The Age Old Question

Originally written: April, 2009

Time and again. It just doesn't lose it's value.

I was at a party last night of a dear friend of mine. This friend I have known since I started working in mental health at a drop-in centre downtown and I was as green as a frog. We are entirely different humans, her and I, but she makes me feel loved and cared for as a friend in a way few have.

So I'm at her party, celebrating her day of coming into this world. There are people there I am becoming acquainted with. People who clearly haven't met a lot of queer people. This is fine. There is the nice lady who looks like she should be on tv reading tarot cards late at night and maybe selling a hair product on the side. I introduce myself and upon hearing my name her smile becomes forced, but she nonetheless perseveres. She later spends most of the evening pointedly remarking on how beautiful I am. I know she's trying hard.

Then there is that particularly awkward moment in the night where my queerness becomes an opportunity for teaching, all out violence, or both. The fellow I introduced myself earlier to who had asked me, "So is that supposed to be your real name"? and scoffed with judgement which I can only presume to mean that validating my gender in relation to his must also mean admitting he might be a little gay if the lines are blurred. The kind of gaze that let's me know my likes and dislikes don't make me another human, but simply an object of freakishness and a target for violence and power-over. I keep my eye on him and my back up.

At the moment of acute drunkenness when I am sober and the parties around me are swaying like trees on a windy day in Stanley Park, I hear the utterance.. "So what, man or woman?" I ask him, "Are you talking to me?" Of course he is so drunk he can barely string two words together, yet they nonetheless manage to disturb and provoke me. He says "Yeah, what are you, man or woman?" I say "I am what I am." He repeats the question. There are obviously only two choices. I repeat my answer. I only have one.

He says "So, what are you, a hermaphrodite or something?" The drunken guy (his buddy) beside him and my other good friend go silent. I ask him why it matters? Why does he need to know? He has no answer. He says "Your voice and your body give it away", referring to the fact that my obvious masculinity must mean that I am trying hard to be something I am not and have no access to: male privilege. For educational purposes I respond that I am not trying to be anything, and that I am a "masculine person." At this point, my straight friend leans into me in a protective stance and puts her arm around me and states that I am beautiful. I appreciate it. But in this moment I am deciding whether it is better to walk away and stifle my sensitivity to tearing up, or to tear into this asshole in some sort of competition. A competition where the house ends up being destroyed and where my face will likely suffer.

I decide that my friend's celebration does not need distractions such as this. I tell the guy to drop it. His buddy agrees. "Yeah man, just let it go." He insists it's just a simple question.

The funny thing is, this is the attitude that has assumed my natural state of being and desire were unacceptable and gross since early taunts on the elementary school playground. And here I am, at 31 answering the same questions. Different playground.

I don't know if a person with such a mindset will ever get the point. My maleness does not take away from his. It does not somehow make him a "faggot" because my masculinity doesn't subscribe to womanhood and he doesn't know what to do with his gaze.

I'm meditating on how to remain peaceful in such situations and reminded that such lessons will continue to unfold across settings and time as I walk through this life.