"Your Mama's a Bulldagger!": Some Notes on Gender

Here are some quotations that have had a strong effect on how I think about gender. I was talking to a friend the other day and dug out some books I'd been meaning to look at again for a long time.

Phyllis Burke's third (and so far her last) book was Gender Shock: Exploding the Myths of Male & Female (Anchor/Doubleday, 1996). In the preface she tells about questions she was asked on the book tours for Family Values: Two Moms and Their Son (Random House, 1993).

... no matter where I went, the most impassioned and inevitable question was always: Who is going to teach him to be a man? I found myself telling the interviewers, in an apologetic tone, that there were men in his life. Yet the questioner would persist: Who would teach him to lay baseball, or football? I assured them that someone would, without telling them that a number of women had already taken care of that, but after a while, their questions began to dig inside of me. I began to wonder if there would be things that no woman would be able to do for Jesse [xv].

By the second book tour Burke was on the ropes, until she had "an experience of tough love from a very wise elder at a Unitarian church gathering."

An elderly gentleman stood and said that he felt there was a problem with not providing a man in the house for a boy. He had been to the home of a single woman friend, and the children were running wild. He explained that this would not happen with a man in the house, and furthermore, that the experience of the deep masculine, as dictated by the work of Robert Bly, would not be possible for my son. ... I nodded and assured the man that I would provide Jesse with men as the need arose, and that I appreciated his comments.

It was then that an elder of the congregation, a usually reserved woman well into her sixties, slammed her hand down upon the table and demanded of me from across the room, "What is wrong with you?" I braced myself. "When I was married," she said, "and I was married for fifteen years, I played housewife, and I did the roles I was expected to do. But when my husband died, I learned the hard way that there had never been a single thing that he did that I could not have done. I raised my sons, and there's nothing wrong with them, because I used all the parts of me to do it. What kind of a mother can you be, if you think because you are a woman that you are incapable of raising your own child?" The elderly gentleman challenged her: "What about Robert Bly? What about the deep masculine, and Iron John?" The woman looked him straight in the eye and said, "The heck with Iron John" [xvii]

I'd put it more strongly myself, and call me dirty-minded, but I can't help suspecting that that "elderly gentleman" would be all too willing to introduce the "deep masculine" deep into young men in private counseling sessions. But the elder was absolutely right.

Rereading this story the other day, though, it reminded me of something I'd read in William Pollack, Ph.D.'s Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood (Random House, 1998), a book that was attacked by right-wing feminist Christina Hoff Sommers, though for all the wrong reasons. Pollack, Ph.D. allowed that single mothers of sons mostly "have excellent instincts about what to say and do -- and about when to ask others for help -- to ensure that their sons will grow into healthy young men" (92-3), and gave this example of knowing when to ask others for help:

Olivia found there was really only one time she needed to call on her ex-husband for help with George, now fourteen years old:

"I remember calling my husband when George was still toilet-training and saying, 'When you're up here, can you show George how to stand over the toilet and pee? He's getting to the age when he can do that, but he's never seen a man naked, so how is he supposed to know how?'" [93]

I'd like to introduce Olivia to that Unitarian elder, who would probably have dope-slapped her a good one. I wonder how many boys with "intact" families, as they're so delicately called, learned to pee standing up from their fathers, especially in the good old days when Dad was away at work all day. Probably their moms taught them, as I suspect my mom did. ("Try to hold it till Daddy gets home from the office, dear" just doesn't work well with a two-year-old.) In fairness, though, Olivia appears to be rather a twit, as shown by her wish that when George was thirteen and needed That Talk, "I could have just gone off and made dinner and said, 'Dear, you handle this. You know how to handle boys.' But I couldn't," so she bit the bullet and "got through it" (ibid.).

Next story, from the chapter "Mama" in lesbian poet Minnie Bruce Pratt's wonderful book S/He (Firebrand, 1995):

When she comes for a visit, after I've moved to D.C., my dyke neighbors ask us over for dessert. I attend to how she gets through a social situation I'm sure she's never faced, an evening at home with an African-American butch and an Iraqi femme. As we four lean toward each other over hazelnut coffee, I wonder if she's ever sat down to eat in an interracial group. But my friends are interested in something else: "We expected a little white lady in gloves. You didn't tell us your mama's a bulldagger!"

She has been the woman who sat at the grey kitchen table with me and my father, her child and her husband. She was always the one next to the stove, within reach of the pot of field peas, more cornbread. I'm so used to this that I saw her hands simply as feminine, though they are huge, capable with iron mattock or steel knitting needles. I'm so used to her height and bulk, her sneakers and windbreaker, her taciturnity and her ease with women, that I've never noticed how much she looks like the white-headed coach of a women's softball team [54].

