Childhood Sexuality

The single most profound moment in the formation of my sexuality during my childhood was seeing Madonna’s Open Your Heart video.  One of the first images is of a peep show booth window going up to reveal two sailors in white uniforms watching the show, faces touching, hands touching.  Madonna is dancing in the peep show, and she is arguably at her hottest, with fishnets, corset, bleached hair and all kinds of sexiness.  Later, even briefer than the image of the sailors, is the image of a woman in a fancy suit jacket and tie watching intently with her hand near her mouth.  Blink and you miss her.  I was very young and much like Sarah Palin staring down Putin across the Bering Strait, I did not blink. Other peep show spectators include a perv with thick glasses and a cowboy who cannot stand to look away as the booth window closes.  The woman appears again as the last image of the peep show spectators, she is smoking a cigarette after the conclusion of Madonna’s stage performance.  How delightfully suggestive!  Or have all of us non-smokers forgotten what some women like to do after cumming? And of course there is the young boy who is barred from entering the peep show but sneaks in, and Madonna gives him a kiss and dances off into the sunset with him at the end of the video, in a spectacle of exuberance and pleasure.  From the sailors alone, I knew I was queer, I knew I was like them.  In fact, the whole cast of characters played out in my emerging sexual landscape. I knew without a doubt that I wanted into that world, the world of peep shows, strippers, sailors, cowboys, women in ties, perverts and other assorted degenerates.  As a child watching a music video, I recognized the world I belonged in!  Some may call Madonna’s forays into queer worlds cultural appropriation.  But in my suburban prison, Madonna was a breath of fresh air, the promise that another world of sexuality existed, one that was not based on the dominant heterosexual mythology of getting to various bases and painful first times. 

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.

Catholics

Why is it that whenever I talk to straight people about my opposition to marriage, I always find myself reassuring them that I am not judging their marriage or their choices?  They never feel the need to reassure me that they are not judging me when they talk about marriage or discuss who is engaged or any of the other choices they know very well I have consciously and deliberately ruled out of my life.  Straight privilege means never noticing that these conversations silence queerness by drowning it out with repetitive straight clichés.  

When a straight person tells me “I am a catholic,” it never occurs to them to reassure me that they disagree with their church’s views about sexuality or contraception or abortion or any of the other things I feel strongly about.  It never occurs to them to point out that they do not stand by the pope’s views about homosexuality.  It never occurs to them to point out that they do not stand by the church’s destruction of ancient and irretrievable books, its inquisitions, its crusades, its complicity with the holocaust and ongoing complicity with the AIDS crisis.  We are talking about the people who created the witch hunt, after all, why not at least pay lip service to this two thousand year abuse of power?  How much does an indulgence run these days, anyway? 

Yet when I say that I am opposed to marriage, I always find myself offering some comforting words to them so they know I am not opposed to their marriage.  I care about their feelings and our relationship.  I guess I am prioritizing the relationship over my ideas, which has its pro’s and con’s, but clearly the caring is not reciprocated.  Part of straight privilege is being comfortably certain that you will rarely be called upon to explain your relationship choices, or consider how your words, actions, beliefs, values and omissions might be painful for others. 

So the catholics now have a pope who has been a fanatical opponent of queer people since he was in the seminary.  We are Ratzinger’s favorite topic going way back in his hate-fueled career. This is the same guy who was protested by Queer Nation in NYC back in the late 80s.  He said in his 2008 year-end remarks that humanity needs protecting from the threats of homosexuality, transexuality and gender theory as much as the environment needs protection from destruction. It made me wonder who he is referring to with the word “humanity.”  In more than 20 years, this man has not moved an inch in his hatred and condemnation of queers.  Is the pope’s humanity the same humanity that led the Vatican to refuse to sign on to a UN proposal for nations around the world to decriminalize homosexuality?  Ratzinger extends open arms to a holocaust denier but looks the other way at state sponsored murder of homosexuals.  In Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Nigeria and Mauritania, homosexuality is punishable by death.  The catholic church has made it very clear that for the Vatican, condoning the actions of states that put homosexuals to death is preferable to signing on to legislation that would suggest condoning homosexuality. People are being punished and even put to death, but they won’t sign on to a resolution to stop the killing because that would also marginally condone homosexuality.  How dense do you need to be to continue to be a part of a church that calls itself pro-life yet holds this untenable position? 

Humanity looks quite different to me than it does to this pope.  Clearly, my personal humanity and the humanity of my kind is not in need of protection in the eyes of Ratzinger.   It sucks to realize you have a more expansive view of humanity than this little old turd who gets to be a world leader.  The humanity of four trans women who were murdered in Memphis, Tennessee over the course of 2008 is the kind of humanity I find deserving of protection.  The pope missed this fact in his year-end reflection.  One of the women, Duanna Johnson, was beaten by police officers in June, was planning a lawsuit against the city, and was mysteriously found dead in November. So where exactly does the threat of transgenderism show up?  What threat did these women pose to humanity?  The question I continue to ask myself is:  When do I start holding the catholics in my life accountable for the position of their pope and church?  When will I start to ask the catholics I know to have some integrity?  Identifying oneself with catholicism is not a neutral position any more than identifying with a political party, and a very mean-spirited and vicious one at that. Either stand up to this fuck or leave his church.  Whose humanity really needs protecting here?