Manhood goes in many different directions, and…to say, “I am a man” is not a transparently clear utterance. Am I really a man? Is it easy to know what a man is? Do I become a man just by saying, in an act of performance, that I am?
—Wayne Koestenbaum, Humiliation
ONE OF MY COMMON cries to the universe on the nights when I literally sobbed myself to sleep in conservative little Cornwall, Ontario, was Where are the people like me? There was Dana, of course, to whom I clung, but as a group of one, she felt rare rather than like a community.
As we grew out of our teens and into our twenties in the early 1990s, we didn’t find our people in Toronto either. Likely because it’s hard to find your kind when you aren’t living your own best self. Dana was in the closet about being trans, and I was trying to train myself not to be too terrified to be looked at. I’d hoped I might find my people in Vancouver, where I moved to in order to do a creative writing MFA. Grad school fine arts, right? It’d be full of handsome young men eager for an artfag romance. No such luck. I met wonderful writers there who’ve become a solid bunch of colleagues a lot more famous than me, but no gays.
Only when I was done with the degree and most of my writing friends had moved back to whatever city they’d come from did I start to find the queers. With the simplest of invitations, life exploded.
Kim Kinakin—who’d been in the popular Vancouver alt-rock band Sparkmarker—sent out requests to join a queer punk collective to all the gay artists and weirdos and politicos he knew. Kim wanted to see more alternatives to the mainstream silos of LGBTQ events where all the types only hung out with their own types. His idea was simple and wildly productive: by using a LISTSERV (which was new enough at the time that the technology felt intimidating yet progressive), we could accumulate an audience of interested queers for alternative events in Vancouver. Folks could sign themselves onto the LISTSERV, and anyone could email when they had an event to announce. This was life before Facebook. It worked beautifully.
The first event Kim planned was a concert at the down-and-dirty Cobalt, when it was still a dive and sans scenester. His new band, the Skinjobs, was queer punk with go-go dancers. The band had a Blade Runner aesthetic; everyone sported Daryl Hannah’s black eye streak. I was immediately in love with all of them. After that first buzz-happy concert, I joined them as one of their drag-queen, punk-rock go-go dancers. During the next three years, our goal for each concert, as the three bandmates put it, was to upstage them. We blew bubbles, threw water, stripped naked, deepthroated bananas, fed suckers to audience members, and generally made ourselves a dancing spectacle.
To participate in the Queer Punk (QP) Collective, poet Billeh Nickerson and I decided we’d do what poets do—organize a literary cabaret. We wanted to meet other queer writers and artists; we wanted them to meet each other. At this same time, I began to cruise the parks, and I felt my sexuality explode with possibility and opportunity. My back acne had cleared by this time, thanks to medication so harsh they warned me I could go blind, though I thought the stats made my risk worthwhile.
Billeh and I started a performance night at the Dufferin Hotel. To inject some perv into the poetry, we called the night “Skank, A Literary Smut Cabaret.” It ran about once every six months, hosting writers of smut and transgression alongside stand-up nudist comics, composers of opera, and performance artists. It was high art with lowbrow content—an embrace of the underbelly. Our guests included every gender, they were pansexual, and from all ages and creative disciplines. We wanted to create a queer space where everyone was welcome.
When Billeh and I were in the early stages of organizing and agreed we were both going to host, I said, “We can’t have a queer cabaret without a drag queen.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” he replied.
When I pressed the point, saying queer wasn’t queer without genderfuck, Billeh asked wryly, “You want me to do drag, Michael V.?”
Although I was a mouthy, assertive smart-ass, I was terrified to let Billeh know how much I wanted to do dress-up. It was okay to put on a dress, but it wasn’t okay to let folks know how much I wanted to.
“I’ve done drag before,” I replied. “I can be the drag queen.” I half-expected him to scoff, Who do you think you are?
“Okay,” he said, “if you want to. Sure.”
I’d only once done drag in Vancouver up to that point, and not very creatively. Now that I wasn’t drinking, my blonde Ontario character wasn’t much fun; she no longer suited me. But I’d been dying for a good reason to put on a dress again, to show Vancouver (where even the geeks worked out at the gym) that my stick arms and legs could be sexy. Most of my dress-up was in boxes at Paul’s house in Toronto, so Skank was my good excuse to spend some money I didn’t have in order to feel attractive again. The next day, I bought a short black wig at Dressew, Vancouver’s costume emporium, and found some cheap heels and dresses at a Sally Ann. There’s no better feeling in the world for a bald man who once had hippie-long hair than to put on a wig and tease it.
The Dufferin had three bars: a main space for dancing and drag shows, a side bar for karaoke, and a lower bar with a male strip show every half hour. Rumour had it that the boys were paid only five dollars a song—they usually did three in a row—but many of them used it as an advertisement for other services. When we pitched Skank to the Duff, we asked if we could roll their strippers into our cabaret, which they were happy to do.
My friends loved the Dufferin; it was one of the best things about Vancouver. Friends from Seattle came up just to spend their evenings there. Everything happened under that roof. Or better still, everything could happen. The Duff held promise. I saw my fair share of drug deals, break-ups, staggering drunks, cartwheels, train wrecks, cat fights, hand jobs after the lights came up, fifty-something cross-dressers blowing off steam from their day jobs in construction, trans queens we recognized from their ads in the back pages of Xtra! West, and thin shirtless boys not old enough for chest hair.
