by Jacob Tobia
“Can’t you just say thank you for the good parts? Can’t you just thank people for the ways they’ve helped you and supported you? Can’t you just focus on the positive? I know that being gay at church hasn’t been the easiest, but can’t you keep this upbeat? It’s probably the last time you’re going to address the congregation like this, and I’d hate for people to take it the wrong way,” she pleaded.
I understood where my mom was coming from. I think that, on some level, she didn’t want to admit that the church had been anything but loving for me; on some level, she felt accountable for the pain the church had caused me. She’d invested so much time and love in ensuring that I had a faith community and a spiritual practice. She’d woken me up on countless Sunday mornings and gotten me into the car. She’d driven me to and from church thousands of times. Church was our special thing. My dad didn’t really go, and neither did my brother, so losing me at church must’ve been painful for my mom. She didn’t know how to let that part of our relationship go.
In the end, I didn’t listen to her—I couldn’t. I had to speak my piece, so I gave the sermon I’d written. I held back my tears as I broke up with my congregation, as I said what I thought would be a final farewell, leaving a relationship I thought was over. I had never wanted things to come to this, but despite my best efforts, it seemed they had.
When I went off to college, I didn’t look back. I didn’t try to join the Methodist group on campus, I didn’t find a new church to attend in Durham, and I didn’t make a point of telling people in my life about my faith journey. As far as anyone who went to college with me knew, I wasn’t a spiritual person, and I certainly wasn’t a Christian.
The distance was healing. I hadn’t realized just how badly I needed to be emancipated from the church for a while. I had damage that needed time to mend. In high school, I hadn’t given myself the space or time I needed; I kept picking at the scab over and over, desperate for healing. College allowed me the time to properly treat my wounds, to wrap them up in gauze and wait out the stitches. As I grew more distant, I also grew stronger in my sense of self and knowledge of my own power. Even though I went to college forty minutes away from home, I never went home on Sundays to go to church.
Instead, I would spend my Sundays like most college students: sleeping in late, recovering from the night before, and—in my case—trying to figure out why there was so much glitter in my bed.
PART III
Big Queen on Campus
Chapter 6
A Gothic Wonderland, a Major Letdown
If my intentions were to write a book after I graduated college, I couldn’t have chosen a more perfect place to go to school than Duke University. Duke is infamous. The only Ivy League(ish) school that also excels in athletics, with a basketball program that has won five NCAA Championships since I was born in 1991, Duke is pretty much considered a bully by everyone. The Ivy League schools hate Duke because we have that effortless sense of “State School Cool,” and the state schools hate Duke because we are pretentious sons-of-bitches from the tri-state area. Feminists (rightfully) hate Duke because they/we/I still haven’t forgotten about the Duke Lacrosse scandal, but feminists also love Duke because queer theory pretty much started with Duke University Press (or, at the very least, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote Epistemology of the Closet while she was there). People from North Carolina hate Duke because we’re a bunch of terrible kids from The City whose parents singlehandedly destroyed the economy in 2008, but they also love Duke because it is the number two employer in the state, second only to Walmart.
This tension is baked into the school’s very architecture, into its stones and mortar. Looking up at the Duke Chapel, a neogothic masterpiece that soars to a height of twenty stories, it can be breathtakingly gorgeous, recalling the spires of Oxford and Canterbury, mystical tales of castles and knights and damsels in distress. But it can also seem menacing. At the right angle, it looks kinda like Sauron’s tower from the Lord of the Rings—the one with the big red flaming eyeball that looks out across all of Middle-earth. So it’s hard to say. Is Duke beautiful? Yes. Does the architecture suggest that some kind of medieval torture occurs in the chapel crypt? Also yes.
Incidentally, Duke is a memoirist’s dream. It is the perfect antagonist: complicated, multifaceted, dynamic, awful-yet-desirable. Like the Grinch in How the Grinch Stole Christmas! or Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, Duke is a villain you love to hate. And oh boy, did I ever.
