The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You (17 page)

I heard an Australian writer on CBC radio the other day who had lived from age two until eleven in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), and she spoke eloquently about her experience reading books as a child. Hardly any of them, she observed, mentioned monsoons, or desert, or other things with which her Sri Lankan childhood was marked. She spoke of a certain sense of being “off the world,” somewhere not visible to writers or artists, and that this sometimes made her feel invisible, and at other times like a brave explorer. When the host, the marvelous Jian Ghomeshi, asked her whether she would have preferred her books to be more reflective of her environment, her answer was certainly instructive. Haltingly, she said, “Well, yes, in some ways, because I wouldn’t have felt so . . . alone. But also, I had never . . . never seen a daffodil. Had no idea about them. So I knew from reading that the world was full of things I had yet to see.”

I am not much worried that our eventual, theoretical child will read about heterosexual, cisgendered, closed parental sets and feel as though they are a wonder yet to be experienced or observed. Thank you, macroculture, for crossing off one of my Official Parental Worries. I’m pretty sure that’s going to be a given in hir world. But I do worry about a kid feeling alone, in much the same way that other children I know from complex, queer families end up editing the details of their lives in order to sound more strictly normal. They report that they went shopping for shoes or to the rock gym with their uncle, quickly learning that if they use words full of cultural meaning, no one asks, they simply assume: your uncle, the brother of one of your parents. It does not occur to them that the uncle in question is in fact the longtime-but-now-ex-partner of your sperm donor, whom you liked far too much to separate from, and so regular dates are scheduled to see one another despite the fact that another of your cadre of uncles, the donor himself, would like to scratch his eyes out.

Perhaps I need to start there: a
Who Are the People in Your Family?
book, one that goes beyond a grandmother-as-caregiver book or a dad-
and
-step-dad one. Maybe a more fill-in-the-blanks kind of book, where young people can write the stories of their own families into the spaces. Or perhaps also a community-parenting kind of book, featuring baby marmosets (marmoset parenting is evidently a lot like human parenting in one key way: adults will bring food to babies who are not their own on a regular basis). In my book, a young marmoset will narrate about a series of people in hir life with whom ze undertakes a variety of pursuits—the mama marmoset, the mama marmoset’s mama, the uncle marmoset who takes hir along stalking salamanders, the auntie marmoset who forages for frogs and brings them back as dinner, the other uncle marmoset who sometimes sleeps with the mama marmoset, and his twin sister who also lives there with all of them and is going to have some babies soon, making our protagonist marmoset a Big Sibling real soon now. And when the new baby marmosets come, everyone will get to take turns carrying them—mama and aunties and uncles and the brand-new Big Sibling, who will be careful and very gentle and very responsible. And all the other marmosets will be very proud.

Just a Phase

For the record, it’s really as simple as this: I wanted to have sex. In some measure, I wanted to be having fond and tender sex; in other ways I craved rough and dirty sex. But at sixteen, like pretty much every sixteen-year-old in the history of puberty, I was prepared to take what I could get. Especially me, big and awkward as I was or at least felt at the time, I would take what I could get. And girls—girls were willing to have sex with me. They wanted to. Girls were smart and cute and smelled nice, so that seemed like a fine plan, and suddenly somehow I was a dyke and only dating girls, which certain people to whom I was related fervently hoped would turn out to be Just A Phase. And lo—they were right. The fact that I was living as a girl also turned out to be a phase, a turn of events that I don’t imagine anyone was really expecting. But such is the way of wishes, I hear. It behooves a wisher to be very, very specific about what they wish for.

I like girls. I always have, and I appreciate femmes in particular for their many fabulous ways and particular skills, not the least of which is and has been making me feel like I am just ’zactly the right thing in a world that fairly regularly has taken time to tell me I’m a fuckup, a freak, or some other kind of disaster. Femmes, in addition to being savvy and sassy and generally elsewise charming, stood each of those accusations on its head for me. Through femme eyes, my masculine ways were desirable, my urges and impulses toward chivalry were admirable. My fear and shame about my fat and ungainly body, and my utter disinterest in revealing it to others, were re-imagined for me as the understandable reluctance of the stone butch to make myself vulnerable. To go with it, femmes attributed to me the admirable value of prioritizing the satisfaction of a woman. Considering that boys generally took the time to yell unpleasant things at me out of car windows and otherwise ignored me entirely, this seemed like a spectacular upgrade, and one for which I was very grateful.

