No Words

a fictionalized memoir by Merrill O’Connor. [content warning: discussion of sexual abuse and AIDS.]

—

“Finally gonna talk to them?” Alex asks casually.

“I don’t even know what I’d say. ‘Hi, mom and dad, I have something to tell you. I definitely don’t identify as male. I’m not saying I’m gay, and I don’t think the term trans applies. I’m not sure which word to use for how I feel but I just wanted to let you know, it’s probably why I’ve never felt quite at home in my own skin.”

“So say that.”

The room I grew up in no longer feels like my room, and not just because there are random storage boxes in the corner. There’s still a few photos from my childhood. Sometimes I’ll look at a picture, and I can’t even remember where it was taken. A few years ago I read a long biography of a classic film director and the only thing I really remember from it is how he described his childhood: “I don’t remember much.” I guess that’s how people used to have to deal with trauma before therapy was socially acceptable: just forget as much as possible. The phrase “I don’t remember much” meant a lot to me when I read it. As if my memory is more defined by absence than presence. Sometimes trying to remember hurts, like looking at a picture of yourself as a child and feeling like that image is from someone else’s childhood because the boy in the picture is so distant; in a sense, he never existed at all. Other times it’s just strange, like how I seem to be the only person my age who doesn’t know all the words to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song. Like culture is a mold and when I was molded, the cast didn’t harden so my malformed body just oozed right out. Maybe this room never felt like my room, and I just forget feeling that way.

“Feels like I’d be telling them I don’t know who I am.”

“But if that’s how you feel…” Alex finally looks at me as he says this. By that I mean he looks into the camera. He’s FaceTiming me from backstage at his drag show, and he looks away again for a moment as he deftly applies long, glittery eye lashes. I was in the audience the first time Alex ever wore high heels, and even though he’d never worn them before, somehow he walked with more ease and confidence than I’ve ever walked in my entire life. I was the only kid on the junior high boys basketball team who couldn’t dribble the ball between my legs. I was good with my hands though.

Unrelated but related: my junior high basketball team won the league championship one year, but I don’t remember anything about that day. Instead, my strongest memory is from practice, when we played shirts vs skins. I was on skins. I had terrible acne on my back, shoulders, and neck. The girls team had the gym after us, and I was very aware that our coach made them wait outside until we were done because he knew I’d be embarrassed if they saw me with my shirt off.

Pool parties were hell.

I shrug after Alex says but if that’s how you feel. He tries again: “How about, ‘Mom, dad. Gender and sexuality aren’t the same thing. And I want you to know I’m genderqueer.”

“All they’ll hear is the word ‘queer,’ which is a word I do identify with, but not in the way that they’d understand it.” At an early age, I got very good at giving myself reasons why I shouldn’t try something, why I should just shut up.

Have you ever tried googling what words you should use to describe your own identity? You sit at your computer and you want to ask the nebulous internet: “What am I?” But you can’t google that, because the first result is literally riddles dot com, which is irritatingly ironic, so you google the word “genderqueer.” You google “non-binary.” You google “are genderqueer and non-binary the same thing.” You want to ask google “is it okay to call myself non-binary?” As if you need permission to embrace your own identity. Permission from who? From Google? As if the unfeeling, unblinking, inhuman white wall of a search engine gives a damn about LGBTQIA+ terms beyond how it can monetize them anyway.

Just yesterday I finally googled “body dysmorphia.” That was enlightening.

Anyway, non-binary seems to make most sense to me. Ever since I first started learning about binaries in Lit Theory class a decade and a half ago in college, something struck me about the concept. That was before I even questioned my gender, but it was like… “There’s something about that phrasing, something about binaries being bullshit, that I get on a deeply existential level.”

Alex tells me something I already know intellectually, but feel like I can’t imagine ever accepting emotionally: “You’re too caught up in what they’ll hear. If you come out, you can come out for you. It’s not for them.”

“Yeah,” I say, even if I can’t bring myself to believe it, because how do you suddenly convince yourself that you have a right to ownership over a language when you’ve always felt as if that language was trying to strangle you? Especially when, for the first three decades of your life, that same language didn’t even have a word to describe what you “are.” The closest word you could find was a six letter slur that starts with “f.” And the boys on your baseball team would chase you around the field, shouting that word, laughing, trying to strangle you.