You, my dear reader, are in for a convoluted treat. This is the point where my problems start wildly oscillating between real-people problems and fancy-queer-lady-who-doesn’t-actually-have-all-that-much-money problems. This is the point where I get to dish about what goes on inside the country club—about the sexism and misogyny and transphobia and racism of the protected upper echelons of society—while still feeling like a sellout for joining in the first place. So pop some champagne, stuff your mouth with complimentary hot nuts, and enjoy your trip on Bougie Trans Weirdo Airlines. Apologies in advance, but the captain has turned on the fasten seatbelt sign for the duration of the flight: It’s gonna be a bumpy, turbulent, gut-punching ride.*
* * *
—
My college experience didn’t begin with a keg stand or a visit to an austere library: it began with a twelve-day romp through the Appalachian Mountains. The program, called Project WILD, was one of the most popular among Duke’s pre-orientation offerings. Incoming first years would pack up all their things for their college dorm rooms, bring them to campus, leave them, and immediately hop on a bus to the mountains.
The Appalachian Mountains are some of the oldest in the entire world, predating the Atlantic Ocean itself. They originated when the world was but one continent, soaring to Himalayan heights at the center of Pangea. Over 480 million years, they have been carved, slowly and beautifully, to their present-day shape. Standing in the shadow of that much geologic history, among mountains that have seen the birth of entire oceans, it is easy, and indeed proper, to feel minuscule and irrelevant.
With nothing but an endless vista of mountains in front of you, flecked with outcroppings of rock, the deep green of pine and the dusty green of late-summer maple and oak cascading down their sides, you lose track of yourself. You lose sense of each other. Your identity becomes a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which to draw.
To treat nature as wholly idyllic is to oversimplify a harrowing force, but to disregard its transformative qualities is an equally grave oversight. The twelve days I spent hiking around Pisgah National Forest in the most temperate part of an Appalachian summer were sublime. I felt at peace with the world around me, my worries about what “typical Duke students” would be like placed on the back burner. The nine people on my hiking crew were kind, empathetic, sweet, and motivated. We did long days of hiking, using only old-school topographical maps. In the era of smartphones and GPS, the experience was novel—and replete with all the campiness you’d hope for from a pre-orientation camping excursion.
It was everything you’d expect. Like a bad sitcom version of a collegiate backpacking trip, there were songs by the campfire, silly nicknames, collective nudity, and way too much group bonding time. As someone who adores both nature and overly sentimental traditions, these are some of the happiest memories from my freshman year.
What pleased me most was that, in nature, our normal approach to gender melted away. It melted so effortlessly that most people hardly noticed. Like an ice cube on a summer sidewalk, suddenly, it’s gone. Presto. Poof. Alakazam.
It’s hard to say exactly why this happens, but it’s a fairly universal phenomenon in outdoor programs. Part of it has to do with the radical change in architecture. Without rigid physical barriers, without corners or walls, without doors or locks, structures that are designed to keep us all separate, the metaphorical structures between us tend to disappear as well.
And it’s baked into the psychology of backpacking.
Backpacking demands a profound kind of acceptance. If it is raining, it is raining. If you stink, you stink. If your boots are wet, they will simply be wet. No matter how tired you are of going uphill, the topography of the mountain can only ever be what it is. It may change over thousands of millennia, but you will not see those changes in your lifetime.
Without societal structure, in the shadow of the oldest mountains on Earth, you just sort of lose track. Gender evaporates. What is our modern concept of gender to a 480-million-year-old outcropping of rock?
Overnight, gender-as-division was gone, replaced only by the imperative to be good to one another, care for one another, and treat one another with dignity. For those two weeks, my gender could not have mattered less. No one cared about whether my behavior was “appropriate,” because they were too busy caring for my body and heart just as they were. When you’re alone in the woods in a group of nine people, no one is disposable. You help one another, you respect one another, and you value one another, because you can’t afford not to. Any sense of hierarchy or stereotype suddenly feels not just irrelevant, but counterproductive.
