Effeminacy Without Apology
I cross my legs when I sit down. I don’t think about it. I sit, and my legs cross. My hands move when I talk. My voice has prompted people at a drive-through to call me ma’am before they have ever seen my face. On the telephone, someone has been pleased to reach “the lady of the house.”
I could be wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and work boots. The femininity would still be there.
It was there when I was a little kid, before drag, before I understood the word gay. I didn’t have a name for what other people would eventually find objectionable. I was simply going about the business of being myself. By thirteen, when I was being bullied in high school, I was learning their names for it.
I have written about that hurt. I have written about the ridicule, about being seen and misunderstood, about the strange authority people assume over a body they happen to be looking at. Lately, I have been trying to write about something else. I want to enjoy being effeminate.
Even writing that, I feel how much is contained in the word enjoy. There is the ordinary pleasure of moving through a day without checking every gesture. There is also the more deliberate pleasure of wanting something extravagant and allowing myself to want it.
The hair. The earrings. The pink. The fabulous, unnecessary flourish that makes me smile. I am sixty years old, and I am still discovering how much of that pleasure I want in my everyday life. That makes me happy. It also hurts.
I have spent roughly forty-two years doing drag. There has been room onstage for an entrance, a gesture, a degree of femininity that people understood because they had come to see it. Looking feminine was part of the occasion. They could receive it as entertainment.
I’m sitting here wondering whether drag was, among other things, my outlet for being effeminate without apology. I don’t want to diminish what those years have meant to me. There is artistry in drag, work in it, pleasure in it. I know what it takes to put yourself together and offer something to an audience.
But I’m beginning to ask what I wanted to bring home. How much of what I enjoyed had I learned to reserve for a performance? How often did I allow myself something because there was a show, when perhaps I also wanted it on an afternoon when nothing special was happening?
I don’t have tidy answers. I’m only now finding the questions. Recently, I watched an interview with Dolly Parton about her appearance. What stayed with me was her account of creating an outward expression of how she saw herself inside. I heard intention in that. Pleasure, too.
I don’t want to be Dolly. I recognize something in the wish to make yourself visible to yourself. Her humor matters to me as well. She could joke about her appearance and still be entirely committed to it. There is freedom in being able to laugh about something you love without surrendering your right to love it.
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I want some of that ease. I want to enjoy a fabulous image of myself without immediately conducting a hearing about whether I’m entitled to look that way.
I’ve been creating images that let me explore it: blonde curls around a face that still has facial hair. A pink suit with glittering earrings. Pink lingerie, crossed legs, and the kind of glamour that makes no attempt to enter quietly.
They are created images. They allow me to imagine possibilities. When I look at them, I feel recognition alongside desire.
I want the appearance. I want the pleasure of being admired. I want the ease of sitting there and enjoying myself. I want to find out which parts I might bring into my life. There. I’ve said it. I don’t want to qualify every desire until it becomes modest enough for someone else to approve.
There is also a photograph of me sitting on a picnic blanket, wearing a pink shirt and a broad-brimmed hat, serving food. An ordinary moment. Looking at it alongside those more extravagant images, I’m thinking about the person present in all of them. I am nonbinary femme. I use she and her. Other people may read my appearance as masculine. My femininity is present while they are doing that.
It doesn’t wait for them to understand. Yet I can still find myself waiting. Waiting to feel sufficiently confident. Waiting to stop wondering what someone will say. Waiting for the moment when wanting something comes without an accompanying argument.
That is the part I’m tired of. When I say I’m reaching a point where I don’t care anymore, I don’t mean that a cruel remark has become incapable of hurting me. I wish I could promise myself that. I can’t.
I mean I am questioning how much say an imagined remark should have over an experience I haven’t even allowed myself yet. Someone might laugh. Someone might stare. I know. Must I give them the afternoon in advance?
There is a public weight to being visibly different, especially when I already feel scrutinized. I don’t always want to carry that weight consciously. Sometimes I want to enjoy my voice, my femininity, my own ridiculous delight in a pair of earrings. I would like an ordinary day in which I am absorbed in living rather than assessing how much of myself the room will tolerate.
I wish this wanting had become clear sooner. That is difficult to admit because it invites the familiar advice about never being too old. I know I’m allowed to begin at sixty. I’m glad I can. I still have feelings about the years before sixty.
I wonder what I might have tried. What pleasures I might have allowed myself. Whether I would have recognized some of these desires earlier if I hadn’t spent so much time learning what they could cost. I won’t blame the child who didn’t have the words. I won’t pretend the adult always had the freedom she now wishes she had taken. But I can grieve.
I can love my years in drag and wonder why some things felt easier to want there. I can be pleased by what I’m discovering and sad that I’m discovering it now. Those feelings are sitting together, and I am trying to let them.
Perhaps effeminacy without apology begins, for me, with allowing the desire to remain uncomplicated for a little longer. Looking at the pink suit. Liking it. Letting myself imagine wearing it somewhere. I want to stay with that pleasure long enough to find out what I would do next.
