High Cholesterol

Overheard on my block tonight: "You act like a boy so I'm going to fight you like a boy."


Right now I am looking at this picture where I'm riding piggyback on a new friend. You can't see it in the picture but we are in front of maybe a hundred cheering queer people who are out in the park for a day of games, dress-up and socializing. We are on our way to collect a tiny prize for our field day team as part of a very promising evolutionary current in the local community ecosystem. Suddenly I'm thinking back to a certain day in high school. After school I was walking to my car and somebody threw a rock that hit me on the left hip and bounced off. It was about the size of a baseball, probably a chunk of broken concrete and gravel. That shit was everywhere where I grew up, paving a new parking lot or strip mall that would go unoccupied. Somebody threw a rock at my crotch. I never saw who threw it but I wonder where are they now? Sometimes I still think about all the people who convinced me to feel so alone and subhuman that I wanted to kill myself when I was little more than a kid. Now I have my share of problems but my life turned out all right. How did the conformity you so passionately enforced work out for you? I imagine your cholesterol is sky high and your wife left you and your house was foreclosed and you lost all your hair. I wonder if they do anything differently now in my old high school, if the teachers and children there have heard about Lawrence King or Sakia Gunn. I think about how fortunate I was to suffer only the most minor of forms of violence, the rocks, spit and insults. It would be great to one day feel more compassion for people in my past, but for the moment I just know I need to release all this rage I tried to swallow for so long.

On Being Both Queer and Human at the Same Time

Heterosupremacism blocks queers from being a part of the culture’s stories about what is normal, human, decent or good. Our likenesses, our histories, our kinship networks, are all missing from what is considered normal. Now people may object, “Oh what is normal anyway?” It’s nice when folks want to play at defying norms, but Normal is serious business. Normal that gets discussed is one thing, but Normal that gets enforced with silence and absence is another. This Normal is something queers have to contend with in our every interaction. In part it determines whether we will or will not be relatable. If you can’t talk to me about guy stuff and I’m not one of the girls, can you talk to me at all? This question sounds kind of funny but has been part of my real experience, particularly in professional settings. I have had to seriously consider my relate-ability as an organizer and a leader in straight education sector workplaces. I have discussed it with bosses and mentors, and I am grateful that more recently I have had the chance to experience it out in the open, instead of always just missing connections and feeling like an outsider for no clear reason.

Heterosupremacism is perpetuated by actively excluding that which is queer from our consciousness. What we think about, what occurs to us off the top of our heads is not the product of chance, but rather the result of a steady stream of stories presented to us over and over again. These stories make up our culture and are ingrained in our consciousness. The stories will not get questioned or rewritten without an active effort on the part of straight people to stop and look at what they have been trained to ignore, to seek to understand that which they have been trained is incomprehensible, and to make friends with those they have been trained to see as exceptional, abnormal, immoral, other. Heterosupremacism is the system that protects straight people from feeling responsible. Power acts to reproduce itself, and heterosupremacism is a self-serving feedback loop: Here is what is normal, so ignore this, that and definitely the other thing. Here is what is Normal, here it is again, and again. Something queer just showed up? That’s an exception and you can safely disregard it. Heterosupremacism keeps the queer as exceptional and either irrelevant or evil or both.

It is somewhat less common today for people to publicly spell out their homophobia but they still do sometimes like NY gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino saying "And I don't want them [children] to be brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid or successful option. It isn't." This is an open statement of heterosupremacism in that it literally negates the validity of our existence. Paladino also said "I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family." He is speaking directly to his perceived moral superiority. The statement is literally asserting the fact of being better, he uses the slightly milder words “better off” and “much more successful.”

When I hear stuff like this I have several simultaneous reactions. I am hurt and angered. And I am also relieved. There is some part of me that is relieved when I hear some fucked up homophobia because I feel like I’m picking up on it all the time subliminally but it is never stated outright. Hearing it outright makes me feel relieved that I am not crazy. So when I see the full face of hatred, I am hurt but I also have a sick sense of relief that all the homophobia I have been sensing beneath the surface is finally out in the open.

