Читать книгу Like a Boy but Not a Boy - Andrea Bennett - Страница 8

david

DAVID IS THIRTY-FIVE, QUEER, AND MOSTLY CIS. He sometimes feels a little non-gender-y, but not in a very defined way. Usually like, “What would aliens think about our construct of gender?” David doesn’t really even care enough to pick a label. If he had to, he’d choose agender.

David was born in Ontario, but because his dad was in the army, his family moved to Germany a month or two after he was born. David lived on an English-speaking military base in Germany until he was five. Then his family moved to Saint-Hubert, just outside Montreal. They were there until David was eight. Finally, they moved to Fredericton, New Brunswick, where David lived until he was seventeen. He went to school in English in Germany, in French in Saint-Hubert, and in English in Fredericton.

All of David’s earliest memories are of Germany and of travelling around Europe. He doesn’t really remember Saint-Hubert, but he thinks it was probably stressful, since he doesn’t remember it. He didn’t really speak the language.

When his family arrived in Fredericton, David didn’t know that was where he’d be until he left home to go to university. The one nice thing about moving there was that his family lived with civilians in a regular neighbourhood for the first time. Living on base, only with other military people, had sometimes felt a bit like living in a cult. They moved to the suburban neighbourhood of New Maryland, about a ten-minute drive from Fredericton, and bought a nice house, on about an acre of land, right next to a forest. The edge of their property ended at the forest line, and David spent a lot of time in the woods.

David doesn’t remember when he actually realized that being queer was a thing. At fourteen, he watched Jack on Dawson’s Creek come out. That was when he realized that coming out was something he’d have to do. He came out to his friend Maggie first, at fifteen. His parents learned soon after. The closest he got to telling them was a moment when he was sitting on the living room floor watching TV with them, but he didn’t do it. And then he was really angsty, so his mom read his journal. And that’s how she found out. David’s mom told his dad, and his dad had a very uneventful conversation with him about it. Like, “So your mother tells me you’re gay.” “Mm-hmm.” “And that you didn’t clean out the litter box.”

David has an older sister. They were close until puberty, but she grew up first and was out exploring, away from David, so they grew apart a little. They’re close again now. David wasn’t very close to either of his parents as a teenager. Now, his relationship is good with his dad, and not good with his mom. David feels like his dad is more open to growing and changing and acknowledging the impact that he’s had on him. He’s made some remarks that have felt apologetic to David, whereas his mom has never really been interested in acknowledging any effect that she’s had on him.

David was at his sister’s cottage once, and his stepmom asked if she could take a photo. His dad brought David and his sister in close, and David made some comment like, “I thought you taught us to never touch each other.” And his dad was like, “Oh yeah, sorry about that.” He acknowledged it, and apologized for not expressing physical affection when David was a kid.

For David’s master’s in social work, he had to write a paper about the intergenerational emotional patterns in his family, which required asking his parents questions. David’s dad was very open to sharing information, and he also apologized for going away for a large portion of David’s grade twelve year. That year, it was just David and his mom, and they fought all the time.

There were other out kids at David’s high school. At least, there were after his mom outed them. In grade eleven, he started hanging out with two gay kids in grade twelve, and he started seeing one of them. They were sort of out to their friends, but not super out. One day, David was supposed to go home, but instead, he hung out with the kids from grade twelve. David’s mom found out where the boy lived, went to his house, and told his parents that he was gay. David still doesn’t know why, to this day. The boy immediately wanted nothing to do with David.

David’s high school principal didn’t like him because David handed out a survey about gay attitudes and experiences for his grade twelve sociology class. He handed it out to his friends, some of whom were out in high school and some of whom came out later, but also to other, random students. Someone reported him, and he got called into the principal’s office. His sociology teacher didn’t stand up for him. His principal yelled at him and said the survey was inappropriate. The principal stood up and walked around his desk so that he was standing over David, his cheeks quivering he was so angry. After, one of his classmates who was an intern at a TV studio got David on a local show to talk about high school homophobia. David badmouthed his principal on TV. It was funny. David was almost prevented from attending prom. Not because he had a gay date, but because he wasn’t dressed appropriately. They did eventually let him in. It may have been a power play.

When David was coming of age in Fredericton, the city still felt very homophobic. It was twenty years ago, so that’s part of it, but also, New Brunswick tended to have more traditional, Christian values than other places. For the entirety of high school, David was looking forward to leaving. In every teen soap he watched, his favourite season was the one where they went to university. He was really excited to do it himself.

David ended up going to the University of Guelph. It wasn’t an easy transition, though. He lived in residence for his first two months and then moved out and got his own apartment. His room in residence was nice, with big bay windows, but it felt like he’d moved in with his high school football team. He needed to get out. He’d signed up for psychology as his major when he applied to university, and it worked out—he liked studying it and was drawn to learning more about himself. The people he met felt like his people, but he was still pretty much just living in his head.

It took until David graduated from university and moved to Toronto for him to really feel comfortable being himself. He felt pretty closed off in Guelph, even though he had queer friends and dated people there. He found a big queer community in Toronto, where everyone was really weird and not like a lot of other queer people he’d met before. He felt a lot of kinship with them. Eventually, he felt more comfortable opening up. It was age, partially, and doing work on himself. He figured out how to be more open.

When David got to Toronto, he lived a carefree life for the first few years. He was a bartender until he was twenty-six or so, partying all the time. David abused alcohol in those years, but then he started dealing with the emotions he’d been avoiding, and moved from bartending back into the structure of school. The consequences of drinking started to outweigh the benefits, and he stopped drinking excessively. He only drinks a bit now and no longer has a problematic relationship with alcohol. There’s an intensity to sobriety that can feel like being on drugs. When David stopped drinking excessively, he felt more anxious at first, and then he felt sharper than he’d been in a long time.

He thinks that part of that time of excess in his twenties might be attributable to the fact that queer millennials didn’t really get a youth—the freedom to explore that exists for some in their teenage years and early twenties is often devoted to repression, or a focus on escape and survival—so they have had to live it later, once they found their communities. It may also be that being queer is like rewriting a script: when you break one of the main rules, you just aren’t as willing to follow other kinds of rules, and you’re not as willing to follow traditional life paths.