Those Who Cant
Joshua G. Adair
I learned the word “effeminate” as a third-grader; it was 1985 and I was not yet 9. From the moment I heard it, I was convinced it was a curse, something no one should say – and I wondered why I had never heard it before. It escaped the mouth of Mrs. Ross, one of my two third grade teachers, and I knew she intended it to insult me, but in a way that satisfied her distaste for my demeanor while going over my head at the same time. I was not that kid, however, because I had been a target for a long time; I also, on occasion, adopted the affect of a forty-year-old. Queer kids learn to do that early, once they realize they are ‘different.’
She used the word to decree her dismay at the idea that I spent recess sitting at the edge of the asphalt playground reading a book or talking to the girls in my class. “You need to start behaving normally,” she hissed, “no one likes an effeminate boy.” Though the word itself confused me, I received her message loud and clear. She was the latest old lady – my paternal grandmother had been the first – to declare I could not “act like a girl.” Like my grandmother, my behavior – though it was no act – bothered her tremendously. Femininity, when I was its source, felt foul and fake to them – though they themselves were feminine figures. “You’re the kind of boy who likes silk drawers,” my great Uncle Paul told me when I was four or five. My grandmother cackled in delight as she chimed in, “he’s a little light in the loafers.” I didn’t know what they meant then, either, but I understood that they detested me. I was their figure of fun and revulsion, whenever we met. I was afraid of them and told my mother I didn’t want to be around them – though never explaining why. When I went to school shortly thereafter, I quickly understood that women and girls were more often – though not always – safer friends for someone like me. |
Teachers adored me all the way through second grade. They raved to my mother about what a sweet, smart, and obedient child she had raised. I made good marks and never caused commotion. While they might have looked somewhat askance at my denim book bag with its big blue applique bunny that I insisted mother make me, I think they largely felt relief that I was nothing like my unruly, proto-masculine older brother. If they whispered and wondered whether I would have trouble when I was a teen, they never let on. Surely I was not the first feminine boy they had schooled.
For I was just feminine, despite what Mrs. Ross would have had me believe. There was no excess or artifice in my behavior. I was a sweet kid who liked school. I wanted desperately to fit in, though I always failed. I liked myself so it was difficult to see why I should change. No one taught me how to hide my automatic reactions, to study the swagger of older boys to avoid being bullied. I was generous and emotive; I hated P.E. and didn’t like roughhousing. I did not know that making myself clear in all these regards was closing doors with me forever on the wrong side.
In that ‘effeminate’ instant, I understood that she hated me; I sickened her. The alliance that I had shared each preceding year with my teachers, a sort of secret, unspoken pact that they would protect me had now perished. She did not care how well I performed or behaved, my existence enraged her. “Go play on the monkey bars!” she would command, “you cannot play with the girls.” An early adopter of amateur conversion therapy, she apparently believed that I would catch masculinity if she forcefully exposed me to it often enough.
Instead, she inoculated me. When I would reluctantly remove myself to the jungle of the monkey bars, I would be met with what I took to be masculine proclamations: “faggot,” “fairy,” and “fudge-packer.” If my older brother was in the crowd, he would take part – certain that my condition was catching. He knew if he stood up for me that the other kids would know he had caught it and treat him accordingly. When I turned to Mrs. Ross as this litany let loose, she merely smiled at me – though whether out of delight at seeing me reap my just desserts or purely casual cruelty, I cannot say.
Not every day went this way. Everything depended upon which teacher took primary control of lunchtime recess. If it was Mrs. Crockett, my former second grade teacher, the atmosphere was pure carnival. Her name ought to have been Mrs. Crocked because she was an abject alcoholic who could barely hold her head up. In fact, sometimes she didn’t. My primary reminiscences of her pedagogical plan conjure up classes filled with endless excuses for students to massage her back and rub her neck. She always carried a coffee cup that smelled strongly; my parents didn’t drink so I couldn’t call it whiskey then. Her eyes were bloodshot; her nose purple. She often passed out during the Disney films she assigned us to watch from the reel-to-reel projector she made us learn to operate.
Today, Mrs. Crockett would have been canned – and quickly. She was always lovely towards me, though she too had her cruelties. My friend Leslie, a girl who was sometimes incontinent, ended up locked in our classroom closet for one such calamity. While stuck in solitary, crouching among stacks of calculators and coloring books, she sprang another leak that drained under the door – much to the delight of those who detested her. For the remainder of her time at Yorkwood – another ten years – she was permanently “Pee Face.” No one ever let her forget that Mrs. Crockett locked her in the closet which, they claimed, she mistook for a restroom.
If Mrs. Crockett was finding it difficult to deal on a given day, Mrs. Schreiber usually stood in. She was the terminator of the third grade; old as Methuselah and mercilessly mean. She was my other third grade teacher and she adored me – a feeling that was mutual. She took nothing from nobody and everybody knew it. She had been teaching since my parents were students and wore her lifetime’s worth of uncut hair in an overblown bun the size of a casaba. I have no sense that she actually taught me much, but I liked her law and order classroom. Recess was no different; had she heard those boys they’d likely have been hung. I exchanged Christmas cards with her until she passed away when I was twenty-five; she seemed like a drag queen prototype to me.
Her major contribution to the carceral state of our school was the refrigerator box banishment. She suffered no fools, as many of my friends – and foes, fortunately – found out. It was never entirely clear what would set her off. Her advanced age and antagonistic energy meant that she perceived many prosaic actions as direct frontal assaults for which there was only one answer: being locked in the box. My friend Crystal couldn’t stop chewing on her hair. Because this was before the days of My Strange Addiction, I doubt anyone could have told her parents she was suffering childhood trichophagia and needed counseling. Instead, Mrs. Schreiber invited her to chomp away in the privacy of the box in which she received her Frigidaire. As an added bonus, she would then ascend to her stepstool and use the prison as her podium – decorated as it was with construction paper, bunting, and the tearstains of students who had definitely learned their lesson.
If Mrs. Schreiber had seen what was happening to me, I suspect she would have hotboxed whomever she deemed responsible – even Mrs. Ross. It’s a shame she couldn’t have done the same for Mrs. Crockett so she could have dried out, but then perhaps she should have locked herself in her own closet and left poor Leslie alone. Mrs. Schreiber never did see, sadly, and I was too ashamed to tell her. I did not know then that feminine boys are an absolutely fabulous alternative to humdrum mainstream masculinity, prosaically type-cast simply because of the presence of a penis. It’s a shame that I didn’t know Mrs. Ross’s eldest grandson was also the recipient of similar slander from his so-called granny.
