I’m trying to look like a man, and these peachy cheeks just aren’t cutting it. What I want is a goatee.
I cut some of my hair into millimeter-long shreds, apply spirit gum (a costume adhesive) to my face and dab the hair onto my chin. It’s unconvincing—the hair is too long and it lies in all directions on my face, like a grove of pine trees felled by a hurricane.
The clothes for the evening: baggy, double-kneed Carhartts hanging low, a raglan t-shirt, sneakers and a navy-blue hooded sweatshirt. To this get-up, I add a pair of plaid boxers, a tacky “Bahamas” baseball cap and an athletic bandage wrapped tightly around my chest. The latter compresses my breasts into uncomfortable beef patties. When I remove the bandage three hours later, red lines outline my stomach and sternum. In profile, though, I look convincingly breastless.
It’s a balmy Wednesday in mid-April, and the first night of a two day experiment in gender destabilization.
I’ve dressed myself as a “man,” following the advice of Bronx resident Laura Starecheski, a freelance journalist who recently attended a drag king workshop led by New York-based performance artist Diane Torr, the self-proclaimed “drag king ambassador to the world.” The plan is to go around campus as I always do, and to register how my shift in gender identity changes the way people interact with me.
I’m not trying to make a definitive statement about how Harvard men are treated differently from Harvard women, because I can’t know for certain if people will perceive me as a man. By donning this dubious man-costume, I’ll only be able to examine how a woman who already dresses androgynously is treated differently from a person whose gender identity is deliberately uncertain. I also wonder how Asian-American stereotypes will factor into this experiment. After all, Asian-American men chronically suffer from stereotypes depicting them as fey, wily, perverted bantamweights—will this make my attempt at passing any easier? What happens when a butchy Chinese dyke dresses up as a butchy Chinese thug?
Serious non-traditional gender identification is virtually invisible at Harvard. On this campus, it’s all fun and games—it’s the cheeky self-celebrations of the cross-dressed Hasty Pudding, or the flock of final clubs punches humiliating themselves outside the Science Center. But in the midst of this kitsch is a small population for whom gender concerns aren’t just a way to get a laugh.
Sarah, a senior who asked that her real name not be used, identifies as a woman but considers herself “technically” a male-to-female transsexual. She decided to undergo testosterone-inhibiting hormone treatment in order to transition to her female identity during her sophomore year. She is the only undergraduate transsexual person that she knows of. “I’m not particularly aware that there is a transgender community on campus,” she says.
During her transition, she sought advice and support from what she calls “activist-y” groups outside Harvard, including the Boston-based Lesbian Avengers and Trans Menace. For a while after the transition, she says, she questioned her sexuality, but says she eventually decided to be “nominally bisexual.”
“It’s not about gender or genitalia,” she says. “If I think you’re a cool person, you can identify as a potato. I really don’t care.”
Sarah says her transition at school was “not a big deal.”
“The biggest problem with the administration was finding every single database that had my old name and making sure it was changed over to my new name,” she says. “It wasn’t a human thing, it was just the gigantic Harvard bureaucracy. No one gave me a hard time.”
My drag experiment occupies a shaky middle ground between spectacle and serious commitment. I worry that it will be perceived as the former, but I’m not doing it for a bear-walking-on-hind-legs laugh. I’m just trying to wreak a little gender havoc.
My male costume is almost finished, but there remains the question of the missing fruits of the loom, the package that will complete my package.
Starecheski recalls that, for Torr’s drag workshop, “Everyone was supposed to bring her own penis.” There’s a twinge of regret in her voice. “I only had a pair of socks.”
“[Torr] actually emphasized deemphasizing the penis,” says Starecheski. “Most people who do drag want a really big one, and aren’t very realistic about how big they really are.”
Isabell Moore, a 24 year-old Columbia University senior who occasionally performs under the name “Zed Haywood,” offered different advice for fashioning the bulge in my pants. Moore is fresh out of the mid-March Southern Girls Conference held in Asheville, N.C., where she attended a drag king workshop sponsored by a Chattanooga-based performance troupe. She identifies as a woman, “but not with much gusto.”
My phone call catches her in the middle of a train ride from New York to Philadelphia, so she is reluctant to speak too loudly. I ask her if there are any special “packing” tips she’s picked up from the workshop.
