Tango

Table of Contents

 

 

 

BY HILTON ALS

 

 

 

A LONG TIME AGO, I USED TO SPEND TIME WITH the members of a dance troupe; they performed under the name Tango Argentina, and, once or twice a week, I went to see them perform; their dance of passion—the tango—was an early twentieth-century invention, and had been culled, shaped, out of the music and dancing style poor blacks brought with them from Africa to places like Buenos Aires and Montevideo; the tango dancers I knew on Broadway, performing night after night in front of an enthralled audience, followed the spectacle's attitudinal rules; that is, the men danced in a way that was meant to exaggerate their maleness as they moved about the stage in dark suits, while the women accentuated
their femaleness in heels that made their ankles wobble; in short, I learned, fairly quickly, that the tango was gender-based; men lead the women but the women controlled the rhythm of the couple's movements with a shift of the hips, a turning away of the head; the women contributed greatly to this moving picture of love gone awry by projecting their powerful difference and anger while drawing the men into their interior world; all that aside, I loved looking at those doomedseeming partners as they moved through that abstraction known as dance; it was like watching a sentence unravel; or sometimes I imagined the dancers' sinuous moves as the visualization of breathing itself, breath as it moved in and out of the body, providing sustenance to the dancers, or maybe not even the dancers, maybe just you in your darkened bedroom, wondering if your body would mean as much to someone in the world as those dancers meant to an audience sitting in the dark, one that maybe took a look at the history of their respective bodies as the dancers moved across that stage, sometimes inciting audience members to wonder about
their own bodies, and how, as men and women living strictly in maleness and femaleness, they had limited their movements let alone their lives, in order to fit categorizations or stock characters that fill the world stage, wherever that is; and I probably wouldn't have remembered my friends over at Tango Argentina—time erases us all—had I not read Mx Justin Vivian Bond's book,
Tango
, which hardly needs an introduction, but I am very grateful for the opportunity to write this sentence nevertheless, or have this exhalation of breath, if only to say I can relax now, Justin Vivian has, finally, talked about bodies in a way all of us can understand, bodies moving in space, specifically Mx's own, and through sentences that cause my body to stop wondering what it might mean to others while starting to wonder what this mortal coil might mean to myself, in the dark or in the light, held by my own hands, or the hands of others; in
Tango
and elsewhere, the performer and singer Justin Vivian has learned to dance with V's self, to wear the heels and the suit that fit V's being, all cut and formed to suit V's soul, having earned it
as so many of us earn it, through being brutalized and suppressed and sometimes through love, too; this sentence could go on; it could go on to talk about Justin Vivian's authorial voice, which tells us, in so many words, about being Mx from the beginning, and then being told not to be, except in the safe home of a man who kissed his dead wife's picture every night before he went to bed; and I wondered, while reading
Tango
, what that might have meant to little Mx, seeing the dead image of a dead woman and bringing pleasure to an old man who liked Mx's Ginger as much as Mx's Fred; and I wonder, too, about the boulder that was removed in Justin Vivian's town so children wouldn't get hurt on it, the antisepticizing impulse of people who don't want to deal with pain and regret even as they inflict it; and, yes, Justin Vivian describes that, too, how the children in his town learned to hurt each other anyway, based on what they learned at home, along with learning to fear their bodies, and the vulnerability that comes with love; and I wondered, too, what darkness looked like in Justin Vivian's room as Mx became Justin Vivian
more and more, despite the promulgating of souls all around; did Justin Vivian tango with Mx's own soul in that darkened room as it filled up with a kind of loneliness, and the town filled up with loneliness, too, as Justin Vivian's mother's manifested itself in making her own child an accessory to be dropped at will because love sometimes crushed her, too, and alienated her from her purer impulse, which was to see and celebrate what she saw of herself in Justin Vivian even as she said, No, you must not, you cannot, sport the lipstick I wear, our lips must not touch our shared truths and love of cosmetics, even as I wonder what Justin Vivian's first brush of lipstick smelled like in that riot of closeness and distance called V's family home; even as I imagine, from the pages of this book, what Justin Vivian's tango of the self looked like as Mx grew up to inhabit Justin Vivian's very own passion play on a stage Mx now controls, in a safe arena Mx now makes dangerous, ankles wobbling in high heels, defiantly and naturally sporting a red mouth that pulses like a wound.

H
ey, Fred! Where's Ginger?” my grandfather would ask me. I was always dancing around the house as a child. I didn't know who Fred was, or Ginger for that matter. All I knew was that I liked to dance. After seeing
Top Hat,
I was flattered by the comparison, but I was also confused. Couldn't I be both Fred
and
Ginger?

 

 

A FAMOUS COMEDIAN ONCE SAID, THE GREATEST thing about being bisexual is that it doubles your chances for a date on a Saturday night. That might be true, but for me it doubles the anxiety.
Decision making of all kinds has been complicated for me. For instance, deciding on an outfit for a night out on the town isn't easy because I don't buy into the notion of male, female, or ageappropriate clothing, and I don't make a distinction between formal, casual, and sportswear. I can spend hours trying to get in touch with what form of expression my wardrobe choice should take. Sometimes I won't leave the house until three or four in the afternoon because I can't decide if I want to wear eyeliner or not.

