Sissy

by Jacob Tobia

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  In spite of growing masculine aggression, there were moments in middle school when my femininity was radically affirmed. Like, for example, when I went to the mall with Meredith for the first time.

  In my adolescence, the mall was historically a place of restriction, a place where gender divides were pretty much absolute. It was an unspoken rule that when a girl was hanging out with a boy, she wouldn’t make him go into women’s clothing stores.

  I’d spent a lot of time one-on-one with Kate and Paige at the mall, but because they weren’t girly girls, we never really “went shopping.” Kate and Paige were the type of friends who preferred band T-shirts to sequined tops or Lilly Pulitzer dresses, so hyper-feminine stores never really entered into the equation. We would look in a few stores that carried both men’s and women’s clothing (Hot Topic, Journeys, Aéropostale), and a few stores that weren’t clothing stores at all (Brookstone, the Disney Store, the arcade), but our trips were never really “fashion excursions.”

  Not so with Meredith. In addition to being powerfully feminine, Meredith had the kind of gregarious, self-assured confidence that could knock down any barrier and open any door. She was both brilliant and audacious, with emotional intelligence and talent to boot. She knew that if you were confident enough, loud enough, and charming enough, you could break pretty much any rule. Meredith also knew what she wanted. She was a preppy, Southern girl who loved Jesus and wore ribbons in her hair and curated her wardrobe perfectly. And when we went to the mall, she wasn’t messing around. She was going to get some cute new looks, and she was going to teach me to have some fashion sense if it killed her.

  The first time we went shopping together, she forced me to enter my first American Eagle. I’d been too insecure to even walk into an American Eagle on my own. It was the hottest new club, and I wasn’t on the guest list. I hadn’t deemed myself worthy.

  Meredith wouldn’t stand for that. She’d been in that store easily twenty times. Meredith was a regular who could sneak me past my own mental bouncer and straight to the dance floor. By taking me into that store, she wasn’t just giving me fashion advice, she was helping me redefine who I was, anointing me with newfound social and economic status. Before I walked into American Eagle, I was a nerd with braces and glasses who was struggling to figure out how to fit in. After Meredith took me shopping, I was an American Eagle Kid, transformed through the magic of capitalism.

  Meredith also dragged me into every other store she liked.

  That first shopping trip with Meredith was a dizzying thrill. It made my head spin off its axis. Not only did I have permission to look across stores to the women’s section, I had permission to walk over there and say hi to my friend. I had permission to look at women’s clothes, to judge them, to touch them, to weigh options and compare. The women’s section was no longer forbidden terrain; it was somewhere I was welcomed. Without our peers there, without our parents, we were free to set our own rules.

  And we did. Meredith dragged me into stores that were exclusively for women, into stores I’d never had the courage to set foot in on my own. We went to fabulous stores that weren’t “classy” by any stretch of the imagination, that specialized in cheap sequins, towering heels, shiny polyester, and flashy costume jewelry that would turn your fingers green. She took me to stores with names like Charlotte Russe and Wet Seal. She let me ogle the crystal necklaces and jewelry with her in Swarovski. Without shame, without apprehension, without any sense of anxiety whatsoever, she even took me into Victoria’s Secret with her.

  It was the first time in my entire life that I’d seen that type of femininity up close. It was mind-opening. I must’ve freaked some people out because I was obsessed with touching everything. It’s like the first time you stay at a really fancy hotel. The sheets, the soaps, the lotions, the fancy chairs, the tile, the shower, the vanity, every single detail strikes you as incredible, as surreal, as something you’ve grown up seeing in movies but never had access to.

  For those brief moments, I was over the moon. I was over the stars. I was beyond the universe and had ascended to a multiversal plane, somewhere beyond space-time, to a galactic layer where there were no more rules, no more despair, only hope. It was ecstasy. I was high, tripping on my newfound gender freedom, and perhaps some chemical fumes from the cheap dyes.

  But like any good trip, it had to come to an end. The thrill faded because, as happy as I was in those women’s stores, my existence there was still second-class. I was only granted unstigmatized access to those stores under the aegis of a female companion. My presence was only permissible if I understood that I was an accessory. You can look, but you can’t touch. I could see the incredible hotel room, but I could never stay the night. I could stand in women’s stores with Meredith, but I could never, under any circumstances, try on the clothes. They were not my stores. I could be her plus one, but I could never get my own name on the list.

  Ultimately, however, these trips were transformative because Meredith took the time to care about my body and my look, too. She styled me. She pulled clothes (albeit men’s clothes) for me to look at, encouraged me to take fashion risks (within the world of masculinity, but still), and took the time to help me ask questions that I couldn’t bear to ask myself:

  What do I want to look like? How do I want to dress?

  Out of self-defense, I’d pretty much given up on clothing as a source of joy. I’d spent so much of my childhood longing to wear what was deemed women’s clothing, longing to dress my body in frills and shimmer and fluff. I’d taken so many risks trying to obtain and wear these clothes, only to be shot down, bullied, or isolated every time. By the age of seven or eight, I learned to give up; to stop caring about what I looked like at all. It was easier to shut down that side of myself than to address the pain, hurt, and frustration it entailed.

