July 24, 1982 (Day Six), conclusion
Apr. 15th, 2026 11:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahunter3I finally get passed onto my wing, my unit. Emily, being Unit Leader, is in charge and has every opportunity to berate me, but she doesn’t. “We’re so glad you’re back”, she says.
I see Jake and April. Now I see them as a pair. It was probably right there in front of me before and I wasn’t parsing it. I do feel a mild resentment. There’s a space in my head for ‘Why not April and Derek’. I don’t mean we were destined to be and now I’m deprived, more like ‘why isn’t it ever me’. April is somewhat atypical. She has characteristics and expressions that a person might tag as more like the boys than the girls, and she kind of pushes that out there. Therefore somewhat like me on the other side of the divide. And too often when I notice someone like that, especially someone broadcasting it as a defintion of who they are, it turns out she’s only attracted to female people, so then when that’s not the case, it’s annoying that it’s often still not me, or at least someone like me, that’s she’s inclined to latch onto. Well, not their fault, April and Jake, either of them. I nod to them both. I also wave to Ronald, Noelle, and Valerie, who motion for me to join them.
Ronald is apparently addressing Noelle: “...thing you gotta realize is that men are always gonna be in competition about it, it’s that old caveman inside us, spread your seed, make as many babies as you can, but then we get all jealous and shit if our women are being all loose and easy with other men. We want the babies to be ours.”
Noelle shakes her head, her short brown bangs flying. “That’s uncool, you don’t get to have one rule for the girls and different rules for the guys. He was fucking around and I caught him at it, that’s all there is to it!”
Valerie nods, adding, “Besides, it doesn’t make sense, I mean, let’s say you’re a caveman and you’re screwing cave chicks left and right, and the other guys in your tribe are doing that, too...you don’t know which kids are yours, none of you do, and why the fuck would a caveman care?”
“I don’t think it has anything to do with kids”, Noelle says, “it’s selfishness. People want to cheat but they don’t wanna be cheated on.”
“I think it’s kind of silly to worry about that”, I say. “If you care about someone and they care about you, why should it bother you if they have sex with someone else? I think the sixties flower children had it right, jealousy isn’t about love, it’s about being uptight and controlling!”
“That’s not realistic”, Noelle replies. “It feels like a gut punch, a betrayal, after you’ve trusted someone like that and then they go and do this shit behind your back.”
“Yeah, I get that”, Ronald says. “I’m not saying it isn’t a fucked-up thing to do, because it is. Just because guys act like that a lot of the time don’t mean it’s all right.”
I shake my head. “It’s only cheating if you make a promise that you won’t be sexual with anyone else. It’s a stupid promise that people shouldn’t make, because it’s an attempt to make love safe, but everyone ends up worrying there’ll be cheating, so love still isn’t safe, and then we resent being restricted and confined by the promise. I see all these people going around, like...” I switch to a cartoon voice:
“‘Oh, Love of my Life, because I love you so much, I insist that if you find yourself wanting to have sex with someone else, you won’t’...”,
then, dropping back to my regular voice, “that’s not an expression of love, that’s a demand for a sacrifice!”
Noelle scowls at me. “I don’t appreciate being called stupid, and you acting all superior like you’re above all this jealousy, I mean, can you hear yourself?”
Valerie adds, “Yeah, you do like to act like ‘this is just the way it is’, passing judgment and shit on other people, I guess you can dish it out better than you can take it.”
“Truth, bro”, Ronald says, pronouncing from that horse-face of his.
I feel my face flush hot. “I’m sorry, I apologize. I didn’t think about how that would come across. Jealousy doesn’t make sense to me, but I didn’t mean it to sound like I’m right about this and y’all are stupid not to agree.”
The ‘April and Jake’ thing prompts me to think about Marjorie for the first time in months. Marjorie Turpin. Nurses’ training school, another LPN student from my class. A class of about thirty-five students, me being one of only three males. A fairly warm crowd, overall. Women being themselves, in a way that you mostly only see when they vastly outnumber the male folks to the point that they don’t consider our presence very much. Teasing and banter and joking around. Our teachers, too. Ms. Thompson and Ms. Dixon, professional and efficient but clever and amusing, down to earth, guiding the new crop of caregivers. It was a good place to be.
