Dressing the Man

or Queer Gender Fatigue

June 2018

My son asks to look through old photo albums of me as a child. I haven’t looked at these pictures in years and I find myself looking with new eyes, not rewriting history exactly, but seeing the past in a new context. The new context is that although I identified as bisexual from the time I was a teenager, I now only date women. After being used to passing as straight (when I identified as bi, I almost exclusively dated men), I now find myself questioning how I present.

My son giggles at a picture of me dressed in my dad’s sports coat with a bubble pipe in my mouth. I am probably one of the youngest people who blew bubbles out of a plastic bubble pipe or smoked candy cigarettes. I remember my dad taking this picture. The sports coat was tweed and had suede elbow patches. I also remember that I was dressed up as who I wanted to be when I grew up—a writer.

In another picture I am wearing a light blue bandana tied like a headband on my hair, my arms are up, hands clasped behind my head. We flip through the album and I point out another picture I like. I am in an oversized hoodie, sleeves pushed up over my elbows, and I am looking over my shoulder, a scowl on my face. Classic mom-look, my son says about my expression.

~

My male colleagues seem to dress in two different ways: either in a suit or in jeans, fleece pullovers and tennis shoes. Sometimes the tennis shoes are untied, but they are unquestionably still “professor” as they walk down the center of the hallway. I walk close to the right-hand wall of the hallway, usually in dress pants and a collared shirt, which I should add is the third way that my male colleagues dress, but somehow it never looks professional on me.

I joke that for Halloween next year I will go to class in jeans, a fleece pullover, and tennis shoes. Maybe no one would notice, but if they did, I would tell them I am dressed up as “some of” my male colleagues.

My first semester teaching I wore a short purple dress with orange tights to one class. I was clean, and I liked how I looked, which should be all that matters. Nice tights, some of my students commented, laughing. Ok, that was a poor fashion choice, although I cannot help but wonder if it was even more of a poor fashion choice because it was so gendered.

~

In the hallway at the community college where I teach college writing, I am walking behind a female professor and a male professor walks towards us in the center of the hallway. You look flowery today, the male professor says to the female professor, who is dressed head to toe in black.

This is not the first time I notice the professor dressed all in black. She looks about my mother’s age, late fifties, and what most impresses me is how impeccably she always dresses: heels, nylons, dresses, sweaters or jackets. To my Midwestern eyes she looks like she would fit in teaching in France or on the East Coast. Her hair is always exquisitely styled; she wears make-up.

Something in me sinks at the thought of being an almost sixty-year-old professor and still being subject to men commenting on my clothing. It sinks at the idea of someone so closely following the constraints of gendered dressing—heels, glossy hair, make-up, a skirt and still being subject to some type of weird criticism. She doesn’t respond, Nice suit, asshole.

Might I have misread their interaction? The professor dressed in black answered her male colleague with a smile; he used her first name when addressing her. Maybe this is just how these two individuals interact, and it is not gendered. But I think it is telling that I witnessed this interaction and did not witness a female professor commenting on a male professor’s clothing. Because this is how it tends.

I am just a little over half the age of the professor in black and dress much less professionally. I hope I would have at least glared at a male colleague if they commented on my clothing. You don’t need to comment on what I am wearing, I practice saying inside my head. For the most part I think my male colleagues are unsure if I am a student or a professor, and I am glad to be off their radar for the time being.

~

I don’t own a blow-dryer. Wearing makeup reminds me too much of the times an ex-boyfriend bruised my face, but before any of that took place I swore I would never wear makeup as a child who already hated gender. Oh, you’ll change your mind when you are a teenager, my mom’s friends assured when I swore off makeup as a ten-year-old, but I didn’t, until I had to stand up in front of a classroom with a black eye.

~

When I start dating women I once again think about what my clothing communicates about me. Does my shirt button on the left or on the right? Does my hair look gay enough or does it look too gay? No, of course there isn’t such a thing as too gay, but I want to feel like I look authentic. Authentic to what I am unsure, except that I want to be read as unequivocally gay at this point in my life.

The butch/femme dichotic feels just as inauthentic as straight gender roles felt. The first few women I date fall somewhere between those extremes. And I know I read as femme when I don’t read as straight, but sometimes I wear men’s boots; some of my shirts button on the male side.

I join a dating website. Some profiles specify looking for a stud. I don’t message those women, even though some of them seem otherwise compatible. Other profiles specify, femmes only, and I feel no better about messaging those women. I don’t feel femme, but I wear women’s underwear. Sometimes I want to be on top, but not always.