  Looking back, it’s almost comedic. As someone who has so many aesthetic preferences now; for whom clothing is perhaps the most important signifier of individuality, self-worth, self-love, and affirmation; for whom distinctive (albeit not necessarily expensive) clothing is imperative—as someone who recently went to a fitting at a major designer and got in a fight because all they had for me was a simple black dress, I have to look back on that period of my life with wistful mirth.

  My “fashion sense” in middle school was nothing short of tragic. It was a tragedy that I didn’t get to wear clothing that expressed my identity. It was a tragedy that, for many years of my life, I gave up wearing clothes that brought me joy. It was a tragedy that wearing button-down polyester dragon shirts and Hawaiian shirts was the closest I could get to wearing bright colors without scorn. No offense to any butches out there, but it was a tragedy that I ever thought cargo shorts were a look. It was a tragedy that, out of a desperate need to cover up my femininity, to shield my femme from the world, I compelled myself to wear cargo shorts nonetheless.

  Meredith opened me back up. While she may not have known the reason I’d stopped caring about what I wore or understood the coping strategy behind my aesthetic complacency, she knew that it had to change. She knew it was important for human beings to feel happy with how they looked, that dressing as you want—not necessarily expensively or even “well,” but of your own volition and according to your heart’s desires—was an important part of expressing your agency and identity in the world. It was a way to tell the world you valued yourself and knew who you were.

  Meredith taught me basic tenets of fashion that I’d never known. She taught me to button up an oxford shirt, but to leave the top (or even the top two) buttons undone. She taught me how to cuff my sleeves so that I looked casual but put together. She also taught me that it was okay to wear clothing that simply fit well. That I could wear shirts and pants that fit my body; that everything didn’t need to sag all the time. To a kid like me, who had been taunted mercilessly, publicly shamed for wearing shorts that were to
o short and too tight, the idea that I could wear clothing that fit me as I desired, that hugged my body in ways I liked, was revolutionary.

  In the end, Meredith compelled me to buy two shirts from American Eagle that I will never forget. Together, they probably cost me $30, but they felt like a million bucks. Up until that point, I’d only worn dragon-print button-downs and plain T-shirts from Kohl’s. She made me buy a pink button-down with blue and white stripes, as well as a brown form-fitting T-shirt emblazoned in teal with the phrase Almost Handsome.

  Looking back, it probably should’ve read Seven Years from Fabulous or I’m Trying, Okay? or This Gender Stuff Is HARD, but for the time being, Almost Handsome would have to do.

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  We can never underestimate the power of naming something, the power language has to transform our consciousness.

  Take, for example, the color blue. Did you know that for millennia of human history, in languages across a significant portion of the ancient world, there was no word for the color blue?

  Most of us can’t begin to imagine a world without “blue.” For our modern imagination, a world without blue seems inconceivable. Blue is a color most of us consider to be foundational, the color of the sky on a gorgeous day, the color of the water that covers 70 percent of our planet, the color of fire at its hottest, of sorrow at its deepest.

  No matter how strange it may seem, for thousands of years of human history, the color blue was never paid any attention to: It isn’t mentioned once in The Odyssey, in the entirety of the ancient Greek canon, or in thousands of other ancient texts. Homer was famous for writing not about the deep blue sea but about the wine-dark sea. Without a word for “blue,” the color of wine was the closest Homer could come to describe the brooding, tumultuous ocean.

  When I look back on my early childhood and adolescence, I feel like a Greek poet: staring at the sky, marveling at the Mediterranean Sea, gazing deeply into a piece of lapis lazuli, confounded. Blue was right in front of me. Blue was everywhere. It was searing into my eyes from all directions, informing everything I saw, but its name evaded me.

  As a child, I understood that my difference was beautiful, was natural, was fundamental. I knew just how special my gender was. But without a name, without language to put to what I was seeing and feeling, I had no way of sharing the importance of my difference with others. To them, gender could only be painted in bright red, deep green, or electric yellow. But floating at the edge of my consciousness, perched on the tip of my tongue, I knew there was more.

  In the absence of the words trans, genderqueer, gender nonconforming, nonbinary, or gender-fluid, in the absence of the modern language we have created to name the natural, beautiful diversity of human gender, I used the best language I had at the time to describe myself.

  I chose the word gay.

  Looking back, that word feels foolish, primitive, and imprecise. Looking back, I see how lacking the word gay was, how unprepared “gay” was to hold the depths of my gender exploration. I could see that my ocean was something more, was something different. But I didn’t have a word for it yet.

  Choosing the word gay, seating “gay” at the head of my identity, set in motion dual arcs of self-discovery and self-loathing. Over the next five years, understanding myself as gay would fill my heart with dichotomous feelings of power and shame, beauty and repugnance, community and isolation, peace and despair. As a gay teen, I had a long, arduous journey ahead of me, one that would ultimately undo my idea of myself as a man.

  At the time, I didn’t have a clear road map of what that journey would entail. Back then, in the paucity of my queer adolescence, I knew only two steps.