Josh Vlasto from the opponent Cuomo campaign said Paladino's comments demonstrate “a stunning homophobia and a glaring disregard for basic equality." Democrats pointing at somebody like Carl Paladino and calling him homophobic are not actually condemning him, they are merely naming that he is homophobic. But wait, they didn’t actually do that. They said his remarks demonstrated homophobia. That is an even weaker statement than I initially thought. They weren’t even courageous enough to attach homophobia to the person, but rather more safely to his remarks.

Democrats act as though calling out Paladino’s homophobia makes them our allies, but it doesn’t. This incident brought to my mind the reality that democrats naming homophobia still may not be clear on the meaning of that word. It came across to me as though they were calling him a name, calling him Bad, but not making any statement of their own against homophobia, not actually making any positive action to ally themselves with queers. What a great deal-- they got to state their liberal version of moral superiority without taking any actual action against homophobia.

When Tracy Morgan expressed some unfortunately standard homophobic ideas in his stand-up comedy routine, responses were similar in that they focused on the words and not the intention. The words were condemned but not the heterosupremacism. This is a subtle but important difference. Morgan said, “I want to apologize to my fans and the gay & lesbian community for my choice of words at my recent stand-up act in Nashville.” I am not so concerned about his words, but more the thought and character of somebody whose words included the idea that being gay is something you learn from the media, and that he would kill his own son if he turned out gay, lesbians aren’t real, and kids who are bullied should stop complaining and stand up for themselves. Tina Fea, producer of the TV show he is on, said “I'm glad to hear that Tracy apologized for his comments.” Again emphasizing the comments as though this were a matter of poor word choice. NBC made reference to “homophobic remarks.” All the discussion is focused on the words because of fear of taking up their meaning. Heterosupremacism wins when straight people agree on what can and cannot be said, without changing any underlying beliefs, attitudes or assumptions.

Of course what Morgan actually said is very telling. Like with Paladino, it is a case of heterosupremacism being spoken out loud. When Morgan denied that lesbians are real, it reminded me of a straight colleague who explained away middle school girls coming out by making reference to the immaturity of boys their age. People honestly believe that lesbians aren’t real, and I had to have a conversation with my colleague about how lesbianism is not about boys at all, and is really real all on its own. Paladino said queerness was brainwashing, and Morgan blamed the media. When our realness and very existence is questioned, the normality of heterosupremacism is maintained at our expense. When Morgan said he would stab his own son if he turned out gay, I thought about a middle school boy who came out to one of the principals I used to work with. The kid’s father came in for a meeting and told the principal that no son of his was going to be gay because, “What would my boys think if they found out?” People hate the idea of having a queer kid, feel implicated and humiliated by it. This is not an accident of word choice.

The media has taken an interest in representing bullying as the source of queer kid’s suicides. We all know, if we pause to think, that many people are bullied and do not kill themselves. Many people who experience bullying are able to believe the bullies are wrong about them, or are able to focus on other more pleasant aspects of their lives, or are able to muster the courage to stand against the bullies. The root of “courage” is “cour” or heart. Encourage means to give heart to others. Bullying and the absence of encouragement are a dangerous combination, but even this analysis is just scratching the surface. In my personal experience, the masculinity I was being bullied for also made my parents uncomfortable around me and was the very same thing that adults and strangers regularly shamed and shunned me for. The message was so consistent that I mostly wound up believing the bullies were right about me. A much more recent example is a kid I heard about in one of the elementary schools I used to work with, whose teacher made fun of him for being too feminine. The kid himself told the principal it was like some of the bricks had been falling on him but suddenly all the bricks were falling on him.

