butch/femme was something to sport with rather than a deeply felt commitment to honor. Lesbian sexuality seemed to me to have nothing to do with masculinity—or femininity, for that matter, though lesbianism was integral to a feminism that sought to liberate all women. Sex was just sexy. Commitments to explicitly feminine and masculine styles were to my mind outmoded and irrelevant. I’ve done a lot of reading and talking since then, and have come to regret this position so insensitive to the complexities of desire and the stylizations specific to race and class, but such was my youthful understanding. When several years ago I read Amber Hollibaugh’s book My Dangerous Desires, I recognized myself as one who would have discounted her and her sweetheart had we met in the 1970s. She’s a big, beautiful, dedicated femme who showed up with her decidedly butch lover at a meeting where they were both written off as relics of a superseded past. She was rejected by a movement for sexual liberation she’d been a part of from the first. Amber, please accept my apologies.

  In the 1950s and 1960s, one place butch/femme genders were elaborated was working-class bar culture—you can get a vivid sense of the stakes by reading Stone Butch Blues, an autobiographical bildungsroman that recounts how a young butch comes of age in the bars and factories of Buffalo, New York. For another approach to the same scene, read Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, an oral history of working-class lesbian life that famously dedicates itself to “understand[ing] butch-fem culture from an insider’s perspective.” (Both books have been recently reissued, clear evidence of ongoing interest in how gender is stylized.)4 My lover in graduate school was older than I, and had grown up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood surrounded by New Jersey affluence. She wanted to have nothing to do with the culture of those bars. When I was in graduate school, Elizabeth and I once went to a bar in Pawtucket, a worn-out working-class town just north of Providence. The place was mostly empty, though several women were playing pool, most of them large, all with short haircuts, wearing shirts and pants. It seemed sad and lifeless to Elizabeth, though I could imagine having fun drinking Miller High Life and hanging out in a place so far distant from my library carrel. I drank a Miller and she had a bad glass of wine. We never returned.

  Elizabeth’s dislike was, I think, solidly grounded in a refusal to be identified with a lower-class stylization of life. Her mother, a gifted seamstress, conspired with her daughter to transform Elizabeth into a girl who could, without any faltering and with no misstep, date a boy who belonged to the Windy Hollow Hunt Club and rode to hounds. He invited her to the annual Hunt Ball, and had the pleasure of a beautiful, fashionable date on his arm. Elizabeth said he was handsome, but dumb as a brick. Things started looking up her first year in college, when she fell in love with a Jewish girl from New York City—a striver like herself, but from a world entirely different from suburban New Jersey. I don’t know what her girlfriend studied, but Elizabeth was a French major who longed for the elegance and intellectual sophistication of Paris. When they graduated in 1962, they were off to the City of Lights.

  Elizabeth was to return to Paris again and again, first as a graduate student studying the most experimental of experimental French novels, and then as a professor of French language and literature. When she spoke to me of those years, she told me that the Katmandou, a nightclub at 21 rue Vieux Colombier, was fabulous, and when we went together to Paris in 1990, we hoped to find it still open, only to be disappointed. I discovered an Internet site memorializing its history when I googled the name.5 It was “a sophisticated place, patronized by relatively well-heeled women and celebrities, whether lesbian or not: the place was therefore quite exclusive socially,” and promised attractive decadence. As the club’s publicity pointedly announced, “The girls are young, modern, [and wear] miniskirts, [not the] antique male costume of the other clubs.”

