LGBTQI+
My Bewitching Queer TV Crush
Oh my stars, It’s Elizabeth Montgomery!
A crush hurts. It’s like the deepest homesickness, the weight of its perceived or actual unattainability, profuse. That’s the crush, that you want to be close to that person, have that thing, or be in that place so dearly, but the desire cannot be satisfied. Despite the discontent, there is an odd pleasure in the dissatisfaction because the nagging, longing pangs give the absence form, a palpable connexion to the object of desire.
Sometimes, crushes have a darker side. The crush invades our dreams, dominates our waking moments, and becomes our raison d’être. Most can handle that but when deformed into covetous obsession, some of those less emotionally skilled, become stalkers, commit murder or even suicide in their hopelessness. Fortunately, I’ve never gone to those extremes but I’ve flirted with witchcraft, sort of. I tried selling my soul once but no one wanted it, at least nobody answered the offer so I struck no bargain; it was a half-assed, attempt before I decided it a stupid idea.
My crush is impossible and I was desperate. My unfulfilled longing is to claim and hold feminine space and receive social affirmation of it just as my crush did. I’ll never be a cis woman like her, but she is the beautiful archetype who embodies my desire to be a woman.
The witch, Samantha Stevens, Elizabeth Montgomery’s character, in the 1960s sitcom Bewitched, has been my intermittent TV crush for nigh on five decades. I no longer ceaselessly think of her, my aging brain, getting on with the work of life, no longer obsesses about her but sometimes, with the nostalgia of my innocence, the crush flits back a bit and I smile at the delicious eccentricity of it. My wife and I watched the series again recently and my heart melted in fond, envious longing.
It was intense as a kid. Sat on the floor in front of the tele, more than a few times, I wiggled my nose expecting it to work and turn me into her. When it didn’t, I reckoned my powers hadn’t come in yet — of course, they never did. The most that came of it were moments in R.E.M. sleep where I was her. For me, those dreams were as thrilling as the flying dreams we’ve most of us had and sometimes I did fly in them too, only on a broom.
Most boys don’t want to be girls let alone a witch. Besides simply saying, I am transgender, I can’t tell you exactly why I came up with the idea, like why the inclination is so clearly intrinsic to me and I identified with it. It started in my daydreams as a quirky wee thought, and then just persisted. When I was very young and still new, I saw an episode where Samantha changed herself into a male ghost and it got me thinking:
‘If I were a warlock, I would transform myself into a beautiful, benevolent witch and then I’d simply stay that way. Oh, what if Samantha was born a boy who wanted to be a girl too, and changed into a girl, and we just don’t know it?’
I took to the thought like a fish to water.
The Samantha Stevens character was the beginning of my relationship with magical thinking. I dwelt in my imagination wishing upon the likes of stars, hoping on prayers, pavement cracks not stepped on, and magic doorknobs. I’d scan the ground for lost trinkets and pick them up hoping they were charmed and would turn me into a girl and not a frog. When all that failed, I got pseudoscientific and imagined being wheeched into other dimensions where I had to be a girl to maintain balance in the universe, or being sucked into in a UFO and my sex switched by experimenting extraterrestrials.
After I learned on TV that “sex changes,” were an actual thing, I imagined going in for a tonsillectomy, the doctors mixing up my chart, and waking up post-op to realize they accidentally turned me into a girl — “Oh gosh, oh no! what a bummer!” I’d facetiously exclaim as I flipped my hair and rolled my eyes. Because by then, I’d have the connatural disdain of a teenage girl.
My fantasies on the subject ran rampant but throughout my life, I’ve kept revisiting the idea of becoming some equivalent of Samantha Stevens. I didn’t need to BE her per se, just LIKE her. It was her amazing fashion sense and poise, she could rock the most fabulous of ponytails, her femininity was strong and unabashed, and her eyes and makeup were gorge!
Her husband Darren was my only problem, nice guy and all (albeit a bit domineering) but he was a man — not my bag. I reckoned that if it came down to it, I could wiggle my nose, cast a spell on myself, and fall in love with him if I absolutely had to, problem solved — but only the first Darren, the second one, the one they snuck in to replace Dick York, was a wet blanket!
Even the first Darren just didn’t give me butterflies though and Samantha always did. Oh, I waited for it to happen, for my heart to flutter and my knees go weak at the sight of a boy, and I expected it would but it didn’t. So, a dyed-in-the-wool gynophile, in the fantasy of my atypical crush, I imagined all sorts of stereotypical ‘girl’ rites of passage — first kiss, first date, wedding, becoming a mum, and so forth where the hypothetical and inconvenient boys involved were empty placeholders; they were like the blank social media icon where nobody’s bothered to upload a profile picture.
