1980. I am 12 years old. 43 years ago.
If you’d asked me to check off boxes, I would have said I was heterosexual, cisgender, neurotypical, Christian, and monogamous. For most of those, I wouldn’t have understood the question: My Christianity was grounds for seeing myself as a stranger in a heathen land, and I would have recognized “straight”, but the rest just fell under the label of “normal”.
I was a normal Christian boy, thinking I would marry the first girl I dated, if I ever dated anyone. At 12, I had pretty much already concluded that I’d likely spend my life alone, because I was too weird, too much of a misfit, to ever attract anyone.
At some point in there, my older brother introduced me to porn, in the form of Hustlers he’d gotten from a friend. Or maybe my first introduction was a trip to Toronto, where the hotel TV streamed promos for “I Like to Watch” and other adult titles until our chaperones got the hotel to suppress them.
Either way, my hormones and my background knowledge that I was different in ways I didn’t understand led me to bury those differences as much as I could. It’s called “masking”, sure, but “masking” is such a benign word for the psychic damage that it entails.
At some point in there, my mother was criticizing me for crossing my arms when I sat. She was very much of the mindset that body language shaped interactions and emotions, and that crossed arms meant hostility. I told her I didn’t know what else to do with my arms. She suggested putting my hands in my lap. I said: “Then people will think I’m playing with myself.”
She sighed. Rolled her eyes. That was the end of the conversation, because any mention of sexuality ended conversations with her.
I kept crossing my arms when I sat. And spreading my legs. And all the other things fragile boys trying to hide their vulnerabilities, even from themselves, did to puff up and look larger and convince the Alpha Dogs that they’re not to be trifled with.
Somewhere in the early 1990s.
My second-best friend was, she and I thought, a lesbian. I say that because years later she married a man, but at the time she was completely attached to the notion that she was a lesbian. Is orientation fluid? Was bisexuality just not a mental option for her at the time? I don’t know, because we fell out of touch and when she reappeared (for a while) on my social media, she was already married and we never had the occasion to talk about it.
At any rate, I told her that I thought I was bisexual. She laughed in my face, and said I was the straightest person she’d ever met.
At this point, I was already not monogamous, and I was already not Christian. So 60% of 12-year-old me’s definition of “normal” had fallen by the wayside.
I wasn’t atheist yet. My father, a Christian minister, died thinking I was a Wiccan. When I’d told him, sometime in the 1990s, he said, “Thank God. I thought you were going to tell me you’re atheist.” For him, my being an atheist would have been the greatest insult I could have mustered against him. It would have been a rejection of his life’s work. That’s what he told me.
When I told him that I was polyamorous and bisexual, I’d thought he’d be upset at the former and okay with the latter, but it was the opposite. I could have multiple partners (but not in his house), but the bisexuality hit his own wall of toxic masculinity.
The Aughties
I spent a decade in the corporate world. In the backchannel I called a private life, I explored BDSM. Once I ordered some materials (books, mostly) and had them shipped to my office because Porch Pirates were active in my neighborhood, and then I found out that the accountant had been opening packages randomly. She got told to stop by management, and several days later I got my package. Unopened. Sigh of relief.
I ran a polyamory group, which included a website and an in-person support group. I was interviewed on TV. The radio shock jocks made fun of my weight the next morning. My immediate supervisor told me that upper management was upset. That I’d never get promoted now.
That I’d been called a freak.
If I’m honest, it wasn’t really worth the effort anyway. Because polyamory was on the cultural fringe, most of the people willing to be public enough about it to meet were exhausting to be in relationships with.
Then my wife had a child, then I became a teacher, and I was concerned about being too “alternative” for education.
So I suppressed anything that might make me look too “alternative”. I didn’t put it away entirely, but I shelved it, and I certainly didn’t talk about it.
COVID-19
I am a tenured and respected member of my educational community.
