When I was a child, anytime that I failed to meet a standard of toughness or hard work, my Father had a name for me:
Pansy.
Can’t keep up with him at hard labor? Pansy. Crying about a wound? Pansy. Feelings hurt? Definitely a pansy. And even as young as 7 or 8, I understood intimately what that meant. Pansies are soft and weak. Pansies aren’t “real men”, they’re faggots, a word he wouldn’t often use out loud, but certainly implied. And his hatred for men like that ran deep. It was clear to me that I shouldn’t be a pansy; they were despicable, something to be ridiculed and beaten down. Every time he called me that, I flashed through all of his limp wristed impressions of “fairy boys and queers”, and swore to myself I would never be that.
When he was screaming in my face about his disappointment at my failure to live up to his expectations of my gender, my terror morphed into a survival level need to never be soft enough to earn his wrath. Pansies are hurt by violence. Real men wield it as a strength.
And so, as I grew, my shell began to harden. Violence, both emotional and physical, leaves scars that form into armor.
When I was 11 and discovered two of my friends from the neighborhood in our shared little “clubhouse” with their pants around their knees rubbing their genitals together, I knew they must be pansies. The shame in their eyes at being discovered as they ran back to their houses seemed fitting, and we never mentioned it when we hung out after that. No one would want to be that way on purpose.
Things got confusing when I was in high school. I had always loved Drama as a class, and joined the Thespian society as part of that. I loved musical theater, and had a fair voice despite being a shit dancer, and in acting, found an accepting family I had never had before. The judgment and strict authoritarianism I’d become accustomed to growing up in a fundamentalist military household was missing here; our emotions were the tools of our trade, and we were encouraged to dig deep into them when taking on roles, to find the motivation behind the characters we played.
And, in musical theater, I met real life gay boys. Worse, I liked them as people.
In fact, as I got to know some of them, not only did I discover how much we had in common in shared artistic interest, but more importantly, we had a shared history of violence against us. It was one thing to be beaten for appearing to be a pansy. It was so much worse when it was because you were actually gay. As someone who was already relegated to the “freaks and misfits” class in school (and already showing early signs of what would later be diagnosed as Type II Bipolar Disorder), the theater kids and the small handful of barely closeted gay kids became some of my closest friends.
To say my Father wasn’t thrilled about my interest in musical theater would be an understatement, but I guarded the secret orientation of some of my friends with my life. I was terrified he would discover it, and hurt not only me, but also them. The very act of preserving that secret knowledge empowered me in some unexpected ways, though. I began challenging the concepts of gender I’d been taught, and finding myself quite at home in the burgeoning Goth scene of the mid-90’s. Eyeliner and black lipstick allowed me to express a part of myself that had always been a target for attack, yet would easily wash away before I went home. I could be the dark freak I felt inside my head for a little while, before heading back to the sterile environment of my home.
I’d discovered my own closet, and my occasional stepping out of it felt more like my true identity than the scrubbed up church boy role I’d been forced into for as long as I could remember.
I won’t pretend that this was a healthy time for me; I’d discovered smoking weed when I was 12, and by the time I was 17 was blending weed, alcohol, pain pills, and hallucinogens on a regular basis. My life was spiraling out of control. I moved out of my parents’ house three months after my 17th birthday, and finished high school while living with a friend, but was driven by the nihilism that comes when you’re a teenaged street rat with no future to speak of. College wasn’t going to happen for me. I never even bothered to take the SAT. I was working a minimum wage line cook job, and using the $220 I took home every other week to double it by selling crack on the weekends. I discovered snorting cocaine, and discovered that I loved it.
It was no surprise when I was arrested, but I played along with the system, and took an intervention program which sent me to a rehab in West Palm Beach three months before my 18th birthday. It was a religious program, and a shocking return to the authoritarian structures I’d only just escaped less than a year before. On the night of my 18th birthday, I snuck out the door with my clothes in a black garbage bag, hit the streets of West Palm, and worked out a Greyhound ticket back to St. Pete.
The next year of my life was probably the hardest I’ve ever had. Having been arrested and processed through the system, I found myself a pariah among the very people I’d been associating with for the previous two years. No one trusted me. My criminal friends thought I might be an informant, and my non-criminal friends knew I was a criminal. I slept in the backseat of a car owned by the last friend I had left for nearly a year, while trying to find some sort of paid work to get back on track.
I eventually found work as a telemarketer selling timeshare pitches disguised as free cruises to the Bahamas, and it was where I met Russell, a middle aged guy who seemed to love my “alternative” lifestyle. It was then I discovered how attractive I was to older gay men.
If there’s one thing you learn as a teenager living on the street, it’s how to exploit an opportunity.