Courage has to come from somewhere, and children have access to far fewer heart resources than adults. The fact that there are so few sources of encouragement for very young queers is something the media has missed in their interest in bullies. And of course they missed it, because they are implicated. The media has also failed to look at parents, teachers, witnesses, etc. The media has failed to look at its own portrayal of queers as wealthy, white and heteronormative. They continuously fail to actually “investigate” the fact that we are all complicit in queer children’s suicides. If the audience of the rather popular show South Park can watch an episode where queer kids in a christian conversion camp are killing themselves left and right, surely it doesn’t take crack investigative journalism to see the causal connection between the pressures of societal homophobia and suicide. The reason they stop at the surface isn’t because they lack the ability to see further. We do not want to see any further because investigation will lead to feeling responsible for the despicable immorality of heterosupremacism. It might destroy our self-image as a moral society. Our shared responsibility is exactly what we are unwilling to face.

The heterosupremacist mainstream media minimally represent us by showing those of us who are relatively less threatening to the status quo, and we’re supposed to be grateful for this inclusion. Acknowledging all the identities and relationships that are outside heterosupremacism would shed light on the fact that there isn’t anything morally superior about straight people or their relationships, nor are they any more natural. The ideal of heterosexuality and monogamous pairing is maintained by the systematic exclusion of all other varieties of sexual behaviors and intimate relationships. The assertion of our rights and the assertion of our existence overlap in this case. Asserting that people who are very much like heterosexuals deserve rights is very different from asserting that people who are very different from heterosexuals exist, are real, and also have rights.

If queers were represented more accurately in the media, or in entertainment, or sports, or politics, we might have an in-road into participating in the culture as ourselves. We would benefit from this participation by being seen and acknowledged for our differences, not forced through the filter of our similarities. Let’s give straight people enough credit to know they can understand our differences rather than dismiss them. I would love to see this conversation approached with curiosity. We’re not all the same deep down. But it’s going to be OK anyway. I’m proud of our differences and would like sometimes to see them acknowledged outside my immediate subculture. If our participation as ourselves in the larger culture is impossible, if our representation is impossible, then we do not get seen or acknowledged. We are not allowed to be real. And where you see the word “real,” read “human.” I want everyone and especially queer children to see that queer life is possible and it is real and it is a pleasure.

Judith Butler wrote something about this from the lens of how our identities are socially mediated. In Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy, she says:

…when we struggle for rights, we are not simply struggling for rights to attach to my person, but we are struggling to be conceived as persons. And there is a difference between the former and the latter. If we are struggling for rights that attach, or should attach, to my personhood, then we assume that personhood as already constituted. But if we are struggling not only to be conceived as persons, but to create a social transformation of the very meaning of personhood, then the assertion of rights becomes a way of intervening into the social and political process by which the human is articulated.

The challenge is not how to integrate queer people into the existing straight society, the challenge is the dissolution of straight society and heterosupremacist ideas of what qualifies as human.  When we are actually included, by definition, it will no longer be a straight society.  Attempts to integrate us without making anything other than linguistic changes to current laws, without changing anything other than spousal pronouns, will not only fail the vast majority of queers but will also do a disservice to all straight people in the continued limitation of their own options and world view, their own gender expression and relationships with each other. A heterosupremacist society cannot integrate us and remain heterosupremacist. It can’t simply adjust its choice of words and smooth things over. The culture cannot both have us in it and remain unchanged. 

School, Part 3

In middle school, I was very conflicted between wanting to fit in and wanting to be myself.  I just wanted to wear military surplus clothes all the time but I feared the consequences of emphasizing my masculinity.  I was already butch enough that I could not get through a single school day without my gender being commented upon by someone.  I developed a crush on an older girl.  She had short hair, wore camouflage pants to school and still managed to have friends.  I didn’t see how it was possible.

At my mother’s insistence, I attended weekly religious classes at a Lutheran church.  The class was a miserable collection of pre-teens, every last one of us enduring the drudgery because of our parents.  I doubt there was a single kid in that class who actually believed in god.  At the end of a year of old testament education, one of the this boys in the class asked me with sincere curiosity, “So why did your parents give you a girl’s name?”  Sometimes I tried to make light of these situations.  And every time something like this happened, I wondered: Why is it that when somebody gets your gender wrong they are never the ones who look stupid? 

