
The Art of Politics
. . . but I’m Not Gay!
By Judy Osborne
I’ve never told anyone this story before. I cringe with shame telling it to you now.
Like countless others of us, I grew up knowing I was different. I can’t remember what happened any younger, but at four I followed my grandmother around like a little puppy dog helping her perform her mother-earth functions. At five I tried to play with the girls and yearned for a gift like my sister’s pink taffeta party dress. At six I was wearing it, and age seven found me wandering up the street dressed in skirt, blouse, and a babushka tied under my chin. Nobody caught me until later.
Even at four I knew somehow that I had to hide my girlish interests and sneak my moments of femininity wherever and whenever I could get away with them. As time went on I became even more adept at hiding the person I really was. I didn’t have the courage to do otherwise. I adopted protective coloration. I became one of the guys, though my heart never was in it. I learned how to tell a Buick from a Ford a hundred years away.
When the onslaught of testosterone hit me, there remained absolutely no doubt that I liked girls. I desperately wanted to be one too, though I humbly trudged on performing my masculine masquerade. I went bonkers thinking about the possibilities when George Jorgensen went to Denmark and Christine came back.
My parents sent me to a Massachusetts prep school, where we lived in dormitories. I still was pretending to be one of the guys, with at least some success. The fact that I liked girls in a sexual way helped me perform the charade.
One of my classmates was taken to swishing around the place, showing lots of hip action, taboo elbow angles, and an unacceptable way of carrying books. He talked funny too. "Gay" still meant happy and carefree at that time, "fag" referred to a cigarette, and the epithet of the day was "homo". A nasty term it was, too, in the days before Vietnam War protests brought a measure of diversity into society’s collective awareness.
People called him a "dirty homo" to his face, and worse.
One day a rumor spread that he had somebody in his room with him. A gang of students yelled and rapped on his door until he finally opened it. He was harassed without mercy that day, and he left school soon after the incident.
I wanted to blend, be one of the guys, maintain my "coloration". I was right there along with the rest of the gang. I did what they did. I harassed and persecuted him along with the other students. I didn’t even pause to consider my own cruelty and hypocrisy, even though I understood from my very first memories that I also was different. He had the courage to be true to himself. I didn’t. I wasn’t a homo!
The story is worth telling, though it shames me deeply, as a stark echo of the hypocrisy and bigotry we continue to extend to others. We’re more subtle now, we don’t say the things we think as much as we used to, but so many of us still can’t find a way to accept gays and lesbians as allies and friends. Our internalized discrimination against the other sexual minorities, especially coming from our male-to-female people, is keeping us from reaching our social goals and denying us access to a rich culture which offers much goodness, creativity, and humanity. We have to find a way to get over it.
How can a biological man wearing a dress discriminate against or disparage gay men and lesbians? What twisted logic makes that possible? If you’re presenting yourself as a woman, and you like women sexually -- what does that make you if not a lesbian, at least for a day? If you happen to get clocked while you’re out on the street, all but the most enlightened of civilians will think you’re gay anyway. Why does that bother you?
It’s equally difficult to understand homophobia on the part of male-to-female transsexuals. As you travel the tortured road from manhood to womanhood, your sexual orientation may or may not change to keep you heterosexual on either side of the gender divide. It seems to switch for some, but not for others. Rarely would a change in your sexual orientation occur at the precise moment of transition anyway, no matter how you choose to define that moment, rendering you at least temporarily gay. Many people in transition are lonely and feel an urgent need to hug and be close to somebody along the way. If you’re lucky enough to have that somebody, would you also be callous enough to dismiss your loyal lover as soon as you leave the hospital because she now represents the wrong sex/gender? Presenting yet another temptation to stray into a same-sex relationship, lots of newly-recovered transsexuals seem to be energized to check out their new equipment according to a whole variety of hypotheses.
Gay men and lesbians are defined by their attraction to and love of persons of the same gender and/or sex. As we cross the fluid boundaries of gender and sex in our own lives, we have to step very carefully indeed to avoid discovering that we fit into the definition of gayness at least at one time or another. We share a lot with gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, and it’s time to get over our fears and prejudices.
The ultimate olive branch was offered to us some time ago by prominent gay columnist Gabriel Rotello in an article entitled "Transgendered Like Me" (The Advocate, 12/10/96). Arguing that "an emerging definition of all gay people as transgendered is the wave of the future," Rotello said:
"What distinguishes us is that we all, to some degree or another, have major traits that place us somewhere between the two primary genders. In that sense we are all transgendered. . . Homophobes don’t merely hate us because of how we make love. They hate how we make love because it violates our expected gender roles. Really, we are hated for gender transgression. . . So just as all gays are in a basic sense transgendered, all homophobes are first and foremost ‘transphobes’. . .
"If the ultimate cause of our oppression is gender transgression, then shouldn’t it also be the focus of our identities and our movement? Shouldn’t we stop being the les-bi-gay-trans-whatever movement, with a new syllable added every few years, and simply become the trans movement?
"I think we should. And ultimately I believe we will. Once we stop thinking of ourselves as oppressed by what we do in bed and start thinking of ourselves as oppressed because we occupy a space between genders, the sexual differences between us will fade into unimportance, and our common humanity will emerge into the light. If that’s not a higher form of liberation, I don’t know what is."
I sure wish I could find my ex-classmate, express how sorry I still feel after all these years, and finally get to know him (or her).
Comments, including critical ones, are most welcome. Please e-mail your thoughts to me at heyjude@eskimo.com.
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