Sissy Spring - Scrapbook of My Coming Out, in 1980
In my last two blog posts, I described my life between high school and the end of my first semester of giving college a second try. I'd started out pretty optimistic that I wasn't so different from everyone (or that I was, but that it didn't matter any more, that I would find my niche). I was confident at first that I would find an expression of masculinity that worked for me, that fit me and suited me and also provided me access to dating and the probability of girlfriends.
That didn't happen. I tried the blue-collar affirmative self-determination model as an auto mechanic but didn't fit in with the other guys, seldom met women, and couldn't support myself adequately. Then I retried college but found that the lightweight bantering of flirting was embedded with sexist assumptions and gender-specific roles that definitely did not fit me, and although people were less hostile and more accepting on campus than in mechanics' garages, they thought I needed to work on self-acceptance - that I needed to come out.
If things had been working out for me, I don't think other folks' opinions would have had much bite, but they weren't. The world might have guys like me in it who had girlfriends to love them, who had active and fulfilling sex lives, but I was still a virgin at 21 despite having sought and pined for a romantic relationship since I was 10 or so, and I spent a lot of my time feeling pathetic, a miserable failure in the way that mattered the most to me personally.
In fall of '79 I picked up one of those self-help growth and actualization workbooks from the UNM student bookstore, and one of the quizzes in it was about how much you matched up with gender expectations for your gender, and doing that quiz had really electrified me, startled me. It's not that I had never noticed or thought of myself as being more like the girls than I was like the other boys, but now I was seeing it in the context of being upset and frustrated about the dismal state of my romantic and sexual life, and whereas before it was just one difference among many, all of a sudden it looked like an explanation. Or a restatement of the problem. So with that in my head, the well-intentioned encouragement to "come out" added gasoline to the fire burning in my head: what was I? What did it mean, what were the implications for ever getting to have a girlfriend, what did all this make me? Was I gay and somehow didn't know it? Or, dear god, maybe it was less about what I wanted and more about the way I was, feminine instead of masculine, making me heterosexually ineligible??
Yeah, that was the big fear, really. I did not want to change and become more masculine. I'd rather be dead, frankly. I didn't want to spend my life never having a girlfriend and a sex life either.
Something clicked into place between December 1979 and February 1980. I finally lost my temper about the situation and stepped out to confront it. I realized women didn't come rolling out of a factory, identically produced and identically wired to only respond to conventionally masculine men who fulfilled conventionally masculine expectations in dating and flirting behavior - there would be women who found the generalizations and expectations no better a fit for them than they were for me. And hey, that was a big part of feminism! I was essentially rejecting patriarchal sexist stuff for myself on a personal level in a way that mirrored what radical feminists were saying and doing!
I came out in Spring of 1980. I didn't have terminology to express it (which is still a problem) and I wasn't entirely consistent in what terms I did use, but the phrase I used most often was "heterosexual sissy". I also used phrases like "straightbackwards people", "contramasculine", "diminutive-docile" as opposed to "dominant-aggressive", and a few other things.
Anyway, I also kept a scrapbook. I considered myself to be doing something important, something political, something radical. I was coming out of the closet.
SISSY SPRING SCRAPBOOK
These first two were continuations of the self help workbook quiz. I kept jotting down additional observations about myself and the ways in which I was more like one of the girls than one of the boys. (Some of those observations were pretty contrived and more than a couple are statements I would not make about myself, but never mind that). I was examining the idea: is this real, is this centrally true about myself? It is, isn't it?
These two are self-portraits from the first semester of college. Both of them reflect a feeling that I was walking through life as a cheerful zombie and trying to smile on the outside while I was cut off and miserable on the inside.
I used to draw with colored pencils especially when I was tripping acid. I had this one on my wall for awhile in Fall 1979. One of my roommate's friends said he knew what I was aiming for with this picture, that it represented a limp-wristed mincing prance with a Rockettes kick (he mimicked that posture to illustrate), and he winked and nodded his approval. I never knew how serious people were and whether they were being snarky and hostile and when they were being liberal and accepting, and I wasn't always sure how much of it was just in my own mind, but there were enough occurrences to populate all three of those categories with many such events.
When I started the scrapbook, I wrote directly into it, designing a title page and a statement of purpose:
Several pages in, I designed "the Questionnaire". I was trying to put down on paper a sort of questionnaire that I felt like the world had been administering to me in various ways my entire life, and I was making it explicit.
