The Story of an Oppressed Gay Child Who Abolished Their Feminine for Over 40 Years

Nascent sexuality and its ‘correction’….

When I was a child I hung out a lot with my sister. I liked the company of girls. Boys were strange aggressive creatures who obsessed over cars and football. Together with my sister and her friends I found men to be mysteriously attractive. 

The boys no doubt saw me as a lisping sissy who played with the girls, cried easily, danced, skipped, skated, couldn't kick a football and threw like a girl!

In primary school all the boys wore shorts and one day a sexually precocious girl taught us how to play a secret game called ‘nervous’ which started with the girls touching the boys on the inside of the knee and then slowly inching it up their inner thighs asking all the time ‘Are you nervous yet?’ The boldest among us would allow the finger to pass under the hem of our shorts, pass inside our underpants, move onto our scrotum and then finally allow a whole hand to grasp our little prepubescent willies. It felt amaaazing! I quickly adapted the game so I could play it with my classmate Michael, under the desk during maths lessons, and with my friend Benny, in the shallow end of the swimming pool.

My dad was a Scout leader and this meant, as a family, we’d go on camping holidays with scores of horny adolescent lads. I remember, at the tender age of 9 being adopted by Kestrel patrol - a gang of 7 teenagers who, upon realising I didn't actually know the answer to the question ‘Do you know how you were born?’ took it upon themselves to educate me into all the elaborate ins and outs of sex as they understood it. This included stories of boys wanking behind their desk at the back of the classroom and being able to ejaculate ‘spunk’ more than six desks in front of them. Someone they knew had been born as a result of ruptured Durex or ‘Johnny Bag’ which was known as ‘Being born on a bursted Johnny’. There was also talk of ‘Homos’ and ‘Lesbos’ and a clear message that none of this was acceptable. Nevertheless all this talk from man-boys with deep voices, prominent Adams apples, hairy armpits and athletic physiques firmly cemented my erotic curiosity in the direction of male secondary sexual characteristics and made it all a deliciously irresistible forbidden bowl of fruit.

As I hit my teens the boys in secondary school started to violently police the behaviour of the boys they identified as different. This involved constant name calling, pushing, shoving, kicking and shaming. Making sure they knew they had been clocked and excluded from the possibility of any sort of social connection.

Once this started my preservation instinct kicked in and I rapidly learned to perform the correct code of conduct. Not backing down from a fight instigated by the accusation of being 'a puff’ saved me from closer scrutiny. Then, to further develop my laddish credentials I would hang out with the smokers by the bike sheds pretending to be interested in their sex talk of  fondling, fingering and shagging. I even started dating girls with the sole purpose of making conquests I could subsequently brag about. 

There were some boys who were very gentle and softly spoken. They seemed unwilling or unable to behave in acceptably masculine ways. They were mercilessly punished on a daily basis. I didn't bully them myself but watched on as it happened, fearing that defending them would blow my cover and I'd end up having to suffer the same fate.

Nascent gender performativity and its ‘correction’…

In 1960, the working class world I was born into knew nothing beyond a very strictly policed gender binary. I had a penis so I was a boy-simples! But I was a girly boy. I wished I could be a mother and become a housewife. It made me sad that this option wasn’t open to me. I envied girls and their ability to attract sexy men. I wanted to wear makeup and once dusted my face with some foundation powder from a discarded compact of my mothers. My dad noticed immediately “Wash that muck off your face!’ A few months later I patted a bit of talcum powder on my cheeks then forgot about it. Again my dad spotted it and with disgust said ‘What have you done to your face? Wash it off and don’t let me ever see you do that kind of thing again!”

So I was efficiently detected as a potential gender transgressor and rapidly knocked back into line. I quickly learned that some of my speech patterns, mannerisms and gestures could be identified by others as ‘girly’ and were therefore potentially dangerous signifiers of differentness. I felt this girlishness was somehow related to my secret attraction towards men and so for the sake of my social survival it needed to be eradicated from how I presented myself to the world.

Thus began the extended performance of a macho-ish false self. The voice had to be lower and gruff with no squeals or screeches. Hands had to be anchored in pockets. The walk became a cocky lolling swagger with a man-spreading gait suggestive of a need to avoid scissoring an imaginary pair of big balls between upper thighs. I was pretty convincing to the point that I almost believed it myself! Even beyond the age of 20 when I came out as gay, the straight-acting-ness was firmly ingrained and would remain so until met the Faeries.