But I never stopped liking boys. I came out, when I came out that first time, as bisexual. In the fullness of time I revised that to queer, because I had learned some new theories about sex and gender, and gained more understanding of my particular desires (as well as some new and frankly exciting things about acting them out). But it took me until I was in my mid-twenties to start thinking again about men, and sex, as something that might happen for me.

In part, this waffling and misdirection with regard to my sexuality was a failure of modeling. It was some time before I was grown enough to meet people who wore their complex sexualities in full array. Longer still, I think, until I was able to move through my hormone-driven, want-right-now phase and recognize what I was responding to in my sexual partners. I liked, and continue to like, queers and freaks and outlaws. I like transgressive genders and transgressive sexualities, especially in people whose expression of those things has a lot of whimsy, and when someone’s sex and gender cues are all shook up I like that even better. As you might imagine, this is hard to articulate as a teenager (and was even more difficult twenty years ago, before the magical Internet swept in and normalized so many kinds of desire that had previously been served only by fervid imagination and limp mimeographed newsletters sent in plain wrappings). I like expressive, entitled sexuality; a cocktail of thoughtful gender expression and feminist sensibility. Show me someone who has examined cultural gender norms and cherry picked exactly which of those things suit hir and is serving them back with a certain style and a come-hither-or-fuck-off attitude, and I will show you someone with whom I could cheerfully pass at least a sweaty afternoon.

But there’s this other issue, too. I like boys. Well. Really, what I like is masculinity, and what sort of genital or bodily topography it comes with is definitely of interest but not a limiting factor. There is a theory-enriched scholarly office in my brain patiently telling me that each and every one of the things I like about masculinity—sweat, fur, muscles, a certain fix-it attitude, authority, neckties—could also be embodied by the femininely gendered. This is true, and the femininely gendered people I have felt great desire for in my lifetime have all had, or been, at least some of those things in their own inimitable femme ways. But the more I allow myself to embody and enjoy my own natural masculinity— the more I move toward my most comfortable (if complicated) places of my own gender expression—the more I find myself interested in those (and other) traits in their masculine forms.

This has caused some issues, and not just because I am the author of a book entitled
Butch Is a Noun
in which I talk quite a lot about femmes. I don’t really know how to explain what happened. I was never lying. I liked, and continue to like, girls— and especially femmes, for whom I have so very much esteem. I love the tender, brilliant dance of butch and femme, the ways that femmes have and do soothe some of my most tender places (and excite some of the others). Inexorably, though, the needle on the compass of my desires has been remagnetized, and now swings toward the bulk and woof of boys, even though so many other tastes remain the same: I still fall like a ton of bricks for the smartypantses, the storytellers, the activists. I still like bigger bodies, and remain fairly well convinced that there is no such thing as too much ass.

And yet, somehow, and with not a lot of warning, the more I moved toward masculinity, the more I wanted it. I know that I am not the only one this happens for, not the only masculinely gendered, female-bodied being who has suddenly been startled to discover, while buying cute boxer briefs, that ze was also lewdly imagining how some cute boy would look in them.

The adjustment hasn’t been so difficult for me—I always liked boys, I could just never figure out how to go about that, as a putative lesbian. The fallout, however, has been substantial. The end of my first marriage eventually turned out to be, in part, because my fantastic femme wife no longer felt as though she wanted to be married to someone essentially living in so many ways as a faggot. While I have since remarried and adore my husband—and am reveling, even as I type this exact sentence, in fresh newlywed love with him squashed up against me on a plane—I regret that my ex-wife eventually felt devalued and unappreciated. A bitter harvest indeed for someone who did a great deal to redeem me from the nay-saying monsters in my own brain. It wasn’t what I would have preferred.

