1 I am nine years old in 1986 when Prince’s album Parade is released. One night I catch the music video for his song “Kiss” on Entertainment Tonight and am enchanted by the singer’s lithe body, centered on a sparse stage. Prince’s movements are precise and angular but unpredictable; his eyes glint with mischievous pleasure, yet he’s serious too. I get the sense that he’s baring himself, that he’s exposed, like a thrilling secret shamelessly in the open. This creature could run away with your heart if you let him. And I want to let him.
I mimic his moves in our living room, pointing a finger in the air and jutting my hips. As I spin on socked feet, I’m surprised to find my dad watching from the dining room, lips a thin line.
“Turn that shit off,” he says, crashing onto the couch in his sweatpants. His eyes refuse to meet mine. I slink to my room to read, ashamed. I’m not sure what compels me about Prince, but I know it’s in direct opposition to my father.
2 The following summer I have sleepovers with my cousins. We sit in a circle on my aunt Barbara’s living-room rug and listen to singles of “Only in My Dreams,” “Hungry like the Wolf,” and “Karma Chameleon” and the soundtrack from Grease, one of the few movies we all agree is worth watching over and over. Sometimes we dance—wildly, terribly. I secretly wish to transform, like Olivia Newton-John at the end of Grease, into badass, leather-clad sex appeal.
My cousin Jenny sleeps in a four-poster bed with a frilly pink canopy. It is an island of pillows and linens in a room full of crumpled clothes, plastic jewelry, dolls, and keepsakes. Posters of pop icons plaster the walls. I spend quiet afternoons in front of them, admiring Debbie Gibson, all dimples in a bowler hat; Simon Le Bon’s shoulder-length mullet, not a hair out of place; Boy George, with his lips painted crimson. It’s not their fame that entrances me, it’s their style, their comfort in their own skin. Their freedom.
I envy them that.
Jenny spreads her makeup collection over her bed. Compact in hand, she puts on eyeliner, rouge, and lipstick while I watch.
“Wanna try?” she asks.
Many confident, gorgeous men stare at me from the walls. They all seem to be wearing makeup. This is what a man can be too, I imagine them whispering. I’m nervous, but I want what they have. So I nod, and Jenny paints my lips red and succulent. I smile at myself in the mirror. Lipstick smears my front teeth. “You look pretty!” she says.
I agree. But then, with a glance at the door, Jenny hands me a kleenex. “Here, take this. You’re going to get me in trouble for wasting makeup.”
3 The Welsh crooner Tom Jones records “Kiss” with the band Art of Noise in 1988, and, like Prince’s original, the video is a hit. In it Jones wears a black suit with a turtleneck and, perhaps in homage to the jacket Prince discards, a long trench coat that he also removes mid-video. But where Prince’s body was exposed, Jones’s, aside from his face and hands, is hidden.
When he reaches the “Think I wanna dance” bridge, Jones edits Prince’s expression of desire to “Think I better dance,” then sways around the screen in a goofy, self-deprecating way. Even as a kid I can tell he’s stiff, that there’s an attitude of Aww, shucks, I’m dancing, a performative bashfulness, as if he’s only doing it because he has to, because it’s what the music-video demands, not because it’s fun. I find him awkward and inhibited, the opposite of Prince’s liberated and natural ease.
I think the video is cheesy as shit, but when it appears on Entertainment Tonight, Dad lets it play all the way through. “It’s nice seeing a man sing it,” he says.
4 On a warm spring night when I’m thirteen, my dad tells me to help him pull the trash cans to the curb. As we do, he asks if I’m gay.
I am surprised. Not because I identify as gay but because I thought I was doing a good job of aping heterosexual masculinity in front of him, of hiding the discomfort of waking up every morning in skin that feels like an ill-fitting suit.
He stands on the sidewalk, his mouth set tight, and I tell him no, I’m not.
“It’s OK if you are,” he says, looking at me seriously, almost confrontationally. “I’d just think of you as my daughter instead of my son.”
