The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You (2 page)

I considered my options. On the one hand, I had the choice to more or less trap Miss Sweater Set between me and the wall of the airplane for the better part of ninety minutes, all told. I could read gay books, write gay smut on my laptop, discourse helpfully about the life of the modern homosexual. I could give a little
ex tempore
speech about Gays Throughout History, perhaps focusing on characters she would recognize. A little speculation, maybe, about the preferences of Eleanor Roosevelt, or the water-jug carrying man (a highly gender-non-normative behavior for a man of the time) who leads Jesus to the Last Supper as referenced in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 14. I could read to her from the collected speeches of Harvey Milk, or share some of the excellent research my wonderful friend Hanne Blank was doing for her upcoming book about the origins of heterosexuality. Or perhaps I could just take the opportunity to cough on her a great deal, complete with much apologetic touching.

Listen, I’m not a saint. It would have been a lot of fun.

But then I realized that if I relinquished this particular set of pleasures, I could have my seat to myself again; that the putatively sympathetic flight attendant was extremely unlikely to make someone else move to accommodate the homophobic wishes of what’s-her-name. I could spread out my things, and my body. I could probably work
or
sleep.

In that moment, if I am being honest, I have to report that I had no compassion whatsoever for Miss Sweater Set. I like to imagine that I can act with generosity even toward people who avow themselves my enemies, and sometimes I really can, but in that tired moment I didn’t care about her. I didn’t even consider her. I thought only of myself, and how tired I was, and how much I was not equipped for any more toxic energy or misguided nonsense, and I waved her off. The flight attendant grumblingly reseated her (immediately in front of a screaming infant, I was pleased to note) and I buckled my seatbelt and raised my armrest and let my arms down.

Just after that, the usual safety demonstration was given. I generally tune these out, because I hear them twice a week on average, and they don’t really change very much—one needs to be admonished only so many times to put on one’s own oxygen mask before assisting one’s companion before it sinks in. Likewise, I’m pretty sure that if you woke me from a drunken sleep at three a.m. and asked me where my nearest emergency exit was, I would mumble “it may be behind me,” before glaring at you and going back to bed. I know all the words by rote. But somehow that day, after Miss Sweater Set’s Catch-the-Gay hijinks, and my torrent of reaction to it, when the flight attendant said, “Please take a moment to locate your nearest emergency exit. Remember that the nearest exit may be behind you,” I heard it in a whole new way, though it took a while for me to figure out exactly what had sent a shiver up my spine.

I considered it as I sat there. The flight was otherwise uneventful. The flight attendant tried to apologize to me and I said firmly that it wasn’t in any way her fault, and then I had a little nap. In comfort.

Of course, immediately after the plane landed, I called everyone I knew to tell them this story. They were all suitably, satisfyingly, both horrified and amused. People asked what I was wearing, what I was reading, if I had spoken to her or made some sort of eye contact, all of them dancing around the same question—how did she peg you as queer? Not only that, but what
kind
of queer did she think you were?

I have no idea, really. I wasn’t wearing an expressly gay T-shirt, and my books and magazines were all still stowed. I don’t know if she read me as a dyke or a fag or a tranny; have no idea what signifiers she was responding to (which, in retrospect, would have been the right reason to ask the flight attendant to seat her next to me). I don’t know if it was my hair or glasses or clothes, comportment or demeanor, or just my general homotastic being. But something about me was clearly too queer for her comfort, and triggered a full-fledged Gay Panic that splattered all over me.

It’s the nature of Gay Panic to do so. Even though the whole phenomenon is more or less entirely about the person experiencing it and their fears about homos (what if it talks to me? what if I like it? what if I, you know,
like
it?), it nonetheless is almost never contained where it belongs. Being visible in the world as a queer person comes with a whole set of these free-gift-with-purchase experiences, where you never quite know what you’re going to get, or what it will end up doing. Indeed, this entire book consists of stories and essays written and told because the experience of being so identified on a plane made me start thinking in a whole new way about what it means to be visibly different, visibly queer in the old sense of the word, visibly and knowably Other.

