Sissy

by Jacob Tobia

  Wait, no one’s said that to me. People say that? What?

  Some religious and community leaders consider homosexual feelings to be a sin. Historically speaking, homosexuality has been classified as a mental disease that only a doctor or psychologist can treat.

  There you go talking about mental illness again. If it’s not a mental illness or a sin, then do you really have to bring that up so often? I’m in fifth grade and reading this in 2002, so you can trust that I already have enough negative associations with gay people. Reading about this “mental illness” and “sin” stuff is not that helpful, to be honest.

  But many of these views and opinions are now changing.

  Oh, okay. Phew. Wow, way to bury the lede.

  These days, there are a lot of people who feel that homosexuals are natural, normal, and socially acceptable. Homosexuality is understood as a personal issue that should not be judged, mocked, or treated with disdain.

  Reading those last words, my brain was electric. It was like the first time someone shows you a diagram of the solar system and the earth’s orbit. You’ve spent your whole life watching the sun go up and down in the sky, the moon mysteriously changing shape; you know, anecdotally, that celestial bodies move, that they shift, but until you see a diagram for the first time, until someone explains to you that these movements are called orbits and revolutions and rotations, the how eludes you.

  Puberty, Puberty, Puberty, Puberty: For Boys! was my first blueprint of how human sexuality operated. Suddenly, the urges and feelings and feelings I’d been experiencing had scientific names. I was no longer jacking off, I was masturbating. I was no longer gay or queer, I was homosexual or bisexual. Everyone else (seemingly) was no longer straight, they were heterosexual. When you were as nerdy as I was growing up, having scientific words for the things you were observing mattered.

  Which was what made the book’s silence about queer sex and queer lives all the more conspicuous. In the present, the book strikes me as not only outdated, but alienating. Reading it now, as a queer/trans adult, the subtext of the whole thing makes me cringe. Other than that small section, queer people are hardly mentioned. While the book does mention homosexuality in a nonstigmatizing way, it is represented as the exception to the rule, a type of attraction that is not the norm and accordingly not worth spending much time on. While it talked a great deal about vaginal sex, it didn’t discuss anal sex even once. It only referred to it ambiguously as a “very high-risk sexual act which results in large numbers of homosexual men contracting AIDS,” and that was only in the introduction, which was written for parents. The entire book assumed that its reader was straight. While it told me that who I was sexually was natural and perhaps okay, it didn’t really prepare me for what life was like as a gay person.

  And where it only minimally served me as a young gay person, it completely failed me as a young, gender nonconforming, trans kid: Like much of the world in 2003 (and certainly in 1988 when the book was written) it was completely silent about trans and gender nonconforming people.

  * * *

  —

  None of this newfound knowledge could’ve prepared me for sixth grade. As every church kid knows, sixth grade is a big year. It’s the year when you cross over from being in the “children’s ministry” programs to being part of the “youth group” programming. The shift was important to me both socially and sexually: It meant I could hang out with high schoolers, young people who had grown beyond the gender-based insecurity of middle school to embrace coed friend groups.

  It also meant I had an excuse to hang out with high school boys. When I was twelve years old, high school boys simply oozed sexual confidence. You know, those tenth-grade boys. And oh my god, the senior guys. At the beginning of sixth grade, I still believed that a blow job had something to do with blowing air on or around a penis.* But those high school boys. They discussed making out and losing their virginity and they actually knew what they were talking about (or bluffed very convincingly). Those boys were music to my deeply confused ears.

  The paradox of church youth group is exactly that: It is the space that is singularly accountable for introducing sexuality into young people’s lives while simultaneously giving rise to sexual shame and insecurity. Church youth group is like that one aunt everyone has who bakes incredible cheesecakes, but spends the entire Thanksgiving dinner talking about her new diet. She sets you up with something delicious, conjures something rich and creamy and beautiful, only to shame you when you inevitably give in to the temptation to eat it. Each creamy bite feels wrong, each crumbly bit of graham cracker crust deviant, each calorie transgressive but seriously sexy.

