Recently I walked into a room of beautiful naked people who hadn’t seen me in a few months. Immediately I tore off my clothes, jumped on top of the pile, and while hugging all the bodies I could reach to squeeze, I asked what they were watching on TV…
One person remarked “you look really great, kind of different, what have you been up to?”, and I replied, “I started taking Testosterone!”. This particular foursome didn’t know I had been considering hormone replacement therapy, and they hadn’t seen me since my first shot. They do though (obviously), each know me at least semi intimately, and immediately smiles popped up all around with remarks like “it’s doing you good”, “I didn’t know you were going to do that, but it suits you”, and finally a room wide round of smiles and head nods as one person simply paused, then looked at me and said:
“Well it sounds weird to say, but you look more like yourself than I’ve ever seen you look before.”
What a blessing to have people in every port of my life not bat an eye when I let them know what’s up with my current explorations of self. What a gift of reflection back to me about following my heart and abandoning layers of anxiety. Thank you, Intimates, for celebrating the me outside of you — the one you watch pass through and do not need to define for yourselves to love. It is a gift to belong to you on my terms, and to have you joyfully and knowingly smile when I’ve decimated a box you’ve observed me keep myself within over time.
I also have to thank my little siblings, masters of the generation Millennial, who watched some of us Xers flounder and dissatisfying cluck and balk at the binary, the roles we were supposed to champion, but felt some level of unease around. That discomfort, our in-between-nesses and dissatisfied bitching, you read as a problem to be solved, a theory to work out anew, an upgrade to spitball wildly and freely about during redesign. Today I can more clearly understand my particular discomforts and the pain I felt coming out 20 years ago. There’s new language to articulate that instinctual angst: I have never been the “either” or the “or”, I have always been the “yeses” in between.
Thank you, flitting fluid little siblings, for helping me find comfort in my identity/body/impulse/home — I thought my place might forever be burdened with the sounds of argument and debate about where I was supposed to fit, which side I should relinquish to and take on with hardened pride. You emptied boxes of colorful dress-up clothes and glitter-bomb flash mobs on my floor, you thrust pretty flowered beards, impossibly androgynous crossdressing (if it’s even possible anymore) runway models, and hormone cocktails prescribed without “the script” at my generation’s rebellious “guyliner” beginnings. How beautiful was that day.
I remember you years before, your worry that you weren’t “trans enough” or “queer enough” to belong. In Jr. High and High School you and your friends showed up dressed to the nines made up like little miniature rockstars flocking to my gender bending performance troupe’s “Drag King 101” and “Gender, Orientation, and Identity Round Table Discussion” classes — it’s been a decade at least already. I was shocked way back then. I remembered how threatening and dangerous it was to be perceived as gay or lesbian at all when I had been your age, and there hadn’t even been a LGBT alliance in my school… You and your friends have ushered in an age which pledges allegiance to each queer’s inner flag, and we each, every one, find ourselves more deeply because of it.
Thank you for letting me teach you to tie your first tie — as “Drag King Papa Webb” it was an honor to initiate you into a realm of Queerdom. Thank you for repainting our clubhouse and blowing out a couple walls in the process. We needed fresh air, new inspirations, and a reinjection of Pride which invites a world of Wonderers, not only the recognizable queer archetype conformists inside.
Fluidity from polarization. The water we drink now, instead of the bread that we break. We can try on the clothes of any characters we’d like to play, and change as many times as we want in a day. Sure, we keep some favorite ensembles around, knowing they don’t have to match anything else in the closet also squirreled away… It feels fantastic celebrating the knowledge that what we do and do not wear on our bodies is but the expression of a moment. Art, revelry, and adjustment belong to each of us, dynamically, in our own time.
Play On My Friends,
~ Creature
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~Thank you.