Flag

The first time I saw an upside down American flag it was on the back of a wheelchair. It made me uncomfortable, but Helen* frequently made me feel uncomfortable. She was a blunt, demanding, intimidating, old-school activist working class butch dyke with a voice that was simultaneously raspy and shattering. In short, she was a hero. If I need to call to mind the exact tone of her voice, I just need to think of her partner’s name. Helen’s utterance of it, like her voice, had layered notes of demand, vulnerability and impatience. Miiicheeellle.

 If a door was too heavy or inaccessible for a person encumbered with crutches, a walker or a wheelchair, Helen was the first to report it, and if she wasn’t the first, she’d definitely be the last. Lesbian rights, women’s rights, disability rights, civil rights – all of it sat front and center in any room she inhabited.

Where I favored email or a fond wave from across the room, Helen favored full on engagement. She’d steer her wheelchair like my grandma used to steer her car- choose a direction and hit the gas hard. Next thing you knew, her wheels would be inches from your toes, her belly hanging between her legs and her hands gesturing to the middle of your chest. That’s why, when I used to see her at the YMCA just after her pool exercise and my weight machine rounds, I ducked and weaved behind the pulleys and mirrors. Before we got to know each other, she wasn’t keen on trans rights, which is to say she was a lesbian separatist. Eventually, she questioned her stand there. I don’t think I, a very visible trans man, had any influence on her; I just appeared in her life as she was changing her mind about that. Still, I was early in my transition and didn’t have the confidence to defend myself yet, so just in case, I usually tried to steer clear and appreciate her from a distance.

I was on my way to my truck after a workout and had snuck out around her as she was holding forth with two YMCA employees about the contraption that was supposed to lower and lift her in and out of the pool. The flag was draped over the back of her wheelchair, sort of pinned there. It was a little grimy from the hours and miles driven on hot St. Louis sidewalks and being loaded and unloaded into a van. Dozens of bumper stickers competed for space on the armrests and a big plastic cup with a straw bumped along as she aimed herself my way and hit the gas hard. Now she was barreling down the sidewalk, gaining on me.

It’s perhaps these few minutes that made me love her a little, and I can’t even remember the conversation except that she was kind to me and she had a stuffed animal wedged between her thigh and the armrest.

Helen didn’t believe in new age therapy or touchy feely anything. I knew she’d grown up in an orphanage, and the only picture I’d ever seen of her before the wheelchair was of her smoking a pipe while straddling a motorcycle. Her helmet had giant stars and stripes like Easy Rider, and it rode on the handlebars.

I didn’t ask her what it meant to hang the flag upside down, but it looked like a giant fuck you, which would have been true to her nature. It made me sort of angry for reasons that I couldn’t quite understand at the time, and also inspired me to make a mental note. Sometime in your life, be bold enough to question every sacred thing.

The thing I do remember about our conversation was that she had named her stuffed animal. She was trying to bond with it, to connect with a smaller self, a child self. In other words, new age therapy. I silently bonded with her as I thought of Snoozy Bear, my doll from my fifth birthday, resting perfectly seated amongst my other teddy bears that I routinely comforted as I searched around them in my closet. I remember her being happy to see me, and I remember making another mental note to stop being such a dick.

When I got home I looked up what it means to hang the flag upside down and saw that it wasn’t a fuck you, but an S.O.S. A sign of a nation in serious trouble. I can’t help it. Every time I think of this, I think of summer, 1990. I was seventeen, and driving my sister home late at night. We only had about a mile’s drive through Effingham to get to our dad’s apartment, and to get there, I cut through downtown, where there were dozens of American flags flying. In the darkness, we saw a group of boys tearing down the flags. I still see the image in my mind of them running, cigarettes in hand, jumping and grabbing at the cloth, dragging it into the dirt. I stopped the car and we looked at each other for a beat before flinging the doors open and chasing them across the courthouse yard, across the street, past First National Bank to the post office where they scattered into the darkness. We stopped, crouched with our hands on our knees, and caught our breath, high on our righteousness, our certainty that we were defending the good. We were the brave ones. Two girls who had chased the boys away. Even though we had been drinking vodka and smoking menthols and weed (at least I had), we had defended something sacred. I was sure of it. So sure, in fact, that this memory stuck in my mind as evidence that I was one of the good guys.

