[Leonard writes:]
Did anyone happen to catch the second segment of ABC's PrimeTime last night? It was about the medical practice of surgically altering infants whose genitalia are 'ambiguous' at birth. In most cases, according to the report, such infants are surgically made into females 'because the surgery is so much easier'. They are then raised by their families as little girls. Trouble is, many of them feel really weird growing up, even as little children--they know they are 'different', they feel like 'something's wrong', but they don't know what. One boy who was being raised as a girl said he had the equivalent of a nervous breakdown at age 9 because he knew he wasn't a girl at all. Later he had his manhood surgically restored. But he never got over the trauma of having been raised as something he wasn't.
The thing that hit home for me was how similar, if not identical, this man's experience is to my experience of growing up gay but being raised as straight. All the things this man said about how he felt, the clear sense of something being wrong, the mental and emotional collapse, and the knowledge that accepting and becoming who and what he really was--all this is exactly my experience of growing up gay, struggling with being different, trying to adjust and to live as something I was not and never was (though being outwardly quite successful at it), and finally coming to see and understand how wrong it all was, and embracing my true nature and becoming my true self for the first time.
The arrogance and hybris of the medics who make these radical decisions for the parents of these unfortunate children reminded me of the arrogance and hybris of the American Freudian psychoanalyst who took on my case when I tried at 17 to tell my parents that I'd fallen in love with a boy at school and that I understood for the first time what homosexuality really was about. I am still angry at the way he treated me and my 'illness' from his lofty omniscience, and I saw this omniscience again in these doctors who announced that they were determining the sex of these children simply by reconstructing their genitals.
[Will replies:]
Leonard,
I missed the Prime Time piece on ambiguous sexual organs, but there was a very personal and thoughtful article on the same subject about a year and a half ago in the New Yorker.
You write about growing up with the confusing sense of being different, and the liberating recognition of a new personal identity when you come out as a gay or bisexual man. I share the sense of relief at no longer feeling the need to masquerade as a straight man, and I'm very happy to have made many friends whose sexuality is like mine. But for me, and I expect for those of physically ambiguous sexuality, I don't find that a new label simplifies the tasks of living a satisfying life. Happiness is still a matter of building and maintaining relationships, and those are at least as much work among gay and bisexual men as in the straight world.
There is another parallel between our situation and the situation of physically ambiguous and transgendered people. I have to confess an anxiety that I feel in myself when I am with men whose appearance or mannerisms are distinctly feminine. It's not exactly homophobia. I feel it with a heterosexual friend of mine, Trevor, who likes to wear dresses and makeup, not in a campy way but because he feels he is more truly a woman than a man, even though his sexual attraction is toward other women.
The source of my anxiety, I think, is a feeling of shame that comes from worrying that I will be seen by other people, and especially by people I want to be my friends, as weird in the same way that they see him as weird. I guess I've grown more comfortable at thinking of myself as queer in my own way, but I don't want to be grouped with queers who are not like me.
Now here's the point I'm getting at. I realize that my own reaction to Trevor is as oppressive to him as the homophobia of the boys who called me a fairy and worse in high school.
I have another friend, Claude, who has a genetic condition called Klinefelter's Syndrome, involving inheritance of both the XX chromosomes of a man and the Y chromosomes of a woman. He has a small but fully functioning penis and the testicles of a 10 year old boy. I don't feel in myself that same anxious ambiguous-gender response to him that I feel toward Trevor, because Claude is like myself in being a bisexual married man, and because his appearance and manner is that of a good looking and conventionally masculine man. I've never had a preference for large cocks, so I don't feel uncomfortable about his being small and undeveloped in that way. But as you can imagine he has felt all his life the shame of seeming and being different, and particularly the shame of being taunted for his undersized sexual equipment.
As different as my feelings are toward Trevor and Claude, I recognize that I have in myself the fear of being seen as shamefully weird. So if I want to be accepted for the person I really am, I need to work on my own embarrassment in the presence of physically ambiguous and transgendered people, and of effeminate men, whether gay, bisexual, or straight.
[Leonard responds:]
I used to feel much as you did about other people's queerness. Before I came fully out, part of my constructed straight persona was to project as unambiguously masculine an image as I could. I never thought I did it very well, but I gave it my best shot. When I saw or heard stereotypically effeminate men, I avoided them, telling myself "I'm not like them."
A very important consequence of my coming out two years ago is that all that fell away. I remember the first time I was in an environment full of openly 'feminine' gay men camping up a storm and not giving a shit who was around to see or overhear them. I was astonished at my own reaction: I felt completely at one with them, that they were my people, that I was indeed like them. Not in outward mannerisms, perhaps, but at the core. For perhaps the first time in my life I understood the meaning of the idea of solidarity.
Shortly after this I was thrown together with a young man (that is, he looked about 28--he was in fact 40!) who was extremely effeminate in outward manner: fluffed hair, sculpted eyebrows, the whole bit. High lilting voice. Very much a stereotype. Again, my reaction surprised me. I found myself instantly drawn to him as a person--the mannerisms just weren't a problem any more.
Most of my life I've been some sort of quietly subversive rebel, and I learned at a very early age not to care too much about what people think of me. Now that I'm fully out, I no longer try to make people think of me in certain ways and not in others. I rather enjoy seeing the surprise, if not shock, in people's reactions when they see me with people they never would have thought I'd have anything to do with.
As to how I think of myself, it has not been a problem for me, nor does it get mixed up with what some people like to talk about as labels. I've spent the better part of 41 years trying to tell myself and others that I was not like other people, other homosexual men, etc., I was different, unique, my own person with my own equation, etc. All that, too, has gone. Instead I am growing into a new awareness of my likeness, my connectedness to other people who are like me in very important ways. I am quite happy to be grouped with queers who are unlike me in all sorts of other ways--I think, again, it has to do with identity and with solidarity. It helps me to understand, sympathize with, and be a part of the gay political movement--me, a profoundly apolitical person!
I think we all need to work continually on this. I know I do. I feel like I've shed a lot of my own older, acquired prejudices, but I know there are always more I'm not yet aware of, and it behooves me to become aware of and eradicate them. But I've always been perceived by the people around me as weird, I'm used to it, I hardly notice it. I may not have been able to accept being gay when I was young, but I did learn to accept being different by the time I was 10.
Leonard