Art Room Vandalism, Performance and Being the Unwilling Centre of Attention.
Visibility, masking and being your true self.
There are plenty of things about my childhood that live rent-free in my head. So many strange incidents and moments have set up lodgings, like rats in the walls of my mind that refuse to be flushed out. Many of them have become so tangled, the metaphoric “rat-kings” of my psyche that I’ve never had the constitution to stare at directly let alone articulate into the world. An example of one of these is that one time I threw clay at the ceiling in art class…
Nearly thirty years has passed and I’ve never uttered a word about it to another soul.
It was one of those wound-tight-like-a-timepiece moments of childhood disruption. All my churning anxiety and mania made manifest. The pent up spring inside my chest releasing its tension in an act of casual vandalism. Over and over, I took a tiny blob of clay in my hand and then flung it upwards like I was doing a magic trick, disappearing the object. Dozens of times, all over the entire art room. Of course, somebody later noticed the secret of my slight-of-hand.
There were consequences.
Even now, I struggle to think about the class being made to line up at the end of the school day outside the art room. That creeping dread. The slow dawning that we were all here because of me. The cold lead in my stomach. You know the feeling. The thoughtlessness of my actions was suddenly now going to be back to haunt me. The chickens of my fuck-ups well and truly here to roost.
This was an era when a private school could still tout that they believed in the judicious application of the The Strap. No doubt you are picturing something akin to a leather belt, the sort of thing a small, weak man would whip from his pant loops to inflict his inadequacy on his family. No, that’s not what The Strap was. Though made of leather that’s where the similarities end. Not thin and flexible like a belt, but an inch thick, two inches wide and two feet long. Heavy stitching. A flail. A firm leather club. And of course it was always accompanied by The Ledger of Accounts. A handwritten register of its uses; the names, the infractions, the administers dating back decades. A history of brutal punishments for boys who did not do as they were told.
We didn’t even get into the art room before I went to the front of the line and told the teacher, “it was me”. Stony faced they told me to get back in line and my confusion grew. So, we lined up and waited. They made us file in. They gave a long-winded speech; a teaching moment to talk about respect for property. A room full of boys still completely unaware of why they were there despite the evidence a few feet above their heads. The teacher droned on. The buttoned down Christian-leader of his own little fiefdom relishing his moment.
It’s then that I realised my name wasn’t to be added to The Ledger and that something much worse was in store for me.
This. The teacher already had his culprit and he desired that I sit with a room full of boys about to miss trains and busses home because of my choices. Rob them all of their afternoon and make sure they knew exactly who was to blame. I would have preferred The Strap. The swift surety of it. Instead, I knew with iron clad certainty that no matter what the school could dish out it would be nothing when held alongside the punishment meted out by thirty inconvenienced teenage boys. The daily tortures, the isolation, the occasional surprise beatings when opportunity presented itself. All these punishments from boys that would not be for the crime of defacing the popcorn ceilings of the art room, but the crime of my existence having any impact on them at all.
I blurted out to the room that it was me.
There in the room in front of everyone, I claimed responsibility and asked, begged that the rest of the class be allowed to go. The teacher relented. It’s hard to make a big performative show and dance about taking responsibility when someone is taking responsibility. So, while the other boys filed out, glares and mutterings abounded, I climbed atop the desks to scrape drying clay off ceilings, relived to be left alone. Left to hold back the tears and rising panic of what I would face in my true punishment.
I’ve never spoken to anyone about this before. It hurts to think about it. It hurts to think about the longing for the isolation, that blessed solitude, the knowledge that the worst thing that could happen to me is attention being drawn. Eyes on me. Opinions being formed. So much of my life had been an exercise in being invisible. There’s a primary school report card somewhere that refers to me as “hiding in plain sight”, and “If you hadn’t read the class roll you wouldn’t even know he was there.” Mrs Hill in year five was fucking ruthless.
I struggle to imagine that small boy I used to be, wide-eyed and quiet. Sitting toward the back so that he was always obscured, always just a little out of your eye-line. I struggle to imagine it because only a few years later, I was an obnoxious drama kid. At least I was until senior year when the school decided to cut the program due to dwindling interest. Didn’t stop them starting construction on a multimillion dollar performing arts complex the next year, did it? (I always felt as though I was both born too soon and born too late.)
