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| Original artwork by C. Kellam Scott |
When I say I was a boy I don't mean just biologically although that too. I felt like a boy and had no reasons not to. I've always loved roaming around, riding bikes, going exploring, getting my hands dirty, making things, playing sports, breaking things, tussling with my friends. You know, the boy's life. Up until the 2nd grade I was an outgoing - affable kid who got along well with others. What no-one else knew when I started to become withdrawn was what I had noticed. The genders were separating even further and I didn't know why. Something was amiss. I now only had guy friends. Which wasn't so bad considering some of my interests. I have always sought masculine input. As any little boy does I idolized my Pop. I still carry a brown leather wallet today to remind me of him. But I put a high value on feminine input too. I can be pretty effusive and emotional at times and women are often far better at that then men, not always of course. The only thing of real value to my sense of self when I was young was my creative side, and that would be the route I took.
By the sixth grade things had really changed, for everyone else. I had already left N.J. for eight years on a sojourn to M.A. and been back for three. You do the math. I was still playing soccer, even then I was quite good, I always played on top teams. I was a halfback, with a talent for the tackle. The weird thing was though the other boys brought the aggression of the pitch with them when they left the field. I couldn't understand it. My mom just said I was a good boy. They had also started to talk about girls, allot. I started to not hang out with the team as much. I felt no part.
When middle school came slamming into me it hit like a brick, I know those years aren't easy but boy what a ride. I was coming into myself as a creative individual. I had three wonderful teachers who took me under their wings in the eighth grade. My chorus teacher, the art teacher and an English teacher. Two men and a woman who would show me, in class and in their own time, the gift of creative expression. Creative people are good like that, they see one of their own and they want to give 'em a nudge down the path. What I didn't know was that you really can express yourself, and you may express emotions that you didn't know you were feeling and I began to write poems with a confusing darkness. Emotions that didn't fit.
Boy Scouts was another saving grace. In the ranks I would lose the new and nagging sense of dread that had begun to haunt me. Scouting was so good because not only was it the boy's life but it was not about sex. No one really talked about girls in scouts, not that I noticed, we were all wrapped up in talking about what we were engaged in out in the woods. It was then that I developed a yearning to attend a military academy, my folks are staunch pacifists. When I was with the guys, I never had to worry, my world wasn't complete but it was peaceful. Scouts being nerds I was by far one of the biggest kids, I sprouted early to 5 foot ten. I'm not big, but nerds aren't either. Joke. Straight male society is based on pecking orders on dominance, I could never understand why, I never tried to dominate anyone and shirked responsibility whenever I could. But I'd also do anything for anyone, help anybody. I'm big on favors, I love getting involved and lending a hand.
This solace was only one night a week and on weekends. Never for more than two weeks straight for camping trips. I do love exertions and endurance, testing myself, I don't want to best others. I take their accomplishments as inspiration to do better for myself. That being said, my eighth grade soccer team was nearly undefeated. But I was otherwise totally alienated from them, they openly mocked me, it was with nothing specific, just pointless cruelty, boys are like that, but I certainly didn't understand why. I don't get it but I began to try to ape it. The sex talk too, I would listen in to the way they talked and the things they noticed. They were always turning their heads. I could never see what they were looking at. But they revealed the body parts ("what?") in question with their lascivious talk and I took note. At a later date, apropos of nothing and in different company I would try to talk like they had, plagiarizing them back at them. My parroting would sometimes land and I'd get a "yeah" or a laugh. But sometimes I got a look, that told me I had gotten it wrong. Evidence of the disconnect, exposure of a fraud. I had two male heroes at the time. John Lennon and Henry David Thoreau. I had a female hero as well. I had identified strongly with Wynona Ryder in Beatlejuice. Yeah I know. I wrote her name in my eyeglass case, I had seen that on TV., and left it out for people to find. So they would think I had a Hollywood crush. I didn't even want to meet her, I'd just identified with a fictional character. I was feeling less and less every day. I felt lost, but they told me that was normal. I was just a teen. I'd grow out of it.