The stage downstairs at the Duff was three feet off the floor, but about the width of two duffel bags or maybe twenty loaves of bread. Everything had to happen in tight quarters. I’d heard the story about the dancer who’d fucked a barbecue-roasted chicken on that stage. Another night, he walked out the side door to the lower bar partway through his song, completely naked, with a Coke bottle up his butt, and returned about a minute later before the song ended with a lit cigarette. He was fired months before our show, but that was fine, because we had Rylee.
Rylee was a young blond married man (ahem, straight) studying at Simon Fraser University, who danced, he told Billeh, because he loved getting naked. His moments on stage were more performance art than strip show. In one Skank piece, he wore an alien mask but was otherwise naked as he tried to drive a twenty-inch knife into the glass monitor of an old television set. Each full-body thrust of the knife skidded off the surface of the television screen toward Rylee’s bare feet and shins. I prepared in my head what to do when either he stabbed his leg or broke the glass and shredded his hand. Thanks to a guardian angel who admired his bar skills, the music stopped before he could do himself or the TV damage. Someone later told me that Rylee got fired from the Duff when, after an argument with management, he showed up in the lower bar wielding a match and shaking a full gas can around.
Anything could happen at the Duff.
At Skank, we filled the lower bar wall-to-wall. Hipsters mixed with feminists mixed with artists mixed with academics mixed with the post-retirement regulars who’d first tried out being gay when most of our parents were in diapers.
At the first Skank night, my high-heeled legs shook so badly when I climbed onto that small propped-up soapbox of a stage, I seriously imagined tumbling off my heels and cracking my head. If you trip, I told myself, drop straight down. It’s the shortest fall. For the purposes of that night, I decided to invent a new drag persona, a sober one. I wish I had a genesis story that’s full of profound insight, but Miss Cookie LaWhore exploded out of me like a character from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
We booked Tralala, a performance artist who was already a Vancouver institution, to appear onstage toward the end of the night. My guess is that she was the first woman to strip on that stage. To conclude a reading about her days in the sex industry, Tralala moved the microphone aside and asked the DJ to “hit it,” which meant Larry the bartender pressed play on the cheap CD player. Tralala did a small, slow dance until she was stripped down to her undies, which were stuffed—she was packing. Tralala is mesmerizing onstage. She comes with her own spotlight because her pale skin has a faint trace of blue beneath it, a blue so soft the eye can only see it in contrast with her red hair. She appears illuminated.
Down to just undies, Tralala didn’t even as smile as she squatted quickly and picked up a bottle of white glue placed at her heels. She twisted the cap, held the bottle over her head, and squeezed. Globs of white liquid dripped onto her body, like self-made bukkake. She rubbed her hands in ecstasy over her creamy skin, making it look, um, creamier. From inside her panties, she pulled out a small beige teddy bear. Raising it to her mouth, Tralala tore out its throat, splitting open its neck. Fake blood dripped down her face. She was a red and white sticky mess.
In heels, she bent over slowly, twisting at the side, which I came to love as one of her signature impressive moves—nobody else can swivel at the waist and touch their toes with Tralala’s ease and sauciness—then picked up a small, full, white plastic bag. She held that over her head and pulled her hands apart, splitting the bag in two. A mass of white feathers dropped from between her hands onto her body. She was tar-and-feathering herself, swapping tar for a kind of seminal glue.
As Billeh introduced the next act, I went to the women’s washroom, which was both our green room and backstage. The evening had already been a watershed. I’d been onstage in drag, wearing ridiculous outfits and being funny on the microphone. People looked at me as I let out all my girlishness, and it was a success. It was as if I’d been walking around my whole life with bandages on my face and they were suddenly cut away. My skin breathed in the smoky air of the lower Dufferin bar and felt newly unencumbered.
Stripped down to my fishnets—without undies, because it’s easier to change if you don’t wear any—and black bra, I rifled through my bags and realized I’d miscounted my outfits. I didn’t have anything new to wear for my final intro. Tralala came in to get cleaned up, still sporting feathers. Riding the high of so many homos crammed into a small room to watch other homos do dirty things onstage, including me, I plucked the largest feathers from off Tralala’s body and braided them into my fishnets to cover my crotch.
I asked Tralala if I could get away with this as an outfit, and she didn’t hesitate: “Totally. You have to wear that.”
Walking out in nothing but bra, fishnets, stilettos, and feathers, I felt a chrysalis open inside me. Until then, I’d always worn clothes, whether boy or girl outfits, buttoned up to the chin. I’d always dressed to cover both the acne scars on my back and my body hair. In my early, mostly drunken days of drag, I’d also disguised my crotch and body hair because they would interfere with “passing.”
Now, with the crowd at my stilettoed feet, I waved a hand around my groin, and said, “Tralala’s not the only one who knows what to do with feathers.”
