by Jacob Tobia
I left the evening conflicted. After the show, when many of the gay boys around me willingly stripped off their false eyelashes, removed their makeup, unlaced their corsets, and changed clothes, I found myself suddenly reluctant to do the same. Other than my wig—a cheap, poorly affixed clump of polyester (that, to be honest, didn’t smell all that great) on loan from a friend—I didn’t want to take anything off. While the other boys effortlessly stripped, putting their personas in garment bags, shoe boxes, and makeup totes, I found myself unable to part with mine. I wanted to wear my shitty Goodwill dress all night. I wanted to keep on my heels, leave my lipstick intact, let my earrings shimmer on the dance floor.
At the time, I felt alone, singular in the way that I was relating to drag. I thought I was the only one who learned something fundamental about myself that night. But as I’ve gotten older, I’m starting to question that assumption. Like much of my college experience, I perceived myself to be alone only because so few of us (myself included) had the courage or acuity to name what we were experiencing. I think that everyone was changed in some way that night. Each performer was expressing something new, powerful, and dynamic about themself. We were all learning together, fumbling our way toward liberation.
That night, I realized I didn’t want what I was wearing to be a costume. I longed for it to be just another outfit—for my femininity not to be my persona, but my person. So while I eventually changed out of my dress because it was sweaty and hot, I left my lipstick and high heels on and twirled all night in my stilettos. My feet weren’t entirely pleased, but my heart was imminently grateful.
* * *
—
I took my next gender steps gradually. I didn’t know what these discoveries meant about me or my future, but more important, I didn’t want to get ahead of myself. Despite my confident ethos, I was and am an exceedingly fragile creature. I break at the slightest unkind word, at the smallest look of contempt. I am socially perceptive to a fault, able to suss out the emotional and social architecture of a room with only a quick glance. When it comes to social rejection and emotional intelligence, I’ve never had plausible deniability. Since I was a child, I’ve been able to perceive exactly what most people around me are feeling. It was the only way I was able to get away with being such a little shit in middle school and still have my teachers like me. It is the only way I am able to get away with being such a big shit in the present and still manage to have a career.
While this emotional intelligence often helps me break down barriers and rip social norms apart like an industrial shredder, it also gives my heart the consistency of porcelain. One social rejection, however masked or veiled, can send me spiraling for an entire evening. One wrong look my way, however subtle or hidden, can send my heart skittering across the floor in a thousand tinkling pieces. In college, I knew myself to be highly impressionable, pusillanimous, moldable, putty in the hands of Duke’s broader social norms.
So after the drag show, I took baby steps: unwinding my gender gradually, sounding it out letter by letter.
And what could be more gradual than wearing high heels to the Yule Ball? The Yule Ball was the Harry Potter–themed dance hosted by Duke’s Quidditch team. If there’s any space where you know it’s going to be okay to be super queer, it’s a party where a bunch of fellow nerds are already dressing up like witches and wizards.
The Yule Ball has a special magic at Duke. It’s held in the Great Hall, which resembles—with an uncanny level of accuracy that the name would perhaps suggest—the Great Hall at Hogwarts. With vaulted ceilings and wood paneling, all it takes is a few flicks of a wand to make you believe you’ve actually been transported to a certain school of witchcraft and wizardry.
I wore the same pair of high heels to the Yule Ball that I wore in the drag show, and the evening was magical precisely because my gender was unremarkable. Sure, I got a few compliments on my shoes, but most people were too preoccupied with being nerdy to care. We spent the evening dancing, casting spells on one another, and death dropping on the dance floor any time someone had the gall to throw an “Avada Kedavra” our way.
That night, as I lay on the dance floor in four-inch heels, pretending to have been murdered, I thought, Maybe college is going to be all right. Horizontal on the floor, surrounded by wizards and witches, soaring ceiling, gothic crests, and tinkling glass spinning above me, Duke felt—for a precious moment—like home.
I went to my parents’ for winter break that year feeling self-assured, confident that I could somehow make this whole college thing work.