What I learned in middle school were rules and taboos.  There are rules for being a man and there are rules for being a woman.  And then there is this big fat taboo against ambiguity.  I understood that my gender issue was unspeakable because the pronoun accidents and misunderstandings were never addressed directly.   In a 7^th grade math class, a substitute teacher asked me, “Are you in the right seat?  A girl is supposed to be sitting there.” She was not apologetic, she simply moved on.  I was the one in the wrong, even though she had just broadcast to the class that she thought I was a misbehaving boy who had stolen the seat of some good girl.  Laughter ensued, and if I had my way, I would have smote her on the spot.  Instead, I grew out my hair.

These experiences solidified my belief that while I did not belong among regular people, I also did not want to belong among them.  In response to my gender, people proved to be incapable of permitting the slightest deviance from stereotypical gender roles.  Each time they opened their mouths to me, I could see their frustration and inability to understand who or what I was.  It made them angry and impatient.  I did not have these words at the time, but I knew I was failing their expectations and frustrating them.  I also knew there were only two gender options and somehow I was ill suited to both.  On top of that I observed how deviating from gender roles produces disgust in others, real physical revulsion.  It was inconceivable to the adult denizens of my childhood that I could be a butch girl, so instead they looked at me and saw either a boy, or a disgusting girl, or an immature tomboy who needed to grow up already. That was a lot for a kid to deal with, so looking back now I understand how I spent a few years being fairly well shut down and distant from everything.

A friend’s mother literally asked, “Couldn’t she try to be more feminine?” I alternated between sharing their disgust with myself and being filled with rage at the confinement.  Folks proved themselves to be severely limited in their imagination and limited in their ability to see gender rules as just rules.  All I could see were rules, rules I could not keep.  Seeing gender as a set of made-up rules was one of the pivotal understandings in my life thus far because it shone a bright light on all the other norms that are taken for granted in our culture.  And it wasn’t just that others pressured me to obey the rules, it was that no one else seemed to understand that the rules were rules.  I imagine they thought, “This is just the way things are and always have been and always will be.  Girls don’t act/look/think/talk/dress/walk/behave that way.”  Sometimes the messages were direct and sometimes they were subtle.  Yet there was such universal agreement to these rules that usually no one even bothered to write them down.  So it wasn’t just that I was disobedient of gender rules, it was that I didn’t make any sense.  Men are like this, women are like that, anything else does not compute.  Anything else evokes disgust.  Becoming queer was not a matter of declaring my attraction to women, but more a permanent disengagement from following a given gender track, the simplifications, the either/or choices, the rules.  It felt liberating to realize this, but it also felt disconcerting and alienating.  But once that light came on, liberating, disconcerting or come what may, there was no turning back.   And I could not help but see that when the rule keepers weren’t criticizing me, they were busy attempting to control the bodies and sexuality of other girls with a similar set of rules about who is a whore, who is a slut, no abortions allowed, who is too fat, etc.

Later on in high school, we periodically held pep rallies to celebrate our treasured sports teams.  At the last pep rally I attended, this boy spit on me from the bleachers above where I was sitting by myself.  I do not remember if any words passed between us.  I only remember realizing there was spit in my hair, the long hair I had been growing since eighth grade in order to stop being mistaken for a boy, in order to minimize my surface differences from other girls.  When I think about simply walking out of the school building at the start of each subsequent pep rally, I feel these quiet exits capture the essence of my high school experience.

