I wanted to be something different when I was a kid. I don’t know. I wanted to be something different from what I was, and different from what I am. There are so many layers of girl in me, and so many layers of not girl. Toni gets it about right when he calls me a high femme tomboy, but I don’t fit easily into either category.   High femme tomboy ends up making me look straight and I am more like cisqueergendered. It was clear to me from pretty early on that I was making it up. Improvising with a set of tools that didn’t make that much sense, but at the same time held so much meaning. They were given a meaning that didn’t rightfully belong to them. They seemed to say things about whether I was tough or vulnerable, angry or acquiescent, dirty or clean, safe or pretty. My earliest gender memory is an argument I had with my sister about whether I could still be a tomboy if I wore my prairie dresses to school on Wednesdays — and even then all these questions were tangled up in that skirt, and it’s taken me decades to start to pull it apart.

So, I’m going back to two of my most formative gender icons. Imogene Louise Threadgoode from Fried Green Tomatoes and Vivian Ward, the Julia Roberts character in ‘Pretty Woman’. No wonder.  I grew up wanting to be a metaphorically bee charming dyke who had on silky lingerie under her overalls, but who also had a partner willing to throw her up on a piano at the end of a hard night.

In fact, that still sounds incredibly appealing.

There weren’t that many gender icons growing up in rural Vermont, I wasn’t constantly awash in popular media. Instead, there were the few movies that I watched over and over and over again. It was an unlikely mix of characters, but like ruts in a road they hardened and became the careful uneven tracks of my gender over my body. I don’t talk any more about the places where I am not a girl. About the parts of me that want to slide into men’s clothes and wear my breasts tight against my ribcage.  I am still learning how to be a girl.  I need someone to counsel me on eye make-up and I am on some learning curve with heels and lipstick. But that only draws the parts of the map that I travel in now, not the places I have been, or the journeys I made to get here.

So, let’s take a look at my Imogene and my Vivian.

Julia Roberts was my cinderella. I say this because the actual cinderella held no real appeal for me. I didn’t like her dress and I thought that she had too much figured out too quickly. Like how to walk in those shoes. In Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts was working at it, as well as working it. I liked that she knew as much about cars as she did about makeup, and that she was profoundly uncomfortable in all the trappings of an upper class girl world. A princess world. My mother stocked our dress up box with used negligees and silk nightgowns to fulfill our own princess dreams, but the first time I sat in a fancy restaurant I stared at the silverware framing the wide white plate.

I wanted to be able to lean up against a car like that, in black boots like that, and teach a boy how to drive his own damn car. I wanted to be able to hide who I really was behind a glamorous wig and then reveal myself. I wanted to be able to go from nothing to looking stunning in a black cocktail dress.

As a child I didn’t care very much about the second half of Pretty Woman, I wasn’t interested in the logical conclusion of her domestication. I was more interested in her careful transformation, how she smoothed all the edges of her self to fit the space in his life. I loved the scene when she almost leaves. Even then, I was only interested in a Cinderella who is willing to walk out when she’s hurt, who holds her man to high standards, and promises to ‘rescue him right back’.

But most and before all that, I wanted to slip down to a lover who would lay me down on a piano as black and smooth as my negligee. I wanted and want to know how to fall in love that easily even when I am this broken, even when the person I’m falling in love with is broken. I never knew how to just set myself down in someone’s lap and stay.

I wanted to run away from my life like Imogene Louise Threadgoode: go silent, go down to the river, and build a fire. She was exactly who I tried to be as a teenager, even using the name Idgie for a time.  I wanted to throw cans of food to hobos and talk back to the minister and have that fierce love that she did to live apart from her family for years and still bring them jars of honey and fish from the river. I wanted to protect my girl the way Idgie did. I wanted to be a bee charmer. I wore my hair in a long braid and wore overalls and tanktops waiting for someone to kiss, and stand by, and hold fast to. I cultivated an angry defiance to everything around me and yet her loving butch ways gave me a template for outrageous anger and overwhelming love without self-destruction. I wasn’t ready to see the fierce steel backbone of a woman like Ruth when I was fourteen. I needed that to make it through high school and most of college, before I could take my tenderness and a smile and make it a part of my ferocity.

So, I am here, in a place where I wear black lace thongs under Carhartts on weekends. When I cut all my hair off as a freshman in high school, some one turned around before homeroom and asked me if I was a fucking queer, his thumbs hooked into belt loops and a knife held there. I felt the blood rise to the roots of my shorn head and all I said was, “yes”. All the tension went out of his body then and he walked away. It is hard for me to pinpoint a moment of such power and liberation in any of my conversations about gender since.  People assume that because I look clean and put together that I am, that I am willing to answer the questions that they don’t want to have to ask someone who they might offend. I answer more questions than I should have to about the sex I have, the genitalia of my partners, and the ways we fuck. I am offended. Sometimes I look back at the kid I was in high school and I am glad that I am no longer that bitter or that angry, and then I realize that I have taken much of that bitterness out on myself. I am more like Ruth sweetly offering pie to the lawmen, or Vivian leaving the cash on the bed.

I have wrapped up my own misogyny into my girl. My former partner and I started out with similar bodies and there was a brief period of time when we shared clothes, and I inherited most of the things his mother bought for him from Ann Taylor. He hated his body, and there is something about being a girl in a community where bodies are drifting away from what you are that makes it hard to sit and be and say, “These are my breasts, this is my cunt.” Queer theory says that I am negotiating space, but I used all my fierceness to carve away at myself instead of the spaces I don’t fit.  When I moved to Boston, I lost weight and started being a femme at the same time, and somewhere in there I also found a community where my queerness was embraced with my girl, and sometimes felt contingent on my willingness to be a girl, a partner, a barrier and a buffer. An answerer of questions. I love being a girl, now, and it’s hard to match that up against the previous three pages. When an acquaintance asserts that I am butch, because she is so straight and sees me mainly on weekends and camping, I protest. I am a queer femme tomboy. That sums it up, and there are still ways I carve away at myself and the spaces I’ve been put. I will wear whatever I goddamn please to school on Wednesdays. But I still need Idgie to be angry at oppression, instead of tearing myself down, and I need Ruth to learn how to keep my back straight, and serve pie. I need Vivian to learn how to walk with pride in a body that can give and receive pleasure, and I need you, a community of friends, family, and lovers who can see it all.

There are so many layers of girl in me, and so many layers of not girl.