I am publicly a non-man, whatever that means. To the casual observer, I am still a man, by which I mean that when I go to work I wear clothing that is expected of men, although I have long hair and wear earrings. And occasional nail polish, although it’s been a while because I’m currently in a skittish cycle.
The first time I grew out my hair was in high school. This was because I’d gotten a bad haircut and the other kids had made fun of me for it, so I decided I would never cut my hair again, at least not while I was in high school. They then made fun of me for having long hair, but that was a chronic burn of teasing, as opposed to the monthly acuteness that had been bad haircuts.
This wasn’t a statement on gender. I’d gotten my left ear pierced because that was the trend for straight white boys in the 1980s. We thought that the left ear meant we were straight and the right ear meant you were gay.
So everyone should have known I was a straight boy.
It was just to avoid the monthly post-haircut teasing. But it was taken as a message by my teachers, several of whom passive-aggressively suggested I should get a haircut. I lost the lead in the high school play because it was a period piece and the lead wouldn’t have had long hair. Instead, I got a short role, which wound up being the first laugh of the play from lines that weren’t meant to be funny.
My drama teacher said she’d have given me the role but didn’t offer it because she knew I wouldn’t cut my hair. I dramatically shook my head to cause the locks to dance, and said, “My mane? Of course not.” She looked like she’d eaten a lemon.
The rumor was that she was gay.
If she had been, she wouldn’t have been allowed to tell us. This was 1985, in a suburb of Detroit that thought it was still 1955.
Tarot
I graduated from high school in 1985, a straight cisgender neurotypical monogamous boy who had found his life partner and was questioning Christianity.
Somewhere around there, I bought a Tarot deck at a bookstore called the Book Beat. That bookstore is somehow still around, despite the closure of multiple chains and countless independents. We were regulars there; the owners were obsessed with the Oz books, and we’d bought a few, and so they kept encouraging us to buy more. That was our common ground, even though I still have yet to read most of them.
At one point, I had a complete collection of the L. Frank Baum books, and a few of the others. A few have since gotten damaged by being on the basement floor, thanks to the cats knocking them from shelves.
But before that happened, I’d bought a Tarot deck from the clerk, who had graduated from high school with me. The next time I went in (with my then-girlfriend, now-wife), the clerk was talking to several people. The clerk motioned to me and said, “They bought one last week.”
The people descended upon me: Burn those cards! Beg God for forgiveness! You have let Satan into your house!
I pretended to blow it off, but at home, I stared at the cards. We had a fireplace. I could have burned them. I almost did.
In my basement now, I have just shy of 100 Tarot decks. I haven’t touched them in years, but for a while they were something I collected, obsessed over, studied. For the art and the psychology. I don’t believe that they allow communion with supernatural forces. It’s 78 cards with open-ended meanings, a great way to focus thoughts.
At the time, I was becoming a pagan. I was giving up on Jesus, but I still hadn’t entirely let him go.
Around 1980, by the way, I was collecting Chick tracts. I took them very seriously.
Rain Man
In third grade, I had emotional outbursts in school that gave me an IEP for Emotional Impairment. At the time, IEPs were a new concept; I had one of the first given by my district, a small town in the thumb of Michigan. The four years I spent in that hellscape were traumatic.
At my mother’s suggestion, I invited my classmates over to my house for a birthday party. I don’t know if that was that year or the next. Maybe a dozen kids showed up, mostly because my father was Minister. In that town, most of the kids who were ever nice to me were nice because their parents had told them that my father was Minister.
I remember being in the kitchen with my mother, frustrated that I couldn’t figure out how to interact with any of my party guests. My mother was annoyed with me.
I was always “shy” in gatherings. I had two modes in public: Withdrawn and explosive.
When I started hearing the word “autistic” being used (not about me, never about me), it was hushed. Like cancer. Like the r-word. “Did you hear about Cathy’s son? He’s”–meaningful pause, then whispered–“autistic”.
