This Gay & His Girls: My Tale of Sisterhood

A retroactive love letter to all the girlfriends I’ve had

When you’re a dude who likes other dudes, you grow up dodging years of questions. The star of them: “Do you have a girlfriend?” Obviously you answer, “No.” Or in some cases you lie and say, “Yes,” then find a way to move away from the prying. After years of this, you begin to believe you don’t like women, but the truth is you do, you love women. Years will go by before you appreciate, wholeheartedly, that your love of women is, in fact, a life saver.

As a kid, my predilection for all things feminine rooted from the one idea that changing clothes changed the person. During play dates, dolls were toys I gravitated towards and costumes with accessories were a must-have. If I wasn’t playing with them I really, really wanted to. Even then, I was obsessed with transformation.

An early childhood memory dates back to when I was about 6 years old during a playdate at a girl’s house. Her cousins had these play-heels that I just loved. They were purple slip-ons and they always and quickly landed on my feet.

One time an adult walked in the room and saw me masterfully walking on the elevated footwear. Nothing was said, but I remember the look on their face. I had done something wrong. I could feel it since, for the most part, I knew it was something other men didn’t do.

My stroke of luck of being able to find solace everywhere around me began at that moment. All I remember are the girls I was playing with dismissing my expression of worry — of possibly being in trouble — and telling me to continue playing. All I remember is being understood, mostly because I was allowed to…be.

It’s a seminal childhood memory, partly because I don’t have many of them, but mostly because it was the first time sisterhood entered my life. I hadn’t thought of sisterhood being able to step outside of its gender, at all, until last summer.

It was a humid June day in New York City. I could feel the sweat trickling down my back, unnoticeable thankfully to the power of the black tee. As I took a seat at the Leslie & Lohman Museum I realized the front of the room was stocked with people ready to take the microphone for the “Trans Pride Storytelling Night” and share their experiences as trans individuals. Hence, as a cis male, I was there only to observe.

Janet Mock, a trans advocate, was one of the evening’s speakers — the sole reason for going in the first place. Back in 2011, the OWN network aired “I Am Jazz,” a documentary chronicling the journey of a trans 9-year-old. That night Janet and I had a brief exchange on Twitter and since then I’ve been watching Janet share the incredible story that is her life.

Her message of self-acceptance and advocacy is something I admire. Yet nothing she had shared before that evening had been directly related to anything that I had lived through. When she shared her friendship with her friend Wendi, I was absolutely floored when I felt exactly the kind of solace she was describing.

That day she read a portion of her, then, unreleased memoir, “Redefining Realness.” It was a vivid trip to a period in her life that defined sisterhood for her, a time where she met her best friend, and how their bond allowed her to do the things that were innate.

“I felt freer and began openly expressing my femininity under the grooming of my best friend. On a throw pillow in Wendi’s lap, I rested my head as she tweezed my eyebrows on her grandmother’s plastic-covered couch. I held an ice cube to my swollen eye, trying to numb the stinging pain.”

Even in its regularity, that moment became a bookmark for Janet. It was a level of intimacy she hadn’t known. Sisterhood allowed Janet to be who she was.

There are tons of those intimate moments with my own girlfriends. I’d be a liar if I said that I wasn’t a composite of all of them. I held back tears not completely sure how to sort out the feeling of commiseration that flowed from my chest and spread through my body.

The importance friendships with women had in my life, until that point, were just fact. I always acknowledged my propensity to acquire surrogate family members throughout the years, but never thought about why I had.

It was more than just talking to them about boys, spending Christmas’ with them and their families, or being comforted by them as I revealed secrets I, for long, considered shameful.

“She was my rock, my soul, my conscious,” writer Alan Downs said about a friend that had unexpectedly passed away. If I had known that I would live a life stumbling upon multiple rocks and souls who would become part of my conscious, I would have felt less guilty in not being able to feel the same way about my blood family.

In fact, the thickest silver lining of sisterhood weaving it’s way into my history was learning to redefine what my family meant to me in a more peaceful space — learning to accept the “what is” of a family that I felt alien in.

All the times I was allowed to express my queerness, feel comfortable, even protected were with…my girls. From the beginnings of our friendships they allowed me to be me at a time when I didn’t want to be me. Somehow, when I needed it the most, I was reminded that grace existed. My girls insured I didn’t go through life completely stealth.

They were and still are my life raft.

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Originally published at thedearjon.wordpress.com on May 16, 2014.