Dressing the Man
or Queer Gender Fatigue
- 3rd Place
Claire Robbins
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… Read more »