by Mike Bendzela
In a kindergarten classroom in the mid-1960s, a kid named Mikey steered clear of the boys stacking large toy blocks on top of one another and knocking them down again–so obnoxious—and instead went and sat at the table of girls making beads out of salt dough and stringing them together on a thread. These girls were not averse to tasting the salt dough and smacking their lips in disgust. The teacher had wisely settled on salt dough because she knew it wouldn’t poison the students should they eat it. At least the girls were smart and funny and didn’t continually knock each other to the floor.
Mikey preferred these sober, artsy activities–making necklaces of salt dough beads, pressing hand prints into soft clay disks, tracing the profiles of silhouetted heads projected via lamp light onto sheets of construction paper–over the rough-and-tumble of block stacking, fat-ball tossing, and floor hockey, because–well, he just did. Thus developed the central themes of his boyhood–hates sports; likes art and language; hangs out with the girls.
Throughout grade school, gym class gave him a terrible knot in his stomach and he longed to be elsewhere, a disposition cemented into place by an incident during a game of “battle ball,” in which boys stood at opposite walls and hurled large pneumatic balls at each other for God knows what reason, and a ball smacked him square in the face and knocked his glasses off his head.
The glasses allowed him to read the teacher’s flowing, cursive handwriting on the chalkboard, reading which he was good at, and he forever yearned to be allowed to pick up a long piece of chalk and tap-scratch letters onto the board himself. This desire was at long last granted, and soon he was permitted whole boxes of colored chalks to use, and the teacher allowed him and some girl friends to cover the entire chalkboard with decorative chalk drawings.
Boys, meanwhile, did stupid shit, like blow spitballs around the room, and got into trouble for it. They were paddled and hauled to the principal’s office, which did seem to confer some kind of status on these boys. They sometimes took their in-class hostilities outside the classroom and onto the playground with them, and a gust of rumor would sweep over the kids that so-and-so was going to kick so-and-so’s ass after school! The atmosphere of menace was deplorable. Mikey found himself in a ring of screaming spectators watching two boys scuffle. The whole spectacle made him sick to his stomach.
By contrast, girls were more civilized and accommodating. Most of their time was spent in conversation rather than fighting. Games tended to be less physical or cumbersome–hopscotch, jump rope, and especially “house,” where Mikey was in high demand to play the role of Dad. The culmination of these games tended to be hilarity rather than bloodshed. He gravitated towards these girly activities not in spite of the distinctions between boys and girls but because of them: It was the very patency of these differences that attracted Mikey to the girls.
If asked to describe the distinctions between the sexes at the age of eight, Mikey would have been hard-pressed to enumerate them clearly. Yes, boys and girls differed in clothing styles and hair lengths, interests and activities; but even at his young age he understood that these were differences of custom, not kind; so, struggling for a more complete, cogent answer, he might have said:
“Well, girls pee differently.”
Not a bad assessment of fundamental sex differences for an eight-year-old.
In aspects other than excretory ones, Mikey was “like a girl.” He threw a ball “like a girl.” When accosted by a bully, he screamed “like a girl.” And he shied away from boys, “like a girl” . . . well, except for one.
Chris was not like the other boys, not a “joiner.” He was tough: he climbed trees, and he collected whatever natural objects he could find–feathers, bones, stones. Even spiders! It was wonderful how Chris could hit a spider with an eyedropper of a liquid concoction and kill it, then mount it intact on a cloud of cotton in a little box along with a name tag.
And Chris knew all about birds, how to identify them by sight and by sound. He could imitate birds. His whistles were uncanny. Some of these birds, too, he killed and collected, preserving their feathery hides and pinning them on boards. Chris was a little urban Darwin. This was no mere hero worship: Chris was a biology whiz kid.
One time, Chris asked Mikey, point blank: “You know how babies are made, don’t you?”
Mikey had heard rumors: Somehow, babies “came out of” women’s bodies. Instead of answering Chris’s query directly, Mikey just gave a lying nod of his head.
What Chris told Mikey was as disgusting as it was implausible. Chris apparently didn’t know everything.
Mikey doesn’t know what became of Chris, but his love for him was another of those girly features–he likes boys that way, that is, like a girl. “That way” would not become clear to him until about the age of thirteen, at which time Chris’s point about baby making would also assume more clarity.
Thirteen was the year the hair appeared. Things began to happen quickly–the froggy voice, the changes in shapes of body parts, the smells, etc.–culminating one night when what seemed like a hot beam focused through a magnifying glass passed right through front of his pajamas . . .
Then the girly stuff stopped altogether.
It’s clear now who and what Mikey is, isn’t it?
How he ended up the way he is today is not a very special or harrowing tale. Atypical, yes, but it’s an atypicality that has its own genre. It’s called a “coming out story.” It wasn’t especially pleasant, and it took him a long time, but Mikey eventually did come out of the closet.
But what if Mikey’s story happened today instead of over 50 years ago? How would he fare? Would “acting like a girl” be interpreted as “really is a girl”?
When would the intercession of the gender brigade happen in his case?
Would it still be possible for Mikey to grow up to be gay?
Or would Mikey be transed?
The journey from naïve femboy to full, homosexual manhood is a noble one. Why suffer any boy to repudiate his sex, like Ritchie Herron, who later lamented: “I hated the fact that I was attracted to males and I wanted to do anything to get out of it”?
***
(The events depicted here are drawn from life, but they are highly selective. Mom says I really wasn’t that much of a femboy, but you wouldn’t have been able to convince me of that.)
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Image
Photo of caged balls from Wikimedia Commons.