Read Online The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You by S. Bear Bergman - Free Book Online Page B

probably was a butch dyke for a bit there, but only situationally. I always said that butch was a gender all its own—yes, a noun—and I was pretty clear that that was me. I was a masculine female, a he-she, an egg timer in a forest of hourglasses, and for a time I did okay as a butch. People believed in it to a degree and let me keep my noun on credit, but heads were shaken, and plenty of people told me I wasn’t a real butch. Real butches always and only love femmes, and while I adore femmes and have loved several in my life as well as I could, I didn’t love only femmes. I melted over other butches. I cruised burly, grey-haired butch daddies twice and three times my age, butches who had kids older than me. Butches who had boots older than me. And I had no skills in the trades, and I couldn’t fix a car. One year, for my birthday, I received a dozen tire gauges from various people as gifts because I thought the channel sewn into my friend Kage’s mechanic’s shirt was for a pen, and everyone thought that was so funny they all got me tire gauges (which, it turned out, is what the spot is really for). I still have one of them in a drawer of keepsakes, but I’ve never learned how to use it, like all the real butches. I never wanted a motorcycle or a muscle car or a fishing pole or a motorboat; never worked construction or painted houses. I usually took care of kids or fiddled with computers for work, and the one appropriately butch job I had was working the door at a gay bar, a job I got because my conflict de-escalation skills were better, in ratio to my specific mass, than any of the other applicants.
    But as a butch I was kind of . . . girly. I didn’t like to camp or hunt, I didn’t drink beer, and my pool game is a disaster. I liked to read and write and brunch and shop and cry and go to musicals. I was scared of horror movies, and my favorite part of the Super Bowl was always the commercials. My friends liked me anyhow, certainly, but they took these opportunities to tease me about what a real butch I was definitely not when they arose, as with the tire gauges. Or my haircut, which I wore in a flippety Prince Valiant style for some time (because it fell nicely into place without having to put product in it and, on a good day, made me look a little bit like Joey Lawrence). But my buzzed and butched and flat-topped friends gave me so much shit about it, asking when I was going to get a proper haircut for a real butch.
    I tried, I swear I did. Not as hard as I did at being a girl, because I was more stubborn and less dependent on the approval of my criticizers for things like food and shelter, but still. The thing is, it wasn’t really the activities or the hairstyles that got me in trouble, that prompted people to comment on how real I was not—those were just the signifiers, the concrete, recognizable things they could point to. But unlike my girlness, their unsettledness ran deeper. There was some discomfort with my performance failure but, I now believe, a much greater amount of discomfort with the fact that I didn’t really seem to be working hard to do it right. I wanted to be real, but not fakely real, only really real—real in myself and also recognized as real.
    It gets so complicated. Being real, being read as real, being real to myself. Are we all more or less performing something we hope reads as a workable gender, praying no one notices how we’re really, seriously, irrevocably fucked up? Hiding carefully how far we have strayed in our hearts from the ideal that gets packaged and sold as realness? Thinking about how much we would cheerfully pay to get a few days off to go somewhere nobody knows us and indulge in all our unsanctioned realnesses without anyone there to drag us back to reality? I think we are.
    And then I went and made it all worse. When I finally stepped back and looked at all the pieces, trying to figure out which gender really seemed like the best fit, the one most satisfyingly