The next time I saw an upside down flag it was taken down and burned on an interstate ramp. I was live streaming my participation in a Black Lives Matter march that led to blocking multiple lanes of traffic. I knew my relatives back home in Illinois were watching and I wanted to tell a certain story. I wanted them to empathize, and I knew I would lose them if they saw that. I turned my camera away from the flag burning and stood transfixed. It made me uncomfortable in a way that I still didn’t understand. I held my camera so that the marchers and sign wavers were in the frame and watched in the other direction as the smoke escape through the arms and legs of a circle of people. It was thick and dark the way something that is fire retardant smokes when it’s doused with gasoline. It didn’t want to catch. The result wasn’t the dramatic immolation the marchers wanted. It was awkward, and the logistics of lighting the flag sapped the spontaneity. Only a few stuck with the task, and the others retraced their steps back to the crowd, which was now headed onto the highway. I turned my camera toward the line of police officers wearing riot gear and answered, “No Justice” with “No Peace” along with everyone else. It’s that image that sticks with me – concentric circles of people trying to destroy something – protesters destroying a symbol of oppression, an armored police militia pressing in on a group that threatens the status quo, a group of observers and journalists who encircle the police threatening free speech.

But why was I, in some way, attached to a piece of apparently fire proof cloth?

The answer, I think, begins in Effingham, IL, specifically in a Southern Baptist Church in Effingham. Church was the white-hot center of my family. We went three times a week – twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday. It was where I learned about the power of language and fealty to a cause that is much, much bigger than one person. It was more than Sunday school, it was a thesis statement that followed me out of that church, into independent bookselling and then left me standing on a street corner pointing a camera one direction while looking another.

One Sunday when I was about ten years old, I sat in the baby room in the nursery while we listened to Brother Carl** shout into the microphone and into the radio airwaves and out of the speakers on the floor that ours was the only righteous faith.

“I will not apologize! I will not apologize!” he yelled. It was the first time it occurred to me that there was another group of people, possibly with more control, who would demand an apology for who I was. Other religions had their symbols and their tokens. “False idols,” Brother Carl called them. Ours was held together by certainty, an esprit de corps, a tribalism that became the air we breathed. This feeling of belonging to (and of possessing) the kingdom of the lord expanded to our town, our state, our country. We had the spirit of god, and it was up to everyone else to accept it into their hearts too. It was a big tent, but it was our tent.

Of course that’s a funhouse mirror view of the world. I started to understand that when I asked how to become a preacher and my Sunday school teacher said that was only for boys. I understood it further when I developed a crush on my third grade teacher, Mrs. Woods. I met people, fell in love with people, fought with people and listened to people. I embraced my queerness and my trans-ness. Slowly my worldview evolved in such a way that I was on the other side of the mirror looking in at this white evangelical entitlement knowing I was now the person Brother Carl was yelling at. He would not apologize, and neither would I.

Still, I didn’t have another thesis statement, so I applied the original one to bookselling and activism, trying to be a better person, trying to belong to something bigger, something righteous in an anti-racist, queer, secular way. I thought I had eradicated nearly all the trappings of my bible toting youth, but looking at that group torching the flag, it became evident that I still had it in me – that feeling of belonging to (and of possessing) the kingdom around me. That flag represented to me a nostalgic safety, where I knew the rules and the rules were there to protect me. But that’s a funhouse mirror view of the world. The American flag, to so many people, represents laws that make them outlaws, rules that rule them out, that protect others from them. From us. It is a symbol of the will of a group of people to extract and apology from us for being who we are, for believing what we do, for loving who we love. To some, the struggle is to defend what being an American means, to others, the struggle is to expand what America means. To challenge it. To question the sacred thing and require it to answer.