When she saw that I would not succumb to her machinations, Mrs. Ross raged. She liked neither how I walked nor the way I talked talked; both were too lilting and lisping. If she couldn’t make me a macho third-grader, she would send me away. After canting and chanting, riling and reviling, she came to the conclusion that containment was the sole solution. I could not be recess-redesigned; I was decidedly diseased. She saw her chance when I crashed a math test: I had a learning disability and should be quarantined in the special ed classroom. After all, hadn’t my older brother been relegated to that realm already?
Perhaps he had been right after all – queerness was confusingly communicable. My mother, however, was having none of her ballyhoo. “My son has received consistently high marks,” she instructed with the aid of past report cards. Now because he’s done poorly – though still passed – on one exam, you believe he needs special education?”
For I was just feminine, despite what Mrs. Ross would have had me believe. There was no excess or artifice in my behavior. I was a sweet kid who liked school. I wanted desperately to fit in, though I always failed. I liked myself so it was difficult to see why I should change. No one taught me how to hide my automatic reactions, to study the swagger of older boys to avoid being bullied. I was generous and emotive; I hated P.E. and didn’t like roughhousing. I did not know that making myself clear in all these regards was closing doors with me forever on the wrong side.
In that ‘effeminate’ instant, I understood that she hated me; I sickened her. The alliance that I had shared each preceding year with my teachers, a sort of secret, unspoken pact that they would protect me had now perished. She did not care how well I performed or behaved, my existence enraged her. “Go play on the monkey bars!” she would command, “you cannot play with the girls.” An early adopter of amateur conversion therapy, she apparently believed that I would catch masculinity if she forcefully exposed me to it often enough.
Instead, she inoculated me. When I would reluctantly remove myself to the jungle of the monkey bars, I would be met with what I took to be masculine proclamations: “faggot,” “fairy,” and “fudge-packer.” If my older brother was in the crowd, he would take part – certain that my condition was catching. He knew if he stood up for me that the other kids would know he had caught it and treat him accordingly. When I turned to Mrs. Ross as this litany let loose, she merely smiled at me – though whether out of delight at seeing me reap my just desserts or purely casual cruelty, I cannot say.
Not every day went this way. Everything depended upon which teacher took primary control of lunchtime recess. If it was Mrs. Crockett, my former second grade teacher, the atmosphere was pure carnival. Her name ought to have been Mrs. Crocked because she was an abject alcoholic who could barely hold her head up. In fact, sometimes she didn’t. My primary reminiscences of her pedagogical plan conjure up classes filled with endless excuses for students to massage her back and rub her neck. She always carried a coffee cup that smelled strongly; my parents didn’t drink so I couldn’t call it whiskey then. Her eyes were bloodshot; her nose purple. She often passed out during the Disney films she assigned us to watch from the reel-to-reel projector she made us learn to operate.
Today, Mrs. Crockett would have been canned – and quickly. She was always lovely towards me, though she too had her cruelties. My friend Leslie, a girl who was sometimes incontinent, ended up locked in our classroom closet for one such calamity. While stuck in solitary, crouching among stacks of calculators and coloring books, she sprang another leak that drained under the door – much to the delight of those who detested her. For the remainder of her time at Yorkwood – another ten years – she was permanently “Pee Face.” No one ever let her forget that Mrs. Crockett locked her in the closet which, they claimed, she mistook for a restroom.
If Mrs. Crockett was finding it difficult to deal on a given day, Mrs. Schreiber usually stood in. She was the terminator of the third grade; old as Methuselah and mercilessly mean. She was my other third grade teacher and she adored me – a feeling that was mutual. She took nothing from nobody and everybody knew it. She had been teaching since my parents were students and wore her lifetime’s worth of uncut hair in an overblown bun the size of a casaba. I have no sense that she actually taught me much, but I liked her law and order classroom. Recess was no different; had she heard those boys they’d likely have been hung. I exchanged Christmas cards with her until she passed away when I was twenty-five; she seemed like a drag queen prototype to me.
Her major contribution to the carceral state of our school was the refrigerator box banishment. She suffered no fools, as many of my friends – and foes, fortunately – found out. It was never entirely clear what would set her off. Her advanced age and antagonistic energy meant that she perceived many prosaic actions as direct frontal assaults for which there was only one answer: being locked in the box. My friend Crystal couldn’t stop chewing on her hair. Because this was before the days of My Strange Addiction, I doubt anyone could have told her parents she was suffering childhood trichophagia and needed counseling. Instead, Mrs. Schreiber invited her to chomp away in the privacy of the box in which she received her Frigidaire. As an added bonus, she would then ascend to her stepstool and use the prison as her podium – decorated as it was with construction paper, bunting, and the tearstains of students who had definitely learned their lesson.
If Mrs. Schreiber had seen what was happening to me, I suspect she would have hotboxed whomever she deemed responsible – even Mrs. Ross. It’s a shame she couldn’t have done the same for Mrs. Crockett so she could have dried out, but then perhaps she should have locked herself in her own closet and left poor Leslie alone. Mrs. Schreiber never did see, sadly, and I was too ashamed to tell her. I did not know then that feminine boys are an absolutely fabulous alternative to humdrum mainstream masculinity, prosaically type-cast simply because of the presence of a penis. It’s a shame that I didn’t know Mrs. Ross’s eldest grandson was also the recipient of similar slander from his so-called granny.
When she saw that I would not succumb to her machinations, Mrs. Ross raged. She liked neither how I walked nor the way I talked talked; both were too lilting and lisping. If she couldn’t make me a macho third-grader, she would send me away. After canting and chanting, riling and reviling, she came to the conclusion that containment was the sole solution. I could not be recess-redesigned; I was decidedly diseased. She saw her chance when I crashed a math test: I had a learning disability and should be quarantined in the special ed classroom. After all, hadn’t my older brother been relegated to that realm already?
Perhaps he had been right after all – queerness was confusingly communicable. My mother, however, was having none of her ballyhoo. “My son has received consistently high marks,” she instructed with the aid of past report cards. Now because he’s done poorly – though still passed – on one exam, you believe he needs special education?”
“These things run in families, Mrs. Adair,” Mrs. Ross replied, her mouth full of smarm.