My senior year, I was awarded a scholarship based on my standardized test scores.  The corporate sponsor of the scholarship was the company where my father worked.  There was a dinner to be held at a nice restaurant with the principal of my high school, my parents, and some people from my father’s office.  Ordinarily, my parents barely noticed or commented on my clothes.  My mom had taken me dress shopping a few times because I had to dress up for orchestra concerts.  I hated having to wear a dress and always wore what ever I wanted outside of my time with the viola.  When we were getting ready to leave for this scholarship dinner and I came out in a black blazer I had bought for myself in the men’s department at macy’s.  I thought I looked OK.  My father insisted that I wear a dress and he was so mean and angry about it that I don’t even think I objected.  I very well may have, because we argued all the time back then, but what stands out most in my memory is the clarity of his contempt.  He was disgusted by me and ashamed for his colleagues to see me.  Now I understand that this was his problem and not mine. But at the time I absorbed it and felt disgusted and ashamed of myself too.  I wore the dress.  I barely spoke at dinner.  Instead of refusing the shame, I had made it my own and believed that I deserved it. 

Recently I told this story about my father for the first time, over dinner with a married friend and sometimes mentor.  He was asking me why I do not want to marry my girlfriend and I was attempting to talk about my coming out process with the gender police and the confinements of normalcy.  I described how walking away from traditional family values was a commitment to myself to make the best life I could imagine.  But another detail slipped out in the telling, which I had not previously articulated to myself or anyone else:  Growing up, I never really knew for sure if I was going to make it.  It was interesting to me that this came out spontaneously in the conversation, because I have consciously been working on ways of talking my past and simply telling the personal stories I haven’t told before.  It came out of my mouth as an additional detail, an unsightly little mess that plopped onto the dinner table.  I felt like part of me left the table for a few minutes to observe what would happen next.  I had admitted to uncertainty about the prospects of my living to adulthood. 

One of the reasons for my uncertainty was a lack of options I could live with.  Living a regular life, with a regular relationship and a regular gender was unattainable, repressive and ultimately undesirable.  So I never sought to broaden or revise regular to include me.  I never wanted to redefine normal.  I just wanted more options.  Now I know queers need to live in this world, not in an imaginary perfect world.  People need to live in this world without their bodies and genders and relationships being questioned and scrutinized and criticized and examined constantly.  Or even debated...  It feels like shit to have the substance of your reality subject to debate.  Queers need rights and protections under the laws we have now, not just the laws we imagine in a revolutionized future.  And yet to this day there remains no clearer or more persistent theme in my life than the need for more options.   

Sex/AIDS/Gays

My earliest impressions of sex were directly linked to AIDS.  The first time I heard about AIDS was at the same time it was becoming national news and the same time I was starting to become aware of my own sexuality.  Queerness, AIDS and sexuality all coincided and became intertwined in my consciousness.

It was the early 1980’s, and AIDS was explained to me as a deadly disease that gay men get because they have anal sex.  That was the exact definition.  I was very young and did not know much at all about sex, but I got the clear impression that queer sex was fatal and queer people were doomed.  The time I learned about straight sex and the time I learned about AIDS seem very close together in my memory.  As a kid I remember literally considering that if a man’s cum going in your butt gave you AIDS, how could it possibly be safe to have it in your pussy?   AIDS was found in semen, so I had to learn what that was, and logically it just didn’t compute that semen was bad when it went up gay guy’s asses but OK for women’s pussies...  Kids are rational even when adults are being hysterical, but it would be years before anyone talked about straight people getting AIDS.  My mother explained that a condom was kind of like a sock.  AIDS was attached to a very specific kind of sex.  At the time, it wasn’t even discussed as an infection, but as some mysterious something in the body fluids of gay men that would contaminate others upon contact.  Not expose others, but contaminate.  People literally got AIDS from anal sex.  All gay people have anal sex, therefore all gay people have AIDS.  (Lesbians were treated as mythological and irrelevant anyway.)  Between AIDS and the tainted Tylenol, the world of the 1980’s became contaminated.  Rumors and horror stories were our main source of information.