I fit in. I had fun there. I joined in with the teasing and joking and cleverness as well as soaking up the biomedical science and the technique of making a bed with military tautness or giving an injection. Marjorie Turpin was fun too. I liked her. I don’t know when the name teasing got started... maybe when Ms. Thompson spoke of the obsolete cough syrup called terpen hydrate. But then there was the TURP surgical procedure (trans-urethral repair of the prostate). Or how to interpolate from a series of vital sign measurements. Anyway, at some point I was sitting next to her and glanced at her exactly when I heard the syllable “turp”, and I guess we both reacted as if her name was being called — and it made us giggle. And after that, in one form or another, the syllable “turp” kept cropping up in our lessons and each time it did I’d make eye contact with her and pretend like it was named in her honor.
I liked my classmates and our camaraderie and wished for more time with them, casual time, off-the-clock time to just hang out and get closer. One day I asked a cluster of them if any wanted to go out for dinner together after Friday afternoon class finished and got a series of declines and excuses. I asked a few others separately. Reena said not this week but some other time. And Cynthia had to get back to the kids. Marjorie, however, said sure, and we agreed where we’d meet up.
I was standing out in front of the Pizza Hut we’d settled on, waiting. A friendly-smiling dark-haired fellow came over, asked if I were Derek, and introduced himself: “Hi, I’m Patrick. I’m Marjorie’s husband.” Oh, okay, cool. I looked around but didn’t see anyone else following from the direction he had come.
“Where’s Marjorie?”
“Well, she’s not coming.”
I was confused. Disappointed. I asked if he wanted to order anything. He looked at me oddly then said he had to get back. He had departed by the time I got the parts to click together inside my head.
Well, yes, actually, it was like that, I mean, yes, I found her attractive, I would totally be interested in going that direction with her if that were an option. But honestly, I hadn’t been consciously thinking of it that way. It’s like I’m one of the girls one minute, then, suddenly, no I’m not.
How do lesbians handle this? Is it a problem in the same way? I mean, where these are the people that you like, the people you want as your friends, but yeah you’re also sometimes attracted to them... and you want that to happen too, some of the time? What if you don’t start off making a distinction? Just respond open and warm and let things develop however they develop? Because that’s what seems to come natural to me.
Then there’s the militant heterosexual sissy attitude: It is not my responsibility to make things go in a sex direction just because I’m the male.
The Marjorie event wasn’t unusual for not resulting in me ending up with her as my girlfriend, or affair partner. What was unusual was her picking up on the presence of that kind of interest on my part. I’m really bad at it.
So it’s another part of the communication problem. I want to broadcast to the world that there are people like me. Femme people, male people, sissy heterosexual male people, and we have these natures and these interests. Then I want to be sufficiently readable that people can pick up on me being open to possibilities, or specifically interested in them personally for that matter, without me behaving in some pushy intrusive way. Without me pretending to be someone I am not, donning manly courting and flirting behaviors. Behavioral drag.
Of course I’d apparently been intrusive, maybe even downright creepy, from Marjorie’s vantage point. Hadn’t intended to be. I don’t tend to censor my flirtatiousness in situations where it might be inappropriate because for the most part nobody notices. I mean, I never properly learned to. I’m pretty unfiltered.
It’s all rather complicated. I long ago (well, two years ago) reached the point of being unapologetic and proud of who I was, my identity, and to talk at people about it, to come out, to insist on myself as a valid self and a valid sexuality. Flouncy Derek. What I really really want, though, is a chance to talk with people about it all, and finish sorting everything out.
————
I'm seeking feedback on my book Within the Box right here, one chapter at a time.
I'm hoping people will read it and comment on it as I go. I'm hoping that if they like it, they'll spread the word.
When I get to the end, I'll start over with the first chapter, by which point I'll no doubt have made changes.