“Like hell they do. Joshua’s brother should never have been placed in special ed. He’s a troublemaker and for that you’ve placed him with the other handful of kids who suffer everything from autism to artificial legs. That room’s an asylum, not someplace kids can learn. Why do you think we’re trying to take him out of there?” “I couldn’t say, Mrs. Adair, but those are ugly accusations. I’m sure their teacher would be troubled to hear that’s what you think.” “Believe you me, I’ve already told Rita Shyke exactly what I think of her. She told me one day I’d be grateful if my kid could read a newspaper; that’s all the aspiration she has for him.” “I am not here to tear down Mrs. Shyke, Mrs. Adair. We believe Joshua needs special attention. Please sign the release or you’ll regret it.” |
To my mother’s credit, she did not. She insisted that I stay where I was at and try harder. In retrospect, her analysis of the “special ed” program in which my brother was enrolled was absolutely awful – and indeed an asylum of sorts. Physical and mental challenges – intellectual and emotional – were all lumped together and uniformly ignored. The kids were removed from the general population and cordoned off in a single classroom in which, most frequently, the preferred form of teaching was reading them the Review Atlas – the local newspaper.
While my brother felt alienated in there, he loved the utter lack of rigor or requirements. He got to join the “regular” kids during recess – though not all of his classmates did – and that was all the normalizing he needed. I, on the other hand, was mortified at the mention that I would be taken out of the mainstream. I developed intense anxiety – in the third grade – and started to experience serious stress and fear as I forged a connection between my femininity and failure. Mrs. Ross saw me as a failure simply because I was feminine; I didn’t understand what was wrong with me, so I started endless self-scrutiny to stave off any such future humiliations.
It was around that time that I started dreading school. I would break down at the bus stop and experience mini-panic attacks about leaving my mother. The kids were increasingly cruel – especially the boys – as they sensed I had no place in their pack. Some girls were sympathetic, but their protections only went so far – they had themselves to think of, too. I clung to Mrs. Schreiber when I could, but she could not intervene in the bathrooms or during gym class. Those were the places I really needed help as the other boys began to learn how to bully in a big way. The P.E. coach, Mr. Seward, took a page out of Mrs. Ross’s book and believed he could be more successful at saving me from my sissy self.
Over the next three years I would take to calling him Mr. Sewer, right to his face. He had taught my mother, you see, and she taught me that trick. He had hated her, too, back when he was a novice teacher of English and she a high school senior, four years his junior. “Squeaky works too,” she said, recalling the taunts it took to take him down. “He was a bully back then,” she said, recalling few fond memories of the man who couldn’t cut it teaching literature and turned to kickball instead. He knew I was calling him Sewer, but thanks to mother’s interventions I was somewhat off-limits in terms of making further trouble. Instead, he tortured me himself.
He took every chance to humiliate me in front of my classmates. I was something of a classic queer cliché in that – and many – regards, so I had little facility in the wild world of sports. Instead of kicking the ball, I somehow caught my heel, rolled my foot over it, and fell flat on my back. I could not hit a baseball to save my life; I did, however, once substitute my own skull for a softball when I stepped too close to a classmate at bat. He damn near knocked me out and we all had a good laugh, Mr. Sewer included, about what a stupid sissy I had been. This incident, like so many, went unreported though certainly not unremarked.
Apart from periodically playing the part of pansy piñata, I also developed a reputation as the kid who never came to classes on Mondays. I suddenly felt ill a lot. The doctors could not say exactly what was wrong – some thought asthma, or maybe allergies – others suggested I was just experiencing growing pains and having a difficult time fitting in at school. I felt awful all the time, except for Friday night and Saturdays. Friday nights were my favorite because I knew when I went home Mom would be waiting and we’d have something fun for dinner – usually pizza. We’d watch The Dukes of Hazzard or Knight Rider, Mr. Belvedere and Webster. If we were really good, we could stay up till ten and watch Falcon’s Crest. I don’t think my siblings cared about that show, but I loved the big house and the flamboyant people. I liked to be industrious even then, though, so I usually worked ahead in my spelling workbook as we watched television.
I always wanted to be prepared and I loved learning. Even my parents made fun of my fiendishness for working weeks ahead on assignments while we were having a fun Friday night. I wanted to do well and succeed and everything Mrs. Ross taught me that year made me think just being myself could impede that possibility. If I weren’t working on my spelling or math skills, I was reading the Nancy Drew mysteries I checked out from the school library that Mrs. Ross told me boys shouldn’t bother with. “You should be reading hardier stuff,” I thought she had commanded, but in retrospect I think it was probably “Hardy” – as in Boys – stuff. I didn’t care. I loved Nancy Drew; she drove a convertible, wore a stylish scarf, and seemed utterly independent. She made me want to solve mysteries.
Saturdays were safest; there was no school to contend with and we usually had something fun or interesting to do. If not, I read or begged Mom to teach me to sew or embroider. I don’t know what she thought about that exactly, but I come from a very hands-on family, so she obliged. Her only rebuke – if it even was that – was to send me to the garage to work with my dad periodically. Working with him meant sanding old cars and sweeping floors – even at that age – and while I didn’t relish that work, I learned a lot of skills no one associates with a sissy. She also told me not to tell my friends at school about sewing – suggesting she suspected I was suffering just for being myself.
Sundays were absolute agony, especially after five pm. I dreaded the next day and I knew the minute Murder, She Wrote ended, I would have to go to bed. I hated Jessica Fletcher for that; she always ended on the high note that sounded like me being sent to my destruction. Unlike my siblings, I headed straight upstairs. I knew what I had to do and my anxious reaction flooded me with such dread that prolonging the moment only made it worse. By dinner that day I had already selected my clothes for the next day and carefully packed all I would need in my bag. I tried to think of every terrible possibility and plan for it. I wanted to be prepared.
I envied my siblings their carefree carelessness. They both hated school and couldn’t understand why I got so wound up. They had not planned for or done anything proactive and their days usually turned out better. I would lay in bed after my mother turned out the lights and watch the hall light turn my ceiling fixture into a strange mushroom cloud against the sea of orange flowers on the wallpaper, symbolizing the upcoming explosion of Mondays. Perhaps it was that floral wallpaper that rendered me irretrievably feminine – it’s hard to say. Either way, I was the only nine year old I knew – then or now – who suffered severe insomnia.
I would often lay there for an hour or more and tell myself little stories – childish things – about how the teddy bears on my bed would take care of me. I often thought of a birthday card my mother had given me the year before with actual teddy bears posed around a fancy tea table having a little party. Even though I knew it wasn’t real, I imagined them coming to life – and then to my rescue. Those bears had spent a lot of time with me and surely they could vouch for my fine behavior and pure intentions, I reasoned, though in somewhat less sophisticated language. They knew I wasn’t bad or the kind of person to be avoided. They loved that I might like to throw a tea party or cuddle a bear. They were my early allies and sometimes these stuffed bear-fantasies of friendship – my favorite of whom was called Button-nose – would lull me enough to sleep.