Sometimes this is lovely. Sometimes it means recognizing your tribe, or knowing where to turn for shelter from a storm. But it also breeds a certain watchfulness. Once I finished chewing on the phrase, I recognized that I nearly always know where the nearest exit is, metaphorical or actual, when I am interacting with new people. I am nervous if I feel I don’t.

So thank you, Miss Sweater Set, wherever you are. Thank you for sparking an entire volume of stories about how being readable as queer, as transgressive, as different, informs and shapes a life. However much you might not be delighted to have contributed to 200 pages of thought about queer and trans topics, I am nonetheless grateful, and hope the readers of this volume will be too.

While You Were Away

As a kid, I went to overnight camp for eight weeks at a time with a bunch of other Jewish kids from the Tri-state area who were also relatively happy, for one reason or another, to be separated from their parents for quite a long stretch. We spent our eight weeks doing arts and crafts, taking swimming lessons, evolving and disbanding highly complex preadolescent social structures, and trading the junk food our parents sent us for the junk food other people’s parents sent them. There wasn’t all that much to do, but there was a lake and long periods of indifferent adult supervision, so we managed just fine.

While we were safely away, making lopsided bowls in the ceramics shed, our parents tended to take advantage of our absences to do whatever needed to be done. More benignly, it was a kitchen renovation or a move across town. But for several years my bunkmates left for camp from one house, in one town, and were taken home to a different state. There were more than a few off-season divorces, a couple stints in rehab, and one of my more startled contemporaries returned home to discover that she was henceforth no longer living with her mom and dad, but instead with her mom and mom’s new lesbian lover.

And now that you and I have had this little hiatus since you read my last book, it seems only fair that I should bring you up to speed on the changes in the last four and a half years since I finished
Butch Is a Noun
, got divorced from my wife Nicole, wrote and premiered
Monday Night in Westerbork
, lived alone for a couple of years, started this new book, fell in love at a conference in Milwaukee, moved to Canada, and got remarried—legally, this time, thank G-d for Canada—to a tender and brilliant activist and educator named j wallace (to whom I refer in this book by the fondest private name I have for him that’s not too embarrassing: Ishai, his Hebrew name). Somewhere in those developments I seem to have gone from being someone people generally experienced as a dyke (or sometimes a straight guy) from an old suburban area of Massachusetts to being someone people generally experience as a fag (or sometimes a straight guy) from a big city in Canada.

Yeah, it’s a little weird for me, too. For one thing, I use hair product now, at which suburban-dyke-me would have completely rolled my eyes, but somehow city-fag-me finds it essential.

When I write it out, it feels very far to have traveled. Much like it did when I was eleven and came home from camp to discover that the entire downstairs of my house looked completely different. My parents hastened to reassure me that it was mostly the same—even the same stove—but the paint, wallpaper, and carpet had all changed. Similarly, I have moved out of jeans and T-shirts and into capris and a summer fedora, but most of the underpinnings have stayed the same (and, in the end, it’s still the same things that heat me up, too). I’ve let my little goatee grow in, started wearing earrings again, and painted my study a summery blue-green; it’s all true, but this has not stopped me from also worrying all day about everyone and assuming everything is all my fault, though that last may be more about being a Jewish husband than being either a butch or a transguy. Sometimes these things are difficult to unpack.

I get a lot of questions, these days, about whether I’m still a butch or if I am now a transman. Truthfully, it’s hard to say, a statement I make knowing full well that it just caused hundreds of readers to say, “Well, if you’re not sure if you’re a butch, you’re
not
,” and further hundreds to say the same thing, but substituting “transman” into the equation. I have to say, from where I’m standing, the lines are not nearly as clear as some people would prefer them to be, and the longer I hang around at various crossroads and deltas of gender, the more I notice that nothing is clear enough to be easy. Nothing about gender, or orientation, is clear enough to police or defend without circling the wagons so tight that we’re all pissing in our own front yards within six months.