The summer before high school I went to summer camp as usual, the Scout camp for two weeks and the Presbyterian camp for two, canoeing down the Delaware River. I was excited, I get motion sick in cars but I never do on water. This would be my first multi day boat trip. When I got there and met all the other kids it became pretty clear why everyone else was excited to be there. The summer before I had witnessed Spin the Bottle, dumbfounding. I had seen kissing on TV. but thought they were exaggerating. But there in front of me, proof of what was expected. The summer before high school the kids moved on to full on genital displays and groping. I had lucked out and gotten a tent to myself for the warm up period. There was a girl I had befriended but I got on well with everyone. When we left that girl got in my canoe. She stayed with me the whole trip. For a moment I thought I had paired up like the other kids. They thought so too. But nothing happened and by the bus trip back she was avoiding me. I had liked her but she wouldn't speak to me and I never heard from her again. That was my last year at summer camp. On the car ride home I told my Mom about her and tried to sell it as a hetero experience. She told me it was ok if I was gay.
It was around that time that my family joined the 90's and got cable, now I could learn how to be whatever it was I was supposed to be. I was already on PBS' lead, not just the educational stuff I'm a huge Brit-com nerd. Monty Python opened that door. My favorite Brit-com will always be Are You Being Served? I found I could laugh at sex. AYBS was the crudest and most obvious of sexual humor shows. They mocked the whole system with broad grossness. I identified with John Inman and Mollie Sugden's characters the most, they were very strong and in subservient positions but in terms of who they were they took no guff. Right after that on TV I'd watch Beavis and Buthead. Again crude humor but from the lips of my very own peers. Re-watching it recently I spotted on Buthead's birth certificate my birth year. I didn't identify with them but, I could laugh at them and memorize there patois. I heard my male classmates imitating them, that's how I knew to watch. I watched the videos too and found punk through grunge and alternative. I started to feel that the angst I felt maybe was just teenage stuff and that I'd grow out of it, I just needed to mature.
I still had my brother and gym class for sharing the boy's life. I quit Scouts. I tried to run track in my freshman year, I was a good sprinter but I blew it off. Most of the meets. I didn't vibe with competition of any kind, the coach was still bullying, I was gonna give it my best weather he yelled at me or not. And all the talk on the track was sex. I knew that I was supposed to be um, enjoying my body? But I hated it, it was dull at best and the end game was no better than a bowel movement. But everyone said that was what I was meant to be doing. The thing itself would pop up once and a while but if I did nothing it would disappear pretty quickly. In the constant sex ed I'd been in since fifth grade, every year they told us that boys my age did it at least every day. I could not keep up and often forgot for who knows how long.
So I sought out pornography and it was gross, I tried and tried and nothing. I could reach the endgame only through manual repetition if I stopped I would lose it. I found some gay male porn and had the same experience. Transgender, the same. I was now completely withdrawn from my peers lost in a world of nonstop TV, Caffeine and the beginnings of alcohol abuse and depression. I was starting to associate sex with pain and humiliation. When I was sixteen or so was the first time I tried to commit suicide after a series of failed attempts. If I did try to fulfill my duty it sometimes happened in drag, I would tell myself that I was a woman to shame myself. The world didn't seem to see me as a functioning boy so I had to be a girl. It didn't help that I could find beauty in a man's face in the same way I could in a woman's . I considered the surgery but didn't want to change my body. The idea of having no genitals seemed like a desperate measure but almost worth it. But I like my body and who I am and don't want to change that. I'm not a woman. That at least was solved, although the shaming rituals and lingering doubts would march on.
The best thing about high school came in my sophomore year, I began taking Drama. My teacher was an Italian American Muslim that everyone thought was gay. I didn't, he had two wives. Except for twinks and certain lesbians I have no idea who's what. He was great and encouraged me to study directing and writing as well as acting. It was in watching my peers become other people that I learned how. And I learned how to act more straight. I put on a skin, a cloak. I was getting encouragement from punk. In punk it was ok to be dirty, poor and different. In fact it was promoted. I found role models of every gender and sexuality and from all over the political spectrum. My family has been political since forever. My Pop's a hippie and my Mom's a 70's feminist Christian. I first saw the White House through a line of riot cops with my Pastor and my Mom protesting the Gulf War. So I began to get up to mischief. Shoplifting, graffiti and eco-vandalism. They were tearing my woods down even further, so I was destroying their equipment and knocking down walls. I did get arrested over that but, as would become a trend in my life, talked my way out of the charges. Doing bad things was the only thing that made me feel manly. Getting away with it even more so.