Most often, however, anxiety prevented it and by about the time they were whining about the weather on the local news – around 10:15 – I was back downstairs in the well-lit living room pleading to sleep on the couch. I can’t say why, but sometimes a change in location helped. Other times, I would just lay there, too, traumatized by what awaited on Monday morning. Sometimes when I appeared, Mom would get extremely frustrated and make me go back upstairs. I don’t think she fully understood the depth of my despair or the weight of worry about what lay ahead.
Many Monday mornings I pleaded illness. “I can’t go;” “please don’t make me go;” and “this is the last time,” became common refrains. I was tightly wound and buttoned up for someone not much older than a tot, so I didn’t want to tell her about the boys hitting me or messing with me in the bathroom. I did not want to talk about the terror I felt when I had to face Mrs. Ross or the Sewer. I just wanted to be left alone to learn. While it bothered me a great deal that so many of them hated me, I didn’t understand why they always had to keep at me. Couldn’t I just be ostracized or treated like a ghost beneath the contempt of actual contact?
I dreamed sometimes of Casper and imagined the possibilities of invisibility. I wanted to be in the classroom, marking good marks rather than missing every Monday. If people couldn’t see me, then I could just go about my business and succeed at being a student. If people couldn’t be nice to me, I figured, I could do without them. I never bothered or sought out souls I didn’t want to associate with, I never understood why they couldn’t do the same. Certain types – and it took me many years to discover this – try to fight their insecurity by seeking out those they perceive to be weak or wonky in some way. I suppose I knew this on some level even then, thanks to my older brother Sean.
He had sensed something wrong with me from basically the moment I was born. His first complain came when I laid about as a baby: “he doesn’t do anything!” he had carped to my mother. In an attempt to animate me, he planted himself on my chest and trickled drops of Baby Aspirin down my throat in an attempt to help me OD. When that didn’t work, he waited. I became more animate and he decided he didn’t care for my moves. He slid me face first, midget-bowling-style, into a chair’s rocker and split open my face. He liked the stitches that supported his stories of fratricide, but ultimately felt the tale lacked finality – so he talked four-year old me into drinking battery acid in my dad’s auto shop. Much to his chagrin, my mother caught me mid-slurp and spirited me away to have my stomach pumped just prior to the metamorphosis that would have made me a Casper for real.
He would try stitches to the head – right above the last set under my right eye – for the last time that same school year. He tripped me intentionally and I bashed my head into my mother’s tea cart’s corner and split my skin but good. As I lay in the operating room with a tissue over my face, mom held my hand and I watched the tip of the needle peek in and out. All I could think was, “this means I won’t have to go to school on Monday.” And I didn’t, which was also probably a relief to my brother. I was an endless embarrassment he wished to destroy, his sixth-grade masculinity fracturing with new fissures every time my feminine self entered his schoolyard vicinity.
Not long after, I contracted chicken pox for the second time – something everyone says cannot happen. I had never been happier than when Mom told me I wouldn’t be able to go to school for at least a week. I didn’t feel that badly, but I did have three nasty blisters to complement the string of stitches on my face. I happily sat around the house in my pajamas and bathroom, embroidering a little sampler of a lion that my mother had dug out of some box. My heart nearly broke when I realized I’d been pulling the needle through my clothes and accidentally appliqueing the sampler to my robe. I had to cut my poor lion’s face apart and start over, but fortunately I had the time to do so now that I was legitimately diseased.
Each night my younger sister, then a first-grader, would bring home my assignments from Mrs. Schreiber and Mrs. Ross, who I assume was delighted to imagine me left in some leper colony – though not for the ‘contagion’ she had called out. Mrs. Schreiber, on the other hand, sent me a get well card with a sheet of St. Patrick’s Day stickers she knew I would enjoy. To this day I still think of her fondly as that wonderful witch flying in front of the crescent moon on the Halloween stickers she applied to perfect work – otherworldly and a force with which to be reckoned, even if she did practice false imprisonment from time to time. Mrs. Fuller, my first grade teacher, also sent me some special pencils through my sister, along with her “best.” I felt buoyed up as the scabs subsided and it became clear I would, in fact, eventually have to return to school.
What remained of the year was not easy, nor would school ever truly be again. Though I cannot accuse her of complete causation, Mrs. Ross contaminated my educational career in calculated ways. I arrived in her classroom already uneasy and fearful because of the “funny” remarks – what we now call slurs – of certain sects of my family about my femininity. I even wondered if I was actually a girl, or at least ought to have been. In their narrow framework for life, people with interests and inclinations labeled as feminine – an arbitrary and socially constructed distinction at best, an excuse for vehemence and violence at worst – very well ought to own a vagina. All the rest of us femmes – regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity – ought to undergo some sort of cure for our sickness or at least have the good taste to disappear from public sight.
As I moved through the school system – a model student with stellar grades and behavior – my fellow students amped up their aggression as passivity overtook the faculty. Never again would I have a teacher who would outright tell me not to be girly; not to be like a girl. She was the only one to tell me directly that femininity is offensive – and seemingly manufactured – in a man while not-so-subtly implying the same is not necessarily untrue in a universal sense. Something about me mirrored back to her some sadness or dissatisfaction with herself and her family and rather than face her fear of femininity she set out to destroy it. Sadly, she fell into the age-old sand trap of believing that someone or something feminine is therefore weak and perfectly easy to destroy.
Her own existence and survival in world that is frequently unwelcoming to women ought to have taught her otherwise, but perhaps I grant too much. My teachers – both male and female – from junior high forward did little to protect me from the savagery of many of my schoolmates, even as they praised my prowess in the classroom. They knew my misery; they saw me sit apart from the rest every lunch hour just to have some peace. They knew that I would not speak unless spoken to, the phantom pupil fearful of the fun that would be made when they heard the sound of my voice or the words I would choose. They all knew I was being tortured physically and mentally, to varying degrees depending on the day, even as they canted about fair chances, camaraderie, and equality to us all without ever offering even the smallest example of what that might look like in actuality.
