Real Man Adventures (2 page)

So What Would Darin Do? He managed to wrestle his thing out of him—and quite beautifully at that. But he also said I could wait
on my thing. Or not do it at all. Somewhere therein lay perhaps just the permission I needed to type that Ellison passage, and begin to find out whether I even could.

I don’t really want to write about this thing of mine, but I think I might have to—to stop it from being a thing. If that’s possible. I could certainly regret it later, like I’ve regretted candor on a few distinct occasions in the past.
¹
It’s just that nowadays, one’s candor and the resultant exposure can end up hanging around forever for people to pick through. My kids, for example, who in a couple years can and probably will get on the Internet to read all they can about the subject. Just one Google search and something my wife and I have taken great pains and sensitivity and a bunch of time and effort to explain and share with them in the safe, accepting, and loving environment of our household can be unraveled in an instant. Because when one’s candor is filtered through another human being, especially one with a little more power, the results can be devastating (see: all of history). So I suppose this book is an attempt to be my own filter, leaving me nobody to blame but myself when it all goes pear-shaped.

Well, me and Darin Strauss. A difference being that his “secret” (at eighteen having been involved in an auto vs. bicycle accident that left a female schoolmate dead) was something he could (and did successfully) hide for many years after leaving home. I cannot reliably hide that I was not always the man I am today.

Certainly, when I meet people for the first time, none know my “secret” (or more accurately, my past, which many confuse with a secret). But there will always be people whose history has paralleled
and intersected my own—from family to colleagues to that girl Annika in the second grade who ate powdered soap at recess—and without a complete name and identity change accompanied by renouncing my entire history (something I’m unwilling to do, as tempting as it sometimes seems), it is near impossible for me to live completely stealthily as a man in this world, because, simply, I was not born male. Not in any conventional sense, at least. Not according to science.

_______________________________

1
. See the chapter in this book entitled “The Little Surfer Girl,” for example.

Letter to My Parents I Contemplated Publishing in a Men’s Magazine to Let Them (My Parents) Know I Wasn’t Their Daughter Anymore

[E
ARLY
2009]

Dear Mom and Dad,

I know this is going to be a complete shock to you, not to mention a huge disappointment, but there’s something I have to tell you, and I hope you’re sitting down.

I’m not gay.

There, I said it. It’s out there, and I can’t take it back.

But before you start freaking out, I want to give you the good news. Not only am I not gay, but I’m so not gay that I’m engaged to be married, plus am now stepdad to my fiancée’s two beautiful blonde children. We all live in a nice four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath house and have two hybrid cars, two rescue pit bulls, and a gray-and-white cat that I don’t like very much.

It’s everything you’ve ever wanted for me! I do yard work. And carpool. I’m completely normal, as in, there’s nothing you have to be embarrassed about with friends and family anymore—no more peroxided buzz cuts, no faux-hawks or combat boots, no bringing home anarcho-vegan dates with septum piercings. No more homo anything at all! So you can just send those PFLAG brochures back to be recycled for somebody who actually needs them.

But there’s also some bad news, and I suppose I should share that with you, too. I know it’s not really cool that you’re finding all this out about me in the pages of a magazine, but to be completely honest, for years I’ve been worried you’d reject me for not being gay, and terrified that you might decide to cut me out of your life completely. But you raised me to tell the truth to both myself and others, so in that spirit I feel as though I need to “come out” to you even more explicitly:

I am a heterosexual man.

Let me take you back. Remember how good I was at football? Like, really good? How I was riding motorcycles at an age when most kids were learning to bicycle without training wheels? And how you had to promise me several pairs of shorts and pants in exchange for buying one gauzy dress to wear to Spencer Presler’s bar mitzvah? Or flash forward a little, to 2002. Mom, remember when you came to one of my readings for my first book, and there was a big poster with my picture on it, and it repeatedly referred to me as “he”? You seemed very alarmed and notified the bookseller of the “mistake,” but you never mentioned it again. Or Dad, that time years before that when we were out at a restaurant in Santa Fe, and you thought I was the maître d’ and asked, “Sir, when will our table
be ready?” I just said, “Dad, it’s me,” and you chirped, “Oh,” and then we sat down and enjoyed our Tex-Mex dinner.

Or let’s get even more contemporary. As an author, I’m fortunate to have my work mentioned or appear in various media, and you might’ve noticed that nowadays that media refers to me as “he.” For a couple of years, there was no gender pronoun, and other times, like in the
New York Times Book Review
, a writer will go out of her way to make sure that her audience knows I am a “she” (the reviewer was wrong, but whatever
¹
). Either way, I know you’ve seen a lot of this stuff, because you’ve always been supportive of me and my work and you enjoy sharing in it. But I guess what I’m getting at is whether this news is even really a surprise to you at all.