  When Janet and I took up gender in the waning years of the 1990s, I once again sported with “masculinity,” while Janet elaborated a fabulous “femininity” for her amusement and mine. In those years, lesbian genders often reprised butch and femme styles in a purportedly “postmodern” sort of way—it was the era of the Rocky Horror Picture Show revival on Broadway and doing the time warp dance (“Oh, fantasy free me . . .”).6 We dressed for our own pleasure, certainly, but also as a way of being quickly legible as lesbians. Butches have it easier, in that regard, than femme lesbians, who are almost always read as heterosexual—except when in a butch-femme couple. When we would “go to New York,” as we called it when going to some cultural event in the city, we’d dress up, as we did once when heading out for a decidedly feminist/queer musical put on by the rock ’n’ roll band Betty. I vividly remember leaving the apartment, because the lobby had a huge mirror that reflected our happiness and high style—I was in a white silk shirt with French cuffs, gold and silver cufflinks (Janet’s gift, from Tiffany’s no less!), black velvet jacket, red leather boot-cut pants, and black cowboy boots. Janet wore a long-sleeved white shirt that you could see right through, a sleeveless shirt with an icon of the Virgin Mary on its front, a short gray skirt, and gorgeous red pumps with four-inch heels. Off to the first show, we were walking together in the evening light, and on the busy sidewalk passed a homeless man. We dropped our loose change in his cup, and as we walked away he called loudly after us, “You’re both lesbians!” That short sentence quickly became shorthand for the pleasures of dressing up and stepping out.

  In colder weather, instead of the velvet jacket I wore a butter-soft, mid-calf black leather coat with a white silk scarf. The coat had a beautiful satin lining that afforded scant protection in the wintertime, a fact that was borne in on me one January night when we were walking from the subway to a bar called Hell, in the meatpacking district where the wind whips off the Hudson River—but who cares? Janet had a delectable array of bustiers, filmy blouses, leather, velvet, and silk skirts, and many heels, including brown knee-high boots with silver tips from Barney’s and those red pumps—so elegant that they were long on display in our bedroom. In 2003 we went to Provincetown over Memorial Day weekend to celebrate Janet’s birthday. We were dressed up and on our way to a restaurant for a celebratory meal when a guy sitting on a porch set back from the street hollered out, “You sexy things!” Who’s to argue? We both loved making it clear that we were sexual partners, and that we were, as the phrase is, “sex-positive” and queer.

  The last time I can remember dressing up this way was to go to a cocktail party Henry was throwing early in the fall semester of 2003, maybe three weeks before I broke my neck. Janet and I were apart, in Middletown and NYC. Because wearing black leather jeans requires a certain frame of mind, in the absence of Janet I was seriously considering how I wanted to dress up for the party. In the end, I decided that such an event hosted by one of the founders of the field of queer studies actually called for those leather jeans, which I chose to complement with a tight, silky, white sleeveless top that did a great job of showing off not only my breasts, but also biceps, triceps, deltoids, and pecs. Silver earrings, silver bracelet, silver rings. Fendi perfume. I got to flirt with the girls and the boys—it was a great outfit and just the right gender for the occasion.

  I no longer have a gender. Rather, I have a wheelchair. I’m entirely absorbed into its gestalt. I’m now misrecognized as a man more often than ever before, almost every time I go out. I’m not surprised. I know that 82% of spinal cord injuries are suffered by young men, and middle-aged butchy women must be statistically negligible in that accounting. Besides, when I’m outside wheeling my chair, I’m belted in. For ten years, I used a three-inch belt that went around my chest and fastened with Velcro—I grabbed each end, pushed my torso against the seat back, and brought the belt together as high up on my chest and as tightly as I could, but it still did a pretty good job of flattening my breasts. This I re
garded as a great irony and a perverse injury, because I’ve never wanted to bind my breasts, unlike some butch women. To the contrary, I used to wear my shirts unbuttoned at the top, as Janet likes to remind me, and my zippers pulled down almost to the cleavage. I like my big, gorgeous breasts. I now have a higher back to my wheelchair and a neoprene vest to hold me up, with straps coming down over my shoulders to keep them back, and straps at the bottom, just under my rib cage, that are secured to the side of the chair. There’s a zipper up the middle. My breasts are not as smashed by this restraint, which I wear all the time. It’s better for my posture, if not for my wardrobe. I joke with Janet that the vest reminds me of the old advertisements for Maidenform bras that “lift and separate.” There’s no “lifting” in this case, only a unisex sort of flattening, and indifferent separating. I love my breasts, and loved to show them off, but there’s no way you’d know that seeing me now.

