Before we talk about stories, I'm going to tell you my own story. Think of it as a thought exercise.
--
The rural east has a landscape that’s uniform all the way across its longitude. When we lived in Ohio, my older cousin stuck a child version of me in a tall snowbank in our front yard and left me there. I shrieked with laughter. From a distance I must have looked like a neon pink-and-purple ball, arms sticking straight out from my sides bloated with thick layers of fabric. I felt tall, suspended so far above the ground. I pretended I was the same age as my cousin. A “big kid.” He only would’ve been about 13 at the time. He has a son now, the same age as me when my cousin stuck me in the snow, that I wish I could be better acquainted with. Back then, I didn’t know why he had to live with us. I was just happy to have him there.
A bit later, we moved to Kentucky, the place where the majority of my mom’s family lives and where she spent the entirety of her childhood. I spent my days on my knees looking for four-leaf clovers in our yard, army-crawling my way through the grass with red and itchy knees and elbows. When I was at school, I would run around the playground with my hands gripping the waistband of my skirt. My grandma bought me my uniform and it was a few sizes too big. A few times, I tripped and fell, allowing my peers to bear witness to portraits of Disney princesses printed across the bottom of my underwear. Without an ounce of shame, I would pull my skirt back up and take off sprinting again. One time I was walking back to my classroom, hot and misted with sweat, when a girl behind me tapped my shoulder. She was my next-door neighbor. I think her name was Nina. “There are caterpillars on your butt,” she said, not unkindly. I grabbed my skirt’s waistband and swapped it so the back was now the front. Sure enough, there were small green stowaways clinging to the stiff fabric. I squealed with delight and took them home with me in a little Styrofoam cup. The only thing I remember about Nina is that we would roll down the hill together in our backyards and play in the muddy ditch than ran through both. That, and she had an older sister, about Kyle’s age. Once, her mother came knocking on our door and asked to speak with him. “I’m thinking you’re going to marry my daughter,” she said, which he replied to with a bewildered and amused look. Our family still tells that story at parties to this day.
There was one fateful day when I went outside to play with a group of shirtless young boys across the street, running around and tackling one another in some kind of game without rules. I yanked my shirt off and tried to sprint down our driveway, but I felt a hand grip my shoulder. I turned to see my mother’s face, her lips tight.
“Put your shirt back on, girl!” she hissed.
“Why?” I was bewildered. “They have their shirts off. It’s hot out here.”
“Now,” she said. “You’re too old for that.”
I didn’t see how my shirtless body was any different than theirs.
This might have been around the time that the world began to confuse me. Usually, my family describes the “confusion” as a force that came from within me. Not quite the case.
--
Kindergarten might be where the confusion was strongest. I was sitting across from my friend, playing some sort of hand-game with her in the reading corner. I was suddenly overcome with the realization that I had never seen a cuter girl. She had long sandy blonde hair, cut with straight and neat bangs, and big brown eyes. I thought that she looked like a doll. On impulse, I gave a big wet kiss to her forehead. “Oh!” she whisper-shouted. I quickly drew back, worried that I’d angered her, but she only giggled. Soon, we were both laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe. The teacher cut our laughter short to make me move my card down to yellow but would not divulge why.
Another time, I peeked into the boy’s bathroom. I was astonished to find that their sinks were long and oddly shaped. My teacher discovered me, grabbed my wrist, and yanked me away. “Office,” she ordered, and yet again did not have an answer for me when I whined my protests.
“Seriously,” I said to a male friend as we walked to the buses that afternoon (His name was Benny- I also remember that he had a big mole on his face), “Why do we even have girls’ and boys’ bathrooms? Why don’t we all go to the same one?”
He stopped to think for a moment. “Because if we all used one big bathroom,” he said, casually, “it would get too loud in there.”
“I guess that makes sense,” I answered. Changing the topic, I continued, “Benny, why do boys pee in sinks?”
--
My brother was only about three while we were living in Kentucky. He was a shy boy. Today, he’s still a shy young man. Often, he was the victim of my dress-up and pretend games. Mostly willing, though. In exchange for letting me use him as a baby doll, I would speak up for him. “Anthony had an accident,” I would proclaim to my parents. “Anthony wants a snack. He’s hungry. Anthony has a boo-boo.”
There was an afternoon where he was peacefully playing with his toys on the floor of our kitchen. I was sitting at the table with my grandmother. “Mamaw,” I asked her, “How do we know Anthony is a boy?”
“Well,” she sputtered, “He just is.”
“But what if he’s a girl, and we just don’t know it yet?”
“We know he’s a boy,” she asserted.
“How?”
“We just do.”
She caught my attention with something else. A snack, probably.
--
I bought a diary at a book fair in the first grade. The first thing I wrote about was a girl in my class who I had a crush on. I decided to show Benny and told him not to tell anyone.
“I’m telling the teacher,” he responded.
I ran to the bathroom as he got up and walked to her desk. I muttered all the swear words I knew under my breath as I ran, gripping my diary in my hands with all the strength in my body. I ran into a stall and sat down, ripping and flushing pages in a frenzy. “Hello?” I heard my teacher’s voice echo. I shoved the remaining paper in my mouth. As I chewed, I scribbled a sentence down in huge letters, taking up an entire page for good measure. Though I don’t remember her name, I remember that I wrote it followed by the words “IS UGLY!!!!!” Right as my teacher’s shoes came into view under the stall door, I swallowed the last page with a wince and stood up. I had a thought and sat back down again. On the next page, I scribbled, “BENNY HAS A GROSS MOLE!” Then I finally got up for the last time, brushed off my skirt, opened the door and looked up at her with the most innocent expression I could muster.
“Let me see your diary,” she commanded, holding her hand out. I placed it in her palms and she flipped through it right in front of me, slowly taking in every page. She shut it and looked at me with disappointed eyes. “You know,” she said, “That’s not a very nice thing to say about your friends. Let’s go back to class.”
--
These stories exist in my mind as a constellation with no chronological relation to one another other than a vague age and a place. All some kind of collected evidence of my identity, serving as a justification to myself. Truthfully, these stories all could have happened to me only for me to turn out straight, and I could have realistically had an entirely heteronormative childhood only to blossom into my bisexuality as an adult. But their relation to how I’ve come to exist is what gives them importance. My nurturing of those memories establishes some kind of underlying subconscious, an inherent nature, to myself.
Were I a character in a story, perhaps all of these stories would have been a clean progression to a complete and total revelation when I became an adult. I would have realized I'm gay, I would have known my exact identity, then happily ever after.
But our identities are not fictional stories. I thought I was lesbian when I turned 12. I identified that way all the way into adulthood. There. That should have been it, right? Nope.
I fell in love with my current partner while I was in college, who is a transgender man, all while I was questioning my own gender. So I'm bisexual. Okay. What about my gender? Clearly, based on the stories I've told here, I must be nonbinary.
Sure. Nonbinary is what I've settled on. But in what ways? How is my gender going to grow and change with me in the future? I don't know yet. Maybe there's beauty in that.
There's a final question, then: how do we write LGBT characters realistically, and still give them a satisfying ending? People love happily ever afters. We love it when LGBT characters discover themselves and come out, then we imagine that they stay that way forever. She dates a man, she isn't into him, she yearns for your best friend...Oh! She's lesbian! The end.
There's nothing wrong with telling a story that way. Sometimes, we have to favor status quo over realism; how disappointing would it be to lesbian readers, who so solidly view this hypothetical character as their own, if the author came out with a new story that writes her as having realized that she really is straight after all after a few more years of growing? It happens to some people, sure, but what does it imply when it is a fictional character who is written by a real person?
Perhaps with more advancements in LGBT rights, the community will eventually become secure enough for these types of stories to be written with no unsavory implications...though, understandably, they remain questionable at best for now.
What do you think?
Comentarios