Person is Not a Rude Word

Starting with the first year of my diary journalling (1974), I find June 5th to have fallen, as today 5.6.13,  on a Wednesday.  It was a schoolday; the writing in this mini, pocket-size diary is not my smallest: not too much to say on a schoolday – other than history revision for mock ‘O’ Levels…

So, any clues in that entry as to my ‘hidden Andro nature’??

pocket-size diary text: 5.6.74

The most surprising fact is that I record that I was sewing a dress! Not any garment that I recall and the sewing fact surprising, not because I was in any way a ‘tomboy’ dresser, but because I thought by then I had made a decision not to handmake clothes – after my experiences up to this 14-going-on-15 stage with the well-intentioned but frequently-too-big garments (“for growing into”) that my seamstressing mum had made for me…  (Interestingly, the floppy gusset now seems to have reached its heyday as a fashion feature – predominantly on the male-identified body…)

I see from the Sunday entry of 2nd June ’74 that I was also mending a kimono dress; this was a pale turquoise wrapover-style and ankle-length satin dress of my maternal grandmother’s (out of our dressing up trunk of clothes) which I wore to parties at the time.  Now I would only be seen in a dress if it was a ‘fancy dress’/drag up occasion (but I’ll wear a fine calf-length kilt – see foto below – over trousers in snowy/icy weather)…  I started to feel, in the new-millenium-noughties, that I was a gay male in drag anytime I wore a supposedly feminine, skirted outfit.

Back to ’74: I wrote that I spent an hour on the phone with my first boyfriend discussing how to spend our upcoming Saturday evening: I was in love &  our first anniversary was coming up on 8th June…  Aah! here’s a clue to my androgyny: ‘J’ was an extremely good-looking, androgynous-facially, blonde 18 year old (with Scandinavian parents).  Too young then to understand the concept of gynandrophilia (being attracted to the feminine in a male-identified person, and vice versa, the masculine in a female), I was certainly attracted to his Botticelli cherubic looks: that which stereotypically embodies the notion of the androgynous angelic…

But no!  Only a month or so later, this first love-of-my-life would dump me for not being ‘hippy’ enough, in relation to my clothes style and lack of interest in drugs (and possibly in reluctance to be more sexually active – as an also-‘hidden Asexual‘)… So those lurid emerald green trousers, with the white pinstripe, worn with the fluorescent blue/pink/yellow zip-up cardigan hadn’t turned him on??

Horrors to recall such hideous taste – but these are signs of my attire rebellion, that prelim’d the late 70s’ fluorescent punk era to come, and signalled my desperate need to be different, to look individualistic; signs of the early teenager with own clothing earnings (from cleaning and babysitting) manifesting the sense of difference I had felt since kindergarten age… Sadly, same boyfriend mistook my intention when I wore a black crepe calf-length/ ‘midi’ dress (also out of the dressing up trunk) over jeans; ironically he described my look as “whoreish”… These days my middle-age genderqueer dress sense is still questionable: a sort of twin-set-&-pearls mixed with hip-hop-bling,  AKA ewe-ram dressed as lamb…

More anon: another diary, another date…