Gender no longer dictated responsibility, either. If you were stronger, you would carry a bit more weight on a voluntary basis. If you weren’t as strong, that was okay, too. The group was not calibrated to the strongest performer, but rather to the weakest. It wasn’t just that no one was left behind; it was that the slowest person went first. The person who was struggling the most set the pace, and everyone else followed. Because I was spritely and lanky and my back problems hadn’t started in earnest yet, that person was not me. I was one of the fast hikers. But my speed wasn’t connected to a sense of masculinity or femininity. It was simply connected to my body’s structure, to my vital signs.
One of the greatest shifts also came from the fact that, in the woods, bodily functions immediately stopped being gendered. Everyone talked in depth about bowel movements. Everyone peed outside. Everyone used leaves for toilet paper. And we were unapologetically gross. We washed our bowls with saliva, licking everything clean because, without sanitary drinking water, that’s the best way to do it.
Each time we wanted to relieve ourselves, we had to tell each other with specificity exactly what type of movement we were having, because it determined how far we’d stray from the group. If I just had to pee, I would go one “see-far” from the trail, a distance still just barely in sight of the group. And if I had to poop, I would take the communal trowel, go two “see-fars,” and take however long I needed, using a hole that I dug myself.
We monitored one another’s bowel movements as a community. Sometimes it could take a few days for someone to become comfortable pooping in the woods. But if it took too long for your body to acclimate, it could become a health problem, and thus a concern of the entire group. Having explosive diarrhea is never desirable, but having explosive diarrhea thirty hiking miles from civilization can be medically dangerous. By the third night, it is the responsibility of every group leader to ensure that each person in their group has had a bowel movement, and if someone is still holding out, you prompt a bowel movement by making the most infamous meal of the trip: veggie chili.
After the fifth day, our inhibitions about potty talk were completely gone, and on the sixth—after we’d stumbled upon a wild blueberry patch and eaten so many berries our mouths turned purple—three of us were thrilled to report that the berries were potent enough to turn our poop green. By day seven, pooping wasn’t even a big deal.
On day eight, my group stopped for a break and I left on a two-see-far trip, trowel in hand. At one see-far, I noticed that the tree line was breaking. At two see-fars, the whole valley opened in front of me, Cold Mountain (yes, the one from the movie) looming ahead. It was a few hours before sunset, and with the valley bathed in gold, I began digging into the rocky earth. Birds soared over the ridge, a poetic silence surrounding their cries. The leaves rustled beside me, wind gliding up the mountainside. As I gazed out, contemplating the beauty of our natural world and every creation in it, I knew that no gender-neutral bathroom on Earth had ever been so opulent.
At the time, I didn’t realize the significance of what was happening; I just knew I was happy. I could sport whatever color bandana or shirt I wanted to. I could wear any clothes that felt good, or I could wear no clothes at all. I could sleep wherever I wanted, provided it was dry. I could cuddle with whoever wanted physical affection. I could touch and be touched without imminent sexual pressure. I could cradle any person of any body against my bosom after a long day on the trail. I could speak as much or as little as I desired, with as faggy a voice as I pleased. I could adorn my body with flowers however I chose, and those around me could, too. Bodies no longer signified behavior or character traits; breasts were breasts, nipples were nipples, genitals were genitals, hair was hair, none of them bearing ideological weight.
Without external walls to hold them up, my internal walls broke down day by day, bit by bit. It is a freedom I would yearn for throughout the rest of my time in college, a freedom I continue to yearn for, a freedom I haven’t quite tasted since.
Nothing epitomized this more than the trip’s penultimate day, when all two hundred of us were gathered back into an unshowered, grimy, fabulous group. The final ritual, other than a campfire and songs on the last night, is the Big Naked Slide—a ritual so fabulous and scandalous that the program was briefly suspended because of it.