I wasn’t “autistic”. That wasn’t even a consideration, even though my sixth grade teacher let me use a closet in the back of the room whenever I was feeling overwhelmed, a quiet space all to my own, even though my mother suggested I read “Dibs: In Search of Self” because I would identify with it.
I didn’t read it until a few years ago. Dibs isn’t “autistic” either, because that word is never used in reference to him. If you’re familiar with that book, with the description of Dibs in it, that gives a sense of high a child’s support needs had to be in that era to be dubbed “autistic”.
(Spoiler alert: Dibs was absolutely Autistic.)
In 1988, Hollywood released “Rain Man”. That is what Autism looked like in the 1980s. It’s not a cinematic aberration, it’s a codification of a cultural perspective. If you’re not familiar with it, go watch it, but with the huge content warning that it’s a very limited perspective.
I was far from that. I interacted with people. I made eye contact. I wasn’t obsessed with TV game shows.
Well… okay, I was obsessed with TV game shows.
I was a weird kid who thought I was an alien because I didn’t quite fit in, but it was just a misalignment, not a complete alienation.
Alienation.
That’s funny.
Too Wong Foo: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Fish!
There’s an essay about clothes that I want to write. It’s been on the back burner for a while now.
For now, though:
I don’t understand gender. As a Wiccan, I did the Wiccany stuff of insisting on Male and Female archetypes, but I don’t understand gender.
I’m called nonbinary for want of a term. And here’s where I started, since I did have a point: I don’t understand why I have to have a term.
As a cisgender, neurotypical, monogamous tween, I didn’t need a term: I was “normal”. This is, I think, the root of why so many cisgender people get upset with “cisgender”; they don’t need a term, they’re normal. Only the weirdoes need terms.
But see, I’m normal to me. My lack of understanding gender, my recognition that I’m not defined by my body parts, that I don’t like having to have my presumed reproductive organs announced whenever I’m discussed… that’s all normal to me. So why do I need a term?
And I know we need terms to discuss stuff. I’m not looking for a condescending explanation; I have a Master’s in Linguistics. I know how words work. I know how language works.
It’s because I know how language works, though, that this is so frustrating: I’m just me. There are things I wish I could wear, but I’m too afraid of the judgment of others. This is a safety issue: I could get fired. I could get assaulted. My family could get assaulted. My property could get destroyed.
These things happen to people who are too different. Routinely.
It Ain’t None of Your Business
2023. I am 55.
If you ask me to check off boxes, I will say I am pansexual, transgender, neurodivergent, atheist, and polyamorous. But those words in themselves have little impact on my life. They don’t tell you who I am, they tell you some of the realities I have. I’m also physically disabled.
At the same time, I have certain major privileges: I am white. I own a house that I can afford the mortgage on. I have enough in the bank to pay off my credit cards each month. I have health insurance, and own a car, and my disabilities don’t prevent me from doing basic life stuff. I speak English fluently, and I am a direct descendent of Miles Standish. I am generally seen as male; even being male-perceived is a privilege.
I say the last paragraph lest anyone think I am trying to dodge recognition of those privileges. Apparently that’s a thing now: People claiming membership in oppressive groups in order to dodge responsibility for their privileges. So no, that’s not what I’m on about at all.
What I’m on about is: I’m the same core person I was at 12, when I was denying or ignoring or hiding all that stuff about myself. And yet now I have to carry around a bunch of labels to Explain Myself, when I didn’t have to Back Then.
And maybe I don’t have to. I’ve been loud about being trans and Autistic for a few years now, as I’ve come to terms with that language, but I think I’m moving beyond it, back to being Just Me.
I’m me. Whatever that means.
Most of my anxiety about that, about tossing the mask aside and living fully authentically, isn’t about labels or self-identity, it’s about fear of what will happen to me and mine from people who want me to be their perception of propriety.
I am pineapple on pizza. If you don’t like that, move along, but you don’t have to be mean about it.