“I know how to make”—she pauses, and drops her voice to a whisper—“fake dicks.” Shunning the humble stuff-a-sock method, Moore suggests filling three condoms with hair gel—two small balls and one large tube—and tying it all together in the foot of a pair of panty-hose. The result, she says, is “incredibly life-like.”
I don’t have enough energy (or hair gel) to a make this souped-up package, nor the money to buy the “soft-pack” dildo sold especially for these purposes, so I tuck a tiny pair of striped toe socks into my underwear. I do a few Elvis-pelvis thrusts for effect.
But I can’t figure out how to speak. When I try to lower my voice into a gruff male belch, I sound like I’m gargling. Inadvertently, I affect a Southie accent. I call Starecheski for advice.
“Try not to speak too much,” she says. “It’s not so much how you say it, but what you’re saying.”
“But what if I need something?” I whine.
“Don’t ask,” she says. “Demand. Everything belongs to you. If you’re in a bar, don’t say”—she imitates a valley girl falsetto—‘Um, excuse me, can I have a beer?’ Instead, say, ‘Killian’s Red.’”
I try it out in my lowest voice. “Killian’s Red,” I say slowly.
“You sound like a village idiot,” Starecheski says.
My “male” outfit is alarmingly similar to the androgynous comfort clothes I usually wear, making me question why I even bother trying to change my appearance before trying to pass. I’m already frequently mistaken for a man. When my hair was cropped to a half-inch buzz, I was often asked to leave women’s bathrooms by crusading gender do-gooders who couldn’t see beyond their narrow corridor of femininity.
Screw performing masculinity through one experimental night “in drag,” I think. I perform masculinity all the livelong day. It’s not only my broad shoulders and my assless, boxy build, but also my dogged insistence on breaking the feminine hegemony of tight pants and drooping decolletage. Indeed, toggling between my “real” identity as a woman and my “fake” identity as a man seems to require little more than a declaration of purpose: tonight, having pretty much changed nothing about my appearance, I’m a man.
I’m not the first female Harvard androgyne to be mistakenly called “sir,” nor will I be the last. Iris Z. Ahronowitz ’03-’04 recalls a Chem 10 lecture two years ago, when Professor Dudley Herschbach pointed her out and said, “What’s the answer to this question, young man?”
Ahronowitz laughs off Herschbach’s mistake, attributing it to her “baggy, frumpy clothes in non-feminine colors,” but says that it still bothers her when “people feel it necessary to address strangers in gendered terms like ‘sir’ or ‘young man.’”
“Being identified as a boy is startling, but it doesn’t profoundly shake my conception of the universe,” says Roona Ray ’02-’03, a women’s studies and biology concentrator. “It doesn’t make me change how I act or dress.”
Ray says she identifies “pretty strongly as a woman.”
“Sometimes it’s as though someone has made a mistake in a language you think is common to both of you,” she says. “It’s so fundamental to me that I’m a girl, so when someone mistakes me for a boy all I can do is give a long, hard stare: ‘What are you thinking?’”
“It’s weird how hair is the issue,” says Kyle R. McCarthy ’06, a Dudley Co-op resident from Swarthmore, Pa., who wears her strawberry blond hair in a short pixie bob. Like Ray, McCarthy struggles to find an appropriate reaction for situations of mistaken gender identity. “I was crossing the street once and a cop kept shouting, ‘Sir, stop!’” she says. “Finally, I turned around and said, ‘You can call me ma’am!’”
Belligerent cops aside, McCarthy doesn’t want to confront everyone who mistakes her for a man. “I usually don’t say anything because it just creates an awkward situation,” she says. “And if gender is such a nebulous concept anyway, why should I care what people call me?”
I only wish I could be so conciliatory about my mistaken identity. My first instinct, when someone calls me “sir,” is to snarl back gendered epithets and, to put it lightly, to fuck with people. Once, I got in a 20 minute-long shouting match with a wall-eyed young man on a Manhattan subway who told me not to hold hands with my girlfriend in public, a fight that silenced the train and ended with me shouting, “Suck my dick, bitch,” as the homophobe retreated.
On the town: Wednesday, April 16,
9:20 p.m.
Before I go out, I test the drag act on my home turf, the Dudley Co-op. I descend the stairs in my male regalia, baseball cap pulled low and a scruffy goatee and soul patch pasted on my face.
In the living room, Jack E. Caughran ’03 reclines on a white settee and watches an anorexic blonde get booted off “American Idol.”