Meanwhile, I'll keep querying lit agents, because why not? But this way I'm not postponing the experience of having readers.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
I see Jake and April. Now I see them as a pair. It was probably right there in front of me before and I wasn’t parsing it. I do feel a mild resentment. There’s a space in my head for ‘Why not April and Derek’. I don’t mean we were destined to be and now I’m deprived, more like ‘why isn’t it ever me’. April is somewhat atypical. She has characteristics and expressions that a person might tag as more like the boys than the girls, and she kind of pushes that out there. Therefore somewhat like me on the other side of the divide. And too often when I notice someone like that, especially someone broadcasting it as a defintion of who they are, it turns out she’s only attracted to female people, so then when that’s not the case, it’s annoying that it’s often still not me, or at least someone like me, that’s she’s inclined to latch onto. Well, not their fault, April and Jake, either of them. I nod to them both. I also wave to Ronald, Noelle, and Valerie, who motion for me to join them.
Ronald is apparently addressing Noelle: “...thing you gotta realize is that men are always gonna be in competition about it, it’s that old caveman inside us, spread your seed, make as many babies as you can, but then we get all jealous and shit if our women are being all loose and easy with other men. We want the babies to be ours.”
Noelle shakes her head, her short brown bangs flying. “That’s uncool, you don’t get to have one rule for the girls and different rules for the guys. He was fucking around and I caught him at it, that’s all there is to it!”
Valerie nods, adding, “Besides, it doesn’t make sense, I mean, let’s say you’re a caveman and you’re screwing cave chicks left and right, and the other guys in your tribe are doing that, too...you don’t know which kids are yours, none of you do, and why the fuck would a caveman care?”
“I don’t think it has anything to do with kids”, Noelle says, “it’s selfishness. People want to cheat but they don’t wanna be cheated on.”
“I think it’s kind of silly to worry about that”, I say. “If you care about someone and they care about you, why should it bother you if they have sex with someone else? I think the sixties flower children had it right, jealousy isn’t about love, it’s about being uptight and controlling!”
“That’s not realistic”, Noelle replies. “It feels like a gut punch, a betrayal, after you’ve trusted someone like that and then they go and do this shit behind your back.”
“Yeah, I get that”, Ronald says. “I’m not saying it isn’t a fucked-up thing to do, because it is. Just because guys act like that a lot of the time don’t mean it’s all right.”
I shake my head. “It’s only cheating if you make a promise that you won’t be sexual with anyone else. It’s a stupid promise that people shouldn’t make, because it’s an attempt to make love safe, but everyone ends up worrying there’ll be cheating, so love still isn’t safe, and then we resent being restricted and confined by the promise. I see all these people going around, like...” I switch to a cartoon voice:
“‘Oh, Love of my Life, because I love you so much, I insist that if you find yourself wanting to have sex with someone else, you won’t’...”,
then, dropping back to my regular voice, “that’s not an expression of love, that’s a demand for a sacrifice!”
Noelle scowls at me. “I don’t appreciate being called stupid, and you acting all superior like you’re above all this jealousy, I mean, can you hear yourself?”
Valerie adds, “Yeah, you do like to act like ‘this is just the way it is’, passing judgment and shit on other people, I guess you can dish it out better than you can take it.”
“Truth, bro”, Ronald says, pronouncing from that horse-face of his.
I feel my face flush hot. “I’m sorry, I apologize. I didn’t think about how that would come across. Jealousy doesn’t make sense to me, but I didn’t mean it to sound like I’m right about this and y’all are stupid not to agree.”
The ‘April and Jake’ thing prompts me to think about Marjorie for the first time in months. Marjorie Turpin. Nurses’ training school, another LPN student from my class. A class of about thirty-five students, me being one of only three males. A fairly warm crowd, overall. Women being themselves, in a way that you mostly only see when they vastly outnumber the male folks to the point that they don’t consider our presence very much. Teasing and banter and joking around. Our teachers, too. Ms. Thompson and Ms. Dixon, professional and efficient but clever and amusing, down to earth, guiding the new crop of caregivers. It was a good place to be.
