And I can tell
When you get nervous
You think being yourself means being unworthy
And it’s hard to love with a heart that’s hurting1“I Know a Place” by MUNA
“…queer as not about who you’re having sex with, that can be a dimension of it, but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” – bell hooks
In 1988 I was 5 years old and I was obsessed with my cassette tape of Taylor Dayne’s “Tell It to My Heart.” I listened to it on loop.
In 2021, I made a mix called Getting Swifty 2This playlist is available on TIDAL. I recently canceled my Spotify subscription and moved all of my playlists and favorites over to TIDAL. I could not continue to support a company that underpays musicians while dishing out $100M for the exclusive right to showcase a racist spreading deadly misinformation in a pandemic. The playlist is probably still available and public on Spotify, but I hope you choose another venue to get your Swift on. that is currently three hours and twenty minutes of T-Swift bangers and ballads. It features four different versions of “All Too Well (Taylor’s Version).”
In my sophomore year of college, I lived with my friend Len. Our shared bedroom was a mirror image of itself: two twin beds and two desks where we sat back to back, barely enough room for one of us to push back to get up from the desk. One day, after living together for half of that year and then into our junior year, we were sitting around with one of our suitemates, Eddie, joking about one another’s living habits.
Len smirked and said to me, “You know what I’ve figured out?” I shrugged. “When you put your headphones on to listen to music on your computer, within five songs you will be listening to Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” We all laughed because he was definitely right.
~~~
I come home, in the mornin’ light
My mother says, “When you gonna live your life right?”
Oh momma dear, we’re not the fortunate ones3“Girls Just Want to Have Fun” by Cyndi Lauper
I’ve told this story here before, but it bears repeating. When I was maybe 6 years old, my dad took me shoe shopping while my mom went with my brother to his ice skating lesson. My dad told me to pick out whatever I wanted. I chose hot pink hi-top Converse sneakers.4AKA Chuck Taylors, as pointed out by my editor, CM, thus adding an additional Taylor, to what was initially a tale of two Taylors. I loved them because they were close to my favorite color, the pink of a Baskin Robbins plastic spoon. I wore the shoes out of the store. We went to the ice rink to meet up with my mom and brother, and I was so happy to show off my new shoes. My mom’s reaction surprised me. She was not happy. In the moment, my young self thought she was angry, because she told my dad he had to take me back to exchange them for a different color.
She did not mean to shame my choice, or to shame me for liking pink. It was the ’80s after all, and we all wore neon all the time. Rather, she was worried. She was worried that something about the pink shoes crossed an unnamed line. She was worried what my peers at school, or other parents, or older kids around town might do or say to me. She was trying to protect me. This is one of the few memories I have, maybe the only one, where I can remember my mom being less progressive than my dad.
My mom and I have since talked about the pink shoes a number of times. I do not necessarily give this moment more weight than other moments in my life where the gender binary was reinforced, where I was corrected, shamed, punished, or regulated into being a normal boy, and later a man, and heterosexual. Though maybe it sticks with me because every other memory I have of my mom is one of unwavering support and encouragement to be the person I am and want to be. I know that this moment stuck with her too.
~~~
How long will it be cute
All this crying in my room
Whеn you can’t blame it on my youth
And roll your eyes with affеction?5“Nothing New (Taylor’s Version)” by Taylor Swift featuring Phoebe Bridgers
As I approach my 39th birthday, the third in some stage of quarantine amid the global COVID-19 pandemic with no end in sight, as I approach the achievement of completing my doctoral program, and as I approach the start of the next stage of my life and career—whatever that might be—I still struggle with owning who I am. I am struggling with putting it in writing, which as readers of this site can attest, is not something I usually struggle with [Editor’s comment: “You struggle with owning who you are period. Even putting it in writing – which is a medium you use regularly to claim things, and process things. You struggling to put it in writing is a part of you struggling to own who you are.” – ATW]. Even more so, I struggle with speaking it out loud.