Perhaps this indecision comes from feeling like my choices were under so much scrutiny as a child. Certain people have basic tenets or rules. My friend Nancy's mother always said to her, “Never leave the house without your eyebrows.” I am not aware of my own mother ever leaving ours without her lipstick. Lipstick is one of the most magical inventions ever created as far as I'm concerned. Generally when I'm talking to a person, I don't look into their eyes, I look into their mouth. The eyes may be the windows into the soul, but the mouth quite often reveals a greater truth.

Iced Watermelon by Revlon, a frosted pink lipstick you could buy at most drugstores in the late 1960s, was my mother's color of choice. When I was in first grade, I got into the habit of applying my mother's Iced Watermelon lipstick before I set off for school. I don't know how many days I got away with it, but I do know that I felt confident when I walked out the door. Knowing that my lipstick was in place, I could safely face the world, having enhanced my beauty with a color that my mother, who was clearly a beautiful woman as well, had chosen. If given the chance, would I have chosen a different color, a hue more unique and self-revelatory? I'll never know. I didn't have my own income at that time or transportation to the drugstore. I made do with what was at hand.

I don't recall anyone at school having a problem with my lipstick. My teacher, Mrs. Bivens, never said anything. Mrs. Bivens had her own glamour rituals. Every morning I looked forward to seeing Mrs. Bivens lead the pledge of allegiance in her high-heeled shoes. I recall blue leather, a standard shoe for a Republican woman
and yet, by modern standards, a bit of an extravagant choice considering the only people who saw her in them were a class full of six-year-olds. And yet she displayed a commitment to her selfimage and what she clearly thought was appropriate attire. After lunch, when we returned from recess, Mrs. Bivens usually slipped into a sensible flat. This was her ritual and she practiced it every day like clockwork.

We all need rituals. I decided that putting on lipstick would be one of mine. I don't know how many days passed, how many carefree days, walking the block and a half to Pangborn Elementary School like a movie star or a morning television star. We didn't have a color TV at home, but I could tell even from the small black-andwhite set that sat on our kitchen counter that Barbara Walters, co-hostess of the
Today Show
, was wearing frosted lipstick. So I left the house, an intrepid reporter like Barbara, who had interviewed Fidel Castro, ready to face any tyrant with confidence. Any tyrant but my mother, who one morning intercepted me as I was about to leave the house.

“What is on your lips?” she asked me in what I could only register as horror.

I froze in fear, not sure what to say. I opted for what I thought at the time was the truth.

“It's my lipstick.”

“That's not your lipstick! That's my lipstick. What are you doing with that lipstick on your face?”

“Well, I'm going to school. You don't leave the house without your lipstick, so I thought I should wear lipstick, too.”

“Boys don't wear lipstick!” she shouted, as if this were something I should know, and using that word “boy” which grated against the very fiber of my being every time it was applied to me.

“But Mom! I've been wearing it every day. No one cares.”

“You've been wearing lipstick to school for days? How many days?”

“I don't know.” I was crying. “But it's okay!”

“No, it's not.”

She marched me to the bathroom and wiped it off my lips. I left for school that day defeated, disappointed, and bland. It would take me another
twenty years before I realized that it was okay to leave the house with my lipstick.

Now that I'm in my forties, frosted pink seems a little too coquettish for a person of my stature. But looking back, I think that frosted pink is a perfect color for a little trans child in first grade. At that time I certainly wasn't allowed to think of myself as a trans child, much less decide what color lipstick was appropriate for one. So many of my thoughts and feelings and ideas became fractured when I was young. So much secondguessing informed every decision that I made that I became a paradox in a way, a combination of bravado and insecurity. The scrutiny I was under by the vigilant gender police kept me aware that my first choice should always be followed by a second or third choice before any decision was ever made. That way of thinking permeated my life and has kept me from moving quickly on any impulse for most of it.

 

 

RECENTLY, AT THE AGE OF FORTY-SIX, I WAS scheduled to do a series of performances at the
Sydney Opera House. In preparation for my trip, I asked a friend of mine for some Ambien for the horrible jet lag I anticipated having after the twenty-four-hour journey. He threw in a few Adderall, which he told me would help me wake up and give me energy during the day. I've never really been one for uppers—too many of my friends went crazy in the '90s on crystal meth so I've always shied away from stimulants. But one night, I was expected at a dinner party. Since I was tired and a bit anxious I decided to give the Adderall a try just to see what would happen. I found myself much calmer, and focused.

I was raised that if you have a headache you wait awhile to see if it goes away before you take an aspirin. You only go to the doctor when you are very sick, and you don't buy new shoes until you've worn out the old ones. So even though I felt better on Adderall, I wasn't sure what I should do about it.