GIRLS WILL BE BOYS, Redux
Thirty years ago an editor at Allure Magazine asked me to write a piece for them and I said sure since I was always broke and knew how well they paid. She named the topic: Gender Confusion, added a healthy sum, and said, “Can you write about this subject without saying you’re a lesbian?”
I burst out laughing. “Do I seem confused?”
“I know, I know,” (she was gay too) “but our advertisers….”
Allure posed as a magazine for thinking women the way Esquire posed as a magazine for men. Allure treated fashion and beauty as serious subjects and sometimes serious writers were even invited to address complex topics. Carefully, of course. But the year was 1993, so the word lesbian appearing in this glossy magazine was out. (Yes, out is an amusing word here.)
This editor, who will remain nameless, said, “I’m trying to get something into the magazine about people like us. Can you do it?”
“Of course,” I said. “I named my girl dog Spike, I have a powder blue tuxedo, and I don’t even wear makeup. Also, I no longer own a dress or a skirt.”
“Perfect,” she said. “I was sure you would figure this out.” We shared a consoling laugh.
The piece I wrote was called “Girls Will Be Boys” and Allure paid me generously, but writing it made me wonder if I had ever wanted to be a boy. I do still covet the automatic privileges and respect that come with maleness.
I learned early that girls were lesser, girls were sissies, girls were my cousin Millie, who liked dolls, smiled too much, and thought crying was a defense. When the boy next door and I tied her to a post in her backyard and threatened her with a small grass snake, she not only cried, she wet her pants. I was sorry we had gone this far, but I learned an important lesson: if I had to choose between being a victim or a victimizer, I would choose the latter. I wanted to have power. That winter I traded the bride doll that appeared under our Xmas tree to a boy down the street for his six-shooter. This transaction enhanced my reputation but ruined his.
I was what was then called a tomboy, and my family thought being a tomboy was just great. “No daughter of mine is going to lose a game of marbles,” my father once said, and he taught me so well that the boy next door - I adored him as well as envied him - would no longer play with me. My mother liked to joke that hundreds of my marbles were now hidden in his attic.
I’m lucky that my family considered being a tomboy harmless. Harmless, at least, outside of school. For grammar school my mother said I had to wear skirts and dresses, which I found bewildering and weirdly embarrassing. Sometimes she even curled my very straight hair. At school I was excluded from sports on the playground - unless you happen to think hopscotch is a sport - and, although I was disappointed, I hadn’t yet experienced shame.
Shame arrived in the fourth grade, in a little school play, when, being the tallest girl, I was chosen to impersonate a teacher who would be sitting in a chair on stage watching her students perform. (Apparently this play-within-a-play trick is an old one). I wore a teacher’s disguise, but I don’t know where my mother found that tight straight skirt. No one had instructed me to cross my legs. In the small audience, comprised mostly of parents, my mother kept mouthing something, and I leaned forward, opening my legs wider, mouthing back what? Finally a real teacher came onto the stage and whispered into my ear that I must cross my legs. Until that moment, I hadn’t known that what was between my legs was shame.
This became a funny story in my family’s lore because joking was one of the ways we dealt with pain.
A few weeks after the Allure piece was published, I met a Ms. Magazine editor at a party who said, “It was so wonderful to open a magazine like Allure and read your essay about being butch!”
“I’m butch?” Actually I swallowed this response and mumbled something else, because I had decided years ago that I would no longer play this gender game. I intended to be my authentic self, and, as far as I was concerned, there were three human categories: women, men, and me.
Being gay – such an inappropriate word, my mother had remarked – and being a lesbian - a word that actually used to require capitalization - has, I admit, sometimes been painful and confusing. Just as navigating how to be a woman has been painful and confusing.
But it’s 2024 now, so, hopefully, every thinking person has grasped that gender is, to use the current lingo, “socially constructed.” (In Allure I was prescient enough to describe it as “socially defined.”) Gender signals range from how we dress to what we are interested in to whether and how we use make up and to our body language, etc. Gender is what we present to the world.
I’m 77, so mostly what I present is old, although I prefer my view that I’m a gracefully aging lesbian. But back when I was 34, back before I had discovered the world of sobriety, before a magazine like Allure would ever have contacted me, I was writing for the Village Voice, and, in this capacity, I returned to my hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, to cover a political event. I stayed with my mother in her condominium, and, to please her, I decided to play the gender game. I went downtown and purchased a skirt and some pantyhose.
“You’re doing this for me?” My mother looked surprised and touched. She too was planning to attend this Republican cheering match, and I understood that having a daughter who dressed like a wartime field correspondent might be hard.
“I’m trying, Mom. I even shaved my legs.”
I had intended to interview the power honchos at a reception being held after the political speeches and, naively, I assumed my notebook and Village Voice press pass, pinned boldly to one of my mother’s silk blouses, would give me authority. It did not. I’m just lucky that one of those guys didn’t ask me to go refresh his drink.
“I can’t do this,” I said to my mother, who noticed what was happening. She even looked sympathetic. “I’m going back to your condo. I’ve got to get my own clothes.” She lived only a mile away, so I was quick, and when I returned in my army jacket and jeans and leather boots, the Important People were now willing to talk to me, although nothing they said was interesting enough to make it into the piece I finally wrote, which centered on the 1980 Democratic Convention and began, “Who are these people, and why are they acting like this?”
For many folks, the idea that gender is not the same as sexual identity is just too difficult to grasp. For them it’s all ‘you’re acting like a boy,’ or ‘you’re acting like a girl,’ and what follows is the view that something must be wrong with us. With me.
In this writing I’m not going near the trans debate (too afraid of being cancelled), but I will say I’m glad the medicalization of gender did not happen during the years I was coming out, because coming out sometimes seemed both too awful and too wonderful to endure. If becoming chemically male had been a viable option back then, maybe I would have chosen it. Maybe. I hope not, because now I would be a short man with small hands and hips a little too wide to look convincingly male. Anyway, I love being a normal lesbian, and I hope you know that’s a funny line.
I love having you and Larry in my Vieques life! Just got back to Ct. glad you’re liking the pieces.
Thank you for saying what you have and haven't.