Constance Bougie Landry Trans and Queer Lit. September 11, 2017 C It was difficult for me to dream up an idea for this first photo given my tendency to want to forget all the shit parts of my past and only keep the good parts, but I think the music I’ve both listened to and written since I was a kid is as good a way as any of tracking my ever-continuing realizations that gender and orientation aren’t what my pastor told me they were in my eighth grade confirmation class. I’d have taken a picture of a Taylor Swift CD if I hadn’t probably purposefully lost all her work in the years since my mother died, but One Direction works just as well, will probably suffice. What’s more compellingly heteronormative to a middle schooler assigned female at birth as I was than “You Belong With Me” or “Love Story” if not “What Makes You Beautiful?” I grew up taking lyrics like theirs to heart, alternatively dreaming of becoming an architect for ten-story houses with slides for stairs and marrying a blonde and blue-eyed boy who played trumpet much better than I did in my middle school band. It’s funny, I suppose now, that I wanted a new last name in the seventh grade more than I did a bone fide boyfriend. It took me until my junior year of high school to recognize my asexual orientation because I thought things like, “I can’t possibly be asexual; I wanted to hold hands with A that one time a couple years ago.” So much of pop music, especially when I was younger and probably much more so further slipping back into the lyrics of previous decades, so much of it repeats this narrative that romance is like this, and sadness is like this, and this is how boys feel
about girls and vice versa. So the lyrics I wrote back in middle school and into high school were very much influenced by these very heteronormative and cisgendered narratives, and even as I worried I was some kind of monster for not merely feeling but being different from everyone I knew in some momentarily indescribable way or another, I wrote about being in love with this blue-eyed trumpet player, A. I stayed up late on Valentine’s Day legitimately hoping he would perform some Edward Cullen-type bullshit and find my address in the school directory and show at my window throwing rocks, confessing his undying love for me in pebbled Morse code. I’m lucky, I suppose, that I’ve finally reached a point where I can call this boy who often made fun of me and my abnormalities kind of a piece of crap. He could be okay, too, probably, but allow me to just vent here something I should’ve said much more as a teenager—he was kind of a piece of crap. I’ve been considerably obsessed with Prince Rogers Nelson in the last number of weeks, as both my friends and the door to my room, garnished like a holiday tree with purple-marker drawings of the man taped to the wood, can probably attest. He talks about love and sex in his lyrics a lot, too—but I’m not listening to Purple Rain right now and scratching down ideas for kitschy love songs à la Taylor Swift’s “Teardrops on my Guitar” (and for this I thank a deity I, along similar veins, don’t know if I believe in anymore). He, Prince, has this song on Purple Rain called “I Would Die 4 U,” and the first three lines go, “I’m not a woman/I’m not a man/I am something that you never understand.” And damned if those aren’t the coolest lyrics anyone ever wrote (even if David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel” comes close). I’ve only been out as agender for a month or two now, only figured it out this summer, but he, along with a couple other musicians and activists, is one of my biggest inspirations when it comes to both gender and art. I
grew up being told I could be an architect or an engineer but I had to “dress like a girl”; I couldn’t talk to one of the boys in my class on the phone without my family crowding around the damned device to joke he was my boyfriend; it’s no wonder, I guess, that I was so confused about myself for so long, and to a certain extent, still am. But Prince was someone assigned male at birth dancing in heels and in ruffles, singing that he wasn’t a man or a woman; he learned twenty-six instruments or some shit when he was still a teenager. He says in one song, “In the beginning God made the sea/But on the seventh day he made me,” and he’s so self-confident; I only hope I could ever really sing those lyrics. Thinking all this has been reminding me of a couple days ago; I was looking at nose rings in a glass case and the two I really liked were, respectively, pink, and blue. And I turned to my friend, D, and said, “This has got to be some kind of metaphor or something, I swear.” Because I couldn’t quite choose between either of the things, pink or blue, and here I was again, standing in front of my closet unable to decide between pants and a skirt for Sunday church, for my cousin A’s wedding, for fucking junior prom. In the end, I bought a stud instead, in purple. And I was thinking of Prince’s lyrics, and thinking how real they really were. I guess my existence thus far has amounted to the mixing of colors, and the realization that things are rarely only black and white, or, in my case, pink and blue.