I’m Here, I’m Queer, but I’m Still Not Used To It!
When will my reflection show who I am inside?
Okay, show of hands! Raise your hand if everybody at school knew you were queer before you did. Ah, okay, I see some hands… mine’s up too.
During summers, I remember spending more time in the locker room than in the pool at our local park, fascinated by all the naked men. I was probably around seven years old when I first noticed, and I don’t think I necessarily felt anything sexual. I just kind of really liked what I saw, and wanted to keep looking at it. And looking at it. And not wanting to look away.
Is that wrong?
I hear murmuring amongst the trumple-christians (you know, those horrid, evil little demons that try to steal your children at the border). I guess I’m sick,
warped, disgusting and deviant for admiring naked men. Tough shit. Guess what? I STILL love looking at naked men, and STILL enjoy ogling a pretty cock. And I am not ashamed of it. God made it fascinatingly attractive for a reason. So sue me.
In the following years, in junior and senior high, I did everything imaginable to ignore the naked guys around me in the showers and locker rooms. They were already calling me a fag, so I didn’t want to give them anymore ammunition, even though it mattered not one bit.
Fast forward to today. I spent the last five years plus in a relationship with a wonderful guy, and lived with him for two of those years. On the surface, most people would have wondered what we saw in each other. They say opposites attract, and in this case, we surely did. He was a few years older, very down to earth, a high school dropout who loved to fish and work with his hands. I worked in education with an advanced degree, eat bacon and fried chicken with a knife and fork because I don’t like the feeling of grease on my fingers, and my idea of “hunt’n ’n’ fish’n” is checking out the butcher case at the grocery store.
Once when we met my partner’s cousin and his wife, she told my boyfriend he “hides it” better than I do. That’s partly because I wasn’t trying to hide it, which is exactly what I said. And this happened when she had come into a trailer in which we were replacing the subflooring, a dirty, miserable job. I wasn’t exactly flitting around in a tutu sprinkling handfuls of glitter!
Although I am totally “out,” I continue to act conservatively and modestly in public. That’s code for I always try to butch it up when I’m out and about. I don’t think anyone would ever mistake me for an uber-macho man, but I learned very early in life to blend in, to not appear “different” from the other boys and men. In junior high and high school, that never seemed to matter. The bullies somehow could tell, no matter how I tried to speak or act. I learned to, in the cruel words of my ex-wife, “man up.”
God, how I hated when she said that. Eight years after our divorce, just typing those two words still puts a knot in my stomach. It’s hard to deprogram after 50 years in a closet. But I have internalized that self-preserving instinct so much so that it is second nature. There are times I want to let my guard down, just a bit, but the words and actions of tormentors past continue to haunt my soul.
Sometimes, a bit of femininity inside me wants to come out, and while it scares me, it also fascinates.
Recently, I was with my youngest daughter at Walt Disney World’s EPCOT theme park. At the end of the evening, during a truly amazing multimedia and fireworks presentation featuring Disney characters and music, the song
“Reflection,” began to play. It’s from the Disney movie, “Mulan,” about a young girl living in China who posed as a young man to substitute for her disabled father after he was called to serve in the war against the invading Huns.
And those lyrics! “When will my reflection show/who I am inside?” hit me like a ton of bricks. I got all verklempt. And I wondered if I’ll ever really be able to figure myself out.
I wonder if I’ll ever be able to just be me, whoever that is.
This story is a response to the Prism & Pen writing prompt Will the Real (Queer) You Please Stand Up?