But when I returned to campus that January, everything had changed. January at Duke University is hell. Not because of the weather—North Carolina doesn’t really get that cold—but because the campus is overtaken by sorority and fraternity rush.
For me, the stakes of the rush process were immense, because the entire system was built around totalizing gender norms. Seemingly overnight, a two-gender system was consolidated across campus, the binary fortified in stone. People who I knew to be fearlessly individual fell in line, wearing the required salmon shorts or the requisite white dress. As they increasingly conformed to the gender binary, my slice of campus became an island.
At the time, it felt like being taken hostage, forced to endure the social effects of something that I didn’t want in the first place. Even students who didn’t rush were party to the madness of it. It touched everything, crawling through the consciousness of the entire first-year class. We were being sorted. We were being evaluated. If you didn’t rush, you were simply admitting that you thought of yourself as a nobody.
I know this may not be fair, but to my tender proto-queer heart, it felt like my friends were bailing on me; deciding that my identity and happiness as a gender nonconforming person weren’t worth defending; deciding that the personal cost of truly being an ally to me, of opting out of gendered social institutions that create a hostile world, simply wasn’t worth it.
Watching this all go down—watching my friends join a system that would tell a girl she doesn’t deserve social standing because her thighs are too big, watching my friends trade in any possibility of gender freedom in exchange for social power and shitty beer—damaged my sense of trust in the world and in other people. I’d barely begun to figure out who I was when the rug was pulled out from under me.
Two weeks into rush, when it felt like my school had hung me out to dry and my nascent identity was slipping through my fingers, I decided to fight back.
There are some decisions that are too scary to be thought through. There are some moments in life when you shouldn’t look over the ledge before you jump. You can only pick at the edges of your Band-Aid for so long before you rip the motherfucker off.
Having watched one too many of my friends be fat-shamed by their supposed “sisters” and exhausted from hearing horror stories of fraternity hazing, I found myself hoofing it to the Dollar General off campus, marching straight to the makeup aisle, and purchasing the brightest red lipstick and loudest nail polish—a glittering gold—that I could find. Before I knew what I was doing, I was back in my dorm room painting my nails and adorning my lips. It was the first time since childhood that I’d done either of those things all on my own. Sure, I’d worn makeup for plays and for the drag show, but never on a random Saturday, and certainly never of my own volition.
When I was done, I stepped in front of the mirror. The reflection looking back at me was startling, yet sublimely beautiful. Staring at my own image, glorified with pigment, augmented with varnish, something struck me: I’d wanted this my whole life.
The image in the mirror conjured up memories that had lain dormant for over a decade. All at once, they were back, enveloping me in their warmth like shawls. As I gazed in the mirror, I saw my child self looking back at me. Beneath the layers of shame, cobwebs, and dust, my purest, youngest, most uninhibited form had managed to break through. My hands no longer my own, bu
t the hands I’d always wanted. My lips no longer constituted of flesh, but of stardust.
I smiled, then broke into peals of laughter that cascaded out of me, bouncing around the room and reverberating throughout history, across time, to a place where the truth of my gender danced without confinement, without restraint, without inhibition, without fear.
Looking back at me in that mirror, I saw something I could never unsee, an image that would both support me and haunt me in the years to come: I saw myself. Truly and deeply, I saw myself.
But like any moment of divine vision, you have to come crashing to Earth sometime; after speaking with God, every prophet has to head back down the mountain. Unless you brought a tent, you can’t stay up there forever.
More often than not, prophets are not received with kindness. Normal people don’t like the fact that you spoke with God. They’re jealous, because they wish they could talk to her, too. God’s one cool chick, and you don’t make many friends by bragging about how tight you are with her or telling people she gave you the exclusive on human truth. I mean, how would you feel if one of your friends was like, “Yeah, I already know what the next iPhone looks like—God showed me and not you.” It sucks. It makes you feel left out.