“What do you think?” I ask.
He gives me a head-to-toe look. “The goatee has got to go,” he says.
Across the room, Signe E. Peterson ’03-’04 concurs, saying, “Your chin looks dirty.”
I take Caughran’s hand and place it on the zipper of my jeans, so that he can feel the bulge in my underwear. He shrieks in delight.
The first stop is the Adams House dining hall, where free visors will reportedly be distributed to the first 300 brownnosers willing to write five alumni thank-you letters. I have some trouble with the bike ride down—my inseam is so low that my leg mobility is severely restricted—and arrive to find the dining hall cleared out for a dance rehearsal. No visors to be seen.
I can’t stop thinking that everyone in the room is staring at my obvious fraudulence, but really, no one has given me a second glance. I walk with a slight limp (due to a pulled quadriceps) and pray that it translates to a cocky strut. I can’t stop sneering.
I realize pretty quickly that it will be hard to tell what discernible effect, if any, my Asian-American features have on how my passing is perceived. There are just too many factors at work here: I’ll never be able to tell whether people are responding to my Chineseness or to the fact that I’m an angry teenage boy-girl with a weird walk, a high-pitched croak and a white baseball cap from the Bahamas.
Plus, the problem with the visor-snatching plan is that I haven’t gone anywhere where my gender needs to be an issue. Boys, women, girly men, fruit cups and diesel dykes can all write alumni thank-you letters without reference to their gender. So, in search of a less ambiguous test of my costume, I head to the steamy men’s locker room at the MAC.
A balding beefcake with massive breasty pecs does military presses in the free weight room, but he doesn’t blanch when I walk confidently into the locker room. So far, so good. Strangely enough, the men’s locker room looks exactly the same as the women’s locker room.
I head to the urinals, where I catch a glimpse of a naked man scrubbing himself down in the showers. One of the fifteen stalls is occupied, so I go into an adjacent stall. The guy next to me shuffles uncomfortably. Waiting for a good one-alligator two-alligator, I flush the toilet and slip back to the weight room.
There has to be something more to “masculinity,” whatever the hell that is, than this flat-chested sham; I have a hard time believing that I’m slated to earn $.73 for every dollar that a man in a comparable job would earn simply because I lack a petite bulge in my shorts. If I’m to be a convincing guy, I’ll need to act from a consistent, stereotypically male worldview. According to Starecheski, that means inflating my confidence and my sense of entitlement and privilege. Somewhere in the silent night, I can hear Harvey Mansfield twitch in gender agony.
Starecheski notes the importance of body language in constructing a gender image. “Think about what it’s like to ride the subway and to share public space with men,” she says. “Men generally take up as much space as their body size will allow. Women sit or stand in public as if they’re always willing to move at the slightest provocation. It’s like, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’ll get out of your way. This isn’t really my space,’ like they’re standing on one foot, ready to tip over. If you’re trying to be a man, you can’t be challenged on where you’re standing or sitting.”
I spread my knees when I sit down, and stand with my shoulders squared and legs wide. I barrel down the sidewalk with my shoulders hunched and I won’t deviate off course for anyone. I walk along Mass. Ave from the Au Bon Pain to Bartley’s, deliberately aiming myself toward groups of people. To my surprise, everyone gets out of my way.
Claiming as much space as you can, Starecheski says, is just a subset of a larger mindset of ownership. “You want to act like you own everything, everywhere you go, every object you see, the floor you walk on,” she says. “When you want to pick up something, pick it up. Just imagine you own everything you touch.” Suddenly, something my housemate Nat Tan ’03-’04 said earlier that night comes to mind: “If you’re going to be a guy, you’re going to have to look at a lot of girls.”
I’m not acting like a man. I’m acting like an asshole. I’m rude, ungrateful, demanding, misogynistic and sullen. I know that my version of masculinity relies on an unflattering stereotype and that not all men are assholes, but to pass effectively, I feel like I have to exaggerate whatever traditionally “male” characteristics I can.
It’s 11 p.m. in Cabot library, and all but the most ardent nerds have headed home for the night. I head for the men’s room, but there’s no one in there, so I check my crusty moustache in the mirror and then head for the women’s room. Also empty.