This year, in the wake of the reversal of Roe v Wade, the similarly catastrophic ruling favoring the coal mining industry over global climate change remediation, and other soul crushing defeats, it appears that more (white, cis, het) folks finding themselves outside of the shade of the big tent. They’re losing faith in the judicial system and really any elected official on either side of the aisle (and possibly the actual aisle). Lots of upside down flags. Lots of despair. Lots of crowing on the other side. Lots of solicitations for donations. Lots of silence.

What does this mean for the flag? What about the banners we wave signifying our identities and affiliations? Yellow and Blue flags briefly frame our profile pictures. Rainbow flags are everywhere in June (except for of course Chick-fil-A), and overnight they are replaced by red, white and blue banners and Fourth of July sales (except for Amazon who, even though I have opted out of all communication with them, still shows up in my phone scroll with ads telling me to wait for Prime Day). Is something sacred if it’s sanctioned, scheduled and short-term? It’s hard to be sure of anything. Enemies look like friends. Friends look like intruders with rude wheelchair politics. A flag can be false.

In Helen’s case, the upside down flag’s call of dire distress followed her everywhere she went. She wore it (metaphorically) like a cape. It dangled there amongst one liners stuck to the metal cage she found herself steering through a world she loved enough to provoke but that would have rather avoided her.

A couple of years before she died, I saw Helen steering her chair across a cracked parking lot and around the weeds on the sidewalk a couple of miles away from the YMCA. She held a full bag from Jack in the Box in her hand as she rode away. I waved and called out to her from my truck, but she kept going. I don’t know if she heard me or not. I like to think she did, but she was too damn busy changing her mind and changing the world to notice me. On the Fourth of July, I like to think about that.

*Helen and Michele were real people, and if you’re from St. Louis you probably knew them. I changed their names to respect their privacy anyway.

**Brother Carl is also a pseudonym. Also real.

Air Quotes

When I started transitioning 11 years ago, my goal was to be able to wear a suit and tie without irony.  The irony is that now I rarely wear a suit and tie. If you’ve read my earlier posts, you’ll know I’m more of a Carhartt/Dickies kind of guy.

In the beginning, my needs were modest – almost embarrassing in their naivete and physical appearance-focused nature.  Flat chest, facial hair, deep voice.  As if that was all there was to being a man. As if that would open a door that I could walk through unscathed. I wasn’t prepared for the space between female and male or how no matter what phase of my transition I was in, my status would forever be qualified by invisible air quotes.

If you’re gay and live in a state that still discriminates against you, you’ll recognize the air quotes. You’re “married” to your “spouse.”  If you’re black you’ll probably recognize the air quotes surrounding words like “diverse.”  If you were born a woman, you have already internalized the air quotes around “powerful” and “competent.”

I was not prepared for the air quotes around “person.”

When I was admitted to the hospital after an emergency surgery, my attending nurse came to me in the late evening between my opiate induced naps, leaned on the end of my bed and asked, “Do you prefer to be called He, She or It?” I decided that I had to be nice to her because I was alone in my room (they couldn’t put me in a room with a man or a woman) and she was the person who would come (or not) if I pushed the button on the fob tied to the handrail. My face no doubt resembled the look my bulldog gives when he needs to pee and I’m the only one with opposable thumbs to work the door knob.  Compliant, hopeful, grateful for any scrap of dignity. Part of me wished I had a recording device so I could use it to retell the terrifying tale to sympathetic friends. Part of me planned my emergency escape from the hospital if things got too weird.  Part of me (larger than I’d care to admit) just wanted her to like me.