Perhaps they did not know themselves; theory and practice are very different things. As a high schooler I often troubled myself with a story my parents had told about their “queer” classmates in high school and the horrors that had befallen their classmates – perhaps including my parents, I was too paranoid to ask – for failing to fit in. Boys’ heads shoved in toilets, others forced to fit soiled jockstraps over their faces, family homes covered in graffiti – these were the fees for their femininity. Mom expressed sadness at those stories, but then she also let it be known that one of the victims was the father of a girl I was friends with at school. I suddenly started to wonder if Lisa really liked me or if she just didn’t want to see me treated like her father had been. I thought better of asking, though, if he were anything like me – and apparently he was – he wouldn’t have wanted to share his shame with her.
In the end, I obviously survived – which I consider no small feat. One of my last teachers in high school was also a Mrs. Ross – the daughter-in-law and then the ex-daughter-in-law in the same year of the original – when I was a senior. She taught history and had an interesting one, too. She had been my mother’s classmate when they graduated in ’66. The second Mrs. Ross had had a rough go of it in school too, which she and Mom both confirmed in various ways. This Mrs. Ross was also the mother of that grandson some might call effeminate, because they prefer to label such attributes and behaviors as a condition in need of medicalizing and managing.
Isn’t it funny that we don’t have a comparable word – a binary term – for masculinity? Oh sure, there’s manly or butch – and both can be applied in derogatory ways – but they don’t attack masculinity itself in the way ‘effeminate’ does femininity with its denotation of overrefinement and cloying artifice. No, manly and butch both applaud such qualities, though they may insert some suspicion if the actor evincing them carries the so-called wrong genitals – and that isn’t even always the case. ‘Effeminate’ is term designed to hurt, to degrade men and women both, all while underscoring a presumption of inherent falseness on the part of the possessor.
Mrs. Ross the younger, as it would happen, took the blame for her boy’s physical beauty and fey qualities. She had doted too much, coddled too closely; it’s the shelf worn tale of the twentieth century thanks to Mr. Freud. She pushed, projected, and pampered her femininity onto him and how he was, at least according to his grandmother, destroyed. Men like that never amounted to much. I imagine old Mrs. Ross picturing him slinking in the shadows, Dorian Gray-style, as he succumbed to every vice and perversely dismissed every virtue. What it must be like to find femininity – especially when you inhabit it yourself – so offensive. During that year, though, we learned a lot about history – though not as much as we did about Jim, the soon-to-be ex-husband the old lady raised.
Divorce was on the young Mrs. Ross’s mind from the moment we matriculated. She would teach my tiny high school class of twenty-nine students all the ins-and-outs of D-Day – June 6, 1944 and her own, which happened sometime in December of ’93. Her separation manifested before us physically on the first day of class; the once-heavy woman had returned severely slim with several shades of blond in her hair. We were, in those ways, very much alike that September. Unlike with her mother-in-law, we felt a strong affinity for one another and as she teased me about becoming a bottle blond, I dished it back about possibly sharing a frosting cap in the future.
In the coming months she would imbue our lives with stories of combat and cruelty – though it wasn’t always clear if they were purely personal or part of public record. My adversary from nearly a decade before had been a mother given over to the mania of masculinity. She wanted manly man sons and would not settle for less. The implication imparted in all her stories suggested that no man ever measured up for the old woman. Her sons demonstrated endless weakness from day one and she did everything in her power to pummel it out of them. They were treated to no comforts or kindness – and shockingly – still could not manufacture the masculinity she found so amazing.
So they started to drink – Jim to a point he could not control, which served as further evidence to mother of his fraudulent manhood. He became violent and could not function as he saw fit. Life became an endless brawl whose soundtrack was the chorus of his mother admonishing him to be a ‘real’ man. My mission here – though I’m painfully aware it may seem otherwise – is not to make her a monster. She was not alone in her treatment of me or her son and there were certainly other students who thought the old Mrs. Ross a wonderful woman. What I wish to illustrate, rather, is that ways in which these forms of violence and abuse take root when we fetishize masculinity and demonize femininity.
I could have spent considerable time here psychologizing about her obsession with this unobtainable ideal, but I am opting instead to operate from the position that you need only look around you at virtually anything to discover the ways in which masculinity and its supposedly endless merits are mirrored back to you. It’s everywhere and totally inescapable. It is a considerable act of resistance to take up the fight for femininity in a world where masculinity is all that seemingly matters and those of us who aren’t work our way through well-established structural systems – like schools, for example – without having the femininity completely beat out of us. And sadly, in the grimmest of ways – as the news tells us almost every week – some don’t.
Young Mrs. Ross, in the end, found her husband’s masculinity – for all his own fears and his mother’s pronouncements that it was flagging – too much to bear. Angry and aggressive in its expression and yet somehow still needy and insecure simultaneously, she came to understand its current configuration as a boundless black hole. We construct it as such; should it ever reach the level of satisfaction, certainty, and security about which it endlessly boasts, the whole system would likely self-destruct as many of the shoring-up behaviors demanded for its maintenance would simply cease. We would all then likely fall into a deep, undisturbed extended sleep because that shit is exhausting and seemingly inescapable and in need of a total reset. Sadly, young Mrs. Ross started dating shortly thereafter; her new suitor had just left his first wife and bought a sports car, so you can imagine how well that turned out.
Old Mrs. Ross died not long after the divorce; perhaps our collective feminine defiance finally did her in. Needless to say, I didn’t send flowers. I saw a photo of her grandson around the same time and he looked similar to me. We survived, as did countless other sissies like us – though I’m sure the words they used to describe us, and maybe still do – were far less kind. I thought then, as I do now, about all those sweet kids – and not just the ones like me – whose lives were altered in painful, problematic ways by the people who were allegedly there to educate us. I also marveled that when masculinity malfunctions, it lashes out. Those of us who are feminine, when our lives are fraught, internalize and overachieve. We may inflict pain, however unintentionally, but our sense of entitlement – if indeed it exists at all – does not frequently focus upon inflicting destruction. When masculinity collides with education, definite damage is done.
Implicit in the decision to teach is the promise to try to protect and to prevent damage as much as possible. Instead, what I encountered most frequently were educators characterized by ineptitude and inaction, particularly for the kids who were “different” or seen as deviant. The most fragile few among them, sadly, decided to inflict their insecurities on children with little leeway to lash back. Oh sure, they talked a good game and appeared to ascribe to all the feel-good friendliness that now characterizes the marketing of the American school system, but whenever I hear anyone trot out the trite “those who can’t…” I edit out the apostrophe and remember they say what they preach rarely describes their practices.