My dad always wished I was more like the head coach’s son. He happened to be the kid who bullied me the most.

I try to breathe steadily, and I tell Alex, “I can’t even count the times I’ve been home for the holidays or a family thing and I’m sitting at the dinner table, biting my lip because I feel like I need to tell them something, but I can’t even articulate what that something is.” I get tense, which means I clench my right knee until it hurts, and I can’t stand. “I’m not a word. Words are constricting. Like wearing a tie all day at a wedding, and by the time everyone else is dancing it’s gotten so tight it feels like a noose.”

Alex has to go perform. I can tell because he keeps looking away from his phone, like someone is signaling to him. He tells me, “Cameron, if your clothes are that uncomfortable, I’ll lend you a sarong.”

He kind of avoids my point, but he kind of totally says what I need to hear. I exhale.

***

In the kitchen now. My mom stirs a boiling pot of something. Whatever’s for dinner. My dad sits at the table, on the other side of the kitchen. He wears bifocals and keeps staring at a spreadsheet on his crappy old laptop. Something to do with finances.

The kitchen and the adjoining living room are currently being remodeled. Clear plastic sheets cover bare 2x4 studs along one wall. There’s a five gallon bucket in the corner of the room, filled with random tools and rags crusted over with plaster.

I’m between my parents, not sure where to stand or sit, so I lean against the counter. My parents aren’t very social. My dad’s idea of Quality Family Time always meant sitting and watching a movie together, in silence. Talking to Alex was stressful, but at the same time it was reassuring. Now, everything feels tense, like I’m under scrutiny.

Every gesture feels performed, like I have to act like a “man” around them, whatever that means. Each one of my limbs is a stray dog that wants to follow its own path. A man stands against the counter like this… a nonbinary person stands awkwardly against the counter like that. Why can’t I just lean against a fucking counter without analyzing the way I’m leaning against a counter.

Not like they’re paying attention anyway. But when I was a kid, the times I was most sure they weren’t paying attention, suddenly they’d pipe up with something critical about whatever it was I was doing at that moment. They thought they were giving me parental advice, but it was usually just belittling or out of touch or both.

My mom stirs whatever it is she’s cooking again. Sometimes it feels like she’s somehow ironically living the life of a conservative wife. Like she sees what a facade this all is, but what other option did she have? She wasn’t allowed to go to a four year college like her brothers. So what could she do? Get married, have kids, go back to school and work 20–30 hours a week time to pass the time. She just lives it, always with a sardonic attitude, constantly aware that so much of this is bullshit. Her commitment to the bit is almost as impressive as it is depressing. But I’m finally old enough to understand: it’s possible to forget why you started pretending in the first place, as the act slowly obscures the truth. So I feel for her.

I open the silverware drawer. “Anything I can do to help with dinner?”

My mom was staring stoically at the pot, and suddenly she perks up. “Oh! You can set the table. Thank you, dear.”

I open the cupboard to look for plates. It’s all paper. I ask, “Paper?”

“We stored the plates and silverware in the garage during the remodel. Just grab the paper ones and there’s plastic forks and knives in the drawer there.”

I do that. How do you set paper plates and plastic flatware around a table… like a man.

My dad seems a little out of it, as usual. He’s 70, and Parkinson's means his life is a constant battle against his own body and mind. He seems overwhelmed by all the numbers on his laptop screen. But you can’t ask him if he needs help. He’ll bark back that he doesn’t need help. He says if you ask him where anything is in the house, he can find it immediately. That’s something he’s always claimed, and something that’s never been true.

I know he loves to complain about strangers in his home so I ask, “Do the contractors bug you during the week, dad?” I slide a paper plate next to his laptop and place plastic flatware on it.

He says, “I don’t really have a choice, do I.” He loves to act like having his house renovated is worse than being waterboarded. Which isn’t “torture,” he’d assure you. Then he asks, “Who was on the phone?”

“I was FaceTiming with my friend Alex.”