  Retreats were the nexus of this sexual torture chamber. Every spring and fall, we would pack our whole youth group onto charter buses and head off to a campground for the weekend, where we would spend 40 percent of our time talking about Jesus and the other 60 percent canoeing and speculating about the mechanics of hooking up. These were sexually charged weekends for everyone. Some of my friends even managed to sneak away for make-out sessions during free time. But they were literally and figuratively the hardest for me. At night, when everyone returned to the “safe space” of gendered sleeping cabins, I was plunged into scenes of sexual confusion and frustration that could last for hours, interrupting my sleep and ensuring that I was exhausted by the weekend’s end.

  There are two ways I can talk about those nights in the boys’ cabin. On one hand, they were hilarious and fantastic. I got to watch my crushes walk around in towels, I got to sneak glances of people whom I adored in their underwear, and if I was lucky, I maybe even got to see a butt or two as people got in and out of the shower. Some of my fondest memories of eroticism as a young person occurred at church camp. The irony of church camp facilitating my adolescent sexual fantasies doesn’t escape me.

  But those weekends were also cruel and alienating. While I was closeted, I lived in fear that I would be found out. I lived in constant fear of my dick, terrified that it would give me away, that I would see someone I was attracted to, get a boner at an inconvenient moment, and have my secret, my deviancy, revealed to everyone.

  Placing a young person in a sexual environment while simultaneously pretending it is totally devoid of sexuality reiterated the message, over and over again, that my sexuality did not matter, that my desires were irrelevant and abhorrent and should stay that way. So while the transgressiveness of being the peeping tom was sort of hot on the surface, it was psychologically destructive. I rarely felt more alone than I did in those cabins after the lights were turned off. As my friends drifted off to sleep, I spent countless nights staring at the ceiling, resisting both the urge to masturbate and the urge to cry. At the age of twenty-seven, I am still unlearning the shame and sexual erasure those retreats imposed on my adolescent body.

  That being said, my church wasn’t as bad as other churches could be. I have a ton of friends who grew up in churches that spent 90 percent of the early and mid-2000s talking about the precise circle of hell that was reserved for gay people. Something about George W. Bush’s presidency really emboldened that conversation. I think, on some level, that a number of fundamentalist evangelicals actually believed that 9/11 was God punishing us for the scourge of butt sex and glitter that was sweeping the nation. Instead of helping them accept queer people, Will & Grace just seemed to make them angrier.

  My friends who grew up in churches like that were delayed in their coming out process by easily four or five years. They generally came out in college. Also, a lot of them were frat boys. Go figure.

  In the grand scheme of things, my church was just kind of undecided on the question of homosexuals. Given the political debate concerning queer people in the early and mid-2000s, this ambivalence was communicated through silence. No one ever really told me how I should feel about being gay. My pastor never said that homosexuality was wrong, but I also didn’t know of anyone at my church who was out as queer.


  This awkward approach to queer people was never more obvious than in the spring of my sixth-grade year, when our new youth pastor, Pat, decided we should spice things up by having a beauty pageant that featured exclusively guys. To this day, I can’t say I understand Pat’s motivations for staging such an event. What compelled him to have a drag beauty contest in our sanctuary, in the room where we had weekly services each Sunday morning, is beyond me. Maybe he was secretly trying to advance the queer feminist cause, empowering nascent homosexuals through the transformational power of ecumenical drag. That’s certainly what I tell myself.

  But the more likely explanation is that he probably didn’t think too much about it at all. Or perhaps he thought about the beauty pageant in the same way that my grandfather would’ve thought about it.

  In the 1950s and ’60s, my grandfather actually participated in a few cross-dressing beauty pageants that were fund-raisers for his local Lions Club. At one point in time, my grandfather danced onstage with five other men wearing coconut bras and grass skirts. The way my mom talks about it, these cross-dressing pageants were just for fun. Which I guess means that in my grandfather’s Southern mill town of Danville, Virginia, masculinity was so hegemonic and absolute, so unquestioned and solid, it never crossed anyone’s mind that a grown man could enjoy wearing women’s clothes and dancing around onstage. There was no political or identitarian value in what was being done. It was just for fun. Nothing serious to see here. Move along.