Then, at the age of 49 I put on a wig, a dress and some make-up. It was such a transformation that no-one seemed to recognise me. A part of me that had been frozen began to thaw out. This presentation of me wasn’t seen by the Faeries as disgusting but was celebrated and appreciated. What a relief it was to no longer be policing myself, to be allowing free reign to any whim or style of being without fear of reprimand.

But then it got complicated, some of the presentations of my repressed femininity could seem like a caricature or a parody of womanly behaviour and thus I noticed a potential to cause offence to female and trans faeries. The enjoyment I experienced in allowing my cis-male programmed behaviours to recede led me to wonder about my gender identity. Sadly when I dared to consider that I might be trans*, the young trans Faeries shook their heads seeing me as too cis-seeming. 

So, now at the grand old age of 60 I know I’m not a conventional gay-cis-male. Within a cis/trans spectrum I tend to get pushed away from the trans end. And within a Gay/Bi/Straight spectrum I’m experientially fairly gay even though in my youth I did engage in faux-straight sexual activities.

There’s certainly something odd about my gender so I tend to describe it as ‘cissish’ and when it comes to pronouns, I do tend to be referred to as ‘he’ but generally I prefer to be seen in all my plurality as ‘they’! 

I reckon that the oppressive policing of my gender and sexuality has wounded me pretty deeply. I've had to work hard to find at least a degree of healing from all of this. 

I’m wondering if, for some who have experienced a similar kind of wounding, when it doesn't, for whatever reason, get fully processed can it kind of manifest itself as an ‘identification with the aggressor’ and does it then present itself as misogyny and transphobia?

I know that whenever I detect misogyny or transphobia directed towards others it presses on the memory of my own oppression and I feel a twinge of pain from those suffocating 40 years of self policing

Full Spectrum Faerie Sex Magick

The Faeries are a fairly diverse bunch of queers.

However, in the early days, 40 years or so ago, at the very first gatherings of Faeries, the vast majority of attendees were gay men who were drawn to the idea of meeting together as faggots in nature to celebrate their sissy selves and explore their spiritual consciousness, asking the questions: 'Who are we, where are going, and what are we for?'

From the exploration of these questions, (and from a growing awareness that, although a lot of gay men seemed to be having a lot of sex, they were often craving an intimacy with each other which seemed forever-out-of-reach), there emerged an intensive workshop aimed at helping those who felt the call, to delve into the personal and interpersonal reasons for the many obstacles to intimacy encountered by gay men. These healing workshops, facilitated by volunteer Faeries, for the benefit of Faeries, have been running for the past 30 years and are known as Faerie Sex Magick (FSM) Workshops.

These days Faerie-space is now a much more diverse and inclusive network where those from across the full range of the LGBTQIA+ spectrum are invited to enrich the exploration in community of the questions: 'How does it feel when a) I dare to stand in the full power of my sexual orientation b) the expression of my gender identity is not only unrestrained but is completely appreciated and celebrated?'

Until now the FSM workshops have been confined to fagot identified men. The logic for this being that there is a real kind of hurt experienced by faggots growing up in a homophobic social environment, and that faggots are best able to develop an understanding of this. Fags are uniquely able to sooth and heal each other's wounds around blocks to intimacy related to this kind of trauma.

However in recent years trans* men have been invited to attend the workshop and during this time there has also been a growing momentum of enthusiasm to have FSM workshop participants reflecting the full diversity of identities and sexualities present at modern Faerie Gatherings.

So very soon there will be the pilot of a workshop which will be open to the full spectrum of queer sexualities and genders. What will happen when a fully inclusive group sits in heart circle to explore the obstacles to emotional and physical intimacy that exist between them? 

The intention of the heart circling within the traditional workshop is to reach a state of community trust to the extent that co-created rituals, involving permitted group erotic touch, are able to be devised and consensually enacted.

How might this look between individuals not accustomed to considering erotic touch with genders and sexualities beyond their habitual erotic arousal patterns?

Nobody knows but it’s the beginning of a radical adventure into a better understanding of how faerie queers, with a range of sexuality and gender expression, might more freely express the erotic together in community…

Watch this space!

If You Like To Take It Up The A*se- Does That Make You A Sissy?

Last week I had sex with a guy in the sauna. Yay! And afterwards when we were cuddling and chatting in our little cubicle (it can happen sometimes- occasionally) we got on to the subject of how to respond to THAT QUESTION: ‘Are you a Top or a Bottom?’