My mom perks up again, “Oh, is he the one who does drag?”

I go, “Mm hmm.”

She smiles, stirring. Her Midwestern sarcasm is intensely thick, but she means well. “I just think that’s so funny. Those dresses and hair. And the makeup, my God! But it’s so much work, I can’t even imagine. They look ridiculous, but you know, I do think it’s really cool.” She amps up the sarcasm to eleven and looks me right in the eye. “It’s pretty cool, Cam.”

“So he’s…” my dad trails off.

“No, he’s not gay, dad.”

“He seems gay.”

“He’s bi, but yeah, he mostly dates guys.”

“That’s not gay?” My dad is good at making something sound like a question, when it’s really a statement of fact as he sees it.

“I don’t know, dad. You’ll probably never meet him in person, so does it matter?”

He shrugs, like I guess not. Then, “He wears women’s clothes, though.” He sits there, looking up at me, as if he’s proven some sort of point. As if saying that “wins” the conversation. As if we, in this room right now, are hashing out definitions of words that will be stamped Official by Webster’s Dictionary at any moment.

Sometimes there’s no point in replying to him.

I finish setting the paper plates and plastic spoons, knives and forks on the table. Then return to my spot, leaning against the counter. There’s an L-shape to the counter. It juts out into the middle of the kitchen, separating the dining area from the food prep area. The spot where I lean is the corner inside the L. Apparently in typography, that inside corner is called a “crotch.” Took a few minutes to find that definition. Looking up proper definitions of words gives me a sense of security, a sense of certainty. I like knowing what words mean. I guess dictionaries are one of the few types of authority I don’t despise. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was a professor who said, “You’re all reaching for the thesaurus when you should be reaching for the dictionary.” Of course, applying definitions to myself has always felt unsettling, uncomfortable. No words ever felt like they fit me right, because every word was invented by someone else.

I’m hanging out in the “crotch” of the L. So much meaning in human history has derived from the crotch.

“My cousin J.B. was gay.” Mom’s sarcasm has disappeared. She’s wistful. “He moved to Los Angeles with big dreams of becoming an actor. That’s what he told us, anyway. He moved in the late 70s, a few years before I moved to San Francisco. I guess now that I think about it, he probably just didn’t want to be stuck in Indiana, either. God, I can only imagine how awful it must’ve been for him. He ended up with this sweet older man. His name was… Wes? I only ever met him once, just after college. I visited them in LA.”

For the next moment, there’s a hint of what you might think is condescending sarcasm again, but it’s my mom’s tone for simple irony: “J.B.’s big break was playing a coma patient in an episode of Days Of Our Lives. He didn’t even get to speak.” Now she’s silent. And then, “In the 80s he died of AIDS.” And then, with almost no emotion: “It was so sad.”

“I didn’t know he died of AIDS,” I say, because I didn’t, even though I’d heard the bit about Days Of Our Lives probably a dozen times at Thanksgiving year after year when my aunts and uncles would gather around and tell stories. Yeah, for some reason they always left out the part where he died of AIDS.

She asks, genuinely, “I never mentioned that?”

I shake my head, no.

“I guess he kind of got to do what he wanted for a while, though. So that’s good.” She takes a deep breath. Like there’s more to tell, but she’s kept it inside this long so it probably won’t ever come out. Or she’s forgotten what it was to begin with.

My dad coughs. Clears his throat. Keeps clearing it.

He breathes. Seems he’s done clearing it.

Then he coughs one last time and says, “My cousin Alain.” He pauses. He does this a lot. Long pauses, as if he has to think hard to remember the right word to use next. He finally remembers: “No, Alain was my second cousin.”

When my dad was totally lucid, he’d tell rambling stories that seemed to have no point. Strange details would stick out to him for whatever reason, but felt irrelevant to whomever he was telling it to. Some people found it endearing. Some people found it annoying. Being his child, it made every moment utterly confusing. As you can imagine, the Parkinson’s only makes this worse, usually.

But this is different. Like he’s excavating a raw memory for the first time in ages. He’s surprisingly clear when he finally continues, “You didn’t say ‘gay’ back then. You didn’t even say ‘homosexual.’ You’d just say, he’s ‘different.’ You would say, ‘That fella is different.’”