In that moment, I was a lightning rod, struck by the power of possession. It’s the same feeling in the expression on Manet’s Olympia or in Poitier’s character retorting, “They call me Mister Tibbs”; it is the rising up unapologetically as one’s self. I felt I’d such conviction that I was sexy, I’d seduced a whole room into believing it too. Fabulousness, I learned, came not from the clothes, but from the gall to wear them. An outfit sparkles brightest if people who see it think, I could never wear that. The most fabulous thing about me that night was simply that I let myself be.
Over the next four or five years, the QP Collective busily put on art openings and poetry readings and film screenings and fundraising dances. I did drag pretty much any time I had the chance. Skank ran for three years, with our final show at The Penthouse strip club. I learned how to pole dance for that event in heels, but got so nervous the night of the show that I forgot all the safeguards and bruised myself into physiotherapy. The Skinjobs toured queer festivals like HOMO A GOGO in Olympia and Bent in Seattle with bands like The Butchies, Pansy Division, Tracy + the Plastics, and The Gossip. I emceed at HOMO A GOGO, giving introductions for Eileen Myles and Kate Bornstein. Life as a genderqueer was far more validating than life as a boy next door, which I was never good at.
By my early thirties, I was donning skirts as boywear to both art shows and work. Any day was a good day to walk up Main Street dressed all in pink. I’d gone from being the guy who was neurotic and paranoid about what he wore out of doors, who tried to fit in, to being the guy who’d wear anything.
One warm Sunday morning after an event, I was having brunch with my queer women friends at Slickity Jim’s Chat ’n’ Chew, a Main Street hangout in the years before hipsters grew beards. It was me and three of my besties, all amazing women: writer, teacher, and activist Amber Dawn; Trish Kelly, who’d organized all-ages punk shows throughout the Lower Mainland while still in high school, helping to create the riot grrrrl movement on the West Coast; and Zena Sharman, who co-edited Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. Women power queers.
I complained to them how my buddy Jeff and I recently noticed that we always went to events that attracted a predominantly lesbian audience. These parties, fundraisers, cabarets, plays, dance nights, films, spoken word events, and art gallery openings were totally lesbotic.
“Every time we go to something we like,” I said, “all the queer women are there too. And no men.”
I jokingly told them that if I were going to meet a boyfriend, I would have to hand in my lesbro card for a while.
“Jeff and I have a new strategy for meeting men,” I said. “We’re going to things we won’t enjoy.”
“That’s silly,” Amber Dawn replied. “You don’t have to stop going to things just because gay guys don’t have politics.”
“I know that. I’m kidding.” All six eyes turned to look at me. “Mostly kidding.”
“It’s not because we’re queer women,” Zena pronounced—everything she says sounds authoritative—“it’s because we’re femmes.”
I placed my hands gently on the table. “Oh my god,” I said quietly. “You’re all femmes.”
I felt my head tilt to the side to look at Amber Dawn’s ruby hair, Trish’s horn-rimmed glasses, cleavage, and super-straight bangs, Zena’s red-manicured nails and pearl drop earrings that contrasted with the new red leather thigh-highs she was sporting.
Their faces all said, Du-uh.
“I’d never realized all of you are femmes.”
“Of course we are,” someone piped up. Maybe they all did.
“I know butches. I like butches,” I said quickly, worrying that maybe I was prejudiced. Did I have lousy politics? Had I been excluding the butches from my life?
“Why are all my best lesbian friends femmes?” I asked tentatively.
Trish patted my hand like I was a slow learner and she was performing kindness and patience. “Because you are too,” she answered.
Obviously, it was obvious. I owned a pink filing cabinet, for Christ’s sake. But I’d never thought of that language as being applicable to me; femme identity was a queer woman’s term. I’d been busy working on reclaiming sissy and fag and feminine and girly and queer and femmey even, but hadn’t thought of femme. All these queer women had been busy constructing the very solid and refined house of femme while I was shouting out other names and tromping up and down the sidewalk.
In the homo film Gods and Monsters, Sir Ian McKellen as movie director James Whale describes for his handsome gardener what it was like to be born a fag into a poor Irish farm family. He says, “They meant no harm. They were like a family of farmers who’ve been given a giraffe, and don’t know what to do with the creature except harness him to the plow.”
Here I’d been, unaware that I was a giraffe. It’s not like I was unfamiliar with femme-identified faggots, as rare as they might have been. Writer Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore had been through Vancouver a couple times—we’d hosted her in some shows—and a Portland fag friend of mine had been kicking up femme heels as a boy long before she transitioned. So how could I be a giraffe and not notice my neck?
“How could I not have known?” I said aloud, incredulous.
“Sometimes it just happens like that,” Amber Dawn answered, soberly sipping orange juice.
How weird that we can look in the mirror and not see ourselves. What is so clear to others escapes us until someone taps us on the shoulder and names it.
That moment, of course, was a long time brewing. I write about it as though it was inevitable, when really it was a mess of coincidence and unknown intention and random shit, like in a pinball machine where the ball mostly just bounces around by itself, and my job was to hit the flipper every once in a while when it was important until, luckily, it shot through a hidden channel I didn’t know was there and a great bonus appeared.