It’s a question often furtively asked during the course of a bit of fumbling exploratory touch. It seems to be asked by guys in a rush to get to some kind of destination. They ‘aint looking for some mutually explored erotic adventure. It’s like they want to fast forward to some live-action, conventionally plugged-in, porn cum-shot.

I usually indicate that I’m enjoying the touch happening right now and that I’m capable of going with the flow of wherever it might take us. Which usually gets us back in the zone!

My sauna buddy seemed interested to talk about this topic, so I told him, for the record, that with regard to gender I personally identified as a bigendered. 

And, furthermore, having reflected on how my bigendered-ness impacts on my sexuality, I’ve come to the conclusion that the feminine pole of my gender is BISEXUAL! She’s into men who are into her femininity and she’s also into women who want to engage in sexual play with her. (Hmm- one of these days that fantasy of a dominant woman with a strap-on taking me to heaven will become a reality!). 

And then there’s the masculine end of my spectral identity, who is a sexually versatile gay guy. He enjoys f*cking, being f*cked, s*cking, being s*cked, d*minating and s*bmitting. It’s all f*cking great!

Then my sauna lover said ‘Well, I’ve done Queer Studies and they said there, that ‘Bigendered’ doesn’t exist because gender is all fluid-like’. He was young and not a little irritatingly- if not invalidatingly- correct. I suppose!

As a sissy child I was ruthlessly coerced into eradicating any element of femininity from my behaviour. I was a quick learner and a good little actor and so rapidly acquired a reasonably convincing straight-acting veneer of false-self. It’s taken years to recognise and challenge the shame that I was made to feel about my sissy self. Thankfully I am now able to honour and reclaim it as my precious birthright.

Why does this ugly gender expression repression happen? And why do so many men  continue to hide and despise their feminine nature. Is it because we live in a patriarchal, misogynist culture hating women and seeing men who resemble women as even worse?

Whatever it is, we do appear to be stuck with this gender binary thing and it does seem, for many, to touch on something deeply fundamental which shouldn’t be messed with! 

Maybe I’m just a freak of nature. Maybe most men are just men. In which case that’s just fine too!

Teddy Bear Goes to Church...

Once upon a time there was a little teddy bear who was an only child. His daddy was a Lion and his mummy was a Unicorn. His daddy was ferocious and wild and his mummy was very- well- pink and fluffy. His childhood was untroubled and carefree. His mummy would dress him up in pink and fluffy clothes and all the little girl animals at school loved to play with him. They would braid his bear-hair tying it with rainbow ribbons and everyone thought that Teddy Bear was soooooo cute.

Then came the time for Teddy Bear to go to Big School. It was different there and, on his first day, all the other animals crowded round him in his pink knitted shorts and his pink fur cap. They said ‘That’s not the way bears dress. You should be ferocious and wild like your Lion daddy’. Teddy Bear burst into tears. He was confused and upset and when he got home he ran to his room and wouldn’t come out. He made up his mind right there and then that, although he did love pink and fluffy, he was going to be ferocious and wild from that day on and he wasn’t going to have anything to do with those girls any more.

As the years went by he began to realize that he was drawn to the boys and their ferocious and wild ways, in the way that the boys were drawn to the girls and their pink and fluffy ways. He noticed too that there were some pink and fluffy boys too who were also attracted to the ferocious and wild boys.

Pink and fluffy boys made him feel uncomfortable and he decided he wouldn’t have anything to do with them either. But the ferocious and wild boys began to pick up that there was something not quite right about Teddy Bear and though they were friendly enough towards him, they didn’t invite him to their ferocious and wild parties where the pink and fluffy girls liked to hang out.

Teddy Bear left school as soon as he could hoping that life would be easier as a Grown-Up. It was tough pretending to be ferocious and wild but the shame of that first day at Big School kept him well away from pink and fluffy whenever it came his way.

One day when he was feeling particularly lonely, sitting on a park bench and wondering if he would ever be happy, he saw a teddy bear just like him walking straight towards him. He smiled and then sat right down beside him on the bench.

‘Hi my name is Ed, you look to me as though you’d enjoy a teddy bear’s picnic’

Teddy was mystified ‘What’s a teddy bear’s picnic’

Ed laughed ‘Oh it’s just a chance to hang out with other teddy bears. In fact there’s one down in the Woods and it’s happening today!’

Teddy could hardy contain his excitement ‘What? Just teddy bears hanging out?’