He takes a deep breath. Gives himself a moment. Removes his bifocals. He speaks with ease. “There were two kids in my high school who were different. There was just something about them, and we all knew. They seemed nice enough, but I was never friendly with them. After we graduated, for years I didn’t hear anything about them.” He stops talking, but I don’t ask anything because you kind of just have to let him keep going or he’ll get distracted and never come back to it. He plays with one of the hinges on his bifocals, and eventually comes back to it: “They both died of AIDS.”

She shakes her head, “It’s like that’s just what happened back then. And what could you do?”

He nods, as if What could you do is a concrete fact instead of what it really is: a useless rhetorical question used to absolve oneself of guilt. When your entire generation stands by and does nothing to stop an epidemic that wipes out family members, friends, acquaintances, and strangers, I guess you have to tell yourself there wasn’t anything you could’ve done.

My dad continues, “We always knew Alain was different. He really liked theater. He married some woman who was nice, but they must’ve just been best friends. I think she really was in love with him. They moved to Arizona. Some kind of hippy artist colony.”

I bite my lip because I know I want to say something but I don’t know what to say. He shrinks in his seat as he puts his bifocals back on and says, “Anyway, you can probably guess how Alain died.” He returns to the meaningless numbers on his screen that he has to tell himself are important.

I remember my dad once told me, every morning when he grabs the paper the first thing he reads is the obituaries. When I asked him why he said: “Because one day my name will be there.”

My right knee tightens. Breathing gets shallow. Adrenaline. I look at my mom’s profile as she stirs. Can’t see her face, really. Just the outline of her cheek and the tip of her nose.

I swallow and my throat grinds together like an engine that’s run out of oil. I turn the other way to look at my dad as he sits there with his numbers, facing away from me. His yellow polo, and his hunched back, and gray hair.

Trying to find the words. Even if it’s not the right words. To tell them… something. And then I’m about to tell them — He says, “I’m just glad you’re not gay, Cam. It’s a good way to get yourself killed. One way or another.”

You’d think I’d be offended, but it’s like a gift. Like, oh you don’t understand any of this so what fucking difference does it make if I tell you. You’ll believe what you want to about me. In that moment, it felt freeing. What seemed impossible a moment before suddenly seems simple.

“I don’t know how to say this, but — ” And I say it.

***

I lie in bed, face up, in the dark. Alex texts me: support you either way, but did you tell them?

I text back: yeah. Wanna talk about it?

I tap my phone a few times and a moment later his number is ringing. The bed is in pretty much the same place it was when I was a child. But the shadows are different. A decade or so ago the city installed LED streetlights, when I was away at college probably. They’re way brighter than the tungsten or sulfur ones they had when I was a kid, or whatever they were. I’m tired of looking up words right now.

Alex picks up and I tell him, “They were talking about all these gay men they’ve known who died from AIDS, years ago. Cousins, friends, and stuff. They think being gay is a death sentence. Like, ‘Those men were gay and now they’re dead. We are straight and that’s why we’re alive.’ It just pissed me off because it’s like, you both lived through this? They obviously cared about these men. Maybe they knew lesbians or trans people or other queer people too. But they just turned their backs on them. And I don’t buy this ‘I just don’t want you to be hurt’ bullshit. If you don’t want me to get hurt — if you didn’t want them to get hurt, if you didn’t want them to die, you should’ve done something. That’s what they taught me growing up. If you see something bad happening, you do something.” I breathe. “And they chose to do nothing.” I’m crying now.

Alex calms me, says some kind things.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” I say. I laugh once. Helplessly. “If anything, it just made me realize: you’re my parents, you thought you were protecting me by — ” Sometimes when I’m talking about traumatic shit, my train of thought just grinds to a halt and words stop. Alex knows this, and tells me it’s okay. I’m crying more.

I wipe tears and snot out of my face.