Part of that femme-olution included a stand-up interactive comedy event I staged for the 2003 Fringe Festival in Vancouver. Privates, a Public Unveiling was simple: a volunteer handed out small sheets of paper before the show started, asking every audience member to write down their first name and the body part on themselves they least liked. The sheets were collected in a bucket moments before the show began.
I came out in drag and proceeded to remove my clothes in the first ten minutes, cracking jokes about the long tortured history I’d had with my body and its gender. Then, nude except for heels and a wig, I picked up the bucket, drew a card out, and read aloud the first name and body part the person had listed. They were then invited to show the audience their own embarrassing body part. If they didn’t feel comfortable, we’d solicit someone in the room who shared that dislike for their own body to do it in their stead, in solidarity. If nobody wanted to, I’d invite the audience members to remove an article of clothing together, any piece of clothing, of their own choosing. A reviewer in the Georgia Straight labelled the show “an episode of Oprah gone horribly awry.”
By the end of the show, some audience members were down to their underwear while others refused to remove so much as a shoe—which, to my mind, only proved the need for a show like that. I then pressed play on my boom box, blasted a dance song, opened the theatre doors, and invited everyone to take that body-loving courage we’d been practicing in private out into the streets. In varying stages of undress, we danced a conga line around the theatre.
About the same time I discovered Cookie, the sissy-celebrating Radical Faeries entered my life. There was a glittery pile of gender-blenders in that mix too. The faeries taught me best what it could mean to be a man and a femme.
We could spend a decade discussing what the faeries are without coming to any consensus, so here’s a biased version: each faerie is self-chosen, meaning anyone who wants to be a faerie is. Although they are pan-gender and pansexual, my group, which meets twice a year at Breitenbush Hot Springs for five-day retreats, is for men who have sex with men. That includes trans men, bi men, and anyone who self-identifies as a man and “gay,” though, as with anything a little hippie, there are always paradigm-benders.
The gatherings at Breitenbush are characterized by two main organizing principles. First, every morning there is a Heart Circle, where faeries sit down to listen to anyone who wishes to share what is in his heart—I call it the Witness Program, where we all take part in listening to stories—and second, all gatherings have drop-in events/workshops that are entirely participant driven, which means you can choose anything from ball torture to croquet. Add to that mix a healthy dose of genderbending and you might have a sliver of an insight into what an average day can be like up in the woods of the Cascadia mountains with more than a hundred gay men interested in creating an alternative community.
The goal of a faerie gathering (to my mind, because you could get a different answer from everyone) is to come together to share in a community of generosity. That means a generosity of spirit and self that, depending on your tastes, can range from sex to conversation, silence to abstinence.
Another key faerie characteristic is permission. The faeries are great at celebrating a person’s individuality at the same time as they seek community-minded living. If a man like my father were going to describe them politely, he’d say something like: every freak under the sun is welcome and celebrated for being the freakiest freak they are. The counterweight to this individualism is their notion of a tribe, that we come together as a community of men who self-identify as faeries. One person’s indulgence extends as far as another person’s critique, and between those two perspectives arises a dialogue.
Perhaps the last main feature worth mentioning is that most faeries take new names, sort of like New Age types claiming spirit animals, but more playfully. Faeries choose names that range from nicknames to taunts, from the profane to the sacred. Some choose something silly (Pussytoes, Bubbling Banana, Strangé That’s-French-You-Know); others take a moniker that embodies a way of being in the world (Princess Daddy, Gentleheart, Morgain Lessloss); there are also plants (Pansy, Acorn, Waterlily, Jicama), verbs, waterways, magical creatures, and, yes, spirit animals.
On my first trip to Breitenbush for a gathering of the Radical Faeries, I was sick to my stomach with excitement. My bones vibrated. Starting to do drag in a butch-obsessed gay community in Vancouver, I felt like the biggest sissy in the whole of Canada. Imagine you’re a young Quentin Crisp living on a pig farm. Picture men in rubber boots spitting on soggy grass that you’re trying to manoeuvre over while wearing suede shoes with an impractical heel. Not that Vancouver wasn’t cultured, but I was struck by how everybody either worked out or was athletic. Five days with soft-hearted gay men promised to bring a wealth of blessings.
Not least of which, I’d have men to wear dresses with.
Just before five a.m. on my first morning at camp, the sky was still winter black. I lay in bed for half an hour listening to the moist breathing of the other three men in the cabin. It was still two-and-a-half hours to breakfast.
Determined to find my people fast, I snuck out of bed at six. I knew from my Vancouver faerie friends that folks did dress up at mealtimes so I put on a full face of drag for breakfast. I wore two wigs—a light blue in the front that feathered out into one with black curls at the back. My dress was skintight crushed velour. Purple. With a zipper across the chest.
When I arrived, people nearly howled with enthusiasm; turns out nobody goes to such efforts on the first morning. Makeup, morning makeup especially, was as rare as a smart quote from G.W. Bush.
My dear friend Lloyd, who goes by Darlene the Ambassador’s Wife, announced at breakfast that each year he brought outfits by theme. This year, his theme was rhinestones and beads. Every outfit was geared to show off the jewellery. “I’ve had furs, lace and sheer, hats. It changes,” he said, stirring milk into his morning coffee. His manner of speaking was gentle, almost meek, but full of a kind of authority that comes from sagesse. Darlene, being the (pretend) wife of a (nameless) ambassador, makes everything sound reasonable.