I fit in. I had fun there. I joined in with the teasing and joking and cleverness as well as soaking up the biomedical science and the technique of making a bed with military tautness or giving an injection. Marjorie Turpin was fun too. I liked her. I don’t know when the name teasing got started... maybe when Ms. Thompson spoke of the obsolete cough syrup called terpen hydrate. But then there was the TURP surgical procedure (trans-urethral repair of the prostate). Or how to interpolate from a series of vital sign measurements. Anyway, at some point I was sitting next to her and glanced at her exactly when I heard the syllable “turp”, and I guess we both reacted as if her name was being called — and it made us giggle. And after that, in one form or another, the syllable “turp” kept cropping up in our lessons and each time it did I’d make eye contact with her and pretend like it was named in her honor.
I liked my classmates and our camaraderie and wished for more time with them, casual time, off-the-clock time to just hang out and get closer. One day I asked a cluster of them if any wanted to go out for dinner together after Friday afternoon class finished and got a series of declines and excuses. I asked a few others separately. Reena said not this week but some other time. And Cynthia had to get back to the kids. Marjorie, however, said sure, and we agreed where we’d meet up.
I was standing out in front of the Pizza Hut we’d settled on, waiting. A friendly-smiling dark-haired fellow came over, asked if I were Derek, and introduced himself: “Hi, I’m Patrick. I’m Marjorie’s husband.” Oh, okay, cool. I looked around but didn’t see anyone else following from the direction he had come.
“Where’s Marjorie?”
“Well, she’s not coming.”
I was confused. Disappointed. I asked if he wanted to order anything. He looked at me oddly then said he had to get back. He had departed by the time I got the parts to click together inside my head.
Well, yes, actually, it was like that, I mean, yes, I found her attractive, I would totally be interested in going that direction with her if that were an option. But honestly, I hadn’t been consciously thinking of it that way. It’s like I’m one of the girls one minute, then, suddenly, no I’m not.
How do lesbians handle this? Is it a problem in the same way? I mean, where these are the people that you like, the people you want as your friends, but yeah you’re also sometimes attracted to them... and you want that to happen too, some of the time? What if you don’t start off making a distinction? Just respond open and warm and let things develop however they develop? Because that’s what seems to come natural to me.
Then there’s the militant heterosexual sissy attitude: It is not my responsibility to make things go in a sex direction just because I’m the male.
The Marjorie event wasn’t unusual for not resulting in me ending up with her as my girlfriend, or affair partner. What was unusual was her picking up on the presence of that kind of interest on my part. I’m really bad at it.
So it’s another part of the communication problem. I want to broadcast to the world that there are people like me. Femme people, male people, sissy heterosexual male people, and we have these natures and these interests. Then I want to be sufficiently readable that people can pick up on me being open to possibilities, or specifically interested in them personally for that matter, without me behaving in some pushy intrusive way. Without me pretending to be someone I am not, donning manly courting and flirting behaviors. Behavioral drag.
Of course I’d apparently been intrusive, maybe even downright creepy, from Marjorie’s vantage point. Hadn’t intended to be. I don’t tend to censor my flirtatiousness in situations where it might be inappropriate because for the most part nobody notices. I mean, I never properly learned to. I’m pretty unfiltered.
It’s all rather complicated. I long ago (well, two years ago) reached the point of being unapologetic and proud of who I was, my identity, and to talk at people about it, to come out, to insist on myself as a valid self and a valid sexuality. Flouncy Derek. What I really really want, though, is a chance to talk with people about it all, and finish sorting everything out.
————
I'm seeking feedback on my book Within the Box right here, one chapter at a time.
I'm hoping people will read it and comment on it as I go. I'm hoping that if they like it, they'll spread the word.
When I get to the end, I'll start over with the first chapter, by which point I'll no doubt have made changes.
Meanwhile, I'll keep querying lit agents, because why not? But this way I'm not postponing the experience of having readers.
—————
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
———————
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on Substack and LiveJournal. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