  It’s actually impossible for me to sit up straight, though it took me two years to understand that simple fact. My body is flat enough when I lie down, but when I sit up, my spine is shaped like a C. Not one of my “core” muscles is functional—those muscles that you work so hard in Pilates—the ones around your abdomen and back that support your torso. “Rake the seat of the chair from front to back,” Danielle, my life-affirming physical therapist, said to me. We were talking about the wheelchair I was using in the Hospital for Special Care. “Look, it’s built so that you can make the adjustment, using the holes that are drilled right here. You can raise the front so it dumps you on your tailbone. Let gravity work for you.” I did as she instructed when I got my own chair, so when I’m seated, I’m always slightly reclined. Check out your own body, and imagine that the muscles below the breastbone have little functional power—you’d flop over without support, like I do. To make things worse, the C-curve of my back is accentuated because the surgery on my neck thrusts my head slightly forward, like a pigeon’s when it walks. As I sit slumped in the chair, the chair is what you see. That’s my distinctive profile.

  I may have no gender, but the chair does. It’s masculine. True, most of the time I offer little that would help you see me as a woman. I dress all in black—black pants or dark jeans, black T-shirt, black sweater. The chair is black, the vest is black, and I’m trying to make my body disappear as much as I can. When I am dressing for work, I’ll wear a colorful scarf and earrings, but that’s it. Maybe I am in permanent mourning. When somebody refers to me as a man, or calls me sir, and then realizes the mistake, profuse apologies follow, as if I had just suffered a grievous insult. The man stocking the grocery store shelves the other day, the shopper in front of me, the boy in the elevator, the barista at the coffee shop, the poll worker where I went to vote—I say to them all, “That’s okay. It doesn’t matter.” The woman standing chatting on the sidewalk tells her friend, “Let that man pass.” Then, flustered, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I just didn’t realize, I didn’t see, I couldn’t tell . . .” “Don’t worry—it’s okay,” I say, as I pass by.

  And it is. I just don’t care that much about my gender, which perhaps tells you all you need to know about how alien I find my body, how alien my life can feel to me.

  8

  Time Held Me

  Green and Dying

  I learned to ride a bicycle when I was living with my parents and my brother in the Mission House, where I spent the first six years of my life. It’s a two-story brick building with four apartments that kept its name when it was used as faculty housing, rather than as shelter for missionaries on furlough from the mission field. It keeps the name still, although it currently endures the rough usage of students. Juniata College was founded by the Church of the Brethren, and continues to be part of that tradition, though I’m sure there are both students and faculty working there now who know little of its history as an institution of the church. My father was a professor of history, as my mother had been a professor of home economics before the birth of my brother. I remember some pretty impressive bicycle accidents from those days—I rode off the short retaining wall by the side of the Mission House, for instance, and crashed onto the sidewalk below. Then there was the accident when I lost control riding “no hands” down the hill from Taylor Highlands towards the intersection with Moore Street below. Skidding on the pavement gave me impressively bloody brush burns, the injury cyclists call “road rash.” An adult appeared. He asked me where I lived, gathered me into the front of his pickup, and put my bicycle in the back. I think of Spartans carried home on their shields. When I was sixteen, my parents bought me a ten-speed, a glossy green Schwinn Varsity. Built with a steel frame, it was a tank. I rode it, nonetheless, around the hilly countryside of central Pennsylvania. One summer day, I was on the Petersburg Pike, coming down fast where the road drops steeply toward the intersection with Route 26, when a bee flew into my blue work shirt and stung me right on my *nipple*. It says something about my mature bicycle handling skills that I somehow managed to stop at the stop sign, and pedal safely home. I could tell you in considerable detail about every bicycle I’ve had since then, and other accidents averted, but the bike that matters now is the second Schwinn in my life, that light, bright machine I bought for myself when forty years old.