He tapped the spoon on the edge of his cup. “We have to keep it fresh.”
All the enthusiasm I had for the weekend of outfits blew up in my face like a bad fart. Why had nobody mentioned themes to me?
At lunch that day I wore a thin dress, small enough to scrunch into a purse. For mealtimes, if you’re in the small minority who dress up in something to cause a spectacle, the faeries tinkle their glasses as you parade through the dining room to show it off. It’s a sissy runway with a few leather outfits thrown in.
After my meal, I approached Lloyd.
“Darlene,” I announced in a loud voice, “you only told me when I got here that you do themes. You bitch,” I said, and she giggled. “I won’t be outdone. I’ve decided to do Twos.”
I opened my purse and pulled out a bathing suit. The bottoms were a toddler’s one-piece—meant to fit over diapers, making room for my small ass—but I’d cut off the upper straps, so it simply looked high-waisted. The material intended for a child’s torso stretched over my lower abdomen, with a tiny row of black sequins lining the upper edge of fabric. It was hot pink with black polka dots. A small black vintage dickey completed the top.
In the middle of the dining hall, I stripped down and re-dressed, then did a second walk.
At each meal, I pulled out another outfit, stripped, and walked, so by lunchtime on our second day all the faeries pounded their tables and chanted “twos” just moments after I’d arrived. It was glorious validation, as a once neurotic-to-be-naked person and a lonely sissy in the world. A roomful of men was demanding I put on something tight and femmey. A roomful of men was happy to see me naked.
The best moment in my faerie life, which convinced me without a doubt that these were my people, came on the fourth day of the gathering. I’d done dress-up for every meal, but I’d go back and change for the afternoon when I was done. That last lunchtime, I had eaten early, changed into jeans and a hoodie, then went back into the dining hall looking for a friend.
Just as I entered, the faeries began to clink their glasses for someone dressed fabulous, so I turned to see who was behind me. Nobody. Someone called my name. The room was clinking for me to walk, in boy clothes. Boy clothes, they knew, were drag. The faeries thought me tinkle-worthy in them too.
For New Year’s that same year, instead of committing to get a boyfriend, a resolution that had proven a failure for nearly a decade, I resolved to take steps at self-improvement to get a boyfriend. Thanks, Therapy.
Over tea one afternoon, my buddy John and I analyzed my approach to men. We were both loudmouths who had learned to be so to compensate for being shy and socially awkward. John’s greatest strength was that he was fearlessly honest; he’d say anything to anyone. I used to think it grew out of his near-brush with death from a cancer-AIDS combo years before, but no, his partner told me, he was always obnoxious.
John isolated my two main strategies. “First, you’re a ham,” he said, “like Phyllis Diller.”
That, I realized, was my default method, where every conversation was a chance for me to make a goofy one-liner. Phyllis was a charmer, people liked her, but she never said anything of substance. Or if she did, the rib nudging made it hard to tell. You don’t date Phyllis. You certainly don’t kiss her. Eventually, you bore of her show-off antics and turn the channel.
“And then there’s your Medusa,” John added.
“Medusa?” I said. My eyebrow raised in threat.
“You chew ’em up. You pounce on them,” he said. He cupped imaginary tits in his hand and shook them like a weapon. “You’re all boom boom boom,” he continued, swinging from side to side.
“Okay. How about we call her Mae West instead?” I offered.
“Sure, whatever you want to call it. That’s the sexpot.”
Mae was less popular than Phyllis because, though more clever, she propositioned anything that moved and a few things that didn’t. She was sharp, sly, and relentless. She aggressively made men into objects. That quality was great as a drag queen—the femmes-bians loved the role reversal—but men weren’t so fond of being made into objects, and especially not by a sissy.
Although the two modes of approaching men served me well in other regards—I was a knockout at parties—they didn’t help me bag anyone. My pick-up rate was low. No, to get action, I told John, I resorted to my other persona, the Small-Town Boy. Friends like John had never seen him, so they doubted I could pull that one off, but in denim I could pass for butch-yet-sensitive, provided I didn’t gesticulate or speak. All three personalities, I realized, were performances. They were characters I put on to approach people, which meant, in a small but significant way, all of them were also anonymous. I was Oz behind his curtain, putting on a show.
Once I’d isolated the social characters, it was easier to recognize when I was slipping on their disguise. My mind’s jaw dropped to witness how much I relied on them. They materialized unbeckoned, consistently. I saw myself turning on the jokester pretty much any time I met someone new or found a situation intimidating.
Imagine people have invited Paul Reubens for a dinner party but Pee-wee Herman shows up. Or Phoebe refuses to be Lisa Kudrow. At a public event, I could simultaneously be saying to myself, What are you saying? Shut up, just shut up, while making everyone laugh at a story about ill-timed blowjob vomit. I was making friends, but declaring myself unsafe.
You can have no secrets safe with me. A large part of being the socialite had meant controlling the room. My social self was, essentially, cynical. The stance presumed that nobody else was as interesting or engaging, so I’d keep everything going. That stage had room for only one showman.