By my senior year I had re-integrated with my peers to a certain extent. After three years in Drama and four in my other favorite, Creative Writing, I had gained some friends. Around prom time things got a bit heated during study hall, girls would start sitting either to close or actually on me. But they got their dates and went off to the dance. I hadn't attended a dance since middle school. Didn't get it, I got dance though. I had skanked at Ska shows and moshed with Punks, I had also started to identify as an anti-racist-skinhead slash rude boy. Mostly a rude boy, the word skinhead on the left is used to frighten people because of the right's co-opting of the word. Whatever the confusing intricacies of my subculture, which was the prevailing Punk subculture in North Jersey at the time, it gave me the surest veneer of hetero-ness. And I like plain clothes mostly, greys and blacks and earth tones. I always have some bright colors though, primaries. Punk clothing allowed me to express myself without anyone noticing. I even wore a Mohawk with my huge goatee once in a while. One of my favorite "skinhead" thermals was a girl's shirt. Outside of the shaming thing I did learn that sometimes girl's clothes that were in my style looked good on me. In thrift stores I often picked them out by accident only realizing three days later. If a garment can fulfill its function and have pleasing colors and textures I'll wear it.
I was also deep in Jersey's spoken word scene. I found my perfect friendship balance again in a Franciscan brother and a strange poetess ten years my senior or not, definitely an adult. I have trouble discerning age at times. But they were big on the scene and took me under their respective wings and gave me advice and encouragement. Went on trips with me to MoMa and the Village for readings. It was great. I also lost my virginity to a coworker. She asked me out, she kissed me, she put my hands in places and told me what to do. It was weird, I kept opening my eyes and wondering what to do. What to feel. Just before she had asked me what my fantasy was, I told her I didn't have one. She asked what I thought about sex, I said it was pretty gross, then I backtracked realizing my error and said that was masturbation was gross but that sex with her was a good thing. I lied. I knew I had. But it happed, it wasn't bad, it was almost a relief that she took a phone call halfway through. Gave me a moment to glance back at the episode of Seinfeld that was on. When it was over she left the room telling me I'd "had a standard vanilla lost virginity" I pulled up my pants quickly. When I looked myself in her mirror I shrugged. Well at least I'd lost it at 18 on the nose, my birthday had ticked over on the clock during. When I went home my brother and Pop were waiting, I gave them a thumbs up and they cheered. I went to take a bath. I was disgusted to find I had crabs and eliminated them immediately. It ended very quickly and amicably, the whole relationship was two weeks at most. From then on I started to feel really humiliated at the advances and expectations of straight women, I had many terrible times that I won't go into here.
My last year in North Jersey was a hard one, the good things in my life kept me afloat but the trials of young adulthood were holding me down. I worked at an art supply store, it was my primary connection to my own peers. I had to deal with a constant onslaught of sexual intentions. Co-workers flirtations drove me to never hang out with them, any of them. They liked me and would try to get me to come along to all sorts of events, I couldn't bring myself to. I was beginning to feel the weight of this lie I was living. One of my hetero male co-workers had noticed that my line always had more young women in it than the others. Whenever he saw this happen he would hold up a sign reading "Stud!". It was humiliating, I was at work and being treated as a sexual object. But how could I tell anyone that? On one such day, as I stepped out for lunch I slowly burst into a full bawl. I made for my car. I wrote in my journal that I felt like an actor in my own life. That I didn't exist. I was just playing the role that everyone expected of me, and playing it badly.