I’m not quite one of those “born in the wrong body” types you see on
Oprah
or The Learning Channel. I actually think I was born in the right body, my body. It’s just a little different, and doesn’t fit squarely into the gender binary. But I think you’ve suspected that
all along. You of all people, in fact, have known about the kind of kid I was, and the kind of person I’ve grown up to be: mostly well-intentioned and seeking to do right by others, moderately creative, often stubborn, but generally pleasant to be around. I haven’t been tortured or miserable or beaten senseless on the playground because of my life experience—in fact, quite the opposite. Sometimes it even seemed like I fit in a little too well, made it look a little too easy. Not that it’s always been a cakewalk (there was the time on the subway at knifepoint), but for the most part I’ve been quite lucky.

In truth, the most pain I’ve had over being a straight guy comes from my fears about how you would react. I can’t front and say I haven’t daydreamed about your passing before I’d have to explain all of this to you (because it would of course kill you anyway). So you can see why coming home for the holidays might be a little tricky this year. There’s my beard, for starters. Then there’s the fact that my children know me as their stepfather, and they won’t know who you’re talking about when you continuously call me your “daughter,” rapid-fire repeating it to anyone and everyone as though the more it’s said, the more it might go back to being true.

You no longer have a daughter. But you do have granddaughters. And they really want to meet the people responsible for making me into the kind of person who figured out that he wasn’t what others decided he was, evolving instead into something else entirely.

Love,

Me

_______________________________

1
. Actually, not whatever. That was fucked up, and it has eaten at me for years. I have considered writing the
Times
to ask for a correction, but what’s the use? How would I explain to them that in their reviews of “normal” people, reviewers don’t take the time out to straighten out readers’ assumptions about an author’s identity: “By the way, Jonathan Franzen is a heterosexual white male.” There was no gender pronoun on my book at the time; there was certainly no female gender pronoun on any of my own press materials or Web site. It was a violation for the reviewer to state unequivocally in a paper of record that I am female. It was simply not true. Not then, maybe not ever.

I keep hoping one day I’ll stop caring, but short of a complete correction in that goddam review that will likely be around for the rest of time (plus a gilded letter of apology and fruit basket from the reviewer), I don’t know if that particular parenthetical will ever stop bunching my boxers.

Excerpts from a Draft of the Letter I Eventually Sent My Parents to Let Them Know That I Wasn’t Their Daughter Anymore

…T
HE GOOD NEWS IS
: I don’t think it’s a giant mystery to you that I don’t identify as female. Sexual identity and gender identity are two entirely different (though of course not completely unrelated) things; one is who you’re attracted to, the other is who you are. I know for years you’ve just assumed I was gay—because of who I’ve been romantically involved with. But it’s not as simple as that—in fact, I don’t think I ever actually “came out” to you as anything, sexual-identity speaking. I was just me, and this was who I was dating at any particular time. In truth, I never really felt gay at all, and that’s why those words never came out of my mouth. Not once. And the word
lesbian?
I have never and would never use that term in reference to myself. Never. In fact, I’m probably one of the most lesbophobic people on the planet, probably because of my own fucked-up
issues of not wanting to be assumed to be one. I got no beef with lesbians; I’m just not one. I’ve never seen even one episode of
The L-Word.
Never been to the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, don’t know who Dinah Shore is, and certainly never donned a thumb ring or ear cuff.…

…As far as my gender goes, I know it’s been obvious to you for years that my gender presentation is not normative, that is, it has never really fit perfectly into the male/female binary. It’s always fallen somewhere in between, and in the past decade or so, it has organically migrated to the male side of the spectrum. I don’t know how else to say it, but: I’m basically a dude.…

…I love you and always will. This has nothing to do with you, anything you did or didn’t do. (It’s not because you didn’t breastfeed me, Ma.) I’m the same person I’ve always been, regardless of gender or whom I sleep with, have relationships with, what my haircut looks like, books I write, what I wear, where I live, whom I socialize with, how frequently I go to the gym—any of these and several other things you’ve agonized over in the past. I am not “a man trapped in a woman’s body.” That’s asinine. I was born in the body I was born into; I’m not trapped, but I am a man. I know you’ve heard me say stuff like this in the past, both publicly and privately; I know you’ve seen some of this material pop up in some of my writing, at readings in the form of questions from the audience about my characters, or in interviews. I know you have been with me when people refer to me as “he,” and you have flustered many a waitperson when referring to me as “she” or “your daughter” when there is nothing but what looks like a son sitting at the table next to you.…

…If you can, please try to hear me, and not whatever you might’ve seen or heard on this topic; it’s not like the pregnant man on
Oprah
, or the lady on
Maury
who didn’t know she’d married a guy who had not been born male. It’s not like what you’ve read in your PFLAG pamphlets or online about “roid rage.” I don’t turn into the Incredible Hulk at intervals (if only). I have not been tortured and miserable for years and years suppressing some deep, dark secret that I’ve been afraid would come out and destroy me and my family; my experience is completely my own. It’s not a “hard life,” certainly not harder than most others’ on this planet. I know this may be forever impossible for you to understand, but this is nothing for you to worry about: it’s simply, for me, the most natural thing in the world.