Paradoxically, by studying these reflexive social masks, I saw how my girly-boy compensated extremely well for my insecurity. Rather than falter, I hid. The performance was a mask. It’s no small irony that I felt more comfortable in femmey performances after my early years of being tortured by it. I’d cultivated a social power by being free and easy with my bent gender. I’d whittled it into a very sharp weapon. Trying to embody any masculinity, however, made me feel like a female executive with workingwoman’s syndrome: everyone might find out at any moment that I was faking it.
Set within that great gift John had given me was a bright gem. Social masks weren’t an issue—everybody has them—but there are two kinds: those that hide and those that reveal. As much as I was embodying a slippery gender because I loved the girly parts of me, much of that was used as a femme-bully disguise.
For the rest of that year, I attempted to expose my inner self more than my ever-popular masks. Slowly, I could recognize the cues for each personality and pull back the entertainer. If a friend asked me why I was so quiet—Is everything all right? What’s going on?—I told them the truth. I was practicing being genuine.
My best new social tool was silence. I listened to what people were telling me, both text and subtext, instead of reacting to them. I’d somehow believed that I really loved people, but I’d been treating most of them like fodder in a stand-up routine. Silence and listening made space for people to expand. They told me things. I heard them. They told me other things. I made far fewer social missteps because I was recognizing social cues. The quieter I allowed myself to be, the more I felt safe to reveal. The more I revealed, the more secure I felt. I’d created a causality loop.
When living in Vancouver in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I used to say that I was the gayest person in town. Most people who knew me would confirm that that meant I was gayer than him and him and him and her and him and most likely him. The more I fucked with gender, the more I felt free to step out of the narrow boxes people created for me. Myself especially. I loved being a man now that I could burn up the dance floor in stilettos. Being looked at was so much easier when I was having fun. Revealing that girly-boy sense of myself was like shedding a well-used skin. I was wriggling out of the dead metaphor of manhood.
As people saw clothes making my body this or that gender, a right or wrong gender (or something in between), I recognized a familiar confusion. The binaries were giving way to a sliding scale, much like the grey scale in sexual positions.
An ancient gay riddle that has long proved unsolvable goes: If you receive a blowjob, are you the top or the bottom? You’re kind of worshipping the dick if you’re doing it right, so isn’t that bottoming? Conventional gay thought asserts that the holder of the penetrating device must be embodying topness. But I learned from a flirty bisexual woman backstage at HOMO A GOGO that unless the bottom has pulled out her dentures and is being face-fucked, she’s the top. She has a man’s dick between her teeth. An erection can’t always take the title. The power to injure must trump the hard dick at risk.
The same confusion applies to gay men in anal sex. Fags invented the phrase “aggressive bottom” to deal with this contradiction. Isn’t an aggressive bottom a top if the top is more lie-back-and-relax? Who’s in control if an aggressive bottom is doing all the work?
The top/bottom binaries are shitty tools for understanding nuanced dynamics, because we assume the top is the aggressor, meaning the more active participant. Top equals the power position, which is faulty logic. (This applies in hetero couplings too. If the woman is riding a man hard and he’s all hands-behind-the-head, isn’t she the one in control? Isn’t she setting the rhythm? Isn’t the cowboy the one riding the beast?) The top/bottom binary is a reductive elision of a complicated dynamic. Gender is a thousand-thousand fold more complex.
My femme identity was about to show me just how.
I donned the blue jeans of manhood—without feeling the itch of fakery—in one of the most unlikely strategies in human history, by making lesbian porn.
In 2004, I brought two queer women together into a creative trio with me. We called ourselves the Miss Nomer Collective. We made a short film of hetero-lesbo porn, called Girl on Girl: A Documentary. We called it anti-porn porn, because it was meant to be an antithesis to an industry employing bodies without subjectivities: our plan was to have sex on camera as two vulnerable people. I think that video is probably the best thing I’ve ever done.
Certainly the oddest, definitely the boldest.
In a roundabout way, our video was prompted by John Ince, owner of Vancouver’s The Art of Loving sex store and founder of the Sex Party, who had created a furor in the Canadian media in 2003 by producing a theatrical event called Public Sex, Art, and Democracy in which a married man and woman performed oral sex on each other. There were threats the police would lay charges. Ince drew a great deal of media attention to Canada’s repressive (and old) sex laws. I’d considered attending the event, but in the end it felt like old hat—I saw folks having public sex all the time. The only surprise for me was that tickets to the spectacle were as low as twenty bucks; I’m sure everyone would have happily paid sixty-nine.
A year or so later, after the hoopla, I heard through friends that Ince was hoping to create another event to challenge sexual prudery. I had had a great deal of success producing Cruising. I was loving my body bit by bit, using increasingly more nude drag performances to overcome the stigma of being seen. I’d been toying with the idea of having sex with a woman for the first time, because I was curious about their bodies and my own sexual identity. I’d been in a relationship with Dana, after all, for four years without either of us knowing that she was a woman.
When I mentioned to my femme friend Tralala that I was thinking of pitching a piece for Ince, wherein I’d lose my virginity to a woman, and I hoped she would be that woman, she said, “First, I’m flattered.” Then she had a bunch of questions, some for me and my motivations, and a bunch about Ince that I couldn’t answer. But we both agreed we were interested.