And so now, I live mostly as a fag. I have fashion glasses and I put product in my hair and I am extra thoughtful about the housewares and I do unspeakable, delicious things with the other fellas when I get the chance (which is also complicated, since I am not in any way a Man, but luckily there are other queers who are queer for queers like me, and we manage pretty well together). I treasure the quantum femmes in my life who can still make me blush, can tune me up into my best butch behavior with a raise of the eyebrow or a certain, complicated smile—and I serve them as best I am able, somehow better because I feel fully seen by them. The husband and I, we have them over for brunch. I am always stirred to better locution, better manners, and better outfits by them—but not to heights of sexual desire, most of the time (there are a few lifetime exceptions to this rule).

And so it turns out that my mother and other relatives were right, and I was entirely wrong. Liking girls was just a phase I passed through. I indulged myself in it for a while, when it worked well for me, but once I was older my preferences naturally aligned themselves toward the company of men, and I eventually married a Nice Jewish Boy with whom to make babies. All of that, all those half-realized wishes made when someone thought I couldn’t see or hear, turned out to be true.

Oddly, however, no one to whom I am related seems to be much placated by this change. I don’t know why. It’s exactly what they wanted.

Bowing to the Beams

Even by Bay Area standards, it probably looked a little odd. I was on my hands and knees on the concrete out behind the Ferry Building, cheek pressed against the ground, eyes scanning under the benches and beams lining the water. When I satisfied myself that nothing was glinting at me, I moved down a bit and looked again, ass in the air, clearly intent but getting increasingly frustrated that I couldn’t find it. So when the nice straight ladies interrupted me to ask what I was doing, I couldn’t resist a bit of snark and responded, “Bowing to the beams. It’s a San Francisco thing.”

“Um,” they said. “Seriously?”

I stood up, brushed off my knees, and shook my head. I went ahead and explained that my boyfriend and I were playing a game in which we hid notes and gifts for each other all across the country as we criss-crossed it in travel. We’d leave or send one another detailed instructions, I said, showing her the rumpled postcard on which my instructions for this trip had been written. On the last item, I said, I was being thwarted: the thing I was looking for wasn’t there.

“What about the others?” they asked with rising excitement, while their husbands shuffled their feet and looked uncomfortable.

Nodding, I said I’d found those: a slip of paper folded up and stuck under a table at the Bagdad Café, and another note at a coffee counter in the Mission. The first one had required peering under a lot of tables people were already sitting at, which caused some explaining as I’m sure you can imagine, but it’s the Castro, you know. I bungled the first attempt horribly, marching up to a two-top of transwomen and blurting, through the blinders of my excitement, “Can I look under your table?” I’m sure you can imagine how that went, but eventually I managed to explain what I was after and they thawed considerably, enough to let me peer under and see if my note was there. It wasn’t, and in conversation it developed that they’d refinished all the floors in the two weeks’ gap between Bobby hiding it and me finding it—a situation that gave me plenty of practice repeating the story for maximum charm value.

Number two was a quick grab in a nearly empty coffee shop with nice architectural details on the outside, but number three was looking grim indeed. He’d sent me to the same spot where I had sent him on his previous trip, a bench overlooking the water and also in proximity to a particular sign so it would be easy to locate. I was supposed to be finding a tiny metal box crammed into a crevasse under one of the beams at my feet, I explained to the nice straight ladies, but I couldn’t find it.

By then, they were well into their Brokeback Moment, sighing happily over how romantic this was and exclaiming that no one had ever done anything so
charming
and
imaginative
and
downright
magical
for them, all the while casting meaningful glances over their shoulders to their stolid, GORE-TEXed husbands, who looked a little cranky and a little bewildered. Gay men, they informed me with confidence, are just so much more
imaginative
. Then they announced their intention to help me find the tin, and set about peering under beams on their own while asking me a fusillade of questions: where did this boyfriend of mine live? When had I seen him last? When would I see him again? Was he my true love? Whose idea had the game been? Where else had we played it?