  Pat must’ve been thinking about our youth group’s beauty pageant in a similar way. It was just fun and games, just boys hilariously running around in dresses and their mom’s shoes. Nowhere in his calculus did he account for a ferocious, budding queen like me sashaying past the altar and down the aisle.

  The week before the pageant was to take place, Pat asked the guys in our youth group to sign up if they wanted to participate. Of course, no one signed up, because it would’ve been way too gay to volunteer to wear women’s clothes on a stage. So Pat spent the week reaching out to individual guys, eventually mobilizing enough contestants to make the pageant a success. Why he asked me to participate is still beyond me. I was close with him, and he knew I was a good actor, so perhaps he just thought that pretending to be a woman would be a natural fit. Whatever the reason, on Wednesday night between prayer group and Bible study, he pulled me aside. I’m pretty sure this is how the conversation went:

  PAT: Do you think you’d be able to be a contestant in the pageant on Sunday, Jacob?

  ME: [screaming loudly inside] Ummm . . . I don’t know, maybe. Can I think about it?

  PAT: [unaware of my internal screaming] Sure—can you let me know by tomorrow what you think? It’s going to be a lot of fun.

  ME: [continuing to scream loudly inside, a twelve-year-old girl at an NSYNC concert] Okay, sounds good. This is fine. I am relaxed about this.

  I went home and asked my mom whether she was okay with me borrowing some of her clothes for the pageant. I think this set off some alarm bells for her. It wasn’t the first time I’d asked her if I could cross-dress or attempted to wear girls’ clothes, but this was the first time I’d asked to wear women’s clothes at church (little did she know that it wouldn’t be the last). I don’t think my mom was worried about me being queer—she already knew she had a sensitive, audaciously feminine son—but I’m sure she must’ve been worried that I would face bullying for participating in the pageant.

  With some trepidation, my mom agreed. Her only condition was that we should probably keep this from my father for the moment. That made good sense to me.

  It’s not that my father is an asshole or a raging transphobic person. If anything, my dad is a reasonable, loving person who was completely unprepared to have a child like me.

  My dad and I don’t talk about his childhood a lot. My understanding is that it was pretty traumatic, due in large part to the loss of his sister Linda to pediatric cancer and the subsequent medical debt the family spent decades paying off.

  The culture my father was raised in was blue collar, conservative, and full of machismo. I imagine that if my father had ever expressed any femininity as a child, it would’ve been swiftly coaxed out of him by his two older brothers, the kids from the neighborhood, someone at the Ford plant, or my grandfather. When you grow up in economic hardship in a masculine culture, like that of Ford’s Cleveland plant in the 1960s, is it any wonder you might have some trouble accepting that your son plans to wear your wife’s dress and shoes to strut around the church sanctuary for a beauty pageant?

  At that point, neither my mom nor I was ready to start that conversation. At the age of twelve, I hardly understood my own identity. How could I have explained it to my father? Talking with my dad about my gender felt impossible.

  Instead, that Sunday, my mom and I went up to her closet and picked out a long black dress and a pair of her shoes that loosely fit. To round out the outfit, we also grabbed a necklace, a pair of clip-on earrings, and a tube of lipstick. We put them in a big bag so I could leave the house sans paternal freak-out, and I headed off to church to compete.

  When I got to youth group that night, I joined everyone for dinner and then went back to the vestry to change for the pageant. To my horror, I realized I was the only middle schooler who’d signed up. The only people who’d been convinced to compete were myself and three high school seniors. They had the social clout and cool points necessary to make it through the pageant unscathed. I, on the other hand, was a queenly little sixth grader who everyone had always thought was a bit too fruity anyway.

  In the vestry, sandwiched between three eighteen-year-olds and a row of acolyte robes, I considered backing out. But by dragging me to choir rehearsal after choir rehearsal, my mom had taught me to always keep my commitments, especially when they pertained to church. So I pushed through. I donned my dress, slipped into my mom’s shoes, put on a little lipstick, and took a deep breath.

