THE NAKED ANIMAL

My therapist once told me that the years between eight and thirteen are always the hardest to talk about for people, and sure enough, I could barely string two sentences together when trying to describe scenes from that era to her. Since then, I’ve attempted to write about certain events from that time, but they’re wrapped in a haze and unreachable by either technique or poetry. This has puzzled me for a while. Did something really awful happen during this time that I am repressing, or is it something more subtle, perhaps even more insidious?

I got my answer when I watched an old video of myself (tranfered from Super 8!) performing in skating competitions back in the 70s. There I am landing jumps and doing footwork and everything, but otherwise feigning nonchalance. In this footage, I perform with no expression whatsoever; I merely go through the moves. Then the camera follows me off the floor where I talk to my coach, and in one particular cut, I’m talking quite animatedly to him with my hands on my hips, fingers facing backwards. I glance at the camera; sheer terror dilates my pupils and immobilizes my face for a split second as I shift my hands so that they’re lower on my hips and my fingers are facing forward.

This was one of many things that my mother, other people’s mothers, my teachers, my schoolmates and various random bystanders told me as they gathered in a tacit culture-wide effort to meld me into the semblance of a heterosexual male, though they could see I was a big faerie: Women put their hands on their hips like THIS (hands at the level of the belly button, fingers facing backward), and men put their hands on their hips like THIS (hands just below the hipbones, fingers facing forward). I was also regularly chastised by just about everyone at the skating rink any time I tried to sneak something the least bit graceful or balletic into my routine–while other guys were mysteriously allowed to queen it up–so it’s no wonder that I was devoid of any personality whatsoever during those performances.

In fact, I was devoid of any personality whatsoever no matter what I was doing. I was so busy constantly monitoring myself for feminine gestures and substituting the correlative male ones that I had no time for an actual personality. Instead, I was furiously working away at developing a persona that no one could ridicule or tear apart so easily, lost in a fugue far more complex than the term “self-conscious” could describe. And I did a great job at it, because I’ve always put my heart and soul into all my endeavors–it’s just that many of them have been self destructive. But seriously, I’m a real artist at it. Self expression had no place in my life. I didn’t even know what it meant. What I was after was a simple respite from constant nagging–even at the expense of my true self. Is it harsh to say I took the easy road out by learning how to “pass” as “normal”? Anyway, I was a kid, and apparently kids are not to be blamed to any great degree for their own actions.

Then suddenly, I wasn’t a kid anymore. When I was thirteen, I discovered both drugs and sex, which opened a maze of conjoined, hidden, alternate universes to me, in any of which I could be myself–at least as convincingly as I possibly could considering my lack of practice in the field. But at least, in those worlds, there was a part of me that felt the fresh air for the first time since I’d begun walking and talking (too much like a girl, even at first). Not that I turned into a flagrant flamer and called everyone “Mary” or anything when allowed to “be myself”–no, my true self was filled much more with anger and fantasy, in equal parts: the anger was in response to the fact that I’d been forced to create a false self in order to survive, and the fantasy was my imagination feverishly constructing a different reality construct, where no one is forced to perform such a violent, invasive operation on himself, and everyone lives in peace and harmony. Yup, I’d like to teach the world to sing. But I’m still learning the song myself.

Perhaps that time of my life doesn’t need to be dredged up any more comprehensively than I’ve done in this post. Recounting the events of the past is only rewarding if you’re searching for their import. If you’ve already gotten emotional satisfaction from your memories without having to tell the whole damned story, incident by mundane little incident, then wouldn’t it be better to spend the time and narrative impetus on moving forward instead? Or do people really enjoy wallowing in the minutiae of reality as regurgitated onto the written page? My mother tells me that people like to read “real” things. I, on the other hand, don’t. I like to read about things that are exactly not “reality,” at least as generally agreed upon, and I like to write those kinds of things, too. So it’s somewhat troubling to me that I feel this sort of compulsion to write a comparatively nuts-n-bolts account of my wild and somewhat dark cavort through the passages of time.

I really don’t know where all this autobiographical writing is going, but I do know this: From age eight to thirteen, I formed an impenetrable cocoon about myself from which the butterfly is still attempting to emerge. Is that age difficult to talk about for everyone (according to my therapist) because everyone goes through an analogous process during that period whether they’re gay, straight, black, white or otherwise? If so, then I propose that it would be a big step toward accelerated human evolution if we all got together and got rid of the part of the growth process where people have to perfect being something they aren’t before finding out what and who they really are–if, in fact, they can do so at all after so many years of denying it. But I don’t think I’d win any votes on that platform....

Categories: backstory, psychotherapy