  Step 1: Come out.

  Step 2: Buy some glitter, probably.

  With trepidation in my right hand and gay identity in my left, I got started.

  PART II

  Teenage Dreams

  Chapter 4

  A Very Dramatic (First) Coming Out

  For queer and trans people, life in “The Closet” can be nasty business. It’s not just the experience of withholding your identity from people you love, living a half-truth while you navigate the world as someone else, that is traumatic. It’s also the way we talk about that period of our lives, the limiting metaphors we use to structure our self-knowledge. As a kid, I didn’t pause for a moment to think about whether the metaphor of “The Closet” worked for me. I took The Closet as a shameful, for-granted part of my epistemological reality.

  But what’s obvious to me now, as an adult, is that this metaphor doesn’t allow young queer people to have empathy for ourselves when we aren’t yet ready to proclaim our identities to the world. I’ve come to loathe the idea of “coming out of the closet.” There’s something about its black-or-white, in-or-out nature that rubs me the wrong way. Thanks to many queer theory classes in college and the brilliant work of writers like Eve Sedgwick, I’m starting to imagine other narrative possibilities.

  Instead of The Closet, I’d like to propose a more humane metaphor. What if we talk about queer/trans people “coming out of our shells”?

  When you think about it, us queers are a lot like garden snails anyway. We love flowers. We have beautiful, curly shells. We are slimy and understand the power of proper lubrication. We leave a shiny, glittering trail wherever we go. And did you know that most snails are gender-neutral and play both “male” and “female” roles in procreation? That many snails change gender multiple times throughout the course of their lives?

  More important, when you fuck with a snail, when you make it feel like it’s in danger, it’ll go right back into its shell. It will protect itself. You’ll no longer be able to see its gorgeous, glistening, alien-like body—only a hard shell of its former self.

  When a person hides in The Closet, we act as if it is their responsibility to come out. But when a snail hides in its shell, we don’t delegate responsibility the same way. A snail only hides in its shell because the world outside feels hostile. If a snail recoils at the sight of you, it’s not because the snail is cowardly or lying or deviant or withholding, it’s because you’ve scared it. When queer people hide our identities, it’s not because we are cowardly or lying or deviant or withholding, it’s because the world and people around us felt predatory; because someone scared us—intentionally or unintentionally—and we were trying to protect ourselves. Like snails, we too are defensive.

  All this is to say that the metaphors we use to talk about queer and trans experience matter. The Closet is a metaphor that sets queer and trans people up to feel that we are somehow dishonest or immoral for concealing our identities; that it is somehow our lack of courage that is to blame.

  The Closet spent over a decade controlling my life and how I thought about myself, making me feel ashamed for hiding my identity from the world and the people around me. The pressure to come out weighed on me constantly. According to what I’d been taught on TV and in books, coming out of the closet was my responsibility. It was my responsibility to open up that door and step bravely into the light. It was my responsibility to correct what the world had assumed about me—that I was straight, that I was a boy, that I was cisgender. I owed it to them to be honest, not the other way around.

  The closet led me to blame myself for my own lack of courage, my own inability to be honest, my own inability to “just open the door,” rather than blaming the people around me who’d built a world where everyone was presumed to be straight and cis in the first place, where queerness was an inconceivable other.

  Add to that the fact that I was raised in the church, that I had a fairly rigid moral compass—one that clearly and sometimes crudely delineated right from wrong—and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. According to my moral compass, being in the closet was immoral because being in the closet was lying. My silence about my identity became an indictment: indicating that I was untruthful, a bad person. I felt wrong, si
nful, even, for deceiving those around me.

  When I wasn’t busy blaming myself, another emotion found me: the feeling of being deeply, seriously alone. I was facing this Goliath, this golem, all by myself. And because I am a hopeless extrovert, I knew I wouldn’t last long if I kept it to myself.

  As with most complicated questions in my life at that time, I turned to the church for answers. Despite its setbacks, church youth group was where I first learned what it meant to embrace the more complicated facets of my identity. In fact, youth group was the first place in my life where I came out as gay. In sixth grade, I reached out to Jamie, our assistant youth pastor, and told her I had something I wanted to talk about. The following Sunday after church service, we walked to Java Blu, a coffeehouse in the shopping center on Kildaire Farm Road, just across the street.

  I’m still not quite sure why I told Jamie before anyone else. I think, on some level, I knew she would keep what I told her private, that she wouldn’t share my secret before I was ready. But it was a big risk. Because we never talked about queer desire or homosexuality at church, I didn’t actually know what anyone thought about it. Would she be understanding and nurturing toward me? Or would she try to tell me I was a sinner and attempt to “fix” me? Would she turn around and call my parents? It was a gamble, but for my own sanity, it felt like a risk that I had to take.

  I asked her to a coffeehouse because, in every TV show I’d seen where two people had a serious conversation, it was always in either a coffeehouse or a restaurant. I knew my allowance wouldn’t cover a restaurant, so I thought a coffeehouse was best. Jamie ordered a cup of coffee and I ordered a hot chocolate with extra whipped cream. She paid for both.