My boyfriend is kind of a sissy. He hates it when I mention it, and when he finds out that I said it on National Public Radio, he's going to kill me. But he is kind of a sissy. He cooks. He likes to do laundry. He's into fashion and Brit pop and Barbra Streisand. And all that's OK wi]th me. I hate to cook. And if he wants to listen to Funny Girl while he folds my shirts, well, I can deal.
And besides, it's really no sacrifice on my part. I think sissies are sexy. Though sissy isn't the right word, really. Little boys who play with dolls are sissies. Grown men who went to see The Mirror Has Two Faces on the morning it opened and loved it are known in gay slang, at least, as femmes.
My attraction to femmy guys is rooted, I have no doubt, in a high school experience. At St. Gregory the Great where I spent my sophomore year, there was this senior-- totally femmy and gay and out of the closet-- and this was in 1979. He dressed in Kmart disco fashions and wore his hair long and used eyeliner.
St. Greg's was a dumping ground. All the kids kicked out of other Catholic high schools for being bad students or hoodlums wound up at Greg's. These were not kids who instinctively honored diversity. These were kids who beat up sissies.
But no pounding could stop St. Greg's only femme. Like Gandhi he'd be back the day after a beating, defiant in his satin pants with his hair feathered back like Farrah Fawcett's. No punch, no putdown could stop him from talking loudly in the cafeteria about the bars he went to, the men he dated, the trouble he'd seen. He was very femmy, but he didn't want to be a woman. He liked being a guy, and he liked being gay. And he liked everyone to know about it.
As a miserably-closeted 14-year-old sophomore, I desperately wanted to go to gay bars in satin pants. I wanted to date men. I wanted to see some trouble. But I wasn't brave enough or strong enough or courageous enough. This femmy senior, he was all those butch things. He displayed more courage when he walked into St. Greg's every morning than I've ever displayed in my life, which is why I had such a crush on him, I think. Of all the tough kids at St. Greg's, he was absolutely the toughest.