  I was horrifically nervous, but if I was going to do this, I was going to do it right. So when they introduced the four contestants in the First (and last) Annual Miss St. Francis United Methodist Church Beauty Pageant, I strode out like I owned the place. I sashayed like a professional, turning elegantly and perfectly, whisking up and down the aisles of my church in my mother’s dress. Inside I was terrified, but on the outside, I worked. it. the. fuck. out. honey. RuPaul would’ve been proud.

  The difference in attitude between me and the other contestants must’ve been apparent to everyone. Where the other contestants were grotesque in their gestures, I was elegant; where they were parodic, I was earnest; where they were clumsy, I was graceful. This was most notable during the talent portion of the contest. One of the contestants danced jokingly to a Britney Spears song, one juggled, and another blew bubbles. I chose to sing. I can’t remember exactly what song—it might’ve been a church song, but more likely it was something by Sheryl Crow or Shania Twain. Despite the clumsiness of my newly dropped voice, I did my best to sing earnestly. I sang truthfully. I sang beautifully, and in that moment, everyone in my church youth group must’ve realized that there was something profoundly different about me.

  Afterward, the contestants all waited backstage while the judges deliberated. A few minutes later, the results were in and the contestants were brought back onstage.

  “You’ve all competed beautifully,” started Pat, “and each of you deserves recognition for your efforts here tonight, but there can only be one Miss Saint Francis.”

  I squirmed.

  “Tonight’s runner-up is none other than Praise Band’s own James Benson! Give him a round of applause.”

  I could’ve vomited.

  “And now, to crown Miss St. Francis. Ladies and gentlemen, this year’s winner of the contest and Miss St. Francis 2004 is . . .”

  Gulp.

  “Jacob Tobia!”

  The youth group applauded. Jamie, the assistant you
th minister, brought up a surprisingly nice tiara and a sash made out of pink duct tape, adorned with beautiful cursive that read “Miss St. Francis.” The sash was draped over my shoulder and the tiara was placed on my head. I faked a smile. I waved to the audience—elbow, elbow, wrist, wrist—in the queenly way I had learned from Julie Andrews in The Princess Diaries. I may have even made a small acceptance speech. But as I walked out of the sanctuary and back to the vestry to get changed, all I felt was fear. It was already weird enough that I was the only middle schooler who’d competed, but what did it mean that I’d won? As I changed out of my dress, I gathered myself, bracing for what I felt would be the inevitable taunts and bullying to come. I waited until most of the youth group had left before I went back to the sanctuary.

  To my surprise, no one gave me a hard time. In fact, most of the kids in my grade actually respected me because, as a sixth grader, I’d beaten not one, not two, but three seniors. Strangely enough, there was real pride and street cred in being crowned Miss St. Francis. Contrary to what I’d thought, I wasn’t seen by my peers as exceptionally flamboyant or “faggy”; instead, I was seen as the funniest kid in youth group, the courageous comedian who’d bested even the coolest, oldest members. At the time, I was relieved. For the moment, my peers had been thrown off my scent. In fact, it seemed that winning the Miss St. Francis pageant had paradoxically reaffirmed my masculinity by positioning me as bold and daring. After all, I was the only middle schooler who’d been ballsy enough to wear a dress, and surely I must’ve been deeply comfortable in my masculinity if I were willing to do that.

  But looking back, I can see that participating in the pageant came at a cost. The pageant was not a celebration of femininity and gender nonconformity; in fact, it was the opposite. The pageant was a parody, a mockery, a public spectacle that created shame around femininity. Whether they realized what they were doing or not, there was something dehumanizing about watching three older guys, three cool guys, three seniors, mock feminine boys like me. With each laugh from the audience at a flamboyant gesture or swish of the hips, the shame I felt about my own femininity deepened. With each chuckle from my peers, I felt the possibilities for my gender expression narrowing, felt myself growing more and more distant from my body and my gender.