In the first panel, the question is whether or not you fit in as a typical guy, with conventionally masculine characteristics. People who answer "yes" don't get additional questions but anyone answering "no" would be receiving follow-up questions. I created an "option 2" ("you getting any?") as a way of saying that if your sexual and romantic life is working out to your satisfaction anyway, you need not be concerned about your masculinity or lack thereof and don't need to face any further questions -
Option 3 was the most common next question you get to face if you are male, not conventionally masculine, and if, no, things are not exactly working out for you (with the women) anyway: gay? If yes, you've arrived at your identity, but if not, you get to move on to some further questions...
Option 4 is basically the "There's something wrong with your head" possibility. It may not seem like an "identity" but it felt to me that it kept being offered as a way to think of myself, given the irreconcilable situation and the intensity of my feelings and increasingly obsessive nature of my thoughts on the matter.
Option 5 is even darker...
... and Option 6, the one I'd found for myself only after exhausting all the previous ones, was what this scrapbook was all about:
You'll notice:
• I had not as of yet contemplated the possibility that I was transsexual. I did shortly after this point. The word in 1980 was definitely "transsexual", not "transgender" and it specifically meant going the sex reassignment surgery route, it's what people did if they were transsexual. I became quite excited about that for awhile but because I was attracted to women it was not so obvious to me that I should pursue this. Transition to female in order to be a lesbian? Well, I could (even though, in 1980, I had never heard of anyone doing such a thing). But what lesbian would want to be with a woman who had once been a male? (Jan Raymond had just published The Transsexual Empire, an exclusionary feminist declaration of war against male to female transsexuals. Widespread lesbian acceptance of transsexual lesbians didn't seem too likely to me). I still could have, but with this many impediments to consider, I asked the most pertinent question: Do I dislike my body, in and of itself? Do I feel a need to have female parts, does this body feel wrong? And I realized that no, it wasn't about the body, not for me.
• No mention of being bisexual either. It didn't solve anything as an option. Calling myself bisexual wasn't going to conjure up girlfriends, and I didn't have any interest in sex with male people, and so it just didn't seem relevant.
Among my Spring 1980 courses was a poetry course. We were asked to write a poem about what we'd like as an epitaph or how we'd like to be remembered after we were gone. I wrote this one, drawing on how I'd felt the previous semester when I'd been haunted by all these questions and feeling so unknowable and lost -
This next snippet was scribbled in the margins of the scrapbook. I really saw this as a fundamental new identity I was embracing for myself, and it incorporated a vision for a different approach altogether to the matter of sex and romance with women. I was going to pursue it from now on as one of them, as an absolute equal with no tolerance for different expectations and roles based on gender. And I was going to find someone with whom that particular option was going to click.
I placed this personal ad in the Albuquerque Journal, as sort of a combination of personal ad and political call-to-action:
--------
I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
That didn't happen. I tried the blue-collar affirmative self-determination model as an auto mechanic but didn't fit in with the other guys, seldom met women, and couldn't support myself adequately. Then I retried college but found that the lightweight bantering of flirting was embedded with sexist assumptions and gender-specific roles that definitely did not fit me, and although people were less hostile and more accepting on campus than in mechanics' garages, they thought I needed to work on self-acceptance - that I needed to come out.
If things had been working out for me, I don't think other folks' opinions would have had much bite, but they weren't. The world might have guys like me in it who had girlfriends to love them, who had active and fulfilling sex lives, but I was still a virgin at 21 despite having sought and pined for a romantic relationship since I was 10 or so, and I spent a lot of my time feeling pathetic, a miserable failure in the way that mattered the most to me personally.
In fall of '79 I picked up one of those self-help growth and actualization workbooks from the UNM student bookstore, and one of the quizzes in it was about how much you matched up with gender expectations for your gender, and doing that quiz had really electrified me, startled me. It's not that I had never noticed or thought of myself as being more like the girls than I was like the other boys, but now I was seeing it in the context of being upset and frustrated about the dismal state of my romantic and sexual life, and whereas before it was just one difference among many, all of a sudden it looked like an explanation. Or a restatement of the problem. So with that in my head, the well-intentioned encouragement to "come out" added gasoline to the fire burning in my head: what was I? What did it mean, what were the implications for ever getting to have a girlfriend, what did all this make me? Was I gay and somehow didn't know it? Or, dear god, maybe it was less about what I wanted and more about the way I was, feminine instead of masculine, making me heterosexually ineligible??
Yeah, that was the big fear, really. I did not want to change and become more masculine. I'd rather be dead, frankly. I didn't want to spend my life never having a girlfriend and a sex life either.
Something clicked into place between December 1979 and February 1980. I finally lost my temper about the situation and stepped out to confront it. I realized women didn't come rolling out of a factory, identically produced and identically wired to only respond to conventionally masculine men who fulfilled conventionally masculine expectations in dating and flirting behavior - there would be women who found the generalizations and expectations no better a fit for them than they were for me. And hey, that was a big part of feminism! I was essentially rejecting patriarchal sexist stuff for myself on a personal level in a way that mirrored what radical feminists were saying and doing!