I intuit that if this is how he sees the world—male/female, straight/gay—then I’m not going to be able to express who I am in a way that he’ll understand. This makes me want to kick the trash cans over. This makes me want to punch something in frustration: Maybe my dad. Maybe myself.
“Dad, it’s cool. I’m not.”
I can’t even bring myself to say the word gay. I hear it at school, directed at me: Gay. Homo. Gaybird. Fag. During one recess a boy tells me he’s sorry for calling me these things. He offers his hand in apology. I’m so naive that I take it, and he pulls me forward and knees me in the crotch so hard I cry. He runs off laughing at what a dumb faggot I am.
I don’t think I am gay, but maybe I am. At thirteen the whole subject of sex—no matter if it’s with women or men or even myself—makes me squirm. Fucking bodies are the worst.
5 Aunt Barbara organizes a family outing to a restaurant theater named for Lillie Langtry, the British actress who was the Victorian equivalent of a pop star—and the mistress of the future King Edward VII. On a Sunday after church we gather at a long table not far from the stage. This is an upscale lunch for us, and my dad is disgusted to see Aunt Barbara spring for expensive crab cakes only to slather them in ketchup. We watch an hour-long variety show with a parlor magician; a coquettish crooner; and women in feathered headdresses, fishnet stockings, and corseted lingerie, who parade across the stage and give knowing winks to the audience.
It’s an uncomfortable scene for a family that doesn’t discuss sex. Dad loves a dirty joke, but we’ve never talked about what intercourse is. My mom’s sister Nancy, a Carmelite nun, tries to be game, though it’s clear from the hard set of her jowls that she disapproves of the tawdry spectacle. Grandmom and my little brother don’t say much but watch closely with wide eyes.
Dad and Aunt Barbara poke fun at everyone. They think my little brother is adorable and interpret his interest in the women as ogling—though, as my dad puts it, “he wouldn’t know what to do with one if he got her.”
“I think this is too much for Brian Patrick,” Aunt Barbara says, referring to me by my first and middle names, as she does all the kids.
“See something you like there, Bri?” Dad asks me.
My mom seems to be soldiering through but probably wants to go home as soon as possible.
During dessert the dancers sweep through the dining room, tempting men to slip money into their garters. My brother gives one of them a dollar, to the table’s delight. (“Isn’t he something?” Grandmom says.) Aunt Barbara also pushes cash at me, but the thought of touching a woman—of touching anyone—makes me dizzy. The whole scene confounds me: Why is this frilly display of sex considered all-ages entertainment, while Prince’s mysterious and funky video is off-limits? I implicitly feel the difference between the two kinds of performances—how one makes me feel confined and the other liberated.
6 The first time I wear a skirt is trick-or-treating with friends when I’m a freshman in high school. It is my first year out of Catholic school, and, emancipated from the teasing there, I decide to dress up as a prostitute.
My dad considers me too old for trick-or-treating. In general he seems perplexed by me. At my age he played stickball on the streets of Philadelphia, dated my mother, and disdained high school. He eventually learned a trade like his father. I spend weekend nights at home reading novels and watching indie movies. In school I make honors and am nominated by my teachers for the gifted program.
My mom indulges my Halloween-costume needs. She seems to find my commitment to it sweet. She buys me fishnet stockings and drives me to Aunt Barbara’s, where, as Mom and Grandmom catch up over a cup of tea, my cousin Jenny lets me try on her blouses and skirts until I find one that flares in a way I can’t resist. Jenny lets me use her makeup, too—I choose a shocking shade of red lipstick, louder than anything my mom wears. When Grandmom is taken aback by the sight of me in a skirt, Mom tells her I’m like an actor dressed up for the stage, and she’s right, though not in the way she thinks she is.
