by Jacob Tobia
And while the changes I wanted to see take place during my four years on campus hadn’t really happened, while the culture hadn’t fundamentally shifted to make Duke a place where someone like me could succeed and thrive in step with the university rather than in spite of it, something much more important had happened.
While I hadn’t irreversibly changed Duke, Duke had irreversibly changed me. I left Duke knowing, more categorically than ever, exactly how resilient I was. If I could end four years at Duke standing firmly onstage in slutty Jackie Kennedy drag, singing the Alma Mater in front of thousands, I could take on anything.
Duke may have been a trial by fire. But I am a flamer of the highest order. I’m a motherfuckin’ phoenix. And you can’t kill a phoenix with fire, honey, because we’re made of the stuff. When confronted with fire, when faced with adversity, we shine brighter.
Or at least that’s the optimistic telling.
That’s what I tell myself on the good days when I feel strong and whole.
On the days when I feel broken, on the days when I feel worn down or empty, the story changes.
The truth is that my time at Duke was a paradox.
A cold fire.
A salty cradle.
A beautiful wound.
A pair of Louboutins.
On the one hand, they elevate you. They make you taller and bigger and higher. They give you a sense of power and purpose and fashion and ferocity. They give you a whole new attitude and an unstoppable sense of confidence. They make the outfit. But the whole time you’re wearing them, you’re struggling to balance. You teeter on the edge, liminal, uncertain, never quite comfortable.
The act of wearing them—the contortion of the foot, the crushing of the toes, the breaking of the back—leaves damage that lingers long after you’ve taken the shoes off. Just one evening leaves blisters that last for a week. If you wear them most every evening for four years, the damage becomes visible, the shape of your foot changes. The bunyons and ingrown toenails and back pain are inescapable.
Duke was a gorgeous pair of dangerous shoes. For four years, it made me who I am. Astride elite private school prestige, I looked effortlessly perfect. I was privy to opportunity and opulence that I’d never dreamed possible. I felt bigger and stronger and better. I could get into any party in the world, light up any room that I pleased, open any door. I spent four years trying to convince myself that the shoes weren’t that painful, that I’d broken them in and they were unique to me, that the leather had molded to my foot and was now comfortable.
But at some point, I had to look myself in the mirror and decide that the glamour was no longer worth the damage.
I had to put the shoes away and it was hard. I felt shorter and less powerful in flats. I didn’t know who I was without my Blue Devil stilettos, and it took a long time to figure that out. As often as I was tempted to, I tried my best not to wear those shoes anymore. I tried not to mention Duke or talk about my pedigree. I had to find other ways to define myself and earn my place in the world.
Sometimes, I catch myself looking at my Duke blue pumps with rose-tinted longing. There are moments when, perched on the shelf, I still find them beautiful in spite of the pain that they caused. There are moments when I yearn to twirl on the dance floor in them one more time.
For years after college, I felt perpetually underdressed. To this day, I’m still trying to fight off that feeling. It’s an unfinished seam in this story, visible to anyone who cares to look.
* * *
—
After an exhausting four years, I needed a break. But not before I could get in one more epic night on campus with my mom in tow. The night after graduation was parents’ night at Shooters, the trashy country-western bar frequented almost exclusively by Duke students. My mom agreed to go.
A few hours later, I changed into my fifth and final graduation weekend outfit: a sleeveless black button-up vest, black pleather miniskirt, black cowgirl boots (sans heel), and bright red lipstick.
My mom met us outside Shooters in a pink striped shirt and jeans. She took one look at me, at my teeny skirt and my sleeveless shirt and my gaggle of tipsy friends, and broke into a smile, then a laugh.
“My, that outfit is something, Jacob!” She beamed at the friends surrounding me, supporting me just as I was. “I can’t say it’s my favorite look of yours, but you look adorable!”
The night went by in a blur, partially because I was tipsy, but mostly because I was in heaven. My friends and I took the club by storm. We pulled our moms up to dance on the bar. I rode the electric bull in a miniskirt. My mom and I even danced in the cage perched two stories overhead. We tore. the. place. up.
And there was no negative commentary on my gender from anyone. Everyone was chill. Everyone was fine. It wasn’t just respectful, it was affirmational. There was much to celebrate, and my gender got swept up in the revelry, as much a part of what we were celebrating as anything else.
At around ten thirty or eleven, the moms were tired and decided it was time to leave their children to properly begin our final evening of debauchery.
That’s when it happened. In the eleventh hour, I spotted Bruce Springsteen in the flesh. His daughter, Jessica, was in my graduating class, and though we never really hung out, I spent four years praying that I could be at the right place at the right time when Bruce happened to be around. And after four years of waiting, on the final night of my life as a student, The Boss himself passed me on the stairs at Shooters, and I was just sober enough to remember it. We made eye contact for approximately half a second, and then it was over.
Which begs the question: How much are you allowed to crush on your classmate’s dad? Like, at what point, if any, is that acceptable? Because damn, Bruce ages well. If you’re reading this, I’m sorry, Jessica, but it has to be said: Your dad is still fine. I’ll have what he’s having.