I came out in Spring of 1980. I didn't have terminology to express it (which is still a problem) and I wasn't entirely consistent in what terms I did use, but the phrase I used most often was "heterosexual sissy". I also used phrases like "straightbackwards people", "contramasculine", "diminutive-docile" as opposed to "dominant-aggressive", and a few other things.
Anyway, I also kept a scrapbook. I considered myself to be doing something important, something political, something radical. I was coming out of the closet.
SISSY SPRING SCRAPBOOK
These first two were continuations of the self help workbook quiz. I kept jotting down additional observations about myself and the ways in which I was more like one of the girls than one of the boys. (Some of those observations were pretty contrived and more than a couple are statements I would not make about myself, but never mind that). I was examining the idea: is this real, is this centrally true about myself? It is, isn't it?
These two are self-portraits from the first semester of college. Both of them reflect a feeling that I was walking through life as a cheerful zombie and trying to smile on the outside while I was cut off and miserable on the inside.
I used to draw with colored pencils especially when I was tripping acid. I had this one on my wall for awhile in Fall 1979. One of my roommate's friends said he knew what I was aiming for with this picture, that it represented a limp-wristed mincing prance with a Rockettes kick (he mimicked that posture to illustrate), and he winked and nodded his approval. I never knew how serious people were and whether they were being snarky and hostile and when they were being liberal and accepting, and I wasn't always sure how much of it was just in my own mind, but there were enough occurrences to populate all three of those categories with many such events.
When I started the scrapbook, I wrote directly into it, designing a title page and a statement of purpose:
Several pages in, I designed "the Questionnaire". I was trying to put down on paper a sort of questionnaire that I felt like the world had been administering to me in various ways my entire life, and I was making it explicit.
In the first panel, the question is whether or not you fit in as a typical guy, with conventionally masculine characteristics. People who answer "yes" don't get additional questions but anyone answering "no" would be receiving follow-up questions. I created an "option 2" ("you getting any?") as a way of saying that if your sexual and romantic life is working out to your satisfaction anyway, you need not be concerned about your masculinity or lack thereof and don't need to face any further questions -
Option 3 was the most common next question you get to face if you are male, not conventionally masculine, and if, no, things are not exactly working out for you (with the women) anyway: gay? If yes, you've arrived at your identity, but if not, you get to move on to some further questions...
Option 4 is basically the "There's something wrong with your head" possibility. It may not seem like an "identity" but it felt to me that it kept being offered as a way to think of myself, given the irreconcilable situation and the intensity of my feelings and increasingly obsessive nature of my thoughts on the matter.
Option 5 is even darker...
... and Option 6, the one I'd found for myself only after exhausting all the previous ones, was what this scrapbook was all about:
You'll notice:
• I had not as of yet contemplated the possibility that I was transsexual. I did shortly after this point. The word in 1980 was definitely "transsexual", not "transgender" and it specifically meant going the sex reassignment surgery route, it's what people did if they were transsexual. I became quite excited about that for awhile but because I was attracted to women it was not so obvious to me that I should pursue this. Transition to female in order to be a lesbian? Well, I could (even though, in 1980, I had never heard of anyone doing such a thing). But what lesbian would want to be with a woman who had once been a male? (Jan Raymond had just published The Transsexual Empire, an exclusionary feminist declaration of war against male to female transsexuals. Widespread lesbian acceptance of transsexual lesbians didn't seem too likely to me). I still could have, but with this many impediments to consider, I asked the most pertinent question: Do I dislike my body, in and of itself? Do I feel a need to have female parts, does this body feel wrong? And I realized that no, it wasn't about the body, not for me.
• No mention of being bisexual either. It didn't solve anything as an option. Calling myself bisexual wasn't going to conjure up girlfriends, and I didn't have any interest in sex with male people, and so it just didn't seem relevant.
Among my Spring 1980 courses was a poetry course. We were asked to write a poem about what we'd like as an epitaph or how we'd like to be remembered after we were gone. I wrote this one, drawing on how I'd felt the previous semester when I'd been haunted by all these questions and feeling so unknowable and lost -
This next snippet was scribbled in the margins of the scrapbook. I really saw this as a fundamental new identity I was embracing for myself, and it incorporated a vision for a different approach altogether to the matter of sex and romance with women. I was going to pursue it from now on as one of them, as an absolute equal with no tolerance for different expectations and roles based on gender. And I was going to find someone with whom that particular option was going to click.
I placed this personal ad in the Albuquerque Journal, as sort of a combination of personal ad and political call-to-action:
--------
I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts