When You're Raised to Hate the Feminine

Dear Friends:

It’s summertime in San Francisco! The weather’s been hitting 90 this week. Time to head to the beach, grab a spot at the park to work on your tan, grill outdoors lest you turn the oven on inside. Owing perhaps to a sunny best-coast optimism, even most new construction homes in SF don’t have air conditioning, which’ll be unfortunate to watch as global warming fries us to a crisp in the coming half-century.

I’ve spent the week indoors, stuffed-up sick with a cold. I had some weeks of dizzy dizzy vertigo prior to that. It’s been a while since I’ve felt like myself. I had like a day of it, back in Virginia last weekend visiting my folks, down in their retirement town of Williamsburg. Dad cooked his ribs and his sweet-and-sour chicken that I love. Mom asked me questions about my job and my writing. Strange to see how returning to Family Son is how I feel myself again.

I had a dream last night that I was back in my town of Herndon, Virginia, sitting at an intersection on Elden Street (the main drag) that I must have sat at thousands of times in my life. But instead of the sprawling ranch home on the corner I always admired, they’d developed a tall mixed-use commercial block. And instead of the spooky old house set too close to the road, another mixed-use building. I looked down Sterling Road, and the sun was setting against a facade of faux-colonial mini-mansions painted in Disneyesque soft primary colors. Someone bioengineered a pine tree to grow white needles every other layer, making it look like perma-Christmas.

The dream made me pine (mind the pun) for the Herndon I used to live in, a town I couldn’t wait to get out of.

Nostalgia, I’ve always felt, is for old people. And here I am, complaining about my body’s ailments.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. Harry Wild
I don’t know what it is I like about retirement-age women solving mysteries. I’ve long said that what makes Murder, She Wrote irresistible is that it’s about a writer who solves crimes and is always smarter than the police. Harry Wild, a show on Acorn (my parents subscribe; it’s for people who love British TV), does the same thing but with a retired literature professor. Jane Seymour plays the foulmouth, boozehound title character, and it’s her knowledge of Great Books that helps the police (her son) figure out that the murderer’s taking a page, if you will, from Crime and Punishment in planning his murders. Goofy? Absolutely. But I do love that they partnered her with a down-on-his-luck high-school kid, in how it inverts a pairing I’ve had plenty of. I mean the Young Girl Helped/Escorted By The Gruff Older Man. Think the Stark youngest and the Hound in Game of Thrones or the cop and the alien girl named after a number in Stranger Things, or the stars of The Last of Us. There’s something very queer about an older woman teaching a young man the ways of the world, and helping him through life. Hetty Wainthropp Investigates is another Brit-TV example of this dynamic, and I am here for it.

2. Closing All the Windows on Hot Days
The school I work for didn’t install air conditioning in our building when they renovated it in 2010 (see optimism, above), and when I walk around on hot days I see open windows in all the classrooms—a surefire way to increase our misery, bringing all that hot air inside. Listen: closed windows, lowered blinds, shuttered shutters keep the heat out. Then, at night, when the temps have dropped, you open wide the downstairs windows and open narrowly the upstairs windows, creating a chimney effect to cool everything down. In the South, a lot of folks have a whole house fan in the ceiling that points up to the attic, which creates the same effect. I know how I sound here. Everyone loves a know-it-all. But there’s clearly a lot of misinformation out there. I think people open windows on hot days in the hopes of getting some kind of breeze. If you want breeze get a fan.

When You’re Raised to Hate the Feminine

I’ve long said that coming out of the closet brings with it an understanding that The Narrative, as it’s been written by the straight culture that raised you, no longer need apply to you. I mean The Narrative that boys and girls grow up to fall in love with each other, marry, get a dog and then have kids, work, retire, etc. Plenty of gays hold onto The Narrative, because they like The Narrative, or because finding a new narrative is too scary or difficult.

I’ve been thinking lately of how so much of the new narrative involves unlearning the lies The Narrative tells you growing up, one of which is that femininity is bad. Closeted gays get called faggot when we don’t exhibit masculinity as the hetero world understands it, and because nobody likes to be called out, or caught hiding, we learn to hate the feminine in us, or at least to hide it away as requested. And then, out of the closet, some of us gays choose to fight The Narrative by asserting that homosexuals aren’t feminine. We can have big hairy gym bodies. We can play professional sports. We can be first responders. Cowboys. Whatever.