En route to the dining hall for lunch that afternoon, I’d never felt more prophetic or more visible. Walking past fellow students on the quad, I felt like Moses or Jesus must’ve felt when they, too, returned from the mountaintop. Like Moses, I came back down from the mountain to a group of people who were praying to a false idol. Like Jesus, I came back down from the mountain a helluva lot shinier.*
The shame was overwhelming. I was imbued with divine knowledge, but all I wanted to do was keep my head down and be as invisible as possible. Involuntarily, out of instinct and fear, I looked at the ground as I walked and kept my hands in my coat pockets. It took bumping into a classmate for me to even realize what I was doing. Startled out of my daze, I resolved to keep my head up, my eyes forward, and my hands uncovered. I feigned a sense of courage: “boldly” displaying my crimson lips, letting my nails sparkle unfettered in the sunshine.
With each step, I became more comfortable with what I’d done, more fearless. People were, by and large, not freaking out. I don’t know quite what I’d expected, but I certainly didn’t expect people to walk by, see me wearing lipstick, and just continue walking. I thought it’d work more like a Godzilla movie or something: They’d see me stomping toward them, lips ablaze, and cower in fear, a mob of students pointing my way and screaming “QUEERZILLA!” as they fled. I’d destroy a few buildings, fight a giant squid, and leave East Campus in ruins.
Surprisingly, things weren’t like that. My classmates were either chill about it or too self-absorbed to even notice.
Entering the dining hall, I tried to distract myself from the polish coating my nails, the paint covering my lips, and the anxiety covering my heart. I tried to act normally. Slowly, I began to feel like myself again. I filled my tray with tofu and French fries and ice cream—my standard meal freshman year—and headed toward the seating area to find my friends.
It was at this point that my life became something akin to a sappy teen movie. It was just so predictable.
En route, I approached a table filled with twelve giant members of the Duke Football team (which, in 2010, was not doing very well. Just sayin’). As I was about to pass, one of the players, someone with easily a hundred pounds on me, slid out into the middle of the aisle, blocking my way. Legs spread wide, slouched real, real low in his chair—presumptively to show me just how much of a man he was or how big his dick was or something—he stared past my tray and dead into my eyes.
“You’ve got something on your lips,” he spit menacingly, looking to his teammates for approval.
And by this point, because I’d gotten distracted by French fries and sorta already forgotten that I was wearing lipstick, my first thought wasn’t, “I am being bullied this is a hate crime.”
My first thought was, “Jacob how did you ALREADY manage to get food on your face? You haven’t even started eating yet!”
I stood there for a moment, stunned.
Then it clicked.
He is talking about my lipstick.
He is bullying me.
Huh.
In my head, here’s how the rest of this scene plays out:
“OH YEAH, MOTHERFUCKER?” I yelled, loud enough for the entire dining hall to hear. The room fell silent, everyone watching with bated breath. With all eyes on me, I approached him real close, getting right between his widely spread legs and leaning in seductively, as I continued to yell:
“YOU GOT SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT MY LIPSTICK? YOU GOT SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT MY FASHION CHOICES, YOU PIECE OF SHIT? DOES MY LIPSTICK MAKE YOU INSECURE, LITTLE BOY? DO YOU NEED TO SHOW YOUR FOOTBALL BROS JUST HOW MUCH OF A MAN YOU ARE BY MAKING FUN OF ME? WELL, THE JOKE’S ON YOU, ASSHOLE: MEN AREN’T EVEN REAL. GENDER IS FAKE. AND THE ONLY GUYS WHO MAKE FUN OF GENDER NONCONFORMING PEOPLE ARE GUYS WHO SECRETLY WANT TO FUCK US.”
I pause, taking a deep, slow breath, staring directly into his eyes. I’m not done.
“IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT, DUDE? YOU WANNA FUCK ME? IS THAT IT? HUH? WELL, GUESS WHAT? I WOULDN’T FUCK YOU IN A MILLION YEARS, YOU BRAT. YOU WANNA KNOW WHY? BECAUSE DUKE FOOTBALL SUCKS AND Y’ALL HAVEN’T WON A GAME ALL SEASON. MAYBE TRY ACTUALLY BEING GOOD AT FOOTBALL. WIN A GAME FOR ONCE. THEN, MAYBE, IF YOU’RE REAL LUCKY, WE CAN HAVE A CIVILIZED CONVERSATION ABOUT EXACTLY THE METHODOLOGY I WILL EMPLOY TO DESTROY YOUR DICK. CAPISCE, MOTHERFUCKER?”
He whimpers. He’s rock hard, throbbing with desire for me. I lean in farther, slowly, excruciatingly close. I give him a gentle, barely there kiss on the cheek as I dump the entire contents of my tray onto his lap, ice-cold Diet Coke, tofu salad, and mint chocolate chip ice cream dampening his fiery crotch.
I back away, effortlessly blowing him a kiss before turning around and never looking back. Saying nothing more, I strut out of the dining hall and into the frigid January evening, where Robert Pattinson, FKA twigs, and Taylor Lautner are waiting for me in a bright pink vintage Mustang. “You’re late for our double date,” Taylor fusses, playfully pulling on my scarf before planting a kiss on my red lips.
“I know, I’m sorry, sweetie,” I reply quietly, nestling my head into the nape of his neck. “Mama had some business to take care of.”
We drive away into the night. No one comes back to campus to claim my belongings. I am never heard from again. I’ve simply vanished.
Years go by. Students come and go. Duke ages. Buildings rise and fall. The universe inches closer to its inevitable heat-death.
But if you look closely at the Marketplace on a cold January night when the moon is full, students will recount, hundreds of years hence, some say you can still see the silhouette of Jacob’s bright red lips whispering, “Motherfucker” into the night.
In my head, that’s what happened. If anyone asks, please tell them that version.
In actuality, I stared at him dumbstruck for approximately two seconds too long, then broke eye contact while barely managing to croak, “Yeah, it’s lipstick.” It was more a puff of air than a sentence. It didn’t even land as a proper retort.
Ashamed, embarrassed, and caught off guard, I shuffled sheepishly around him en route to my seat, hoping he wasn’t going to try to hit me as I passed by.
* * *
—
That night, I sent an email to the generic email address for the football program, the only contact information I could find online. The email address was so generic I wasn’t sure if anyone even checked the account, but it was all that I knew to do. I cc’ed Janie, the director of the LGBT Center who was basically my campus mom, as well as two staff members from the Women’s Center.
To: [email protected]
Subject: Harassment by Members of Duke Football Team
D
ate: January 23, 2011
To whom it may concern,
My name is Jacob Tobia and I’m a first-year public policy major here at Duke. I just wanted to send an e-mail to the coaches of the football team concerning something that happened to me while I was eating dinner in the Marketplace tonight, but first a little bit of background about myself would probably be helpful. As a proud member of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community, I am someone who doesn’t necessarily operate within the gender binary, and I oftentimes engage in androgynous behavior. Tonight in particular, I was wearing lipstick. While returning to my table at the Marketplace with a plate of food, I walked past a table full of Duke football players, and one of the players—whom I can’t identify—stopped me and said in a very hostile manner, “I think you have something on your lips.” I replied, saying “I know, I’m wearing lipstick. I don’t conform to gender norms and I’m sorry if that offends you.”* The rest of the players seated at the table didn’t make any effort to stop him and most of them were laughing while he did it. His comment was clearly meant to intimidate me, and I left the Marketplace feeling harassed and marginalized.
While I don’t wish to file any sort of formal claim of harassment or anything like that, I wanted to make sure that I informed the football program and coaches of how members of their team had been behaving. While I know that wearing lipstick isn’t for everyone, I refuse to be publicly harassed for how I express myself and my gender. From what my friend Ted, a player on your team who I know through my scholarship program, tells me of the football program at Duke, I know that the Duke football program holds respect in high regard. The behavior that I observed today in the Marketplace left me feeling anything but respected.