We all, perhaps especially those of us on the transmasculine spectrum, are sort of feeling our way along and sorting it out as we go. Me included. I talk a bit in this book about how hard it is to live so near to the site of so much battle, and how much I have been hurt by people’s categorizing or dismissing or assuming about me. Mostly, what I have done is live into myself, into my faggot butch ways, from hair product to ass fucking, and frankly it’s very nice here. And who knows what may yet come? If the last almost-five years have taught me anything, it’s that I should be far more careful about the words
never
and
always
.

It’s the sort of thing that happens, as we grow up and change. Maybe especially it’s the sort of thing that happens to queers and transfolk because a lot of us spend our adolescences and early twenties—when straight, cisgender people are cutting loose and trying on identities left and right—figuring out how to survive and who in the world might possibly like us or love us or even just fuck us (and who we have to be to get that). The world opens, and we change a little more; someone from the other coast uses a new word that’s like walking through a door into a whole different kind of possibility. Books are published, shows are mounted, art is displayed, poems are slammed, and stories are told, and each of these expands our understanding of identity a little more and better. Every one of them—every new story, every new word— creates a kind of opportunity to see ourselves anew.

The first one for me was the story of my great-grandmother, Bergie. She was named Rose Bergman, my father’s father’s mother, but she insisted everyone call her Bergie. I’ve always known about her, of course, but she died when I was small. Over time, though, facts have emerged. I know that she was the only one of my great-grandparents born in North America, the only daughter of the owner of a small hotel. She married in her late teens, had one son (my grandpa), and then abruptly divorced her husband and headed down to the Carolinas where she lived for years, leaving her son to be raised by her mother. No one knows what she did there, but when she came back she told her son that his father was dead, insisted everyone call her Bergie (not Mom, not Rose, and nothing else at all, ever) and never, as Grandpa told me, went near a man again. I also know that she was built broadly, with big hands—my dad tells me I have Bergie’s wide-palmed hands—and used to row dory races and beat all the men in town in her funny wide little wooden boat. When I began to display my array of masculine behaviors in my teens, my grandparents told me a couple of stories about her. Before, I was awkward and odd and freakish in a bad way. But after? After, it was as though I was taking my place in something. Like I wasn’t an ugly duckling at all, just a different kind of bird (though I don’t think anyone would compare me to a swan, except for how noisy they are).

So welcome back. More adventures to relate, more thoughts to rattle hopelessly around in until I save myself or get spat back out, more stories to tell. Here’s hoping you see yourself, in a good way, in some of them.

Wrap/t

The problem with the
tallis
I wanted was that it didn’t match my dress. My dress, which had been chosen by my mother at Bloomingdale’s from the Belle France collection, because Laura Ashley didn’t make dresses in my size. My size, which by then was almost my current frame, including the collarbones my orthopedist once rapped his knuckles on and whistled over, the shoulders that forced the removal of shoulder pads from every women’s garment I’ve ever owned. My shoulders, across which my
tallis
was supposed to rest gracefully, and somehow femininely, when I was called to the Torah for the first time, at thirteen, to take my place as a woman in the society of Jews, capable of adult authority and bound by adult responsibility.

But not, apparently, in matters of my own comportment. A campaign had been mounted to turn me from a bookish, sturdy girl into a Young Lady; it began with a new hairstyle complete with permanent wave, a hairstyle maintained with a round brush and a can of hairspray. With ears pierced long enough in advance so that I could wear “nice” earrings on the day of my bat mitzvah, delicate gold shapes that were a gift of my maiden Aunt Flora, the musician and scholar. And the dress, long shopped for and finally chosen, in blue and purple flowers, a delicate crocheted lace keyhole neckline, a slight bow at the back to nip in a waistline (or to create the illusion of one). The shoes, heels, black patent pumps so profoundly inappropriate for the occasion that I have no idea, to this day, what we could have been thinking; any homosexual in attendance surely spent my entire
haftorah
snickering under his breath. None of which I wanted.