The night of Halloween, with a cheap wig curtailing my vision, I totter around on my cousin’s too-small heels, shivering in the cold. When I ring doorbells, I hike up my skirt and coo, “Hey, handsome, treat for a trick?” if a man answers the door or, “Is the man of the house at home?” if a woman does. The exaggerated, sexualized femininity reflects the misogyny of the day, but it also enables a brazen and direct expression of desire. In performance, imprisoned truth can be unlocked.
Some adults laugh and play along. Others don’t find me funny at all. One disapproving older woman tells me I’m “fresh.” A boy in my party, a tagalong younger brother, says that I’ve got problems. I bat my eyes at him, making him blush. Ali, the girl I had a crush on all through middle school but have now settled into a platonic acquaintanceship with, says, “Brian, you are so weird!” But she says it with honey in her voice. That Ali has gone from a person who ignored me to one who finds me funny, if strange, feels like progress.
7 I kiss a boy, several of them over the years. The first time is in the spring of my freshman year at Oberlin. At a Saturday-night party a dozen of us are passing the bong in the common room when someone kicks an empty beer bottle into the center of the circle and suggests we play spin the bottle. After a few turns we up the ante: kissing and also removing our clothes.
Whatever spirits are in the bottle draw a magnetic line between me and one young woman, Logan, an artist with big, piercing eyes and fair skin. We end up locked at the lips again and again. Her boyfriend, Dan—a jazz trumpeter who, like Logan, only wears black—wonders in jest if we’ve planned this somehow, because after the first couple of kisses Logan and I have started getting bold in our explorations of one another. “You know, you guys don’t have to kiss every time. You could take a pass. Give someone else a try.”
Then I spin, and the bottle lands on Dan. “OK, that’s it,” he says, beckoning me with his finger. “Get over here.”
His face is boyish and soft, but he has sharp, angular cheekbones and sensual lips. We kiss long and hard, pawing one another’s bare arms and shoulders. We lean into each other until we lose our balance. When we come up for air, Logan says, “Damn!”
Dan says he understands now why Logan was so excited to keep kissing me. Stoned though I am, I’m blushing. This is the first time I’ve been called a good kisser.
Before long a security guard, beckoned by the wafting smell of pot, breaks up the party. Logan and Dan creep upstairs, the circle disperses, and I find myself in my room with my clothes on once more, reading before bed as though the Frenching fest never happened. College can be like that: one minute, a bacchanal; the next, back to the books. My mind flits back to Logan and Dan and how their lips felt not at all different aside from the scratch of Dan’s stubble. It wasn’t unpleasant or unusual to kiss him or any of the other boys in that circle. Kissing a man is pretty much the same as kissing a woman.
8 I don’t date or hook up for the first two years of college. The gay men want men, and the women feel the same, except the lesbians. And everyone, it seems, wants people who know what they want, not people trying to solve the puzzle of themselves.
I begin to dress in clothing from the women’s side of the thrift store. I know at least one gay punk who wears a skirt, but the dominant homosexual-male culture on campus doesn’t embrace drag, cross-dressing, or gender-bending. This is the late nineties, when a man who dresses in women’s clothing is a “transvestite,” a term used at best in a belittling way, if not as a straight-up insult. Even at an open-minded place like Oberlin, I hear “transvestite freak” more than once, from fellow students as well as from a few townies who scream it from their car windows as they drive by.
Once, at the tail end of a house party, I nearly fight a guy because I’m tired of the jeers and labels, and the only way I can think to demonstrate my masculinity is with anger. “Say that again,” I tell him, getting close. “Say it to my face.”
“Relax,” he says. “I’m joking, all right?” But he doesn’t apologize. Instead he rejoins his friends, and they direct loaded looks my way, as if the problem is my pain, my “issues,” rather than the violence of his words.
9 Sophomore year I am a dorm coordinator and help organize a talent show. In the same lounge where we gathered for spin the bottle a year before, we circle the ratty red couches to create an impromptu stage and close the dingy white curtains to provide a backdrop. A few well-placed lamps provide mood lighting. Beers are distributed and joints smoked. The place is packed. A band covers “The Humpty Dance.” A quartet in matching jumpsuits and cardboard proton packs dances to “Ghostbusters.” A prodigy in the Conservatory of Music plays an exquisite original composition on the off-key grand piano.