But standing on a stage, feeling eyes on me in that hallowed place has never filled me with the same stage fright that I’ve seen in others. I certainly feel nerves. Nerves that I’m capable of fucking up, sure, but never enough that I would feel the urge to flee. The fluttering of anticipation? It’s excitement, not fear. Almost akin to that crappy slight-of-hand trick from my youth, but now practiced, now genuinely magical. Not simply trick with a flick of your wrist but a dance using your whole being. Not just the vanish of an object, but that you are going to disappear your whole identity right before everyone’s eyes.
Growing up most of my visibility in the world was only through the artifice of performance.
Acting is something the world celebrates. Awards are given if you are good enough. Crowds stand and cheer if you are convincing enough. Again and again transgender people talk about how their lives lived as their assigned gender were performances; how those performances were masks concocted to survive. It’s certainly how I’ve felt. For much of my life this whole identity has felt like a contrivance. So much so that I sometimes wonder if I’m anything like what I present. Am I just a series of performances? At what point does on-stage stop and the back-stage start? And this isn’t even a transgender-only thing. Plenty of neurodivergent people out there (which it is increasingly clear I may also be) will talk about the performances they put on in the world and the complete absence of space for their own identity. The idea that the expectation of who you should be and how you should behave prevails and crushes any truth of who you actually are, because who you actually are is never “right” in the world.
There are elements of how I present to the world as being a woman that could be considered a performance. The reshaping of my body and the way it moves to fit what the world expects of a woman. The sway of my hips, the set of my shoulders, the pitch of my voice. As much as a nay-sayer could undermine the validity of my identity as a woman by claiming it is contrived, the truth is simple to me: My identity as a man was just as much a contrivance.
The choice to walk in such a way, the swaggering strut, head cocked back, the set of jaw and mouth. Allowing the vocal training from the stage kick in to ensure my voice filled a space with deep resonance. The casual lean on a door frame, so effortless, so alluring, so fake. We scoff at actors who can’t “let go of the role”. The eternal eye-rolling when an actor finds they can’t break out of a gait or that their accent has been irreparably changed. So many consider the accoutrements of the new “chosen gender” to be the artifice, when in reality trans people are attempting to strip away the character that we were forced to play.
My femininity is not another mask; it is a peeling away of the old one. It reveals who I should have been, could have been, who I am. Taking the body that was urged to stride with manly purpose instead of gliding with grace. Finding a lightness in my voice instead of rumbling down into my core. These are not affectations, but realisations of the true me. Peeling back layers that prevented me from ever having learned “womanhood” in the first place and finally being truly seen.
I think about all those eyes on me as the boys filled out of the art room. I think about the small, lonely life I lived. Isolation not by choice anymore. Isolation as punishment. I think about the blessing of having a tiny cadre of friends, the force that held back the despair wrought by the general indifference and the occasional viciousness of a wall of private school boys donned in grey and black and white. I think about only ever being seen as an inconvenience. And I think about the public discourse on the visibility of transgender people. I think of how it has grown so vile that, other than the small cadre of allies, we are at best tolerated and at worst we are an affront to decency and morality and all the sorts of things that billionaire novelists tout to their millions of followers.
There’s no solution but to keep going.
I will never convince the whole world that this transition, this identity is the real, true one. That this is not a performance. There will always be those who see this as a contrivance, a mask that I’m using to hide the fact that deep inside I am a man, and a deeply disturbed one at that. Yes, days will go by that I’m not harassed online about it, or in the street. I will surround myself with community and be safe for the most part. But there will always be eyes on me like those boys in the art room.
I now choose to be visible. I choose to be publicly trans. No more forced isolation. The eyes on me in the street, the moments of being the centre of attention. I choose to bear them. That boy who was “hiding in plain sight” hasn’t vanished. He’s still part of me and I know now that the mask he wore was just a scared child’s attempt to find safety. The true me is finally, gloriously present.
I don’t ever want to hide a damn thing ever again.
–S