When I got to Boston, free of parental bonds, I did not go immediately wild. I was too put off by my co-workers at the sister store to the place I had worked in N.J. I wasn't going to college but still wanted to be an artist so I took the working class route to self betterment. I first sought out the Boston poetry scene, I had been cozy in North Jersey's 'cause every one was either much younger or older than me. I felt like an un-dateable, and therefore un-sexualized, anomaly, I'd been happy. In Boston, the majority seemed to be in my age group, sex was in the air. I should have known, moving to a college town, but I tried to stick it out and began to fit in and get respect. I was nearing the solo reading stage when I began to bow out, the pressure was too much. I had found a way to hang out with my co-workers anyway. I took to booze. I hadn't been to a party with my peers since elementary school. I had always been afraid of what was supposed to go on at parties, I didn't know what I was supposed to do there. Now I had a purpose, wander around getting drunk and stoned.
My peer group was uber sexualized. I had not been prepared, I thought high school would be the peek. I thought men were supposed to have passed their peek at 18! Everybody was shtuping everybody. Even the customers would hit on the employees. Luckily there was so much other good creative energy in the store that there were plenty of other things to concentrate on. I was focused on art making.
When my brother finished high school he came up to join me. I'd always looked up to my little brother because he was social in the way I couldn't be. I began to follow him around, having a partner at the party was key. The other solution came by accident, after a month of homelessness we scored a month by month lease on a rehearsal space. We had wanted to start bands since forever, now we had that chance. Our space became a creative center, a scene unto itself. The bands that we created there only played out three times total. It was a non-sexualized space. People of all genders and sexualities and interests and backgrounds came to jam with us. I finally started to feel like one of the gang. Unfortunately, feelings of acceptance and comfort would eventually be challenged. My increased sociability had finally gotten me to parties. The men wanted to compete, the women wanted to co-mingle. I kept up the veneer of the hetero but was happily going along dateless, living my life the way I was happiest. That veneer caught a snag though and I ended up on a date by accident. Luckily, the relationship didn't last long. I think she was still hung up on an ex. She still had photos of his eyes around. We never had sex but we did have naked contact. It was from her that I got my first hummer. I discovered that I hated that, even more than penetrative sex. I couldn't stand to look at it as it was happening and tried to pull her away. That brought the depression back, the confusion. Straight men, it seemed were all about blow jobs, so how could I be straight if I hated them? If I recoiled anytime a woman even so much as reached for my junk? If I felt uncomfortable, or was totally unaware (as I often was), around flirtation? This is when I first began to drink from the time I opened my eyes to the moment I passed out at night.
Drink would become my sense of "masculine" self. And it led me down a road I did not want to follow, it allowed for the replacement of my own feelings with the expectations of society. It made me feel like one of the boys, sure. And now I had something besides athletic competition to prove my worth with. The art geeks, big surprise, weren't big on sport so heroic consumption of booze was the deciding factor. I still didn't want to win against anyone, but I wanted it to be thought of as a possibility. It also just gave me a sense of inclusion in the world. The art store I worked at had all the sexual possibilities working in its walls. Gay folks of every sort, bi etc., transgender, uber hetero, drag queens, you name it. In that plethora of possibility I found nothing to float my boat. There was a woman who described herself as asexual, but she was a quiet goth who wore Morissey shirts. I assumed that it was jus some goth fetish thing, celibacy. I did notice that she treated me differently, but she wasn't in my bawdy punk circles so that possibility slipped away. So I was still just straight, and the women never relented. I found out to my horror that some straight women find it attractive when a man ignores them and their advances. So when my straight male best friend told me that my straight female best friend liked me that way I tried to feel the same for her. I couldn't but I asked her out anyway. I was terrified that it'd all prove true and she'd say yes. She did, of course, and so I began my attempt to be a hetero after all. On our first date I did try to lay some ground rules. I told her that I didn't want to have sex for a month, to be sure that she cared about me. She haggled me down to two weeks. She could hardly wait. I didn't understand how, what was so important about sex that people needed it so fast? When I lost my virginity at 18, the girl had been shocked that I had never dated. She thought I masturbated constantly. I didn't and have never understood the connection.