Which reminds me, it was my tiny mother who (years after I'd refused to learn to catch a ball from my poor father) played softball in the yard with me and my brothers after we'd moved to the country.

Last story, from the preface to Rebecca M. Jordan-Young's Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences (Harvard, 2010).

For instance, when I talk to people about the idea that people are born with a male brain or a female brain, I almost always end up hearing about their experiences with children. A few people relate tales of unexpected flexibility or gender-bending, but most relay their experiences with boys who practically radiate "boyness" from some deep space within (interestingly, I hear many fewer stories about girls who are sugar and spice and everything nice). Recently, my mother happened to be present for one of these conversations, and she very matter-of-factly presented what is considered these days to be a radical idea. Before relaying her idea, let me explain that my mother is a lovely southern lady who has raised an impressive number of children: four boys and four girls of her own, in addition to playing a major role in raising some half dozen of her more than two score grandchildren and great-grandchildren (I think she's drawing the line at great-great-grandchildren). When my friend talked about her girl being so different from her younger brother, who is "all boy," my mother literally snorted. "That's because you have only two," she said. Mama went on to explain that with just a couple of children, gender looms large -- it's the most obvious explanation for every difference you see between them, and unless your children are really unusual, it's going to be easiest to see their personalities as "boy" versus "girl." But when you have a lot of children, you begin to notice that they all come with personalities of their own, and they are all quite different from one another. Gender recedes in importance [xiii].

"Of course," Jordan-Young continues, "that doesn't mean that gender isn't real." But it's a different kind of "real" than most people believe.

A Kinder, Gentler People, Goddamnit!

What happened to Phyllis Burke? I'm rereading her book Family Values: Two Moms and Their Son (Random House, 1993), and anticipate rereading her Gender Shock (Doubleday, 1996). Both of these books had made me look forward to what she might write next. She has published nothing -- certainly no books -- since 1996, and I can't find anything about her online from the past dozen years, not even an obituary. She seems to have disappeared.

Family Values describes Burke's radicalization and involvement in Queer Nation San Francisco in 1990 and 1991, while she was pursuing second-parent adoption of her and partner Cheryl's son Jesse. She had been scared into the closet by Harvey Milk's assassination in 1978, but becoming a parent had given her cause to rethink her approach to life. One thing I especially like is that she mostly doesn't try to make her earlier closeted hangups into virtues as some writers do -- but neither does she deprecate her younger self with I-was-blind-but-now-I-see evangelism. This compassion carries over to her involvement in Queer Nation: she's nonplussed and at times turned off by the flamboyance and adolescent excess of QN's militance, but she's also attracted by it, and never loses sight of the humanity of people whose style is different from hers. (Though she agrees -- as do I -- with Cleve Jones "that Queer Nation did not seem to know their history" [136], a problem that still is with us.)

For example, she's "horrified" at first when she sees in a Pride Parade:

a man who looked exactly like a dime-store Jesus, except that his body was painted pink. He wore a loincloth fashioned from an American flag, and a crown of pink thorns. He was carrying a pink cross, with a green scroll across the top that said, MARTYR FOR ART. Behind him was a multicolored banner that stretched the width of the street. In bold letters it read, NOT SPONSORED BY JESSE HELMS. ... Pink Jesus had large, soft brown eyes, the eyes of a maniac or a theater master. It was impossible to tell whether he was brilliant or insane. Whatever he was, he was certainly an artist, meticulous in his preparations. As I looked closely at him, I realized that Pink Jesus was Gilbert Baker, the creator of the rainbow flag, which is flown internationally as the symbol of lesbian and gay pride. The rainbow flag had been a stroke of genius, but I did not think Pink Jesus was a good idea [36].

Her opinion of Baker and his theatrics changes as she gets to know him better and becomes more militant herself.

Burke also sketches a strong portrait of Jean Harris, then an aide to City Supervisor Harry Britt. (If you've seen Milk, many of the names in this book will be familiar to you. Gilbert Baker himself has a cameo part in the film. Harvey Milk's spirit hovers over the entirety of Family Values, as inspiration and as symbol of loss.)

Jean Harris can easily be mistaken for a man, which is part of her charm. She is the only complete cross-dresser in the history of City Hall, and I have actually heard her say that heterosexuality is a learned response. ...

"I wear a necktie because I want every man who sees to me to know I got the necktie on, I'm after their power, I want their money, and I want their women. Okay? And I will wear the necktie and wave it in their face," she said. "When I enter their offices, I'm not some girl coming in with sensible pumps on and a nice little dress to be a nice, sweet lady, and just sit down and try to get the boys to be nice to me. They know right up front, I'm a dyke, I'm tough, I'm here, I want to know exactly what's going on, and if you've got the power, I'm gonna try and take it from you."