Near the end of the night I step forward. My long, wavy hair is relaxed, and I’m wearing striped black-and-white stockings and a loose navy button-up open to reveal a crimson teddy underneath. My friend Kelly agrees to slide her chair forward from the rest of the audience to be my focal point. With my eyes on her and bordello jazz, replete with wah-wah horns, playing from an old boom box, I begin to dance.
People hoot and holler. I break away from Kelly and flirt with the audience, pursing my lips and swaying my hips, the teddy riding up just a bit. After a minute of tease, I lie on the floor, arching my back in faux ecstasy. Then I slowly peel first one and then the other striped stocking down my leg and off, throwing them into the crowd. I wrap my shirt like a scarf around Kelly’s shoulders and writhe in her lap. She plays along, miming surprise and excitement.
Then the teddy is over my head, and I stand in front of the crowd in only my turquoise boxer briefs, striding in circles around Kelly’s chair, whipping my long legs in front of me, and wagging my ass. The crowd yells, “Do it, baby!” and, “Yeah, Brian!”
Beforehand I choreographed every move in my head, listening to the music over and over, practicing how I would seduce them. It’s working. I have them in my thrall. Now for the climax.
I pause with my pelvis forward, one foot resting on Kelly’s thigh. I put my finger in the elastic strap of my boxer briefs and pull it down just a bit. The crowd screams when they catch a hint of pubic hair. Kelly puts her hands over her mouth, blushing and shaking her head dramatically but laughing too. Which is when I fully yank down my boxer briefs to reveal—a ruse, because underneath I’m wearing a pair of tight red underwear. And inside that underwear is a sock that I’ve rolled into a tube. I shimmy the boxer briefs down my hairy legs, then swing them over my head. After a few more shivers and thrusts the music fades, and my burlesque ends.
I take it all in: an audience that includes nearly everyone I live with, smiling and cheering at me; my face hot with exertion; and a thin sheen of sweat on my bare back that’s already beginning to go cold. These are people I don’t just live with and consider friends, but people who, in my position as the dorm coordinator, I protect from the college administration, covering for their daily 4:20 smoke breaks, the kegs of beer in their rooms, the blackouts and bad trips, and all the other experimentation with bodies and substances that happens when sixty-plus young adults live in the same building. It is the first caregiving role I’ve taken on, and it means a lot to me to shield these lovely free spirits from the powers that be.
And yet I’m also just like them: confused and hungry—for what, though, I’m not sure. Here on this makeshift stage I’m exposed, nearly naked, except I’m not even really me—I’ve got a prosthesis stuffed in my underwear. For all my dreaming and anticipating, I hadn’t thought of what it would feel like to be standing before the audience when the song ended: show over, yet still performing. My role during the dance felt clear. I experienced my first taste of freedom, and it was beautiful, and it was freaky. Now I’m embarrassed, anxious, and unsure. Are they even laughing with me anymore? Or are they laughing at me?
Next semester I’ll become embittered, and the liberation of wearing a dress and barrettes will begin to feel like another kind of cage. I’ll give away my blouses and trim my hair. I’ll parody hypermasculine tropes to such an extent that it will be hard to know where the satire ends and true misogyny begins. It will be many years before I’ll let myself wear my hair long, paint my toenails, adorn my eyes with makeup, and celebrate my queerness. Right now I don’t even want to be seen. I take a few leaping steps back to the dusty curtains and wrap them around me. “Stop staring!” I yell at the crowd. “Go away!”
People continue hooting, as if this were part of the act. It’s only my cohost who comes to my aid, snatching my shirt from where I tossed it and handing it to me. Afterward she says, “As soon as the show ended, that hot dancer disappeared, and there you were—shy little you.”