I spent the rest of the evening celebrating four years of identity development and work well done in the only fashion truly befitting a revered institution such as Duke: by accidentally flashing everybody my underwear. The more drinks I had, the less I seemed to notice the exact geometry of my legs and their intersection with my skirt. I danced on the bar: probably flashing everybody. I danced in the cage: probably flashing everybody. I danced on the giant sculpture of a rearing white horse: definitely flashing everybody. I have photographic proof of that one, a picture of me proudly standing on the horse’s rump, holding on to its mane, perching the leg closest to the camera at an upward angle so you can perfectly see my dark blue briefs.
It was one of my prouder moments. I’d like to think that flashing people my Hanes was just my drunken way of saying, “I’ll miss some, but not all, of you. Here’s to a (sorta) great(ish) four years!”
We ended the evening in a giant circle of seniors, arms draped over one another as we sobbed and drunkenly sang “Wagon Wheel,” the infamous song originally written by Bob Dylan and fleshed out/popularized by Old Crow Medicine Show. The Southern version of “Closing Time,” it was the Duke student body’s official party-ending music.
Only in this case, it wasn’t just ending the party. It was ending everything.
And it was only then, in a circle of drunken crying, that I realized what I’d missed. While I was excited to leave Duke and get the fuck out of North Carolina, there was something here worth mourning, a glittery baby in all the bathwater I was about to throw out.
As much as I had loathed the place, I’d earned my right to exist there. I’d earned my right to walk around campus in any outfit I could imagine, free from harassment, free from aggression, free from any questions about my gender at all. I could walk into any room on campus and simply be. My existence, my identity, and my self-expression were all a fact of life at Duke.
After that drunken circle of seniors was broken, all that security would be gone. I’d have to do it all over again. This time
, in the real world.
Going forth into adulthood, I couldn’t help but remember how I felt before my high-heeled run across the Brooklyn Bridge. The truth is, when I set out to do the run, I had no idea if I could actually pull it off. There was no road map. There were no best practices. I just had to set out, put one foot in front of the other, and, in spite of all the odds against me, have faith that I’d make it to the other side unharmed. I had to look the raw, cruel numbers about high heels, physics, and ankle injuries in the eye and say fuck ’em. I had to take a risk, to bet big in full knowledge that the deck was stacked against me.
Being gender nonconforming as a college student felt easy enough. People expect you to play with gender and sexuality while you’re in school, to experiment a little. But the unsaid expectation is that, after you graduate, those experiments will come to an end. It’s okay to try hooking up with girls in college, Tina, just so long as you settle down with a good man in the end.
But I’d discovered something about myself that was irreversible. I couldn’t “grow out of this phase” when I graduated, because my gender wasn’t a phase. There was no tidying up this mess. In a shower of glitter, confetti, and sequins, my identity had exploded everywhere, and no vacuum or broom in the world could clean it back up. It was out in the open; ubiquitous, uncontainable, coating everything.
There was no manual for how to be gender nonconforming in the real world, away from my friends, outside of the Ivy League(ish) campus bubble. There was no guidebook on how to be gender nonconforming as an adult. No Idiot’s Guide to Coping with the Fact That Your Gender Is Fucking Ridiculous. Like running across a bridge in high heels, applying lipstick for the first time, or dressing like Jackie Kennedy, it was uncharted territory for me. All I could do was throw caution to the wind, publicly commit to my gender, and pray for the best.
At the time, the doubts felt inescapable: Was my identity even possible? Could I exist after graduation? Could I find happiness? Could I still be me?
Standing on the beer-covered floor, arm in arm with a hundred of my sweaty classmates, I decided I could go one more night without asking the big questions, could go one more moment without the existential terror setting in.
Instead, I let the song take me away. We all did. We belted in a drunken stupor, nostalgic tears streaking down our cheeks. Arm in arm, we swayed; rocking, cradling one another.
All sweaty bangs, sniffly nose, and smeared lipstick, I braced myself to weather the impending doom of adulthood, to face a glamorously uncertain future, to take on the miraculous, life-changing bullshit to come.
Chapter 9
Dear Mom and Dad
DAD,
I want to start with you. The unfortunate thing about memoir is that you have to tell the truth and you have to talk about the messy stuff and the parts when people you love were not always their best. The whole premise of this book is that I’m trying to recount what actually happened; I’m not sugarcoating anything or shaving down the rough edges or paving over the bogs. And what results is a complicated picture, a portrait of real, writhing, vulnerable, open people. People who are not perfect, who don’t always know how to handle everything that’s being thrown at them. What results is a book that you might feel set you up as a villain, an antagonist.
But my intention was only to show that things were complicated. Too often, in the quest to make our identities and lives easily digestible, understandable, and squeaky clean, queer and trans folks sidestep telling the complicated stories. Our parents are reduced to one of two tropes: the acceptor or the rejecter. We either tell the story where our parents immediately stepped up to affirm our identities, or we tell the story where we overcame our parents even though they rejected us.