While my brother felt alienated in there, he loved the utter lack of rigor or requirements. He got to join the “regular” kids during recess – though not all of his classmates did – and that was all the normalizing he needed. I, on the other hand, was mortified at the mention that I would be taken out of the mainstream. I developed intense anxiety – in the third grade – and started to experience serious stress and fear as I forged a connection between my femininity and failure. Mrs. Ross saw me as a failure simply because I was feminine; I didn’t understand what was wrong with me, so I started endless self-scrutiny to stave off any such future humiliations.
It was around that time that I started dreading school. I would break down at the bus stop and experience mini-panic attacks about leaving my mother. The kids were increasingly cruel – especially the boys – as they sensed I had no place in their pack. Some girls were sympathetic, but their protections only went so far – they had themselves to think of, too. I clung to Mrs. Schreiber when I could, but she could not intervene in the bathrooms or during gym class. Those were the places I really needed help as the other boys began to learn how to bully in a big way. The P.E. coach, Mr. Seward, took a page out of Mrs. Ross’s book and believed he could be more successful at saving me from my sissy self.
Over the next three years I would take to calling him Mr. Sewer, right to his face. He had taught my mother, you see, and she taught me that trick. He had hated her, too, back when he was a novice teacher of English and she a high school senior, four years his junior. “Squeaky works too,” she said, recalling the taunts it took to take him down. “He was a bully back then,” she said, recalling few fond memories of the man who couldn’t cut it teaching literature and turned to kickball instead. He knew I was calling him Sewer, but thanks to mother’s interventions I was somewhat off-limits in terms of making further trouble. Instead, he tortured me himself.
He took every chance to humiliate me in front of my classmates. I was something of a classic queer cliché in that – and many – regards, so I had little facility in the wild world of sports. Instead of kicking the ball, I somehow caught my heel, rolled my foot over it, and fell flat on my back. I could not hit a baseball to save my life; I did, however, once substitute my own skull for a softball when I stepped too close to a classmate at bat. He damn near knocked me out and we all had a good laugh, Mr. Sewer included, about what a stupid sissy I had been. This incident, like so many, went unreported though certainly not unremarked.
Apart from periodically playing the part of pansy piñata, I also developed a reputation as the kid who never came to classes on Mondays. I suddenly felt ill a lot. The doctors could not say exactly what was wrong – some thought asthma, or maybe allergies – others suggested I was just experiencing growing pains and having a difficult time fitting in at school. I felt awful all the time, except for Friday night and Saturdays. Friday nights were my favorite because I knew when I went home Mom would be waiting and we’d have something fun for dinner – usually pizza. We’d watch The Dukes of Hazzard or Knight Rider, Mr. Belvedere and Webster. If we were really good, we could stay up till ten and watch Falcon’s Crest. I don’t think my siblings cared about that show, but I loved the big house and the flamboyant people. I liked to be industrious even then, though, so I usually worked ahead in my spelling workbook as we watched television.
I always wanted to be prepared and I loved learning. Even my parents made fun of my fiendishness for working weeks ahead on assignments while we were having a fun Friday night. I wanted to do well and succeed and everything Mrs. Ross taught me that year made me think just being myself could impede that possibility. If I weren’t working on my spelling or math skills, I was reading the Nancy Drew mysteries I checked out from the school library that Mrs. Ross told me boys shouldn’t bother with. “You should be reading hardier stuff,” I thought she had commanded, but in retrospect I think it was probably “Hardy” – as in Boys – stuff. I didn’t care. I loved Nancy Drew; she drove a convertible, wore a stylish scarf, and seemed utterly independent. She made me want to solve mysteries.
Saturdays were safest; there was no school to contend with and we usually had something fun or interesting to do. If not, I read or begged Mom to teach me to sew or embroider. I don’t know what she thought about that exactly, but I come from a very hands-on family, so she obliged. Her only rebuke – if it even was that – was to send me to the garage to work with my dad periodically. Working with him meant sanding old cars and sweeping floors – even at that age – and while I didn’t relish that work, I learned a lot of skills no one associates with a sissy. She also told me not to tell my friends at school about sewing – suggesting she suspected I was suffering just for being myself.
Sundays were absolute agony, especially after five pm. I dreaded the next day and I knew the minute Murder, She Wrote ended, I would have to go to bed. I hated Jessica Fletcher for that; she always ended on the high note that sounded like me being sent to my destruction. Unlike my siblings, I headed straight upstairs. I knew what I had to do and my anxious reaction flooded me with such dread that prolonging the moment only made it worse. By dinner that day I had already selected my clothes for the next day and carefully packed all I would need in my bag. I tried to think of every terrible possibility and plan for it. I wanted to be prepared.
I envied my siblings their carefree carelessness. They both hated school and couldn’t understand why I got so wound up. They had not planned for or done anything proactive and their days usually turned out better. I would lay in bed after my mother turned out the lights and watch the hall light turn my ceiling fixture into a strange mushroom cloud against the sea of orange flowers on the wallpaper, symbolizing the upcoming explosion of Mondays. Perhaps it was that floral wallpaper that rendered me irretrievably feminine – it’s hard to say. Either way, I was the only nine year old I knew – then or now – who suffered severe insomnia.
I would often lay there for an hour or more and tell myself little stories – childish things – about how the teddy bears on my bed would take care of me. I often thought of a birthday card my mother had given me the year before with actual teddy bears posed around a fancy tea table having a little party. Even though I knew it wasn’t real, I imagined them coming to life – and then to my rescue. Those bears had spent a lot of time with me and surely they could vouch for my fine behavior and pure intentions, I reasoned, though in somewhat less sophisticated language. They knew I wasn’t bad or the kind of person to be avoided. They loved that I might like to throw a tea party or cuddle a bear. They were my early allies and sometimes these stuffed bear-fantasies of friendship – my favorite of whom was called Button-nose – would lull me enough to sleep.
Most often, however, anxiety prevented it and by about the time they were whining about the weather on the local news – around 10:15 – I was back downstairs in the well-lit living room pleading to sleep on the couch. I can’t say why, but sometimes a change in location helped. Other times, I would just lay there, too, traumatized by what awaited on Monday morning. Sometimes when I appeared, Mom would get extremely frustrated and make me go back upstairs. I don’t think she fully understood the depth of my despair or the weight of worry about what lay ahead.