With Ryan White, the media made it known that you could get AIDS from blood as well as semen.  I remember a teacher talking about how if you saw a car accident at the side of the road it was now a different matter to decide whether or not to help the victims because of AIDS.  Because you might get blood on yourself and get AIDS.  There was no non-threatening information about how it was transmitted, only word of mouth and fear.  My mother kept having regular blood tests because she had received a blood transfusion prior to the hospital screening for HIV. As always when there is little information, stories start up and fear takes over.  This is how you end up with a community holding fundraisers to keep Ryan White out of his own neighborhood school.  There was no accurate information coming from the government, the doctors, the press, or anyone.

Several years later, we knew slightly more, a fact that must be entirely credited to the unrecognized and tireless work of activists in ACT UP and other grassroots groups.  There is one incident in my memory that really captures straight suburban thinking around AIDS and homosexuality in the early 1990’s:  With all the puffed-up authority only evangelical christians can muster, a girl in my high school declared, “All gay people will have AIDS eventually.”  Another born-again student dramatically stood up to her and said, “Maybe this is God’s way of testing our compassion.” Well god knows if you can be compassionate towards some homos you are sure to get into heaven! No wonder I was scared to come out and join the damned and the doomed.  There were no dissenting voices to be found anywhere.

School, Part 2

Suzanne was one of the pre-teen smokers, not one of the popular girls.  She was a year older than me and constantly harassed and insulted me because of my queer boyishness, which was in her eyes just plain grossness.  I remember trying to ignore her, a failed strategy if there ever was one.  Finally came a day when she attacked me physically as well as verbally.  She came at me, not realizing that I kept the school library’s only judo book out for months at a time. When she put all her weight into shoving me, I grabbed her wrists, pulled hard and stepped aside.  She flew into one of the little bushes that lined the sidewalk leading up to the school entrance. 

Suzanne left me alone for a while after that, and then she went on to middle school a year ahead of me.  When I reached middle school, she resumed her usual insults and flinging of rubber bands from her braces at me on the school bus.  The school bus was always the site of the worst misery.  It was also where Suzanne applied her make up in the morning since I imagine her mom would not let her leave the house with as much eyeliner as she wanted to wear.  Does it ever suck to be an adolescent girl.

When I first arrived in middle school, there was no question in the mind of the average observer that I was a boy.  In my mind I was neither masculine nor feminine, but everyone else consistently read me as masculine.  I passed all the time, much to my chagrin, considering the resulting bullying, scorn, disapproval, ostracism and depression.  Around 1987, it got back to me that one of my classmates asked, “Who will want to marry a girl who looks like a boy?”  I barely knew what a lesbian was but people asked me if I was one.  I denied it, of course. I liked both girls and boys, but not too much considering that they were universally such a bunch of assholes. 

This was an enormously painful and lonely time. At recess one day, some one shoved me from behind.  I started to turn towards them, but then I got shoved much harder and knocked heads with this kid Jesse.  I got this strange greenish bruise on my cheek the next day, and it actually took me a while to figure out where it came from.  I must have been so shut down that the event did not immediately register.  Days later, I learned that the girl who pushed me was angry because she told her friend that she thought I was cute.  She was subsequently humiliated upon learning I was a girl.  I had been the object of a crush and revealed as a deceiver all without my knowledge or involvement.

I never talked to anyone about that experience until I was an adult.  It is very telling that I was so ashamed and never spoke of it, not to a parent, not to a teacher, not to anyone.  I thought somehow it was my fault.  My appearance had caused a series of tiny dramas: first attraction, followed by deception, then humiliation and finally revenge.  But my part in this soap opera only came in at the very end, for the revenge.  Too bad I could not understand at the time that none of this was about me, it was about the confusion, fear and anger (and a little bit of desire) other people experienced at the site of an adolescent butch girl.