I suspected his intentions early on, but never turned down an offer to come to lunch with him, knowing he’d always pick up the tab. A footlong sub at lunchtime left half which I could take home for dinner. I was sharing a house with two other friends of mine (along with a long line of other transients who would occasionally share a bed with us), and we rarely had groceries of any sort. So when he asked me to come out to dinner one night, and asked me what I’d like to drink and smoke, I was ready. I told him how to buy weed, and how much, and told him that I liked screwdrivers. Sitting in his car at 18 years old while he went into a liquor store to buy me cocktails felt powerful; I’d never been the “hot guy” in my circle of friends, and yet here I was being treated like royalty by a guy who clearly was attracted to me.
He let me roll a joint out of the bag he’d provided, and I put the rest in my pocket. I smoked it while drinking a screwdriver, and then he took me to a nice restaurant. I ordered heavy, getting a bag for the leftovers, and as we left the restaurant, I told him I was tired and needed to get home. He tried to convince me to come to his house, but I was insistent that I was expected back, and he eventually relented. When I showed up at the house with the rest of the food, liquor, and weed, I was hailed as a hero.
It was my first experience using my looks to get ahead, and I was intoxicated by the power.
A couple of my good friends were lesbians, and found this entire turn of events hilarious. They called me gay bait, and they were convinced I just needed encouragement, and began setting me up with dates with their male friends, which I went along with. Having been a short, fat, poor kid who women in school would act disgusted by, being sought after by hungry men felt incredibly validating. I didn’t think about the consequences of my actions at all until a sweet boy named Michael fell in love with me. He wrote me a long love letter, telling me how he knew I was really straight, but how he would try his hardest to be a woman for me. It made me realize what a piece of shit I was, using these men for validation with absolutely no concern for their feelings, and I cut off further dating adventures.
I still miss him. He was one of the kindest people I’ve ever met, and didn’t deserve the way I treated him.
My substance abuse issues were getting progressively worse, and when I started dating Shayla, my daily mission was to get obliterated. She was the absolute worst partner for me possible, having serious mental health issues of her own, and just as prone to getting fucked up as I was. Many of my friends were scared of her, but in my self destructive spiral, I thought she was perfect. We reveled in madness and chased chaos together, and had the kind of wreckless excessive sex that junkies have when they don’t care about their bodies or consequences.
She had a best friend named Keith who was a gay man, and we would often party together. One night, after drinking an excessive amount of tequila (some cheap terrible brand that I still remember tasting like charcoal), I realized I was too fucked up, and laid down. I wasn’t blacked out, but I was so drunk I couldn’t talk or move. The spins were hitting hard, and I knew I needed to sleep it off. Shayla, however, was ready to fuck, and was deeply annoyed that I was basically passing out.
She came into the room and undressed me, but was angry that she couldn’t get me hard with her hands, and due to her own trauma, absolutely refused to perform oral. So she called Keith into the room and told him to suck my dick to get it hard enough for her to ride.
I had never actually engaged in a homosexual act before; I had flirted, hugged, held hands, and played the role, but in my head, I was straight, and there was a line. When I heard her say that, I was terrified, but the “No” in my head couldn’t make its way out of my mouth. I felt the adrenaline of fear all through my body, my sphincter clenching, but I couldn’t talk, couldn’t move, and felt the most powerless I’d ever felt in my life.
Worse, when he began fellating me, I got hard.
Fucking pansy. You really like this, don’t you?
I was screaming stop in my head but it just wouldn’t come out. I was feeling physical pleasure combined with terror, trapped in my own body while they laughed, and unable to do anything at all while she climbed on top of me and rode me to her own orgasm. At some point I passed out.
The next day, I said nothing, just grabbed my things and left. I never went back.
For years after that, I struggled with my sexuality. I met a woman, married, had kids, but always in the back of my head was that nagging fear that I’d crossed a line somehow, that I actually was that pansy my Father had always said I was. And hell, didn’t I deserve it? I’d played with that line of gender and orientation so much, exploiting it for my own personal gains. This was my payback, to discover that I really was queer, to be preyed upon by a man (in conjunction with the woman I was dating, no less). I could hear his voice in my head, taunting me, pointing out how I’d failed to live up to being a man, how I’d become another victim.
As time passed, many things changed, and I slowly made peace with all of it, inasmuch as you can make peace with sexual assault. The greater coming out and normalization of gay people in our society began removing some of the mental stigma in my head that I might be gay, freeing me to explore my own orientation without the fear or guilt. Twenty years of adult sexuality helped me make peace with my desires; my kinks and fetishes, my fluid approach to both gender and orientation. I grew past the models of toxic masculinity that had shaped me, and filled me with such fear that I didn’t measure up, that I wasn’t a Real Man.
I stopped hearing my Father’s voice in my head.
Decades later, I understand that there’s no shame in not conforming to a strict expectation of how we express ourselves in either gender, or sexuality, and thank god, because my own queer child needed my love and support, not the angry voice enforcing the roles handed down from previous generations.
And I’ve learned that a pansy is not something shameful; it’s a beautiful, delicate flower, sensitive to heat, and rich in color and scent. I should be so lucky to be considered such.