It’s that part – the part that wants to be loved, who hates it when people are mad at me, who cannot abide much conflict at all – that steered most of those early years.  I kept making myself smaller so that I wouldn’t be the cause of any friction. If I’m honest, that part steers me much of the time now, except for I’m better at it because I’ve discovered that most of the time, the person you’re dealing with isn’t very concerned with you at all.  They are so wrapped up in their own insecurities, fears and loneliness that they are posing for you just as much as you feel pressured to pose for them.

In the years since then, I’ve learned to be gracious without begging, to forgive slights without consenting to them, to be grateful while demanding respect.  Being trans in the world has changed, too. Even since I injected my first dose of testosterone, the climate surrounding gender difference has warmed. In many cases, trans people feel freer to buck the whole notion of having a gender at all.  It’s very exciting.  Even Facebook has now included dozens of options under the gender question in your profile.  You can pretty much customize as much and as often as you want.  The whole notion of trans and gender is deconstructed.  Screw the “please like me” impulse – we can thumb our noses at all the air quotes around “man” and “woman” as if we’re not enough of either to be human.  I should be elated!

And I am.

So why haven’t I jumped at the chance to claim my transness on the mother of all social networks? Good question.  And one I’ve been asking myself all day, even after being interviewed about it.

I’ve never hidden my trans status.  In fact, I disclosed it much to my therapist’s chagrin during a group workshop (that had nothing to do with gender) because I had some sort of neurotic impulse to be honest at all cost, even if it derailed the purpose of the session.

I’ve written blog posts, essays, letters and even Facebook posts about being trans.  I went to Washington D.C. and disclosed my status as a transman in a meeting with high-ranking officials at the Department of Health and Human Services for god’s sake. I’m not closeted.

And yet.

I’ve grown attached to my male gender.  It’s mine and no one else’s. I’m a man the only way I can be, which is different than anyone else in the world can be a man. It fits me like my Rural King hat fits me.

The door I thought would be so easily traversed represented the most difficult journey I’ve ever started, and I am no where near, even over a decade later, finished transitioning. As I write this I know I’ll never be finished. 

The truth is that none of us emerge from our lives unscathed. We grow into the people we become – and then grow again. The truth is that transition is not only a  human experience.  It’s the only human experience.

So I’m free to be the person I am.  I have a right to select the term that fits.  So, I’m male.

I also reserve the right to change my mind.

My Slim, Reasonably Sized Trans Wedding (and the Queer Marriage that Follows)

Not even my therapist could say the word.  The big “W” is a concept that she (my therapist) and I had long ago abandoned and let atrophy in our minds.  I went to her office just after Kris and I decided that

Legal Proof – exhibit A.  (I cropped out the “Easy Breeze Trailer Court” address.)

since I got legal proof from the grand state of Illinois that I am male, that we could (and would) get married in Missouri, arguably the least queer friendly state in the union.  We sat through a Katie Couric show about trans youth in her apartment (my therapist and I have a quirky relationship), and I waited patiently for the final fade to credits and inspiring daytime show music to break the news.

I felt like I had to justify what we were doing by telling her that I was taking charge of my legal rights as Kris’ partner, and that ultimately it all made sense even though I had spent the better part of 9 years in her office working through anxiety, depression and one unfortunate bout of ulcerative colitis (too much information?) linked to my gender expression and the problems that go with it.  Also, if you haven’t guessed, my therapist is a lesbian in a long term relationship with her partner, who she can’t marry in this state.  I sort of felt like I had sold out.  Like I had abandoned my queerness to become Mr. Kris Kleindienst.

I expected her to want to dissect why I thought I had to get married and talk about my inner trans/gay phobia or something, but instead she just put her hands over her mouth and then said that it was wonderful news (and that she and her partner are going to Maine to get married).  As we talked about it we kept saying things like, “When I told my sister about, well, you know, the thing we’re going to do…”  Neither of us could utter the words “wedding” or “marriage.”  (Therapists have issues, too.)