Near the final campsite, there is a creek with a thirty-yard stretch of continuous rock that’s been covered in enough moss and algae to make it slippery to the touch. It’s a giant, natural waterslide. And on the last full day of the trip, upward of one hundred Duke students (voluntarily) got naked, ran to the rock in a giant naked herd, and jumped right in. A hundred naked bodies that had been stripped of their gender; a hundred naked bodies that had been given access to nudity without immediate sexualization; a hundred naked bodies with bits flapping everywhere, all sliding down the rock together—colliding, giggling uncontrollably, flopping on top of one another in a pileup at the end. Never have I felt so unashamed or liberated. Running in a pack of people who couldn’t care less about gender, never have I felt more in tune with my own identity.
By the end of the trip, I had a full beard. It was the longest I’d ever gone without shaving and, arguably, the most masculine I’ve ever looked. In spite of my beard and some new muscles, I’d never been more at peace with my body, my gender, or my feminine spirit. Whether it was brought about intentionally or incidentally, I’d found gender freedom in the mountains. I’d found my Walden Pond. I’d found transcendence, a natural spirit and essence beyond gender entirely. At one with the natural world, at one with my most natural self, I’d found a liberation that rattled me.
The next day, on the four-hour bus ride back to campus, most everyone was asleep. But I wasn’t. My stomach churning with anxiety, I stared out the window, fast-food chains, gas stations, billboards, and exit signs supplanting mountain vistas and endless trees.
Would this freedom last? Could this freedom last?
* * *
—
Arriving back on campus, I was a mess: emotionally, but more important, physically. I was filthy, unbathed, unshaven, and grimy, with two weeks of accumulated dirt, sweat, oil, and stank for all my new classmates to behold. My hair had so much grease in it that it could stand up on its own and make lots of interesting shapes. I smelled like crotch sweat, but everywhere. It helped that there were a hundred of us who were like this, but that didn’t make much of a difference when I saw my parents again for the first time.
My parents hid their revulsion, overlooking my stank and greeting me with enthusiastic hugs. Luckily, when we arrived at my dorm room, my roommate was out, so I had time to shower before meeting him. I dug around in my boxes and suitcases for a towel, pulled out my brand-new shower caddy, tossed in my electric razor and some soap, and made a beeline for the bathroom.
I breezed down the hall in my towel before pausing at the door to the bathroom. Staring back at me from the door was the usual, unwelcome sign: Men.
Oh.
Right.
The reality stung as it sunk in, burrowing its way down to my heart. That’s how this works back in the “civilized world,” isn’t it? I can’t pee without being treated as a man. I can’t brush my teeth without being treated as a man. I can’t shower without being treated as a man. Under a housing system that required every first year student to live in the gender-segregated dorms on campus, I couldn’t brush my hair in a mirror, get dressed, sit at my desk to do my homework, go to sleep after a long day, bring someone home with me, or have access to any private space without being treated as a man.
The straitjacket back in place, I couldn’t breathe. It felt like the last two weeks in the woods had been for nothing; everything I’d learned about myself had been for naught. I was back to being a guy, a boy, a male, a man. I was back to square one, my identity erased by the need to sleep, to bathe, to shit, to rest. Each of my basic needs became subsumed by the gender binary, packaged as things that “men do together.” I was to be one of the guys again. Sure, there were some girls in my building, far down at the other end of the hall past the common room, but assumed masculinity was inescapable, and I was not to forget that I was a man. I was not to forget my proper role.
I contemplated this as I took the razor to my two-week-old beard, uncovering my smooth face; as I removed plaque from my teeth; as I stepped into the shower.
Usually, the feeling of your first post-camping shower is exquisite. The massage of the water, the slickness of soap, the heat cascading down your body, soaking into your muscles. That day, I took one of the longest showers I’ve ever taken in my life. I must’ve stayed in there for half an hour, pampering my body, bidding it to relax, praying that the heat would somehow eradicate my mounting anxiety, that my feeling of dread would wash away like the oil in my hair. How could I endure living in a boys’ club for four years? Did I really have to trade the right to have my gender affirmed for the right to a bed?
