Addressing My Real Queer Self
In the thrift business, a lot of resale items come through and must be sorted. For about five months, I worked in the back of a thrift shop where the processing of donated products took place. This was, in dramaturgical theory, the back stage of the workplace. Here, workers could be fully themselves, unhinged, catty, and perverted. As an effeminate gay male who had recently moved out of the Twin Cities due to rapid political transitions, I was in the midst of questioning my own gender identity.
In the midst of testing my own comfort with cross dressing, I decided to move back to a rural town to live with my mother. I intended to save money and move to Germany before America collapsed entirely. I was overly optimistic that rural Minnesotans might be a different type of Trump supporter. The libertarian type who just didn’t like the government treading on them. The type who were tolerant.
The real queer me? Well, I quit my job again because I felt uncomfortable as an effeminate, cross-dressing gay male. Furthermore, I quickly realized I became a token when I was designated the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) captain because I was visibly queer. The leadership was noticeably uncomfortable talking about such matters and then asked me if I wanted to take on the role. I foolishly said yes, gave a presentation, and realized I had just became the gay token of what some perceived as woke bullshiterry, victimhood, and other snow-flakery.
Over time I quickly accumulated clues that liberal snowflakes like myself were not going to be welcome here. While my manager was meaning well, he didn’t realize he was placing work on someone because he was overworked himself and didn’t have a lot of time to really reflect on what DEI would look like.
This mess should have been obvious early on. When there was a video to watch on harassment in the workplace, the conversations my co-workers had with managers went something like this:
“Watch out, Jackson might be offended and quit!”
After watching the video, another worker said, “What a bunch of woke bullshit.”
“Watch your language! That might be harassment!” someone responded.
“This is some stupid bullshit. What a waste of time.”
Hearing these conversations made my heart start pounding. I could barely focus on pricing dresses, pants, and other donated clothing. What if someone does harass me because of my sexual orientation? Who do I go to for support? With managers chiming in on the conversation too, I felt unsupported.
Furthermore, the women in my workplace made it clear that Simone de Beauvoir was right. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir claimed that American women hate their own femininity. I hate my own feminine desires too, but at least I am open to changing this view of myself. In my rural town, this was still very true even though this book had been published in 1949.
How did these women make this clear? When one woman wore makeup, she was singled out by another woman, and made fun of rather bluntly. “Why is Tina wearing makeup, did you see her, she must have a hot date.” Some gossip followed.
In another instance, a woman bragged about how much beer she drank over the weekend, saying she had outpaced her husband’s friends. In false conversation about wine, I fessed up to my feminine desires, “This job makes me crave wine, that’s for sure.”
“Oh,” they snickered, “A wine drinker you are.” How the world decided drinking wine made one effeminate, I will never understand.
When faced with a bag full of heels, the women would say, “Who the hell would want to wear those?” Anytime a particularly dashing pair of heels came through they would wrinkle their noses and share it with someone nearby. Meanwhile I was dreaming, I wonder how my ass would look if I wore those? Not to be funny, but to be desirable to a charming man I have yet to meet.
One woman was particularly interesting. When I first started she was very nice to me, and particularly drawn in. She joked about a set of rainbow colored active wear saying, “Look, it makes a rainbow!”
She was trying to get me to come out so I said, “Well, there must be a reason they put me here processing soft-line donations.”
“And they didn’t even know,” she said sarcastically with a demonic twinkle in her eye. In the break room she started telling me about how she was working with the boss to get another co-worker fired. She was real friendly about it and tried to get me to gossip with her. She wanted me to put another co-worker down. She tried again, on another day, talking negatively about one of the managers. When she realized I didn’t have any interest in gossiping with her about other co-workers, I became the target of her gossip.
Simply put, I’m nobodies gay best friend. I don’t come to work to support someone’s toxic need to put others below them. When the gossiping goose needs someone to gossip with and the goose don’t talk, the goose becomes the gossiped. Oh dear be goosed.
For two weeks, I ignored her attempts to sabotage me, until I finally blew up in an email to my manager. Human resources was going to get involved, and to resolve the issue, I was designated the captain of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Yikes! At first I was excited before quickly putting together the pieces of the puzzle. Management was too busy to take on the task and also uncomfortable talking about something which doesn’t involve being a straight, white, neurotypical, able bodied male. To do meaningful diversity, equity, and inclusion work, employees need paid retreats like the ones I had the opportunity to take at university. Having a mysterious other, the gay male or whoever, take on the work only serves to further isolate and alienate that individual from their peers.
After doing a short interactive presentation on the difficulties disabled people face, my manager said to me, “It must suck being deaf, I don’t know what that’s like.”
Having a deaf person on our team, I didn’t know how to respond. But it isn’t about life being tough and how we as hearing people must have it easy. It is about how we can support someone in the workplace who is hearing impaired. In fact, this individual was rather successful at communicating a lot through forceful utterances and direct body language. Most the time other co-workers could, by the context, figure out what she needed or wanted because she communicated to people effectively. While I was paid extra for the time I put into an interactive presentation on how we could support people with various disabilities, it was clear I was selected because I was queer. The topic of diversity, equity, and inclusion had been coming up awkwardly enough before.
Lastly, my company had decided to update our shirts to include pronouns next to our names. Overhearing a conversation on identity which went like, “I can identify as anything I want,” followed by, “I can identify as a stinky toilet,” was a strong indication that gender non-conformity was not going to be welcome here. I quickly burned out as I continually overheard ridiculous comments.
The worst was directed toward me as a clever joke, “Did you hear about that! John’s big bonus? He gets a big bonus if he makes the store a lot of money. But I saw it, it’s really not that big.”
So, I did a no call, no show. I looked around my room and I saw the corset on the title page of a book, I saw Nijinsky’s effeminate ballet costume on another book, I saw the gender non-conforming sticker of a Chinese ballerina I put on one of the pricing guns, I saw the pronoun cups I bought on discount from Target, and I remembered the time I wore tight floral pants to the Minnesota State Fair just to see how the public would respond. I realize that coming out as gay is one thing and see it is true that coming out as an effeminate gay man, at the age of thirty will be an entirely different matter. Maybe I am non-binary. I grow more comfortable with this term as time goes on.
To cope, I think I’m going to shop for black eyeliner, black nail polish, and black lipstick. I also want a really effeminate black sweater paired with some eccentric black leggings. I want skeleton ear-rings but I haven’t pierced my ears yet. I hate my beard, so I shaved it off. I don’t like my body hair, so I think I’ll take a bath, have a glass of wine, or a whole bottle, and become that dark and hyper-femme emo-sissy I never got to be in high school. I want black chastity and a giant black dildo. I want to flame, ride, and embrace what I somehow reject to maintain a toxic masculine persona of a lone wolf academic, who doesn’t let anyone in.
The names in this piece are merely place holders and do not represent anyone real. I was also careful to make sure the real workplace was not given away.
This story is a response to the Prism & Pen writing prompt Will the Real (Queer) You Please Stand Up?