The fact is, I kept thinking I had to justify my decision to marry Kris to everyone.  “Mom, I’m doing this because it protects me and Kris.”  “Friend, Kris and I have been together for 11 years, so it won’t be like anything changes.”  “Staff of the bookstore, this isn’t an April Fool’s joke, and it’s not a big deal but…”

I even stayed up at night trying to justify it to myself.

I heard Kris justifying it to other people with things like, “Fuck the state of fucking Missouri.”  In fact, she didn’t describe our wedding without a string of expletives for at least the first week.  I didn’t take that as a bad sign.  Kris is frequently colorful, and we were both terrified.

The wedding itself was a utilitarian affair.  We, and several of our close friends and family, were ushered by a bailiff with a whistle into the cavernous courtroom dedicated to just this event in downtown St. Louis and took our vows while our three year old nephew insisted that his monster truck was more interesting.

It was actually perfect.

For a while afterwards, I played with the idea of being a husband in my mind, and it felt like I was getting away with something, and also that I was finally able to settle into my life with Kris.  Even though we didn’t feel like we lacked a marriage before, having one reminded us that we were here with each other on purpose.  Still, the mechanisms and language were and are foreign to both of us.

Last week I went in to 5/3 Bank to see about opening up a new checking account after our current bank whose name I won’t mention but whose name also connotes the first Monday in March in Illinois (and only Illinois, and only fairly recently – in fact, schools only started taking this holiday when I was in Junior High, but I digress) started disabling our debit cards when we made trips over 20 miles past the Poplar Street Bridge.

I had the beginnings of what would become an all encompassing ear infection and had kept thinking I was screaming when I was whispering, then couldn’t hear answers.  Conversation with anyone was becoming even more awkward than it usually is.  So when I explained who I was to the greeter (and there is no other word to describe this person even though he didn’t wear a smock and direct me to the closeout sale on antiperspirant) he asked me about my accounts.  I explained to him that I wanted one for me and one for my wife, which to me sounded like I had only thought the word because I couldn’t hear anything.

I could tell I did actually say the word because while explaining that we do in fact still use paper checks sometimes I noticed that he was noticing my hand gestures.  I talk with my hands more than any straight man I know, and since I couldn’t hear him, I was apparently overcompensating by acting out the words joint checking account so he could understand me, which made me look more like a flaming queen than I usually look (which takes effort).  I could see the wheels turning in his head.  He assured me that transferring money from my account to my “wife’s” (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) would be no trouble at all.  There was yet another long moment of awkward silence where I tried to decide whether to assure the man that I wasn’t a delusional closeted gay man or try to be more butch.  I decided that there were other branches of 5/3 Banks, one was even closer to my house, and that I would probably never have to talk to him again, so I continued my game of deaf charades and changed “wife” to “partner” and back again to “wife” and then just to Kris with the “she” thrown in for good measure.  It’s good to keep your banker guessing.

I haven’t been back to the bank yet, mostly because I’ve been stoned on Vicodin and sundry other medications for the aforementioned ear infection, but I will go back.

It’s a strange thing, this circling around, being so queer we’re straight again – “lapping ourselves” as our friend Amanda put it.  There seems to be this conflicting sensation of having to come out again about stepping into another closet. Augusten Burroughs wrote a good op/ed piece in the NY times about his similar struggle with the husband/wife beast which gets at part of what I’m talking about, but this other piece – where I have a wife (that Kris is a wife) is another kind of weird.

I’m not sure I am or ever will be at a point in my life where telling someone I have a wife doesn’t make me feel like I should be wearing gym socks and cowboy boots, holding my harm around the little woman’s shoulders protectively, patting her hand and talking to my friends at the Masonic Lodge about how she and her friends prattle on.

I suppose this, like every other damn thing in my life, will have to be redefined, reworked and reworded a few hundred times before it’s recognizable as my own.  I can’t wait to see what that looks like.