Chapter One
Seven years ago, I had my first tutorial in becoming a man.
The idea for this book came to me then, when I went out for the first time in
drag. I was living in the East Village at the time, undergoing a significantly
delayed adolescence, drinking and drugging a little too much, and indulging in
all the sidewalk freak show opportunities that New York City has to offer.
Back then I was hanging around a lot with a drag king whom I had met through
friends. She used to like to dress up and have me take pictures of her in
costume. One night she dared me to dress up with her and go out on the town. I’d
always wanted to try passing as a man in public, just to see if I could do it,
so I agreed enthusiastically.
She had developed her own technique for creating a beard whereby you cut half
inch chunks of hair from unobtrusive parts of your own head, cut them into
smaller pieces, and then more or less glopped them onto your face with spirit
gum. Using a small round freestanding mirror on her desk, she showed me how to
do it in the dim, greenish light of her cramped studio apartment. It wasn’t at
all precise and it wouldn’t have passed muster in the daylight, but it was good
enough for the stage, and it would work well enough for our purposes in dark
bars at night. I made myself a goatee and mustache, and a pair of baroque
sideburns. I put on a baseball cap, loose-fitting jeans and a flannel shirt. In
the full-length mirror I looked like a frat boy-sort of.
She did her thing-which was more willowy and soft, more like a young hippie guy
who couldn’t really grow much of a beard-and we went out like that for a few
hours.
We passed, as far as I could tell, but I was too afraid to really interact with
anyone, except to give one guy brief directions on the street. He thanked me as
“dude” and walked on.
Mostly though we just walked the streets of the Village scanning people’s faces
to see if anyone took a second or third look. But no one did. And that, oddly
enough, was the thing that struck me the most about that evening. It was the
only thing of real note that happened. But it was significant.
I had lived in that neighborhood for years, walking its streets where men lurk
outside of bodegas, on stoops and in doorways much of the day. As a woman, you
couldn’t walk down those streets invisibly. You were an object of desire or at
least semiprurient interest to the men who waited there, even if you weren’t
pretty-that, or you were just another piece of pussy to be put in its place.
Either way, their eyes followed you all the way up and down the street, never
wavering, asserting their dominance as a matter of course. If you were female
and you lived there, you got used to being stared down, because it happened
every day and there wasn’t anything you could do about it.
But that night in drag, we walked by those same stoops and doorways and bodegas.
We walked right by those same groups of men. Only this time they didn’t stare.
On the contrary, when they met my eyes they looked away immediately and
concertedly and never looked back. It was astounding, the difference, the
respect they showed me by not looking at me, by purposely not staring.
That was it. That was what had annoyed me so much about meeting their gaze as a
woman, not the desire, if that was ever there, but the disrespect, the
entitlement. It was rude, and it was meant to be rude, and seeing those guys
looking away deferentially when they thought I was male, I could validate in
retrospect the true hostility of their former stares.
But that wasn’t quite all there was to it. There was something more than plain
respect being communicated in their averted gaze, something subtler, less
direct. It was more like a disinclination to show disrespect. For them, to look
away was to decline a challenge, to adhere to a code of behavior that kept the
peace among human males in certain spheres just as surely as it kept the peace
and the pecking order among male animals. To look another male in the eye and
hold his gaze is to invite conflict, either that or a homosexual encounter. To
look away is to accept the status quo, to leave each man to his tiny sphere of
influence, the small buffer of pride and poise that surrounds and keeps him.
I surmised all of this the night it happened, but in the weeks and months that
followed I asked most of the men I knew whether I was right, and they agreed,
adding usually that it wasn’t something they thought about anymore, if they ever
had. It was just something you learned or absorbed as a boy, and by the time you
were a man, you did it without thinking.
After the whole incident had blown over, I started thinking that if in such a
short time in drag I had learned such an important secret about the way males
and females communicate with each other, and about the unspoken codes of male
experience, then couldn’t I potentially observe much more about the social
differences between the sexes if I passed as a man for a much longer period of
time? It seemed true, but I wasn’t intrepid enough yet to do something that
extreme. Besides it seemed impossible, both psychologically and practically, to
pull it off. So I filed the information away in my mind for a few more years and
got on with other things.
Then, in the winter of 2003, while watching a reality television show on the A&
E network, the idea came back to me. In the show, two male and two female
contestants set out to transform themselves into the opposite sex-not with
hormones or surgeries, but purely by costume and design. The women cut their
hair. The men had theirs extended. Both took voice and movement lessons to try
to learn how to speak and behave more like the sex they were trying to become.
All chose new wardrobes, personas and names for their alter egos. The bulk of
the program focused on the outward transformations, though the point at the end
was to see who could pass in the real world most effectively. Neither of the men
really passed, and only one of the women stayed the course. She did manage to
pass fairly well, though only for a short time and in carefully controlled
circumstances.
But, as in most reality television programs, especially the American ones,
nobody involved was particularly introspective about the effect their
experiences had had on them or the people around them. It was clear that the
producers didn’t have much interest in the deeper sociologic implications of
passing as the opposite sex. It was all just another version of an extreme
make-over. Once the stunt was accomplished-or not-the show was over.
But for me, watching the show brought my former experience in drag to the
forefront of my mind again and made me realize that passing in costume in the
daylight could be possible with the right help. I knew that writing a book about
passing in the world as a man would give me the chance to explore some of the
unexplored territory that the show had left out, and that I had barely broached
in my brief foray in drag years before.
I was determined to give the idea a try.
(Continues…)
Viking Adult
ISBN: 0-670-03466-5
Excerpted from Self-Made Man
by Norah Vincent Excerpted by permission.
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