Over the past ten years, as I have focused on gender-based work, smashing patriarchy, unpacking hegemonic/toxic masculinity, and complicating men’s violences through an intersectional analysis of multiple systems of oppression, I have held onto the identity of man. It has felt important, necessary even, to do the work that I do from the positionality of a cisgender man. To disrupt from within.
But I also use the gender pronoun “they.”. I use he/they and have since before I started focusing on gender in my life and work. From my earliest points with Occupy Wall Street when I first experienced the regular practice of identifying our pronouns, I have used he/they. It always just felt right. I must admit though that when someone uses “they” to refer to me, it does not always connect. Sometimes when my students refer to me as “they” in their discussion board posts, I wonder who they’re talking about. Maybe because it’s only recently that people have been using “they” over “he,” I am still getting used to others wielding my identity on my behalf.
I am working to understand that Queer Theory6Queer Theory is an academic field that spans disciplines and defies categorization. It derives from Gender and Sexuality Studies, as well as Gay & Lesbian Studies, much like how those fields derived from, built upon, expanded the bounds of, etc. Women’s Studies. To queer something, is to complicate it, to add nuance, confusion, and recognize its intersections, its blurry boundaries, the ways, despite how we might often think about something, that something is not so clear cut, a spectrum versus a binary. Queering, and Queer Theory “refer to the realms of possibility that exist when normalcy is not assumed, when the existence of social construction is understood, and deconstruction seen as the necessary first step to undoing oppression” (Goldberg, “Queering the Violences of Men,” 2015) has appealed to me not only academically—because deconstruction relates so strongly to how I approach my work—but because it connects more deeply to how I understand myself.
I am working to understand why it has been easier, and more comfortable, for me to identify with Crip Theory7Similar to Queer Theory, Crip Theory emerged from within Disability Studies and the Disability Rights/Justice movement. Crip Theory reclaims a pejorative term and is a radical, disabled person-centered school of thought and social movement. as I have become more accustomed to taking on the identity of disability as I have lived with chronic pain for nearly twenty years, and mental illness—suicidal ideations, anxiety, depression, and disordered eating—for even longer. To identify with/as crip puts me in community, makes me feel seen and validates my experience.
I am working to understand what it means to accept that maybe I’m not strictly heterosexual. That not only have I always been a little queer in my gender identity, but maybe in my sexuality as well.
Amid so much loss and devastation of the past two years, I am not ready to process or try to articulate what the loss of bell hooks late last year has meant to me. I do not think I actually even begin to understand. The loss of her is incomprehensible, it is a devastation unlike any other. I am saddened that it was only in her absence, because of her absence, that I came across this quote, that strikes me to the core in this moment of my becoming:
“…queer as not about who you’re having sex with, that can be a dimension of it, but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”8“bell hooks – Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body | Eugene Lang College” on YouTube
~~~
And I know it’s long gone and there was nothing else I could do
And I forget about you long enough to forget why I needed to9“All Too Well 10-minute Version (Taylor’s Version)” by Taylor Swift
I have never felt more shame, or more shamed, in my processes of becoming who I am, than when it comes to music.
As a young teen, I remember turning down the radio, or quickly changing radio/TV channels so no one would hear me listen to Alanis Morissette, or Fiona Apple, Annie Lennox, Des’ree, The Cardigans, and so many other women singers or bands led by women.
In the early days of dating my former long-term partner back in New York, she gave me a mix CD that was incredible. It introduced me to Tegan and Sara, Arcade Fire, Elbow, Sufjan Stevens, Lou Barlow, and so many others.
Then I made her one.
It was hard for me because she was fuckin’ cool. She listened to more eclectic music than I did, and a wider variety of genres. We had some shared musical interests, but at that point I was not yet really into indie music, so I felt like I had less to offer her. This was especially so because I was into some of the genres that she made fun of, and she made it pretty clear that she wasn’t interested in finding value in them, despite my interests. I made her a mix of songs that were important to me, that I thought were beautiful, that conveyed how I felt about her. I included tracks that I thought she might enjoy—because the singers were women, or the music was reminiscent to me of the world music she liked—even if the actual genre or particular artist was not one she usually listened to. I thought my sharing the tracks might have been enough.