Many Monday mornings I pleaded illness. “I can’t go;” “please don’t make me go;” and “this is the last time,” became common refrains. I was tightly wound and buttoned up for someone not much older than a tot, so I didn’t want to tell her about the boys hitting me or messing with me in the bathroom. I did not want to talk about the terror I felt when I had to face Mrs. Ross or the Sewer. I just wanted to be left alone to learn. While it bothered me a great deal that so many of them hated me, I didn’t understand why they always had to keep at me. Couldn’t I just be ostracized or treated like a ghost beneath the contempt of actual contact?
I dreamed sometimes of Casper and imagined the possibilities of invisibility. I wanted to be in the classroom, marking good marks rather than missing every Monday. If people couldn’t see me, then I could just go about my business and succeed at being a student. If people couldn’t be nice to me, I figured, I could do without them. I never bothered or sought out souls I didn’t want to associate with, I never understood why they couldn’t do the same. Certain types – and it took me many years to discover this – try to fight their insecurity by seeking out those they perceive to be weak or wonky in some way. I suppose I knew this on some level even then, thanks to my older brother Sean.
He had sensed something wrong with me from basically the moment I was born. His first complain came when I laid about as a baby: “he doesn’t do anything!” he had carped to my mother. In an attempt to animate me, he planted himself on my chest and trickled drops of Baby Aspirin down my throat in an attempt to help me OD. When that didn’t work, he waited. I became more animate and he decided he didn’t care for my moves. He slid me face first, midget-bowling-style, into a chair’s rocker and split open my face. He liked the stitches that supported his stories of fratricide, but ultimately felt the tale lacked finality – so he talked four-year old me into drinking battery acid in my dad’s auto shop. Much to his chagrin, my mother caught me mid-slurp and spirited me away to have my stomach pumped just prior to the metamorphosis that would have made me a Casper for real.
He would try stitches to the head – right above the last set under my right eye – for the last time that same school year. He tripped me intentionally and I bashed my head into my mother’s tea cart’s corner and split my skin but good. As I lay in the operating room with a tissue over my face, mom held my hand and I watched the tip of the needle peek in and out. All I could think was, “this means I won’t have to go to school on Monday.” And I didn’t, which was also probably a relief to my brother. I was an endless embarrassment he wished to destroy, his sixth-grade masculinity fracturing with new fissures every time my feminine self entered his schoolyard vicinity.
Not long after, I contracted chicken pox for the second time – something everyone says cannot happen. I had never been happier than when Mom told me I wouldn’t be able to go to school for at least a week. I didn’t feel that badly, but I did have three nasty blisters to complement the string of stitches on my face. I happily sat around the house in my pajamas and bathroom, embroidering a little sampler of a lion that my mother had dug out of some box. My heart nearly broke when I realized I’d been pulling the needle through my clothes and accidentally appliqueing the sampler to my robe. I had to cut my poor lion’s face apart and start over, but fortunately I had the time to do so now that I was legitimately diseased.
Each night my younger sister, then a first-grader, would bring home my assignments from Mrs. Schreiber and Mrs. Ross, who I assume was delighted to imagine me left in some leper colony – though not for the ‘contagion’ she had called out. Mrs. Schreiber, on the other hand, sent me a get well card with a sheet of St. Patrick’s Day stickers she knew I would enjoy. To this day I still think of her fondly as that wonderful witch flying in front of the crescent moon on the Halloween stickers she applied to perfect work – otherworldly and a force with which to be reckoned, even if she did practice false imprisonment from time to time. Mrs. Fuller, my first grade teacher, also sent me some special pencils through my sister, along with her “best.” I felt buoyed up as the scabs subsided and it became clear I would, in fact, eventually have to return to school.
What remained of the year was not easy, nor would school ever truly be again. Though I cannot accuse her of complete causation, Mrs. Ross contaminated my educational career in calculated ways. I arrived in her classroom already uneasy and fearful because of the “funny” remarks – what we now call slurs – of certain sects of my family about my femininity. I even wondered if I was actually a girl, or at least ought to have been. In their narrow framework for life, people with interests and inclinations labeled as feminine – an arbitrary and socially constructed distinction at best, an excuse for vehemence and violence at worst – very well ought to own a vagina. All the rest of us femmes – regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity – ought to undergo some sort of cure for our sickness or at least have the good taste to disappear from public sight.
As I moved through the school system – a model student with stellar grades and behavior – my fellow students amped up their aggression as passivity overtook the faculty. Never again would I have a teacher who would outright tell me not to be girly; not to be like a girl. She was the only one to tell me directly that femininity is offensive – and seemingly manufactured – in a man while not-so-subtly implying the same is not necessarily untrue in a universal sense. Something about me mirrored back to her some sadness or dissatisfaction with herself and her family and rather than face her fear of femininity she set out to destroy it. Sadly, she fell into the age-old sand trap of believing that someone or something feminine is therefore weak and perfectly easy to destroy.
Her own existence and survival in world that is frequently unwelcoming to women ought to have taught her otherwise, but perhaps I grant too much. My teachers – both male and female – from junior high forward did little to protect me from the savagery of many of my schoolmates, even as they praised my prowess in the classroom. They knew my misery; they saw me sit apart from the rest every lunch hour just to have some peace. They knew that I would not speak unless spoken to, the phantom pupil fearful of the fun that would be made when they heard the sound of my voice or the words I would choose. They all knew I was being tortured physically and mentally, to varying degrees depending on the day, even as they canted about fair chances, camaraderie, and equality to us all without ever offering even the smallest example of what that might look like in actuality.
Perhaps they did not know themselves; theory and practice are very different things. As a high schooler I often troubled myself with a story my parents had told about their “queer” classmates in high school and the horrors that had befallen their classmates – perhaps including my parents, I was too paranoid to ask – for failing to fit in. Boys’ heads shoved in toilets, others forced to fit soiled jockstraps over their faces, family homes covered in graffiti – these were the fees for their femininity. Mom expressed sadness at those stories, but then she also let it be known that one of the victims was the father of a girl I was friends with at school. I suddenly started to wonder if Lisa really liked me or if she just didn’t want to see me treated like her father had been. I thought better of asking, though, if he were anything like me – and apparently he was – he wouldn’t have wanted to share his shame with her.
In the end, I obviously survived – which I consider no small feat. One of my last teachers in high school was also a Mrs. Ross – the daughter-in-law and then the ex-daughter-in-law in the same year of the original – when I was a senior. She taught history and had an interesting one, too. She had been my mother’s classmate when they graduated in ’66. The second Mrs. Ross had had a rough go of it in school too, which she and Mom both confirmed in various ways. This Mrs. Ross was also the mother of that grandson some might call effeminate, because they prefer to label such attributes and behaviors as a condition in need of medicalizing and managing.
