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HOME  |  A COMING OUT OF SORTS
MY ATYPICALLY GENDERED LIFE STORY

It ain't easy growing up a demiboy.




Everyone thought I was gay.


And in a very homophobic culture.




Growing up a demiboy in a small town in the Bible Belt was its own special brand of nightmare.  Everyone thought I was gay in this homophobic enclave.  Therefore I was demanded to always act, respond to things and carry myself in all the ways that boys are expected to.

This proved impossible no matter what.  My feminine tendencies are hard wired into the very essence of who I am.  And I was expected to just stop them from coming out at all?  I might as well try to pass for a local somewhere I don't even speak the language.

And the misguided attempts to fit in with the other boys ended in sheer folly.  I ended up dropping out of Little League baseball after my outfielder's glove (required geer neither I nor my family could afford to replace) vanished under mysterious, and on my part shamelessly girlish circumstances on my way home from practice.

Not much saying who may or may not have been the "culpret," but they were actually doing me a favor.  My pet theory is that it was most likely one of my teammates, hoping for that very result.  I was dragging the team down by sucking so badly at baseball myself.

I couldn't stop myself from daydreaming in Right Field.  By the end of every game, the other team would see me coming out of the dugout for my at-bat and start to celebrate an easy out before I even got to the batter's box.

Less dead sure on Cub Scouts, but altimately I never made it any farther than my wolf patch.

So it goes on effort to fit in after effort to fit in.  It was an exorcise in futility.

Then comes the added frustration of going through adolescence and coming of age completely unable to make flirtatious advances on the opposite sex.  I was so shy and socially awkward that any girl would have had to make the first move on me.  Meanwhile, the girls appeared to see me as practically one of the girls myself, and not in a romantically optimistic way.

I actually envied gay men. They could come out and at least find some enclave of acceptance.  They at least had some sort of like-minded community.

In my early teens I fantasized about having the non-existing ability to turn into a girl, and back at will.  I wanted to get a custody change and go live with my father in another state.  Under a new identity to all new peers.  The fantasy being to be a boy at home and a girl at school.

Sure, the inequalities faced by women in the 1970s had been drilled into me for years, but I found it worse to be so socially coerced into suppressing a myriad of my own most natural  behaviors, none of which ever raised a single eyebrow when done by girls.

Then I actually did get a custody change and go live with my Dad on the Gulf Coast, right before I came of age.  I  suddenly found I had to figuratively fight the gay men off with a stick.  Meanwhile, I couldn't come on to a young lady I liked to save my life.

This was quickly taken from flattering to instantly irritating when one other factor reared its ugly head:  Some men get infuriatingly insistent when they don't want to take "No," for an answer.  At best, it's an exorcise in anger management, and at worst caused me concerns for my personal safety and immediate consideration of potential self-defense strategies.

This is where I like to say not to take my word for that.  Just ask literally any woman on Earth and there's a high probability that she can confirm that statement.

I count myself fortunate that my own most actually coercive was the jerk who, after I made the mistake of accepting an offered ride somewhere,  "threatened" to leave me "stranded" just a couple of miles from home.  The guy obviously had no clue that I was well accustomed to walking much farther than that at a stretch.  I simply got out and walked away, deliberately leaving the car door open to the swarm of coast-of-Texas-sized mosquitoes everywhere within 10 feet of his car.  Loser couldn't even pick a more fortunate spot to go parking.

I was actually relieved to see the unwanted attention diminish and eventually go away as I became no longer as young, nor as pretty as I used to be.  Looks like men of all sexual preferences must be visually oriented.

Yet, I've continued in that degree of pressure to conform against my own nature through decades of adulthood.  Now I'm an old man.  And I'm done with that.

Along with my coming out on gender, sorting out exactly how to describe my unconventional gender has been a simultaneous exploration of entirely new vocabulary words for me (Words that didn't yet exist when I was coming of age.) and a journey of self discovery that inexplicably (or perhaps explicably after all) got set into motion by this admission.
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