72
Now, on the very rare occasions when I decide to tell someone about
my background, I've figured out a quick statement that both gives
them the gist and puts them in my place at age thirteen: ''I thought
I was a boy and when puberty came, I got a big surprise.'' I've
found that one sentence very effective, without having to get into
the physical details to explain things. Details that I had to
admit I'm not terribly comfortable talking about and most people are
even less comfortable hearing from me. But that one sentence took me
almost twenty years to come up with and thirteen of those years I was
trying to figure out the answer myself.
With the return to New England in Nineteen Eighty-Two, the living
arrangements were much the same as the previous year. Father was
living at his girl friend's house and would come to the family home
for five evenings a week to share dinner with Pappy and evening
television shows. By October, Pappy was again off to Florida to
snowbird and with him gone, dad found little reason to visit the
house except to pick up the accumulated mail once every now and then.
This left me with the house to myself and also the monthly utility
bills, the good news there was, with the greater income from
the full time job, I could better afford them and used the
heating for the full house this year, rather than just my
single bedroom.
With my friends all off to College, I had plenty of time to reflect.
At first the loneliness was bone aching, but as I'd gone through
similar patches during my first Summer at the apartment town and
similar first Summer in Colorado, I now knew these periods would come
to an end, eventually, and it didn't drown me like that first time at
age ten. And so I spent more time thinking about my life and about
my 'situation'.
Over the years I'd watch any television show that might shed some
light, typically these were the daytime talk shows and before the
nineteen nineties they were still pretty straight-laced in their
approach and the audience members thoughtful in their reactions.
Ultimately, none of them shed any light on my 'situation', but I did
end up learning quite a bit about homosexuals, transvestites
and transsexuals. One of the first things I learned, though,
was that most people in society were dumbfounded by it all.
During the seventies when talk shows would come on to discuss being
Gay, many American audience members would struggle to understand it
as they only had the one box in their head, heterosexual, so they
tried to find someway to get Gay people 'in the box' by asking them
''So which one is the man and which one is the woman?'' This sort of
mind set made producers seek-out Gay couples where one was obviously
masculine and the other feminine. This helped the audience grasp the
concept more easily as it spoke to their own existing world view,
even if it wasn't accurate to the full spectrum of homosexuality.
With transsexuals, audience members seemed to grasp this more readily
unless the person being interviewed expected to be homosexual after
surgery, then the audience members would really be stunned as they
tried to wrap their heads around it. When it came to transvestites,
the common response was, ''What's the point?'
Eventually a second box was formed in the public mind, 'Straight' for
heterosexuals, and 'Gay' for everything else. Let's
call this a stage one understanding.
Homosexuals, transvestites,
transsexuals, pedophiles, anything other than heterosexual were all
deemed 'Gay'.
Toward the late nineteen seventies and into the early eighties, when
discussing these things through the talk shows, eventually the
audience members reflected more sophistication on these issues as
they were now able to understand that there was more than just a
catch-all box of 'Gay' and they could now see that there was more
than just heterosexual and homosexual, there was also the 'Other'
category. The general public could now see that homosexuality was
'same sex' interest and everything else wasn't. This was a mixed
blessing as they would now lump same sex pedophiles in with
homosexuals, everything that was left over fell into the 'Other' box,
even opposite sex pedophiles as common heterosexuals knew this had
nothing to do with them. So 'Straight', 'Gay' and 'Others' gives us
a stage two understanding of sexual variation.
By the mid-to-late nineteen eighties, things had evolved even further
in the common mindset and there were now four boxes. 'Straight',
'Gay' (including same sex pedophiles), 'Transwhatever' and
'The Rest'. Clearly a stage three understanding.
By the cusp of the nineteen nineties the 'Transwhatever' tag
was becoming subdivided as the rest of the 'Transwhatever'
community would dub themselves 'Transgendered' to distinguish
themselves from the 'Transsexuals'. But by the mid-nineteen
nineties, the Transsexuals liked that term better as it got the 'sex'
out of it and they felt that their condition was more about a gender
recognition rather than a surgery goal. Sex changes were now 'just
an option' for 'Transgendered' people.
By the turn of the century, the American public was finally starting
to understand that there was a new category and that category meant
re-evaluating the previous categories. It was becoming clear that
there was a significant difference between same sex pedophiles and
same sex adult interests. Finally, the categories provided a
respectable separation for homosexuals and even a label subdivision:
'Straight', 'Gay/Lesbian', 'Transgendered', 'Pedophiles', and 'The
Rest'. If this placed society at a stage four understanding
for the first decade of the twenty-first century, where does that
place your level of
understanding?
In the Fall of Nineteen Eighty-Two I was still just as clueless about
my 'situation' as I had ever been. Watching all these talk shows
provided me insight into everything else, but
not myself. I
didn't have any sexual interests, so the whole
heterosexual/homosexual/pedophile categories seemed to have nothing
to do with me. When it came to 'Transsexualism' I didn't find I fit
there either as it seemed to be about functional members of one sex
wanting to be members of the opposite sex to some degree. I
didn't find myself to be a function member of any
sex. I wasn't a 'Transvestite', if anything I was the opposite
of that as I felt most comfortable in whatever clothing was most
common between men and women. As young men and women commonly wore
jeans and tees in America, that was the clothing I felt most
comfortable in as it wasn't sex specific. As clothing gets more
formal it becomes more sex specific and I find myself increasingly
uncomfortable in it.
The label of my father's 'What You Are' statement had haunted me
since the previous year, not because he didn't know what to label me
as, to my face, but simply because I didn't.
No comments:
Post a Comment