Isn’t it funny that we don’t have a comparable word – a binary term – for masculinity? Oh sure, there’s manly or butch – and both can be applied in derogatory ways – but they don’t attack masculinity itself in the way ‘effeminate’ does femininity with its denotation of overrefinement and cloying artifice. No, manly and butch both applaud such qualities, though they may insert some suspicion if the actor evincing them carries the so-called wrong genitals – and that isn’t even always the case. ‘Effeminate’ is term designed to hurt, to degrade men and women both, all while underscoring a presumption of inherent falseness on the part of the possessor.
Mrs. Ross the younger, as it would happen, took the blame for her boy’s physical beauty and fey qualities. She had doted too much, coddled too closely; it’s the shelf worn tale of the twentieth century thanks to Mr. Freud. She pushed, projected, and pampered her femininity onto him and how he was, at least according to his grandmother, destroyed. Men like that never amounted to much. I imagine old Mrs. Ross picturing him slinking in the shadows, Dorian Gray-style, as he succumbed to every vice and perversely dismissed every virtue. What it must be like to find femininity – especially when you inhabit it yourself – so offensive. During that year, though, we learned a lot about history – though not as much as we did about Jim, the soon-to-be ex-husband the old lady raised.
Divorce was on the young Mrs. Ross’s mind from the moment we matriculated. She would teach my tiny high school class of twenty-nine students all the ins-and-outs of D-Day – June 6, 1944 and her own, which happened sometime in December of ’93. Her separation manifested before us physically on the first day of class; the once-heavy woman had returned severely slim with several shades of blond in her hair. We were, in those ways, very much alike that September. Unlike with her mother-in-law, we felt a strong affinity for one another and as she teased me about becoming a bottle blond, I dished it back about possibly sharing a frosting cap in the future.
In the coming months she would imbue our lives with stories of combat and cruelty – though it wasn’t always clear if they were purely personal or part of public record. My adversary from nearly a decade before had been a mother given over to the mania of masculinity. She wanted manly man sons and would not settle for less. The implication imparted in all her stories suggested that no man ever measured up for the old woman. Her sons demonstrated endless weakness from day one and she did everything in her power to pummel it out of them. They were treated to no comforts or kindness – and shockingly – still could not manufacture the masculinity she found so amazing.
So they started to drink – Jim to a point he could not control, which served as further evidence to mother of his fraudulent manhood. He became violent and could not function as he saw fit. Life became an endless brawl whose soundtrack was the chorus of his mother admonishing him to be a ‘real’ man. My mission here – though I’m painfully aware it may seem otherwise – is not to make her a monster. She was not alone in her treatment of me or her son and there were certainly other students who thought the old Mrs. Ross a wonderful woman. What I wish to illustrate, rather, is that ways in which these forms of violence and abuse take root when we fetishize masculinity and demonize femininity.
I could have spent considerable time here psychologizing about her obsession with this unobtainable ideal, but I am opting instead to operate from the position that you need only look around you at virtually anything to discover the ways in which masculinity and its supposedly endless merits are mirrored back to you. It’s everywhere and totally inescapable. It is a considerable act of resistance to take up the fight for femininity in a world where masculinity is all that seemingly matters and those of us who aren’t work our way through well-established structural systems – like schools, for example – without having the femininity completely beat out of us. And sadly, in the grimmest of ways – as the news tells us almost every week – some don’t.
Young Mrs. Ross, in the end, found her husband’s masculinity – for all his own fears and his mother’s pronouncements that it was flagging – too much to bear. Angry and aggressive in its expression and yet somehow still needy and insecure simultaneously, she came to understand its current configuration as a boundless black hole. We construct it as such; should it ever reach the level of satisfaction, certainty, and security about which it endlessly boasts, the whole system would likely self-destruct as many of the shoring-up behaviors demanded for its maintenance would simply cease. We would all then likely fall into a deep, undisturbed extended sleep because that shit is exhausting and seemingly inescapable and in need of a total reset. Sadly, young Mrs. Ross started dating shortly thereafter; her new suitor had just left his first wife and bought a sports car, so you can imagine how well that turned out.
Old Mrs. Ross died not long after the divorce; perhaps our collective feminine defiance finally did her in. Needless to say, I didn’t send flowers. I saw a photo of her grandson around the same time and he looked similar to me. We survived, as did countless other sissies like us – though I’m sure the words they used to describe us, and maybe still do – were far less kind. I thought then, as I do now, about all those sweet kids – and not just the ones like me – whose lives were altered in painful, problematic ways by the people who were allegedly there to educate us. I also marveled that when masculinity malfunctions, it lashes out. Those of us who are feminine, when our lives are fraught, internalize and overachieve. We may inflict pain, however unintentionally, but our sense of entitlement – if indeed it exists at all – does not frequently focus upon inflicting destruction. When masculinity collides with education, definite damage is done.
Implicit in the decision to teach is the promise to try to protect and to prevent damage as much as possible. Instead, what I encountered most frequently were educators characterized by ineptitude and inaction, particularly for the kids who were “different” or seen as deviant. The most fragile few among them, sadly, decided to inflict their insecurities on children with little leeway to lash back. Oh sure, they talked a good game and appeared to ascribe to all the feel-good friendliness that now characterizes the marketing of the American school system, but whenever I hear anyone trot out the trite “those who can’t…” I edit out the apostrophe and remember they say what they preach rarely describes their practices.
About the Author
Joshua G. Adair is Professor of English at Murray State University, where he also serves as coordinator of Gender & Diversity Studies. Adair’s work, whether in literary, historical, or museum studies, examines the ways we narrate – and silence – gender and sexuality; it has appeared in over fifty scholarly and creative nonfiction journals. Along with Amy K. Levin, he has edited and contributed to two collections: "Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism" and Defining Memory."
About the Work
"Those Who Cant" explores a queer student's survival -- and success -- despite some educators' focus on his self-eradication rather than traditional education.
Joshua G. Adair is Professor of English at Murray State University, where he also serves as coordinator of Gender & Diversity Studies. Adair’s work, whether in literary, historical, or museum studies, examines the ways we narrate – and silence – gender and sexuality; it has appeared in over fifty scholarly and creative nonfiction journals. Along with Amy K. Levin, he has edited and contributed to two collections: "Museums, Sexuality, and Gender Activism" and Defining Memory."
About the Work
"Those Who Cant" explores a queer student's survival -- and success -- despite some educators' focus on his self-eradication rather than traditional education.