‘Yup!’ said Ed ‘All ferocious and wild!’

‘What? No pink and fluffy anywhere?’

‘Nope-none’

‘Wow’ said Teddy ‘sounds amazing’

So off he went with Ed into the woods and oh what a Big Surprise!

Teddy was ferocious and wild in ways that he’d never dared to dream were possible. From then on he knew he’d found his tribe. All teddy bears. All ferocious and wild. ‘Heaven on Earth’ he thought.

But as the years went by, as lovely as it was to hang out with teddy bears all the time, he found that life still felt a little empty and same-y. Ferocious and wild had started to feel empty and exhausting. There was something missing from his life.

He wondered if going to church would help. But they were all worshiping a God that was ferocious and wild and frankly he’d had his fill of ferocious and wild worship. Someone said if he became a Pagan he could worship a Goddess instead. So off he went to a few rituals. But he found the Goddess far too pink and fluffy for his liking.

He decided that he really wanted to find a Deity that was neither ‘Ferocious and Wild’ nor ‘Pink and Fluffy’. He wanted a Deity that was ‘Just Right’

Maybe one day he’ll find ‘The Church for Teddy Bears Worshiping the Deity which is Just Right’

Maybe he’ll decide, that because right now that Church isn’t there just yet, he’ll make a wish and manifest it into being.

Now wouldn’t that be fabulous boys and girls?

And then they could all live Happily Ever After.....

The Dance of the Cis-ish Faerie

So, here’s the thing! Biologically I’m a bloke. Psychologically I can identify as a man. So that would make me a Cis-gendered male. However I am also able to identify as a woman. Not so that ‘I feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body’ but enough that I enjoy inhabiting feminine attire and relating/ being related to, at least partially, as female. From a gender-world view I don’t fit into the Cis- world and I don’t fit into the Trans- world. Cis- men find my drag puzzling and unnecessary. Trans- women resent my ability to pass as Cis- and do not accept me into their fold either. Maybe just as Bisexuals will often complain that from a sexuality point of view they are at home in neither the gay nor the straight world, I, from a gender point of view am at home in neither the Cis- nor the Trans- world. Maybe there could be a word for it-Bigendered? Or Cis-ish?

I’ve just returned from the US. I went to a gay night-club in the Castro district of San Francisco where I allowed my feminine a degree of expression....

Green velveteen poncho with the pink fringe
Blue ripped denimette lycra tights
Peers over half-moon leopard print framed specks
A brightly coloured plastic butterfly quivering on the brim of the
Dark brown floppy top-hat textured with light faun bobbles.

No bosom swells the green fabric
Just the sturdy shoulders of a masculine frame.
A definite bulge in the crotch of those skin-tight blue jeans
And substantial manly thighs there too
Who is this grotesque come to ruin the night at the Badlands Castro Bar?

“Nice Poncho, Honey”
“Wow-those jeans”
The bouncer braces, sensing imminent danger.
The bartender, with eyes conceding discomfort, attempts nonchalance 
But knocks over glasses as he delivers the requested soda.

Around the dance floor sneers and elbowing 
Saying “Look, what the cat dragged in”
“This bar ‘aint for folk like you” 
“Why don’t you stick with yo’ own kind”

But the siren calls of the diva deities and their dancing dollies
Beam down from the plasma walls of this coliseum
And the straight-acting boys
(Pissed, stoned and almost wasted
Usually reluctant to have their sissy invoked)
Are anesthetized enough now to access at least a caricature of their pansy nature.
The Dance effervesces rare breaths of oxygen into a testosterone driven femininity suffocating world.
Even the trans-lads take a few panting gasps as they wiggle their hips and lip-synch to Kylie.

So here the Cis-ish Faerie dances The Dance
Dances with the space between the backs of disgusted dancers
Dances with the Mascinine-Femculine divine within
Dances as a laugh in the face of the disapproving
Dances a prayer that the “Loved Feminine” become manifest in all ourselves
That the “Hated, Despised, Repressed Feminine” be seen, acknowledged, understood
And gently embraced with love!

Dances it all to Oblivion!
Dances it all to Eternity!
Dances it all to The Cosmos!