The story we don’t tell is the story that’s more often true: the story where we go back and forth between those two poles for years, oscillating between acceptance and rejection in a pendulum dance.
So I have to tell the stories of when we didn’t agree, Dad, because I need other parents out there to know that this is not black-and-white. That things like acceptance and love and coping and rejection and complication are all part of this process. If I pretend you’ve always been a perfect dad, if I erase the parts where you were a little bit of a jerk (or the parts when I was a little bit of a jerk), I would be doing a disservice to other dads out there who are struggling to get through their own ideas of masculinity in order to love their gender nonconforming kids.
The reality is that you were not raised to understand a child like me. You were not brought up in a world where someone like me was deemed possible. And yet, after you married Mom and had kids, you found yourself contending with the impossibility of my gender. You fought it for a spell. There were moments when you made things harder for me than they had to be. But you ultimately broke through to a world in which I am very much possible, if still sometimes insufferable, in your mind.
For all the other dads out there who have a kid like me, you are the hero of this story. Sure, you’ve never sat me down and said verbatim, “Dearest child of mine, I affirm your gender and love you for it, and I am proud that you are changing the world through your feminist activism and lipstick.” But you don’t have to say that, because talking isn’t how you generally show love.
You show love through actions, not through words. And the way you’ve changed, the way you’ve figured out how to love me even when I come home from church in a red dress, lipstick, and chunky-heeled boots, is no small feat. Your transformation of love is nothing short of miraculous.
I’ve written a lot about the moments when we disagreed, but there are other stories—stories that are less “relevant,” less “on topic”—that haven’t made the cut.
Like when my back spasmed for the first time when I was alone in a hotel room in Dallas for a speaking engagement and I was terrified. One moment I could move, and the next moment, I couldn’t. Scared and crying, I called you first. You helped me push through the pain and get up out of bed. You talked to me for thirty minutes as I tried to stretch, to do small movements, to walk up and down the hallway outside my door a few times. You told me exactly how much ibuprofen to take and in what order to stretch, take a hot shower, and lay back down.
Like the way that every day, until I was at least thirteen or fourteen, no matter how tired you were, you gave me a back scratch before bed. And we’d talk about my day for a few minutes and I would be almost asleep when you’d say, “Jacob, I’m proud of you,” and I’d say, “Why?” and you’d say, “I don’t have to have a reason,” and I’d drift off.
Or how, two years after I first came out as gay, we went on a walk through the neighborhood and you told me you were sorry that you’d said all those hurtful things, and I told you that it was okay and that I loved you.
Like the fact that on my most recent visit home, when Mom was slammed at work and I was busy writing my face off, you cooked dinner for us basically every night. And when I started eating vegetarian, you not only learned how to properly cook tofu, you started eating it yourself.
Like the fact that right now, as I’m at our kitchen table writing this, you came downstairs to say hello. I’m sitting here, wearing my grandmother’s old earrings and blowing my nose a bunch because I’m getting over a cold, and you’re sitting across the table from me sipping your black tea.
I love you. And while we still may have a few fights about my gender left in us—perhaps what I wear to my wedding? If that ever happens—I’m happy almost all of them are in the past.
I’m proud of you, Dad.
I don’t have to have a reason.
MOM,
Plain and simple: I couldn’t have gotten any luckier than you.
It almost feels silly to shower you with any more accolades, because everyone who follows me online already knows that you’re an ally icon. In college, you were almost as much of a celebrity on campus as I was, known far and wide for your bri
lliant acceptance of your trans-fabulous kid. My favorite picture of us will always be from North Carolina Pride in 2013, when we rode on the Duke float together. You perched on the front of the float, waving a rainbow flag while I stood on top in Sunny’s old Duke-blue prom dress, proudly wielding a trident and holding my hand-painted sign: “Not GAY as in HAPPY, but QUEER as in FUCK YOU!”
I love that you’ve always had a gender-bending edge yourself, though there are times when it makes me question whether we are, in fact, related. When I think about our divergent fashion sense, I can only scratch my chin. You prefer understated earrings for Christmas; I haven’t worn an understated earring in my entire life. You look dapper in your blazers; I look like Barbara Bush in mine. Just the other day, you said you wished you could wear your hiking boots every day; I do not fully understand this desire.
Despite our sartorial differences, we make a great team. Remember when I got my first job in Los Angeles but it was super-last-minute and we had to drive across the country in three and a half days? The first day of our trip, we drove 1,200 miles straight from Raleigh, North Carolina, to Oklahoma City because we are both road warriors who would probably do well in a lesbian biker gang. We made such good time that we were able to add a visit to the Grand Canyon. When we arrived at the South Rim, it was snowing and we stared out in silence for a whole minute before turning to each other, tears brimming in our eyes.
I know that reading this book is hard for you. You’ve told me over and over again that you wish things could’ve been better. As much as I tell you not to, I know you beat yourself up about my childhood. You wish you could’ve done more, could’ve done things differently, could’ve done something to make it easier for me. It’s hard enough for me to look at the past and acknowledge that things weren’t perfect. I can’t fully understand how hard it must be for you.