I'm not gonna go into full detail here about my relationship with "Sally" (not her real name) I'll just try to give you the important parts. She was insatiable and demanded sex sometimes multiple times a day. I began to take it as an endurance sport. I could go anywhere she wanted to explore because none of it was weirder than the missionary position to me. I tried to find satisfaction in making her happy. I did love her, she was my best friend, and society told me that my feelings must be sexual so I tried to accept that. My brother and I put our youth behind us and got an actual apartment, our girlfriends and best friends moved in with us. Two hetero couples and two straight men, very normal. She told me what to do always. When she'd complain that she didn't get romantic gifts I'd get her gifts. When she said I never initiated sex, I'd try to initiate. The fact that we were drinking buddies was our glue, it was where I could feel like a man. I became a championship level heavy drinker. I tried to carry on with the hetero life plan. She even got pregnant and had an abortion at one point. It only reminded me of when I was in my late teens, trying to imagine having a family. I love kids, and teaching them about the world, showing them all the cool stuff. I had never been able to picture me fathering a child though, and I especially had never been able to picture any partner in that rearing process. I was with a woman, but she was demanding that she never wanted kids or to be married. I was relieved if I'm honest. It was a hard time none-the-less. Especially hard on her. When my brother left town with his partner to pursue his own life Sally and I moved into our own one bedroom. Shortly thereafter one of Sally's parents died. It was shortly after that that she broke up with me. I didn't leave for six months, until the lease was up. We stayed friends and after a few months she wanted me back, I hadn't considered it but she was my best friend. I went back and became totally emotionally subordinate.
Her world had changed, she had slept with another man in the interim, one of her male friends from high school. I wasn't mad or offended, just hurt that she wouldn't tell me who it'd been. Although I had a couple good guesses. I let it pass. The change was that she now wanted kids, to be married. Her family wanted it. We were fast approaching our 30's. I became the care taker. I walked her dogs and gave her cat her meds. I cooked, and cleaned. I was her ear to bend, shoulder to cry on. I did everything she asked. Bought her what she wanted, took her to the places she wanted to go. She began to complain more and more that I only did these things with prompting, that I showed no romance. Our drinking was just getting worse.
One summer day, just over a year before it all ended, I was reading the local alt-weekly on my back porch. Dan Savage's column. In it was a letter from an asexual, trying to figure out what to do about his sexual partner. Savage explained asexuality in brief and then told this person to end his relationship. That what he was doing was unfair to her, that he shouldn't be there because there was nothing for him to offer. I knew he was talking to me. It scared me so much I blocked it out immediately, unconsciously pounding shot after shot of vodka there, in the middle of a hot August day. When Sally came home the drinking continued.
The relationship took an ugly turn and this is when I began to feel emasculated. She was constantly accusing me. I was either "cheating on her" or "should be" or I was "gay now" or ..., or ... she didn't know. All she knew was that I "wasn't a man". Sally has self-esteem and body issues of her own, and I don't think I was helping matters I still feel a certain amount of guilt over what I put her through. Sometimes she would demand to know how long it'd been since we'd had sex. I never knew, "a week, maybe?" No, it'd had always been a month or two. I couldn't keep track. She had noticed that I could only have sex if I was drunk. Everything was my fault. Eventually she did leave me, and I ended up in a shared punk house in Lower Allston with one of my former band mates.
When I was with Sally, I had latched on to my punk rock past as my happy times. She hated punk and didn't let me listen to it in her presence. In truth, everything that made me happy that wasn't her, pissed her off. My art, my attitude toward my art, the music that I liked to make, my desire to go on long walks alone. She told me that none of it was any good, that no-one would ever care. In Allston I began to pursue everything that she'd denied. I was welcomed back into the punk fold and loved it. But something was wrong. My disconnect with straight men kept finding expression.