Half an hour later, I’m slouching by myself on a barstool at Cambridge Common, baseball cap pulled low and tucked under the dark hood of my sweatshirt. Amy, the cheerful bartender, asks for my ID and I hand over my California license, which bears a picture of me as a beatific, long-haired sixteen year-old girl. Amy looks back at me with an arched eyebrow and, remembering Starecheski’s advice, I bark, “Brooklyn Lager.” A sufficiently manly pint.
“Sure thing,” she replies. She calls me “honey” later on in the night, and I spend a while trying to figure out what she means by that. I finish the beer within ten minutes but since I’m so afraid that speaking up will expose my chirpy voice, I spend half an hour waiting for Amy to ask me if I want my check. I nod meekly, dole the money onto the bar and slink out, not waiting for the change.
Drag Bingo: Friday, April 18,
9:05 p.m.
Two nights later, “It’s Raining Men” is warbling loudly from a boombox in the Leverett House dining hall. Dressed in a black boa and a transparent shirt/skirt combo, Andrew R. Suggs ’05 looks agitated. He’s the publicity chair of the Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supporters Alliance (BGLTSA) and tonight, as part of the month-long queer bonanza of “Gaypril,” cross-dressed students will compete for a bevy of smutty prizes in “Drag Bingo.”
Besides Suggs and me, there are only four people in the room.
“We’re waiting for a few people to get out of a drag workshop,” Suggs says. He is the mastermind behind the event and has been advocating for it since last fall, after hearing about a similar event at the University of Virginia.
By the time the bingo balls start rolling, there are almost 30 people in the room, and, surprisingly enough, almost half of them are women. We’re seated in clumps of six or seven people at the dining hall tables, filling in bingo cards stamped with pictures of what appears to be Madonna with a parakeet.
The queens and kings of Drag Bingo still play off familiar drag norms, and most are either swishy hypercamp males decked out in bedazzling sequins and Tammy Faye Baker/slaughterhouse makeup, or butchy chicks in a half-assed suits and ties. I’m still wearing the sweatshirt and baggy jeans configuration.
A few people aren’t in drag at all, including Fred O. Smith ’04, who wears a conservative cobalt sweater and khakis. “I’m going to a Sigma Chi party after this,” he confesses.
Of course, not all the bingo players are queer. Many people attend the event simply for the fun it promises or, like Jonathan M. Bloom ’04, they have come to show support as allies. Barefoot in a slinky spaghetti-strap dress, Bloom says that he is “not queer-identified,” but attended the event knowing that he risked being labeled “gay” anyway.
“It’s easier to say you’re an ally when you don’t have to expose yourself or make yourself vulnerable,” he says. “I didn’t feel perfectly comfortable walking here in a dress.”
Suggs says he envisioned the event as a “an environment where people who choose to go in drag can feel safe.”
“It’s a space for you to queer your appearance,” he says. “I think dressing in drag for a lot of people can be perhaps liberating. It’s stepping out of your clothes, which are the ultimate bond of gendered society, and it makes you think about cultural norms and acceptance.”
Suggs shouts out the bingo numbers in a slight Tennessee twang, and soon, the first bingo is called. The winner is Christine Thai, a short MIT senior dressed like a male high school debater. Her prize: a box of “dirty” fortune cookies that comes in a takeout container bearing a picture of a grinning, slanty-eyed coolie bent in a deep bow. She passes the fortunes around the table. Mine: “Tight buns drive me nuts.”
Suggs draws out a bingo ball and reads the label: “O-69.” A bawdy cheer goes up.
Across the dining hall, I can hear a badly cross-dressed woman saying to two guys in evening gowns, “Do you guys make up and then hook up? That would be so hot.”
“God, they haven’t called any ‘I’ numbers yet,” says one of the two guys, ignoring the question.
“Shut up!” says the other, perhaps to both.
The distinctive reek of camp hangs over Drag Bingo, but it’s something that seems endemic to drag events that are staged as performances. Halfway through the bingo night, Diamond Dunhill, a female impersonator who performs at Jacques’ Cabaret in Bay Village and who also happened to win Miss Gay New England 2001, climbs on the Leverett stage and lip synchs to a house version of Cyndi Lauper’s “I Drove All Night.”
A willow-waist in a black gown, Dunhill slinks around the room and rubs her sternum into some unsuspecting noses. At the end of the performance, she tries to get a rise out of the audience. “Did anyone here use duct tape?” she asks, motioning to her crotch, which she has bound with paper towels and duct tape. No one answers. She tries again. “So all the lesbians here sleep with their roommates, right?” she asks. She gets a few chuckles.
