Who would I have been if I had the kind of role models I see now? Would I have embraced my dykeness more? Embraced the butch side more fiercely? I was looking at Sophia Wallace’s portraiture and found memories stirring.
I must have been about 10 when my mother stormed out of the house and shook me shouting “When are you going to be like other girls are?” I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. I drew beards on my dolls, was Terence Hill in all the cowboy games I played with a friend of mine. Refused to wear dresses, then when I became a teen, that all vanished and I looked like a girl, wore dresses but fantasized about Grace Jones and Jane Seymour. Go figure, I liked woman more – a whole lot. But – really do wonder. If there was a Pride, women who were out and present... would I have conformed, married had children?
And even now years later, I pass as a man sometimes apparently. I have done this on purpose – last year when I was doing business in Ethiopia, I found that women were not really seen, so I donned a suit, tie and arranged my hair differently, and when we were searched going into a high security building the security guard was shocked and apologized. Was it my energy that made me seem male? Or was it the way I look? My partner said that when she first saw me walking towards her, she thought I was a man. But now she simply says I am a “Dykey dyke with big boobs and tattoos” who do I see myself as I still ask? One of the bloggers touched on that space in between. (the F you space) Even as a child I did not identify as a girl or a boy, I was simply me... I often wonder how people really see me, and who would I be if I were 20 now?
