adolescence II (journal entry)

An entry from my personal journal

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High School came along, and life continued to complicate. I recall one evening, at the end of the summer before High School, I took what I judged to be my most delicate and feminine blouse (it was a warm coral color, a loose-necked polo shirt in a very lightweight, thin stretch-knit cotton) and padded it (after shutting my door and being sure nobody might be stopping-by). I didn’t have anything like a bra; it didn’t even occur to me to borrow my mother’s — they’d have been dreadfully large, anyhow. I used kleenex, wadded-up and shaped, held against my chest by tucking-in the blouse into my pants as tightly as possible.

In retrospect, with a little coaching and better materials to work with, I would have made a quite convincing girl: my hair was already lengthening, I still had relatively delicate features then, and my shoulders and jaw had yet to broaden and square-out. At the time, however, the effect was devastating. I had no idea how to feminize my haircut, but that wasn’t the real issue — all I could see were wrinkles of kleenex poking at the inside of the shirt. Then one form slipped down a ways. I was horrified; it was awful. I felt SO DEVASTATINGLY FAKE, a feeling that I’m not entirely certain has ever quite left me. I tore out and threw-away the little pastel-apricot kleenex forms and struggled to put the whole episode as far out of my mind as possible (which wasn’t very far; this scene haunted me for years).

Interestingly, I think that this was when I really started actively fighting masculinity. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t think I could be masculine, but that I didn’t want to be in the milieu of “boys” and “girls” — I saw the ultimate end of masculine presentation as being seen a certain way by girls and women, and that was a way I simply didn’t want to be seen. I wanted to be accepted among them, I wanted to interact without the wretched fence of gender roles. I wanted to ask for help caring for my hair, which I’d begun to let grow (and honestly didn’t know what to do with). I wanted to ask what their adolescence had been like, so far — a deep, taboo subject, to me. I wanted to know what it was I was missing. I already felt I had a pretty clear handle on what the boys were experiencing, and it was unpleasant, dull, and tedious. Muscle development, facial hair, some bone growth, infatuations, and voice changes. Ech.

Socially, I still had the small cadre of somewhat intellectual, nerdy boys that I’d been friendly with in middle school, but I tried to encourage and develop friendships with girls who seemed open to it¹. Until my junior year, though, I didn’t really grow close to anyone at school (in the sense of having anything like a confidante) except for my three friends from early childhood (all male, one [we would later learn] bisexual), only one of whom attended the same high school as I did.

Role-wise, I continued to avoid athletics, pursued music and academic extracurriculars, joined a service club, and began singing. Vocally, it was an issue of significant, perverse pride for me that, while I sang tenor, I had a rich, strong falsetto with a coloratura range that could outdo any alto in the choir, and several of the sopranos.

Still, I think the weirdest thing now, looking back, is how I related to clothing. In some quirky sort of pseudo-logic, I latched-onto white cotton pants as the uniform of choice. I think part of it was that there seemed to be nothing the least bit masculine about them. They were about as emasculating as I could get and still be reasonably age- and gender-appropriate (albeit hardly tasteful). I wore literally nothing else. I owned no jeans — no denim of any sort — no khakis, no more cargo pants, no nothing. Just white cotton uncreased slacks, or white linen.

Some days, I’d couple them with intensely white sailing shirts. When the clothes were new, before the UV-reradiating pigments left the fabric over successive machine washings, I would seriously resemble a lighthouse beacon walking down the hallways of the high school. I suppose I might have been slightly embarrassed by what I could clearly see was a bit of an obsession, but I think any such feeling was eclipsed by a sense of how embarrassed and humiliated I would have been had I dressed conventionally, had I looked like any other boy. It’s even hard to write that phrase, now: “like any other boy”. It makes me shudder.

I was building a fragile little fantasy overlay for my world, wherein I could avoid the unpalatable fact of my assigned sex (or at least avoid considering it).²

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¹ Ironically, the one young woman out of these upon whom I developed a crush (and, at one point, to whom I confessed the infatuation) turned-out to be lesbian — I still haven’t quite figured-out how to interpret that.

² Incidentally, I threw away all my white pants about a month into college and bought a new wardrobe of blue jeans and cargo pants. On the one hand, I’d begun a romantic relationship (with a young woman) and was trying to see if there was any way I could fit the gender role; on the other, I think I was trying to deal with the fact that the little fantasy of denial-of-masculinity wasn’t working. Plus, they really did look horrid.