After the worst winter of my life, one filled with suicidal drinking where I was selling my prized possessions (my books and cameras) for booze, came and unprecedented spring. I was starting to recognize that the person I was, wasn't me. I did things that felt wrong all the time, but I felt compelled to destroy myself. I began to re-engage in riskier behaviors. Suicidal biking, shoplifting, destruction of public property. I was trying to escape, jail and death didn't seem like bad options. When I tried to revive my own musical output, it was pure anger, and many of the songs had a clear death wish. One night I went off to some basement show at Problem House with a recently dumped young male friend. He was weepy and looking for god knows what. The show was good, and when I was smoking outside afterwards a young woman came up to me. We talked a while and it turned out that one of her favorite Street Artists was one that I was about to install at a local museum. After chatting she foisted her digits on me saying "hit me up sometime". She hugged me, and departed, smiling at me as she went up the stairs and away. It was weird. I had totally convinced myself that I was straight but as this 20 year old walked away from me I felt nothing but trepidation. I'm only realizing this now, but it sent me into a spiral.
For two weeks I debated calling her, I asked advice and no-one thought she was too young. It seemed that it was a bonus for a guy in his early 30's to get a date with a girl who wasn't old enough to go to a bar. In asking opinions I heard some of the guys say that they couldn't find any beauty in a man, apropos of nothing. Straight men seem to need to re-enforce this dictum on the regular. And I was also made aware that the only reason, any of my unattached friends went to a party or a show was to get laid. I was starting to feel even more lost. Sally had hurt me by ending what I had seen as an enduring friendship that I had given everything too, though not enough. Now I was feeling that same distance amongst the world where I thought I'd be safe and happy. After a couple months the suicidal thoughts were swirling around me. I finally accepted that the way I was living was not me. I got sober. I thought I had solved everything, but the more sober I got, the more I recognized that there was something else, something I had to deal with. Without knowing what it was or where I was headed I moved forward, searched my soul, my life and my world until I found myself, asexual, at last.
The point of all of this has been to illustrate the effects of the lie I had been told as a little boy, back before all of this exclusion and confusion had gotten to me. Back when I was still happy, and the world reacted to me the way I did to it. The lie was the definition of masculinity I had been given. My whole life, all I've wanted to be, at the core of it was a man. My problem was that I didn't fit the template completely. I like things that men are supposed to like, genuinely. Sport (playing not watching), getting dirty, working with my hands. But that was never enough. I could see quite plainly that these areas were not the exclusive arena of straight men. They thought it was theirs alone but they were accompanied by straight women, gay men and women, transgender folks and transvestites even. And I could see that they were far more feminine than they were willing to admit. I saw no barrier that stood between actions and interests other than the seemingly arbitrary line of gender. Sex seemed to be at the center of it all.
I have gender, I am a man, I just have no sex in me. I am physically male, hormonally male, so I act male, am perceived as such. No one questions that. But all men, gay or straight are meant to fuck. We're supposedly always thinking about sex, turning and twisting for it, if not, you're not a man. Straight folks had trouble accepting that gay men were masculine, but they had equal trouble with the idea that gay women were sometimes masculine as well. I don't know why, even the women straight guys are after are pretty butch sometimes. So where does that leave me?
I think that "masculinity" and "femininity" are merely what the sexual world needs to attract specific sexual interests. They are not the actual definitions of the words. When talking with a couple straight male co-workers recently I discovered this in more detail. Since coming out I've stopped suppressing my own opinions and view point. One of the guys was expressing his confusion at the way some super macho guys are more like the women they pursue than they know. I pointed out that they needed to display a certain amount of feminine traits, perfumes, hair care, clothing etc to attract the hyper feminine girls they were after. They made themselves extra macho to offset this, and redouble the attraction. I pointed out that Bears do this when cruising for Twinks. Sexual gender roles are constructs of their desires. Physical fact can only take you so far, some folks aren't born the gender they know they are at heart. These ideas of masculinity are not set in stone. Men just play the role they have to, to get laid. So, again, where does that leave me? Happy and free, I finally know that no body can determine what my emotions mean, only I can interpret them. Knowing that "butch-ness" and "girlie-ness" are sexual constructs, and that I have never been part of that world, has finally made it possible for me to not care what the world may think. I am comfortable in my manhood. And I don't mean anything dirty by that. I'm a man, and nobody can take that away from me.
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