School

The first thing I learned in elementary school was that I was different, and not in a good way. Adults and other children regularly attempted to correct my gender. The way I looked, dressed, talked and even walked were constantly being subject to scrutiny and comment.  Every day I was given direct feedback about the specific ways that I was failing to be a girl.  A steady stream of negativity came in the form of verbal correction, looking at me too much or not looking at me at all.  I was struck by the barely concealed disgust that my body, my clothes, my mannerisms, my interests and my whole self evoked in adults and children alike.  I got the message that I was distasteful, and I understood that I should be ashamed of myself.  And I was ashamed.

But at the same time I simply could not live with the idea of becoming more feminine.  My efforts were lackluster at best.  I would not have even known where to start.  What they wanted me to become was entirely alien to me.  I could try to be a normal girl and fail, or I could try to have some kind of integrity and be true to the self I felt I was.  So I made a commitment to gender nonconformity as a very young child, long before I had any concept of sexuality or desire.  No one called me a Lesbian until I reached middle school but every day I heard about how I was not a Real Girl.  My mother had put me in a dress for school pictures, and I heard about it a year later when one of my classmates recounted the only time she had ever seen me in a dress.  She detailed the color and material and everything about the dress I had worn the previous school year, while I was somewhat stunned because I could not recall what she had worn the previous day.  Even in a case where I was not being corrected, the scrutiny made me want to disappear.

Deep down I didn’t really want to be a girl, at least not in the way I saw all around me. I decided just to be smart instead.  Smart was an identity I could live with, although it certainly did not win any points with other kids.  With each new shitty experience, I became more determined to find my own way.  Being smart was a clear decision for me, rather than some innate quality.  I just had to concentrate and be willing to work hard, so I set my mind to do it. I pushed myself more than any teacher ever did.  Being smart was a way for me to get positive feedback from adults and a way to live with myself being different.  But mostly it provided a reason for me to continue to show up at school.

I rejected what others girls did and wanted, from dolls to dresses, from marriage to children.  Long before I had any concept of sexuality, I swore that I would never get married and never have children.  I knew this years and years before I knew I was queer.  I also started to formulate ideas about how if all the adults in my world were wrong about gender, they very well could be wrong about a whole host of other things too.  Even as a little kid, I could tell that a lot of the adult world was forced, in the same way gender was being forced on me.  I started to become suspicious about institutions like God, racism, sports, the mall, the giant TVs and the fenced-in homes, and every other suburban idea and aspiration.  My earliest desires included a desire to escape, get out of there and get away.

But there was more to my childhood masculinity than just failing to be a girl, more to it than wanting to be my own self.  There was also misogyny. Misogyny complicates this story by tainting my freewheeling nonconformity with a real aversion to all things related to being a woman.  It spoils the fun of this tomboy liberation narrative with a sexist distaste for the feminine. Sexism and boyish freedom mixed together in my young mind, and in the culture I saw how being smart was associated with being masculine.  It would be a long time before I could sort them out, but as a kid, I knew with certainty which side of the equation I wanted to be on.  I was ashamed that I had been born female but determined to never be a typical, normal woman.  This typical woman did not exist of course, but was the product of hateful statements my father made about helpless, ditzy women and admiring statements my mother made about men and what ever they said or did.  Well, my parents were simply acting in accordance with the sexism that was polluting the air, floating in the drinking water and blaring from the TV.  Within my childhood self existed a complicated mess of shamefully wishing I could be more of a girl, defying suburban girl conformity, and a creeping belief that women were inferior and irrelevant anyway. 

So this is only partially a story about me against the school, or the suburbs, or the world.  The truth is that I still do not fully understand how I made it through school.  I do not remember any moments of respite where I really believed that one day it would be OK for me to not be a regular girl.  Mostly I remember not being able to stand the expectations of me to be a girl, not being about to stand the disapproval of me not being a girl, and generally not being able to stand the scrutiny.  Instead of a story about how I courageously defied expectations and triumphed over the evil forces of suburban conformity, the truth is a much less flattering story about how regular old sexism cannot be extracted from my earliest rebellion against gender.  I was a nerdy tomboy who thought all girlish things were stupid, and that was the best I could do.