Sometime before meeting with Ince, Tralala and I decided that if we did this, I’d do the deed in drag. You’d think I might remember when I had such a whacked-out idea, but I don’t. It’s a testament to how not whacked-out it was. I’d been doing so much drag that I was wildly comfortable in Cookie’s skin. Drag had always been a means to be desirable, whereas my femmey male self still read poorly in my mind. I only felt hot as a guy when I performed that minimalized self when I cruised for public sex.
At the turn of the millennium, I was also surrounded by artists doing very provocative body-based work—watching queers publicly own their sexualities at the Sex Workers’ Art Show Tour and at HOMO A GOGO, both in Olympia, and at Tralala’s File This! events in Vancouver, which were cabarets by/for/about sex workers and their friends. Tralala understood my decision to be in this video in drag. She found Cookie hot. And if you want to make a queer video about queer sex, being a fag in drag losing his femme virginity is interesting. We liked all the ways this film could be transgressive.
I phoned Ince and reminded him we’d met a year before when I’d interviewed him about his show for Xtra! West. When I said that a friend had suggested I get in touch because I’d heard Ince was looking for a possible new project, he asked me a bunch of questions that made it quite clear he didn’t trust me. It took a great deal of reminding him who I was and how we’d met and what my creative practice was before he’d agree to a meeting. Jesus, I thought at first, how many people phone you up every day and offer to have sex in public for your cause?
By the end of the call, he’d apologized, explaining that since the press coverage last year, a number of loonies had called to damn him to Hell or pretended to be sex radicals so that they could get some kind of reportage scoop. He had reason to be suspicious every time the phone rang.
We scheduled a breakfast meeting for that weekend. Tralala and I began that planning session by discussing our idea of how to do a live sex show in which I would dress in drag to lose my lesbo-hetero-virginity to Tralala—a concept Ince had trouble figuring out, because how could a man lose his lesbian virginity, and why was he in drag, and what was the connection to sex, and why wasn’t it straight, and why would a gay guy have sex with a woman?
We replied to all these questions, feeling increasingly like he just didn’t get what queer was. I rationalized his confusion by recalling that he was of a different generation and straight, so his heart could be in the right place even if his knowledge of gender politics or transgression were dated. And very binary.
Then Ince took a sip of his tea, and asked, “So how are you going to find these performers?”
I looked at him, stunned. I think my jaw dropped. Tralala and I both paused a second. After our phone call, in which I thought I’d been clear that I was proposing to sleep with Tralala, and then this meeting in which Tralala and I talked about sleeping together, he hadn’t clued in to the basic facts. Something about the drag-virginity-gender-euphoria mix confused him so much that he didn’t even remember or notice that we were discussing not a theoretical set of people, but ourselves. We went over it again, slowly, to be polite—and though it seemed like a faint light bulb got a little bit brighter, it wasn’t enough to illuminate the whole project.
Tralala and I looked at each other and agreed silently that we should leave it at that and regroup. We said our goodbyes to Ince and walked across the street to my apartment to talk it out. About a week later, I gave Ince a polite phone call saying that we’d decided to not progress further, but thanked him for his interest.
After that meeting, Tralala and I were even more jazzed about doing the project, only without Ince. We debated producing the live performance ourselves, but it seemed inevitable that either we’d have a small audience, which felt disappointing for such a significant event, or we could have a large audience, most of whom would have a poor view. The alternative was obvious to both of us: we needed to make a film. My deflowering could travel the world. And each time you played the tape, that screen person would lose her virginity all over again.
We brainstormed all the filmmakers we knew who might be interested, then asked ourselves, In front of whom would we be most comfortable having sex?
Separately, we chose the same name.
lisa g.
lisa was a weirdo, like us. She made quirky films we both loved. She was super chill, queer, had great politics. And I thought if I could feel comfortable with anyone seeing my dick enter a woman, it would be her. We met with lisa g in person to describe the basic premise for the film. She gave us an enthusiastic “Yes.”
There’s a terrific irony here in that when I was a young teen, my father would often tease me that he was going to take me to a prostitute in Montreal for my sixteenth birthday “to make me a man,” and now, sixteen years later, I would lose my hetero-virginity to a woman (and soon win prizes for it), only we were doing it in a way that would have made my father shit his pants.
Tralala, lisa, and I met three times before the shoot date to make all the necessary decisions together. We agreed that we were working on a documentary, so there would be no re-takes, no do-overs, and no director. We would all be self-directed. The project would be made as a collective, from envisioning to shooting to editing. We’d shoot the film at my place.
The day before the shoot, we moved all the furniture from the living room into my small kitchen. We hung the bedroom curtains over the doorway between the rooms to hide my piles of stuff. The only thing we couldn’t move was the filing cabinet because it was too heavy. But luckily, it was pink, so it matched my bedsheets. We placed the bed in the centre of the living room so lisa g could walk around all sides. I put all my house-plants in the corners of the room to create an air of civilized warmth.