I talk again. “They saw me as this weird little kid. This awkward boy who didn’t carry himself like ‘normal.’. So they told themselves: ‘We have to make him do this and that, or make him walk like this and talk like that. Make sure he crosses his legs the right way, to keep our boy from getting killed.’ But it’s like… No, mom and dad — ” I let out one of those embarrassing cry-hiccups. “It’s like, no. You’ve been killing that little kid for three decades. Smothering your own child with a pillow, because you could call it kindness as long as you couldn’t hear me scream.”

For some reason I think back to another random memory, from before I’d started to even attempt to figure out this whole genderqueer, non-binary identity thing, back when I was still desperately trying to fit in as a cis straight dude. A person who I considered a friend told me that I couldn’t possibly know what pain was, because of the way I looked. She said I deserve to suffer because of how “easy” I’d had it all my life. She didn’t know that I’d been sexually abused as a child for years on end. And as she was accusing me of having a great, fun, happy life, I didn’t feel safe telling her that she wasn’t quite getting it right. I didn’t feel safe telling her that my own experience of being abused twisted my own perception of my own sexuality and gender identity, and for decades my trauma made it nearly impossible to untangle who I actually am and what I actually want out of life. I “looked” cis and straight to her, so my actual lived experience didn’t matter to her. She looked at me and decided not just who I am, but who I’ve always been, in her non-humble opinion. A year later, her roommate sexually assaulted me. You’d think that’d be the kind of thing she stands up against, but she seemed pretty okay with it. Patriarchy isn’t going to uphold itself, so…

It’s moments like those that make me feel like no matter what I do, no matter what words I use to try to define myself, there will always be plenty of people out there who just say, “No, I get to define you. I’ve already decided what you are. And I hate you for it.” Gee, maybe I should stop listening to those people.

I don’t consider that person a friend, anymore, but there was a time when I wouldn’t have realized they were awful, and I would’ve just kept being friends with them. That time was known as “the entirety of my teens and twenties, and probably the first few years of my thirties, too.”

In a similar vein, I’ve learned not to hate myself, anymore. Or at least to moderate those feelings.

We can only define who we are, what we say, and what we do, in relation to what other people are, what they say, and what they do, because language is always a negotiation between parties. We are not alone, even when we are alone, because we always have language. And I don’t mean that in a cheerful the Force is with you, always way. I mean it in the hell is other people way. If other people are awful, it can make it really difficult to find one’s self, because for a long time maybe you take them at their word and you’re like “maybe you’re right; maybe I am a six letter slur that starts with ‘f.’” But then you get to a point where it’s like, oh, all those jerks are actually talking and acting in bad faith, and everything they say is really just a reflection of themselves and their own insecurities and they just want to hurt someone for their own gain, even if that gain amounts to basically nothing but smugness. Suddenly it becomes very easy to define one’s self, or at least to define the fragment called “gender” and the other fragment called “sexuality.” Then there’s all the other fragments you’re still unsure of, or can’t even see yet, or they broke so long ago maybe they’re forgotten forever and they’ll never be salvaged.

I catch my breath. “Of course, I didn’t actually say most of that stuff to my parents. Or any of it. I don’t really remember what I did say. It was… I was a mess. And after I told them, they were nice, and kind, and tried to be supportive. So we eat dinner. And by the time dinner’s over, it’s as if… they’ve already forgotten.”

“Do you think it was like malicious? Or?”

“Not malicious. Not like they’re all, ‘Let’s agree to forget.’ More like, okay, his little speech is over, so let’s go back to how it was. ‘Our little Cameron. Our son. Our handsome little boy. You’ll always be our little boy.’” I pause. Then, “Anyway, god. I’m rambling. How was the show?”

“Fucking fantastic.”

I know he didn’t win, because he doesn’t mention winning, but I also know he had a great time. I say, “Ugh, I’m jealous you get to feel so pretty.”

“You can be as pretty as you want to be.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell myself. If the offer is still on the table, maybe when I’m back in LA I can borrow that sarong?”

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

dedicated to the memories of those who were victims of: “what could you do?”

this story was written by the author as a way to prepare to come out as non-binary to their parents. most every detail is based in personal family history. shortly after this story was written, and before they found the opportunity to come out, the author’s father passed away.