~

Putting my gay body into a classroom confuses the hell out of me. Do I take the rainbow pin off my briefcase? It is a pin the shape of the United States, striped red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. Some of my colleagues wear pins that read Straight Ally, Str8 Against h8, and Not Gay (But Supportive). Nice messages, sure, but the tendency to both align as an ally and separate as an ally, as in I support you, but I want to emphasize that I’m not gay, is confusing. I am gay wherever I go. I was gay when I dated men and I was gay when I was a child and I am gay when people still assume I’m straight.

~

I start dating a woman who mostly wears men’s clothing. On our first date I wonder if she would like me more if I dressed more femme. I also wonder on our first date what pronouns I should use with her. I wonder if she wants to pass as male.

The woman I am dating tells me she was mistaken for her friend’s son at the bar. She sounds both proud and offended. Her friend looks at us and says, She has boobs. She does use female pronouns and identify as a woman, but it is more complicated than that, just like it is for me.

We sit in a mostly empty restaurant and I put my arm around her shoulder, rub her leg; she’s cute, and she turns me on. But then I start to notice she keeps looking over her shoulder at two men eating in a booth across the room. Is she trying to read how they are reading us? I begin to wonder how they do read us.

~

I start sharing clothes with my nine-year-old son. He borrows my converse low-tops and I borrow his shirt with an anchor on the front because I like how it fits me.

Sometimes I wear dresses with leggings and sometimes I wear jeans rolled up to show off my black Doc Marten boots, which I wear everywhere because they cost me ninety dollars. I realize that on some level it doesn’t matter how I dress because I always feel like I am in drag, whatever I’m wearing.

The woman I’m dating tells me that she was feeling really confused about herself the year before she met me. She tells me that she had a relationship with a man and he told her that she would need to dress differently if they were dating. I assume that meant he wanted her to stop wearing mostly men’s clothes. She ended the relationship rather than dress the way he wanted her to. I make a point to compliment her belt, the way her work pants look, her favorite shoes. I turn her cap backwards, so I can kiss her.

I had an ex-boyfriend who told me that he knew how to dress a woman. I had been telling him how difficult it was to find a pair of jeans that fit, were affordable, and that I liked. I know how to dress a woman too, I said. There are many ways to dress a woman, but mostly I only need to dress myself, and that is confusing enough.

~

I work up the courage to ask the woman I am dating if she wishes I were more girly, which leads to an argument. She is confused because she reads me as femme and I am confused because I don’t feel femme. I am attracted to feminine women, point blank, she tells me. She tells me that maybe I don’t know who I am yet, maybe I’m not ready to date her. I tell her that I do know who I am and who I am is something in between.

I think the problem might be that gender expression could be described as a dichotomy—a gay woman is either femme or butch, but gender expression could also be described as a spectrum, and I am less girly than her exes. Could gender be more than a spectrum or a dichotomy? I apologize to her for being insecure and she apologizes for shutting down, but I wonder if we will be able to have the conversation again, more productively. I worry that I shouldn’t wear a flannel shirt in front of her.

It occurs to me that if we both wore flannel shirts it would be even more of a same-attraction than it already is. Is it possible for gay people to fear being gay in their own gayness? Do we look for someone on the other side of the spectrum because we want to replicate the straight roles we aren’t turned on by? Is her insistence on only being attracted to feminine women a type of homophobia? Surely that is going too far.

~

On our second date, she asked, Why women? A question that seems to be the fate of anyone who comes out later in life or is seen as bisexual—a term that doesn’t accurately describe my attractions. I told her that I had always been attracted to people regardless of gender, and I stand by that to some extent. I am attracted to women regardless of gender expression, although I tend to be less attracted to very feminine women—I haven’t figured that one out, but I probably wouldn’t date a very feminine woman. What does that word even mean, feminine?

~

I have a photograph of myself as a nine-year-old. I am wearing a baseball cap backwards, baggy jeans, a flannel shirt and a pair of converse all-stars. I look at this picture and feel proud, somehow it does seem more authentic than me in a dress. But maybe the authenticity came from being in a place of childhood joy. Maybe if I dressed that way now, all I would feel would be eyes on me, eyes I feel no matter what I wear, eyes that have looked so long, they’ve become my own eyes.

~

The woman I am dating says she has two brown flannel shirts from one of my favorite breweries, do I want one? Yes, I say. She tells me we can match, and I think what she means is that she doesn’t care how I dress, although it isn’t that simple either.