If I imagined myself a wife, I focused on the shape of my body, how I’d move and speak, my clothes, and how my hair and makeup might look. My husband was just an inconvenient grayed-out placeholder, required but unwanted. As I came of age and dreamed of being the girl version of myself, if I thought of sex, all I could imagine was a phantom hint of some ambiguous male form that had to be there were I really wanted a woman. Such was the social and religious conditioning of only one acceptable kind of love and sexuality, that it never occurred to me that I could be a woman and have a girlfriend or a wife. Oh! perish the thought! — read sarcasm
Today, I have no hangups or hesitation envisioning I’d be lesbian if I transitioned. And truth be told, a lesbian Samantha Stevens, sounds a lot more like her darkly rebellious and mischievously sexy cousin Serena, also played by Montgomery. I can now even sit at ease with the idea that some transwomen become androphiles in their transition. So what? At the end of the day, you like what and whom you like and interests and tastes change with our bodies, people discover new things about themselves. I very much doubt it will, but maybe that grayed out image will become full of color and form for me one day and if that were to happen, that would be okay.
But before this shift within my perspective, I was unaware of just how homophobic and internally transphobic many of my ideas were. It wasn’t malicious, it was a misguided form of self-protection and avoidance, an attempt to shoehorn my curvy self into some straight mold made for someone else.
Mind you, these fantasies weren’t only centered around Elizabeth Montgomery. She was the unattainable fantasy archetype but I’ve always been quite content with the idea of being like any feminine girl, becoming the girl version of myself.
In my teenage fantasies, I didn’t write myself as having agency over the change or responsibility to others to explain it. Either it was a thing that happened to me and I just had to accept it, or I was entirely freed from my fear of social disapproval, say the only person alive after some cataclysm, so that I could finally choose to live as myself.
“What would you be like if you were the only person in the world? If you want to be truly happy you must be that person.”
— Quentin Crisp
In hindsight, as much as it was about my deep, appalled, fear of the public opprobrium of being visibly trans, it was also my own buy-in of that narrative that fed the shame and kept me silent; being ‘like that’ simply wasn’t acceptable to me. It is why I never transitioned and instead lived my transness in my head or behind locked doors and drawn curtains. It’s why I vehemently asserted statements like, “I’m JUST a crossdresser” and bought into the autogynephila narrative. I knew this inner trans consciousness was there stuffed away, that she pushed her way into the forefront at times, but such were my systems of denial and avoidance that I managed not to look at or analyze it too deeply.
If I did look at it, it was to berate myself. I’d crossdress, muck about in the shame and then commit to expunging the thoughts and never doing it again. That worked… sort of… time, after time, after time... The pattern was that I’d stop (sort of) then one day I’d see a woman, and smitten with a consuming, crushing envy, collapse and groan within myself:
“Oh gosh, I so wish I could be like her!”
A melancholic wave of incompleteness and hopeless loss would crash over me and then I’d go home, dress-up and wish beyond hope that I could just change into a woman already. Then the incongruence would grind me down for months occupying my every moment.
As a younger child, I didn’t beat myself up over these feelings, I rather liked them, but I also knew not to talk about them. The clear thought it wasn’t ‘normal’ and the adjacent shame didn’t barge in until I was 8 or 9 and I began to hear homophobic remarks spewed among my peers on the playground. There I was, apparently interested in ‘gay’ things, I had crushes on girls and I also wanted to be one but I didn’t like boys. What was I? Where did I fit? Was I gay or not? To be ‘gay’ back then was a term for anything deemed weak, frivolous, and girly. If you were labeled ‘gay,’ you were usually abused and the object of disdain.
As I grew older and understood there was often a mutual exclusivity between thinking someone beautiful and sexual attraction, betwixt desire and social taboos, I was certain I’d be lesbian if I transitioned but as I’ve said, even that freaked me out. I constantly assumed my transness had to be about sexuality and only sexuality because that was the way it was portrayed by others. On the television and in movies, I was told I wanted to be a woman because I either had a sexual fetish run amok — a paraphilia — or I was a closeted gay man who was ashamed of it and wanted to become a heterosexual woman to escape my self loathing for my suppressed desire to have sex with men. It was always about sexual perversion and how fucked up my mere existence was.
Except there was that first trans dream I had when I was nearly 3 that had nothing to do with sexuality.
It is among my first and most persistent memories and I think it is the pure essence of the fact of my transness. I dreamt I grew up to be a woman and I was SO incredibly relieved and happy about it. It wasn’t sexual, I wasn’t a wife or girlfriend to some man, I was just a woman, that’s all. The power of the dream was about the way I occupied space in the world free and unencumbered, joyous and at ease in my body and full-of-heart.
Today I can easily admit I’m trans and I fucking love how queer that is.
My queer “crushes” now include the likes of Mx. Viv, Mia Satya, Natalie Wynn, Laverne Cox, Janet Mock, and Julia Serano, among other trans women who are activists and all-round badasses. It’s not love or unrequited longing, rather I look up to them. If someone mislabels me gay for that admiration or the manner in which I carry and present my person, gosh what a nice compliment! That is recognition, it means they see and acknowledge my queerness and even if they don’t understand its precise nature, I have a strong and proud sense of self that is visible.
I’m still not an androphile, I still think of Samantha Stevens as a style goal, and I know I’m trans and love it. As far as transition? I don’t need to wiggle my nose, all in good time at my own pace — wherever that leads, even if it just lives in my soul sans a visibly trans-medical body, I’m at peace with it today. I strive not to need or respond to outside pressure to fulfill a prescribed role, even if it is a trans one.
This story is a response to the Prism & Pen writing prompt, My Queer Movie Crush, Then and Now.