23 Reflections on Men in Tutus

I went to the ballet a few weeks ago. I’m not a big fan of the ballet and I’ve only ever previously seen one ballet-Giselle at Sadlers Wells theatre when I was a young and impressionable 21 year-old on his first gay date with an older and more sophisticated guy. It didn’t appeal to me at the time and the whole stuffy upper class atmosphere didn’t do it for me. However the ballet on this occaision was a whole different kettle of fish!
Les Ballets Trocadero de Monte Carlo is a troupe of some 20 guys in tutus putting on a show which was in equal parts accomplished artistry and comical spoofery. Just to imagine a hairy bloke in a tutu is comical! And this performance fitted with a tradition of men dressing as women in the theatre- early actors, pantomime dames, drag queens and so on. But the very high calibre of the dancing athleticism took this genre to a whole new level.
It got me thinking about how gay men are generally constrained by societal gender norms to behave, think and feel in predefined ways which they generally, at one level or another, ultimately disregard but for which they pay the price of invalidation. The world of ballet similarly expects male dancers to move and perform as stereotypical males and female dancers to move and perform as stereotypical females. This dance troupe showed what was possible when feminine acting men [note- I’m not using the word effeminate] push themselves into female dancing roles. The effect for me was a celebration of what has been referred to as the Third Gender-neither male nor female but an equally exciting and authentic gender capable of excellence in performing either performance role no less validly.
Sadly the spoofery had to be part of the performance because, I suppose, as a society we aren’t ready to accept men dressing and performing as women unless it is done as a joke. Sadly, still, there are only two boxes to tick on the form asking about gender. Growing up as gay men there are generally only two types of gender role stereotypes for us to identify with –Straight Acting Bloke or Camp Queen.
However there were moments during that ballet performance, mixed in with all the campery, buffoonery and drag-queenery, when there emerged a powerful, capable, creative, disciplined, athletic, professional presence; mesmerising and enchanting!
Now wouldn’t that be a worthwhile stereotype for us to get to see more of around the place?
Let’s see more of Men in Tutus! Let’s stop the impulse to smirk, and instead, let us appreciate creative beauty in all its forms wherever and however it manifests itself!

Butch? Bitch? Whatever! Be Who You Are!!

This is my second article for GSCENE and will appear in the JUNE issue.....

Remember back to when you first realised you weren’t like the other kids. Maybe as a boy you identified with the girls [I loved to skip and knit!]. Maybe as a girl you identified more with boys?

Research tells us that if boys are seen as ‘sissies’ by their peers age 8, the vast majority will be gay men 15 years later and a few will identify as Trans. Girls seen as ‘tomboys’ will predominantly identify as straight women, fewer will be lesbian and very much fewer will be Trans Men.

As an LGBT tribe who are, as children, ‘adopted away’ at birth into straight homes we get pretty messed up about our identities as we develop and as our true natures become apparent to us and those around us.

But for most of us we also have the great gift, from a very early stage in life, to be confronted by the BIG question “Do I become who I truly am or do I become what others would prefer me to be?”

It is a gift because the younger you are and the starker the choice between the two options, then the more likely it is that you will choose to take the route to becoming who you truly are. And then this is the first step on the route to allowing your soul to lead your ego.

Whether we are prepared to accept our ‘queerness’ or prefer to disguise it we’ve got ‘a long row to hoe’ because our society with its strict male/female stereotypes still wants its men to be men and its women to be women [except of course for entertainment purposes]. So we are battered and bruised either externally, by a hostile society, for being who we are, or internally, for failing to be true to ourselves.

Quentin Crisp was very influential in my struggles as I was growing up and having to make some difficult decisions at the tender age of 14.

He came into my life firstly in the manifestation of the actor John Hurt playing the role of this unashamedly gay man in the film ‘The Naked Civil Servant’. Subsequently his powerful voice for the victory of the soul over the compromising ego shouted out at me from his autobiography of the same name. His life story has been described as ‘the triumph of the solitary uncompromising voice over the faceless multitude’. Sting famously visited him when Quentin had moved over from London to live in New York after facing over 4 decades of attacks for being who he was from a very homophobic british society.

After hearing his stories of victimisation Sting wrote ‘Englishman in New York’ which includes the lines ‘it takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile, be yourself no matter what they say’

So recognise that you’ve come a long way already! Butch, Bitch, Straight Acting Gay Man, Femme Lesbian, Trans,-Whatever!

And recognise that beneath your ego- accumulated like layers of sediment deposited over the years to defend and protect you and help you feel connected-deep within your very being is your true essence which is immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own presence in this moment. It is the realisation ‘I AM’ which is prior to ‘I AM THIS’ or I AM THAT’

Enjoy it now-and let it be in charge of your life!