The morning of the shoot, I cleaned my body more than I’ve ever cleaned it in my life. I scrubbed between my toes and around the nails. I nearly shoved my hand up my butt trying to clean it thoroughly. Then I applied modest daywear makeup. It was an odd time of day to do drag. Faces in drag aren’t meant for natural light, so I stuck to a bit of eyeliner and shadow, some cheeks, and glossy mauve lips to match my hair. Tralala and I had agreed to wear pretty pinks and purples to match. Even our dental dam was lavender.
Tralala and lisa g arrived at the same time. We set up the cameras. I tried not to puke with anxiety.
We began the film as talking heads, and both Tralala and I did short solo interviews. We answered simple questions about being nervous and what we’d hoped to accomplish. When there was nothing left to say, Tralala and I lay back on the bed and made out. I was a nervous faggot virgin in drag with a dyke behind a camera trained on our pubes, but it all went swimmingly.
After I tongued her thighs, Tralala gave me a tour of where they met. I chomped on her intersection until my lipstick was gone. Then I slid two fingers inside her and rolled them around long enough to realize that if I quickly separated them in a V-shape, she’d make popping sounds. I enjoyed this discovery far more than she did.
When Tralala had had enough of watching me be wide-eyed while poking her cervix, I slipped my hand out and noticed it was covered in some creamy white froth.
“What’s that?” I asked her.
“It’s just a little bit of me,” she said. With one hand she wrapped her fingers through mine and with the other she wiped a bit of the stuff off and rubbed it against her leg. It disappeared, absorbed into her skin.
Then she rolled off the bed. Left behind on my pink gingham comforter was a small pile of the same white frothy substance. A tiny mound, about a thimble’s worth. It had the look of whipping cream beaten just a little more than it should have been, but with a watery consistency. I asked again, “What is that?” feeling like I’d landed in a National Geographic magazine.
She scooped it up with a finger and rubbed it against her leg. It seemed to disappear. I’d never seen anything like it.
“It’s girl spooge,” Tralala said, strapping on her dildo.
Then she asked if she could eat my ass, and I said, “No.”
She asked if I was sure, and I said, “Yeah, no.”
Then she gave me a questioning look and I said, “No.”
After more negotiations, I decided to compromise. I let her finger me until I was ready to be fucked, which took, oh, a minute.
She ploughed my shaggy hole until we decided I should return the favour.
I distinctly remember seeing her pelvis slide down over top of my dick. It felt like magic. Truly. I briefly thought, I’m having sex with a woman and a camera is rolling. But the chief sensation was Tralala’s tenderness. I loved her. She was patient with me, unapologetic, playful, and equally vulnerable. I’d been having so much anonymous sex with men in the dark that this experience in the daylight presented me with a myriad of challenges. And gifts.
In the middle of shooting, still wearing a wig and makeup, penetrating my dear friend and goofing around a little too, the drag felt irrelevant. I hit a point, I think, where I was freaked out and sort of woke up to the experience. I became aware of the drag, aware that it was another form of dressing up or making a mask. A separation. The drag stopped feeling sexy. My dick did too.
The instant my dick softened because the dress-up seemed unnecessary, I felt a very literal narrow door to something else inside me open and a crack of light spill in. There, on the other side of that wardrobe, was a sense of myself as a man.
That uber-femme moment led me to my masculinity. It wasn’t that I was suddenly in a heteronormative coupling—we were still very queer, I was still very much into dick—but I loved Tralala with such delicious gratitude in that moment, I wanted to share myself with her authentically. I wanted her to see me.
Having wandered between the femme and butch camps, neither feels static to me. I’m still walking between them. In recent years, my sense of what a man is feels a lot less fixed. “We are process, not reality,” Loren Eiseley says, which is the closest thing to true I can say about what it’s been like to live in the clothes of a pink or blue system.
Being a man is created in the space between my body and its adornments (and gestures are also adornments). The relationship between my body and the clothes I put on it is live, immediate. The great literary love of my life, John Berger, says, “Reality, however one interprets it, lies beyond a screen of clichés. Every culture produces such a screen, partly to facilitate its own practices (to establish habits) and partly to consolidate its own power.” Men and women are these clichéd habits. We’ve forgotten that men in plaid shirts and ill-fitting Wranglers reference an idea. We don’t see the screen as a simple convention.
As with metaphor, when gender is a cliché, it’s dead. We forget that the flowerbed isn’t a bed. The seeds of doubt aren’t seeds. A boy isn’t blue. We can see the live metaphor a little better if we think of clothes as uniforms: A sailor suit, for example, isn’t a sailor. A naked man isn’t a sailor. But a man in a sailor suit is.
A body in clothes makes reference to all the other clothes we know. A gesture is weighed against all gestures. A gender exists in the context of every other. We’ve created shorthand to help us know someone better, but the language has become so binary we’ve stopped reading the intricacies of that code. If you present a whole bunch of ones, you’re a one. More zeroes? You’re a zero.
I’ve been trying to live my gender not as a fixed thing—with its sets of pre-determined behaviours—but as a conscious, live response. I try to stay alert to how my sense of being a man changes every time someone walks into a room. Ignoring that caused me years of struggle because I wasn’t a fixed idea of what I’d thought a man should be. Now I let that idea stay unmoored, so that it might ride the tide as the winds see fit.