... Perhaps my favorite moment with Jean was when she shouted into a microphone at the Harvey Milk Democratic Club, of which she was then president, "We're a kindler, gentler people, goddamnit." [106-107]

I love the way that Burke gently and humorously demolishes stereotypes of urban vs. rural, conservative parents vs. radical children, metropole vs. the hinterlands. When her mother back in Massachusetts asks her "if we were going to have the baby christened, I told her that I did not think it necessary to renounce Satan because I did not believe children came into the world with sin. She laughed and said that no one believed that anymore [if only that were so!], and she was asking only so she could know when to send birth presents. I told her I would christen him myself. Immediately" (29). And:

We heard from Shreveport, Louisiana, that they had held a Queer Pow Wow, and that New Orleans planned Queer Nights Out, plus their own shopping expedition. You could almost have expected chapters to crop up in Chicago and Boulder, Houston and Detroit, Cleveland and Atlanta. But Lincoln, Albuquerque, Tallahassee, and Salt Lake City? [117]

At the first domestic-partner registrations in San Francisco's City Hall on Valentine's Day, 1991, Burke observed the following couple, who might give pause to fans of Brokeback Mountain:

Two old fellows in their sixties, with rumpled baggy pants and John Deere hats, walked carefully down the stairs, their work-battered hands entwined, their eyes on their feet. They looked like they had just come off the farm. I looked beside me at Gilbert, who was now dramatically dabbing at his eyes with a white handerchief. "What's the matter?" I asked. "Weddings," he said, dabbing away, and although he was camping it up, there were real tears in his eyes [112].

(Incidentally, Burke had already mentioned that Baker was the only one present at the ceremony in a red ball gown. It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it.)

She also described her initial skepticism about the public ceremony for a status that, in 1991, had "no legal weight whatever in terms of health insurance, child custody, inheritance, or taxes" (104), but her cynicism crumbled as couple after couple used the event to declare their commitment publicly.

... I realized that I was crying. These were not people used to grand entrances, photographic flashes, televisions, and a crush of press. Yet these were people willing to perform this very public act, which had absolutely no material or practical gain attached to it, in order to affirm their love.

So far so good, though it should be remembered that among the first couples she describes were the vice president of the school board, Tom Ammiano, a longtime activist (and presently member of the California State Assembly), and his partner Mike Curbo. She continues:

Most of the people who descended these steps never have gone and never will go into the streets. They have never used and never will use the word "queer," or confront the Traditional Values Coalition or a President Bush who called them immoral and unfit to parent. They are our silent majority, and it was only in this way, only to express their love for each other, that they would perform such a public act [113].

This sentimentalizing of quietism and the closet rubs me the wrong way, and I know Burke knows better. I think more of these people should have gone into the streets, should have confronted the Traditional Values Coalition and George Bush. (Whether they call themselves "queer" or not doesn't matter to me.) Maybe they should have realized that by formally declaring their couplehood in public like this, they were doing essentially the same thing that Queer Nation was doing, to the equal fury of religious bigots. If they thought they were somehow different from the crazy radicals with their buttons and slogans, the Traditional Values Coalition would have set them straight on that point in a second.

Here's a 2006 TV interview with Gilbert Baker, the Pink Jesus of Family Values. It's interesting to remember that this (mostly) mild-looking fellow is the same person who shocked gays and straights alike with his street theater during the Queer Nation years. (You can almost see smoke pouring from his ears, though, as he listens to a bigoted Christian caller toward the end of the clip.)



Oh, and there's Burke's humor. While Cheryl was pregnant with Jesse, Burke was office manager at a law firm, one of whose owners was "the quintessential good old boy."

When I agreed to manage the office, the outgoing manager sidled up to me by the coffee machine and whispered, "Don't ever hire any gays, because Mr. O. hates them."

"Right," I said.

After about a year, unbeknownst to Mr. O., I had surrounded him with lesbians who were extraordinarily well paid. I did bring one identifiably gay male secretary into the office for a short period of time. Mr. O. came up to me and said, "If you want to hire a gay, go ahead. But you tell him I'm gonna call him names like 'fruit' if he stays here." Mr. O., who was rather plump, would stomp through the office, past this man's desk. As Mr. O. left the room, the gay man, who had a wonderful sense of humor, would look at me and gush, "I do love fatties!"

I drew the line with Mr. O. when he started making faggots-dying-of-AIDS jokes. In a fairly flat tone of voice, I told him that I had just lost a dear friend to AIDS, and I would appreciate it if he saved his humor for the Olympic Club.

When I announced to Mr. O. that Cheryl was pregnant and that she and I would raise the baby together, there was nothing in his mind to accomodate that thought. I could certainly not be a lesbian, as I did not have a mustache and I was Irish. [21-22]

So, Phyllis Burke, wherever you are, thank you for Family Values. And I urge all my readers to find a copy and read it, if you haven't already.