It is this kind of hyperfeminine drag performance that makes some students of queer theory doubt whether drag can be the liberating gender trouble that it aspires to be. For some, drag merely perpetuates stereotypes of how men and women ought to look.
Filling in a bingo card next to me, Yumi Lee ’04 tells me she has some reservations about the event. She relates story about a male friend who had asked her help in preparing for the bingo night. “He said he wanted to look ‘elegant,’” says Lee, “But if drag is supposed to be subverting gender, why does it always refer to one specific stereotype of women? What is the relationship between elegance and femininity? That often isn’t questioned in drag events.”
A glance at the drag queens around the room confirms Lee’s concern—of the dozen or so men in drag, almost all have chosen to present themselves in long dresses and gaudy makeup. Two men ask me to take their photo together, and they seek advice on “how women stand.”
“Turn your ankle out,” shouts someone from my table.
“Push out your chest,” shouts another.
I’m a little uncomfortable with this advice, just as I am also uncomfortable with acting like an asshole in order to better pass as a man. What kind of gender standards are we subverting here, when we rely on stereotypes of masculinity and femininity to make it all seem believable?
Oussama Zahr ’04, the political chair of both the BGLTSA and Radcliffe Union of Students, sits to my left, wearing a blue polyester Lacoste dress that fits him like a curtain, a teeny bop wig and profoundly maroon lipstick. He says the politics around the event are “complicated.”
“There are some critiques of drag, even—or especially—in gay communities,” he says. “It presents a conundrum, because it might be perceived as misogynistic. It tends to perpetuate stereotypes of a certain kind of woman.”
“What kind of woman is that?” I ask.
“What you risk doing is presenting yourself as a stereotypical African-American, lower-class woman, or a ‘glamorous’ woman,” he says. “And even if it seems laudatory of ‘glamorous women,’ the danger in putting on an event like this is that drag has a way of denying or complicating identity standards for women.”
Other the other hand, carefully taking a page from Judith Butler, Zahr says, “Drag is also a hyperbolic performance of gender in order to destabilize any normative or confining notion of gender. It’s important to highlight the difference in order to undermine it. There’s a power in being conscious of it.”
In some ways, queer critiques of drag can seem like unconstructive navel-gazing: it’s infighting within the queer community about how to best destabilize gender, when it’s a small miracle that any kind of gender destabilization happens at all. The weird truth of it is that even a small-scale drag event like Drag Bingo is pretty damned subversive for Harvard, where bricks are red, blood is blue, and “queer” more often than not means bobo gay boys partying with other bobo gay boys.
Lee, a literature concentrator who describes herself as “a cranky and embittered Cancer,” also has “a problem with the way it seems like [the event] could be trivializing to people who have daily experiences with gender dysphoria.” Given the absence of a transgender or transsexual visibility on campus, she says, the occasional occurrence of cross-dressing as a staged spectacle seems to disrespect people who opt to live differently-gendered.
“Some people feel that it erases trans-identities,” says Lee. “Bingo night was advertised as a ‘safe space,’ but who is it really for? Is it for trans-people?”
It is true that when drag means drunkenly borrowing the girl down the hall’s leopard print bra for an initiation ritual—as it often does—can be disrespectful to transgender or transsexual people. However, it can also be unbecoming of a queer theorist to suggest that trans-people are the only ones who have the right to dress outside the gender box. You don’t have to be trans to use drag to criticize traditional gender roles.
“Some would say there’s a fine line between drag and trans—and some would say there isn’t a line at all. Drag can be confusing, because trans stuff isn’t usually done for spectacle, but I don’t have an interest in saying that people shouldn’t do something that they enjoy,” says Sarah, the transsexual senior. “I think on all levels [drag] breaks gender boundaries. Just because some people do it for fun doesn’t necessarily denigrate the fact that some people do it seriously.”
Though she couldn’t make it to Drag Bingo, Sarah says, “I love hanging out with people who transcend social boundaries, whether it be gender, sexuality, whatever. Bingo night would probably have been a cool place to hang out.”
We’ve finished our forties and all the bingo prizes have been doled out. I go home empty-handed. It’s time to cross back over whatever social boundary I transcended by slathering my face with spirit gum. The goatee washes off with rubbing alcohol, and the striped socks come out of my underwear soundlessly. Voila! I’m a woman again.