  Because I’d always used my bike as a way to get from one place to another, I was accustomed to riding with books or bags of groceries lashed to the back rack. I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t have seriously taken up cycling as a sport had I not known John. I got to know him because he was Elizabeth’s best friend—they went through graduate school together, and for a while they were lovers. Elizabeth lived in Providence, he in a small town outside of New London. They visited each other regularly, and talked on the phone nearly every day. As Elizabeth and I spent time together, we together saw John, and often would go to his home in semirural Connecticut to play together of an afternoon, and stay for dinner in the evening. Sometimes we would just stroll out to his garden to admire the green beans and the sunflowers and the profusion of pumpkins that had shown up as volunteers in his compost pile. More often, the three of us would ride the slow back roads of Connecticut, ten, twenty, forty miles looping out from his house and back. No matter which route you took, the first part would be downhill, more or less steeply, depending on the direction you set out. I, of course, loved the steep slopes. I would get down “in the drops” (my hands on the lowest part of the handlebars, underneath the curve) and pedal hard. Before long I would spin out of my largest gear, tuck into my most aerodynamic position, and watch the road rush by, while keeping an eye on my speedometer—once I hit forty miles an hour, and I was always hoping to go faster, faster. John, whose bike was geared higher, would always be out in front, and I would always be chasing him.

  He had been riding since his college days in the early sixties. I have a newspaper clipping his mother, Mary, gave to me, that shows him competing in the annual Little 500, a bicycle race held by fraternities to raise money for Indiana University’s scholarship fund. A lovely little movie, Breaking Away (1979), which won both a Golden Globe and an Oscar, accorded the event brief national fame and, along with Greg LeMond’s Tour de France victories, brought bicycle racing significant publicity in America. In the 1980s it was, nonetheless, still unusual to see a grown man riding a bicycle with a custom-made frame, skinny tires, clip-in pedals, and a tiny pack holding a repair kit for a punctured tire underneath the narrow leather racing saddle. He was, furthermore, dressed in black Lycra cycling shorts and a bright red cycling jersey with a banana (quick-peel energy food) stuck in the back pocket. Because John wore cycling shoes with cleats that snapped into his pedals (rather than the outdated toe clips that were on the bikes Elizabeth and I rode), he had to walk his bike down the winding dirt drive to the road, and sit down there to put on his shoes, leaving his sandals stashed in the mailbox. We ribbed him about that little ceremony, and, because he was a modest man, Elizabeth would tease him for venturing out in those skin-tight shorts. Before too long, however, when we went
out for rides, all three of us wore skin-tight shorts padded in the seat, because they really are more comfortable when you’re on a bike. It took me a lot longer to upgrade to a high-quality, light, properly fitted road bicycle and buy the necessary snap-in cycling shoes. John kept at me, saying it’ll be great, you’ll see, and he went with me to his shop, where he knew the guys, to help me pick out the only brand-new bike I ever bought for myself.

  John was quite handsome and just over six feet tall, a kind, generous, and energetic man who laughed a lot. He was really strong. I loved him as a brother, kidded around with him and competed with him, knowing full well I would lose every time. I learned from him that when you are riding a bicycle, you are always either chasing or breaking away—in short, either trying to close the gap between yourself and a rider ahead, or charging out in front of those around you so as to create an unbridgeable distance in the imaginary race you are riding with imaginary competitors. (Remember playing sandlot baseball with imaginary runners on base?) In the years that Elizabeth and I were riding with John, there wasn’t much press or TV coverage of cycling—hardly any at all—and certainly no mainstream discussion of the tactics and strategies of bicycle racing. He subscribed to the magazine Bicycling, which I would leaf through, but the little I knew about proper cycling position on the bike John taught me, and everything I knew about racing came from him.