There’s a trap here: by defending gays against accusations of the feminine, gays agree to see the feminine as an accusation, a thing to defend against. Perhaps this is a simple way to read the difference between ‘gay’ and ‘queer’ as they’ve drifted apart in recent decades: gays remain in the trap, queers understand that being called feminine is like being called right-handed, or a native Virginian. Or even tall or handsome.

---

‘“Masculinity” is being redefined,’ a recent issue of Men’s Health told me. ‘But who gets a say in what it means now?’ The essay, by gay writer Brian Broome, tells the story of being in college and seeing a young man cry and wail outside after a breakup, and his friends came up and called him a pussy and a bitch, and the girl who broke up with him a slut and a whore. This was in 1988. Broome comes out, finds the gay club on campus, and learns that gender norms aren’t for everyone.

The essay is all well and good in its overall message, but even it can’t escape the trap:

[T]here are some who ... conflate masculinity with strength and femininity with weakness. So they hold tight to these roles and to their contempt for those who flout them…. It’s queer people, regardless of how we present ourselves, who throw a big monkey wrench into the myth these people have invested in.

Actually, it’s women who do this, and who have been doing this for centuries. I’m thinking of feminists like Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the millions of writers and thinkers after them. Understanding how the patriarchy hurts us all, we queers have (mostly) jumped on their bandwagon, but to think that essentialist gender roles have been upturned by the rise in visibly of queer and trans people is to erase hundreds of years of history.

The history of women. ‘I wonder if we men are still so susceptible to other men assaulting our self-esteem that we promote these antiquated gender roles just so we don’t lose face around them,’ Broome writes, seemingly uninterested in the possibility of losing face around a woman, or having a woman assault his self-esteem.

Broome must be right when he says that some people ‘conflate masculinity with strength and femininity with weakness’. Masculinists, we can call such people. (I call them the enemy; their patron saint is Ginni Thomas.) Those of us who know better, who are better at reading people, and have a better vocabulary and a vaster emotional intelligence, will say that it’s far easier to conflate masculinity with intractibleness and femininity with vulnerability.

That vulnerability ≠ weakness is something I learned at the age of 41, doing book research on shame. So like not opening the windows on a hot day, these distinctions aren’t something we get readily taught. Here’s another plea to keep masculinists off our school boards.

---

Recently, the writer Brontez Purnell posted a quote on Instagram that read only this: ‘…devote myself to the feminine task of writing.’ Purnell is a gay writer, artist, musician who has started his own dance company. In another Instagram post, he’s worn this T-shirt:

I love this shirt for how it embodies queerness better than any pride flag could. I reposted Purnell’s ‘feminine task’ quote with the line ‘Embracing it’, because of course writing is feminine: it’s about community, communing, wisdom, anti-authoritarianism, and finding power from within. Who wouldn’t want to embrace that?

Well, another gay writer I follow, who also follows me, replied to my post with ‘WTF?!’ I didn’t know how to answer the question, and so I didn’t, and maybe it’s inaccurate to say the question came from the trap of The Narrative, which reads ‘feminine’ as a slur, or a limitation placed on whatever noun it qualifies. But where I’m at right now is reading ‘the feminine task of writing’ as self-evident.

Let me end this way: For years, I did a lot of low-level policing of my hands and wrists. I talk with my hands a lot, but I felt if I kept my wrists strong and solid, my hands wouldn’t flop around like a faggot’s. It worried the hell out of me. Now, sometimes when I’m moving through my house, I like to let my wrist go very limp, trounce it around a little, just to feel the pleasure of having a limp wrist sometimes. It’s like I’ve found a minor superpower, which feels apt because I always thought Buddy Cole was our superhero:

This week’s thing I did not buy at the antique store is the Miss Congeniality trophy from the 1973 Miss Kingsport (Tenn.) Pageant. (That’s the second runner-up trophy behind it.)