She was fuckin’ cool, but she was also a snob (I loved that about her). And could be really fuckin’ mean (this not so much). She didn’t tell me right away, but it came out a few years later: She really hated that mix. And I felt so small, not only in my interests, but in myself.
I have rarely been interested in being cool, but I do need validation.
I have only ever wanted to be myself. And I crave your validation.
~~~
Tell it to my heart
Tell me I’m the only one
Is this really love or just a game?10“Tell it to My Heart” by Taylor Dayne
I do not enjoy dancing.
Rather, I hate dancing in front of anyone. Rather, I hate dancing genuinely in front of anyone. I’ll dance to make you laugh, so long as I am in on the joke.
To be pulled onto a dance floor by an excited partner is terrifying in a visceral way. I have little else to compare it to.
When my former long-term partner started seeing someone else, first just sexually as we explored an open relationship, I stopped eating. My anxiety physically settled in my stomach like a bowling ball. I could physically feel its weight and size occupying my stomach. There was no room for food, so I did not feel hunger; I felt only the weight and obstruction of my anxiety. Coffee could fill any open nook, and it was the only thing I could bring to pass my lips without feeling like I would vomit. This went on for the better part of a month, and my body ate itself. I lost over 25 pounds. I was working nights then, so she and I did not often share meals, and if my partner noticed that I wasn’t eating, she didn’t say anything. She knew I was losing weight, but she did not comment on it or express concern for me as it was happening. This was partly out of spite—not the first nor last, of her casual cruelties.
Though I knew I was not healthy, I was, for maybe the first time in my life, not ashamed of my body.
At some point in the drawn-out 10 months of this open-relationship trial run, as our relationship slowly withered and eventually died with me crumpled and sobbing at her feet in our bedroom, begging her not to leave me, we stopped having sex. There were various excuses made, but eventually, as it always does, the truth slipped out. She wasn’t attracted to me—not to my body, not to my mind, not to me. She was revolted by me.
I believed that I deserved her disgust because I was, am, disgusting.
In this last year of our relationship, someone asked her if I would ever break up with her, and her response was, “No, Brett loves me too much.” It was true, there was nothing she could do, or did do, that would make me break up with her. It was easier to think about jumping out the window. Or to wonder, hope even, if I might be better off if she got into an accident and never came home. This thought is one of the many shames I carry with me from that year.
Sometimes I wonder if her cruelty was her testing out her own theory that I loved her too much to break up with her. Eventually she became bored of the experiment. It was more trouble than it was worth. How long can one stand to live with a science experiment?
But this was supposed to be about dancing.
In our final months, we went to see Flying Lotus at Le Poisson Rouge. It was dark, overwhelmingly hot, and so crowded, and she stood in front of me, impossibly close, pressed into me for hours. We danced together as one. When we got home, I think we had sex, though I can’t say for sure.
As our relationship continued to sink, I scrambled for any handhold like I was drowning, desperately grasping for anything other than water as I inevitably sank. I checked venue websites incessantly, hoping that an artist I knew she liked would be playing and we could dance together again. It was not that I wanted it to initiate sex, but that I wanted to feel close to her, with her, to move again together as if we were one.
But we never did.
This is not why I hate dancing, but it does not help.
I have never felt at home in my body, in this body that is me, but that inhibits, feels wrong, hurts and aches; this body that defies me. Or maybe my mind defies my body. I listen, but maybe I have never heard what it is trying to tell me.
Despite the anxiety, the depression, the whispers for death, the nightmares that haunt me, and the dreams that taunt me, I have never not felt at home in my mind. I may not always like it, but this home is me. Though I want to, I struggle with how to invite you into this home.
I’m clingy and needy as a result of insecurities and anxieties I don’t always have language for. I have deep-rooted needs I can’t always name or articulate. I crave your validation to tell me it is OK for me to be myself.
I’m worried about self-fulfilling the prophecies of my deepest fears. That I will push you away by being myself, which confirms that myself is not OK to be; that I am unlovable. That she was right, I am disgusting.
~~~
And I can go anywhere I want
Anywhere I want
just not home11“My Tears Ricochet” by Taylor Swift
I’ve always been unnerved by labels. They have always created more division than understanding. This is a flippant example, but it works: I stopped eating red meat and pork when I was 11 or 12. (Interesting side note: this is where my disordered eating began, but I would not have that language for another 23 years). I stopped eating poultry when I was 17. When it comes up in conversation, I usually say that I am “mostly vegetarian” and sometimes amend it with, “I eat fish sometimes.” More times than not, someone will reply, “Oh, so you’re pescatarian.” You know the tone. I’ll say, “Sure.” This is not a label that feels necessary to me, or that resonates. But I guess it makes me more legible to them. It is not how I see myself or understand my relationship to food.
But labels are often not about how we see ourselves, they are about being legible to others.
At a Christmas gathering last year with my extended built family, my friend’s sister-in-law was telling a few of us about their eldest kid’s journey with their gender identity. Over the past year or so their elder kid has been coming to understand that they do not identify as cisgender or heterosexual. As a preteen with progressive parents, they have been comfortable expressing this and experimenting with their gender presentation as they work to come to understand their self and their gender as their process of becoming veers off the normative path. But their kid is struggling with the labels. There are so many possibilities, subcategories, and variations. It was giving their kid anxiety; not their becoming, but with how to identify their becoming. The labels gave them anxiety. I said to their mom, “Labels are not about how we see ourselves; labels are about being legible to others.” This was a very academic thing to say, but it made my friend’s sister-in-law light up. She said, “Can you go tell them that?!”
The labels I would use un/name me.
Labels can be both limiting and liberating. Labels can give language to what has felt unexplainable, but they can also be constraining and inhibiting. Labels can open up possibilities for understanding ourselves and at the same time confuse our journey.12These thoughts on labels appreciatively appropriated from ATW’s editorial notes on draft 1.
The labels I might use do not make or unmake me.
~~~
Please don’t be in love with somebody else
Please don’t have somebody waiting on you
Please don’t be in love with somebody else
Please don’t have somebody waiting on you13“Enchanted” by Taylor Swift
How might my capacity to love and be loved have been different if I weren’t scared to be fully myself? If I did not hate my body? How might my capacity to connect, to express my needs, to hear the needs of others without hearing boundaries as rejections have been different had I not developed the need to flee, the habit of wanting to run away before you have the chance to leave me, or the haunting whisper that I should run toward death?
Who might I have become if I were not so preoccupied with what you thought of me?
Who might I be if I had not been ashamed to sing “Tell It to My Heart” as a child? Who might I have been as a preteen if I hadn’t been so afraid that liking music with women vocalists had some deeper meaning about me as a person? Who might still I become if it did not take me so long to give Taylor Swift’s music a chance and to admit that it moves me?
How might my relationships with partners and lovers have grown differently, or ended differently had I been able to articulate my needs, insecurities, and desires, still from a place of insecurity and trauma—no denying that—but also as the means through which we built our connection? How might they have responded to me? Would you have validated me or pushed me away? Would I have stuck around long enough to give you the chance?
I am drawn to Queer Theory because I have to fundamentally believe that we never become who we are. Rather, we are always in process of becoming who we might be.
We are perpetually a work in progress and in process.
So here as I approach my 39th birthday, my 39th year of becoming myself, I am a work in progress and in process. Always.
And I can tell
When you get nervous
You think being yourself means being unworthy
And it’s hard to love with a heart that’s hurting
But if you want to go out dancing
I know a place
I know a place we can go
Where everyone gonna lay down their weapon
“I Know a Place” by MUNA
~~~
Written by Brett S. Goldberg / Edited by Alexandria T. Ward & Carrie Morrisroe
~~~
