People In and Out of My Life: Clarence

"your mother shows up in a nasty dress
it's your turn now to stand where i stand
everybody lookin' at you
here, take ahold of my hand..."

exerpt from Silent All These Years by Tori Amos

I met Clarence in my final year of Uni. I had decided that in view of my impending career as a lawyer, it might be a good idea to see whether or not I could pick up a cause for which hitherto I could not have cared less and champion it as if I were its Mother Theresa.

Clarence was the chairman of the International Student Committee ("ISC") of the Utas’s Student Union at the start of 1997. I signed on as Editor of the ISC newsletter and soon took over the Education Officer’s portfolio. Given that the other committee members, including the vice-chairman, were not pushy, straight-talking know-it-alls, I pretty much ran the show with Clarence, who I might add, was the only one paid an allowance by the Union, so he had to actually do some work.

The first day that I met Clarence, he was wearing nail polish. I think it was silvery aquamarine. And he was constantly admiring them. I SO kid you not. I was in for an amazing ride.

In keeping with the path of debauchery that Georgia had set me on, I picked up smoking from Clarence. And not just ordinary cigarettes, but the Gudang Garam ones. Clove cigarettes. Nice, but heckuva high tar content.

Clarence intrigued me mainly for the fact that I couldn’t figure him out. He’d wear the meanest black leather jacket over what I call a man blouse. You know, those collarless boat-neck cottonny lycra things that cling to the body in a manner that in an ideal world all cling film, no matter how cheap, should, dammit. He also wore bracelets and, of course, his nail polish.

Was he gay? I thought so. But then he said he had a girlfriend. So I gave him the benefit of doubt and decided that he was bisexual, particularly since he would talk about a particular buddy of his with just the hint of drool. He loved shopping and once, he rushed – RAN, I tell you – into a shop, molested a gold, shimmery-shiny dress that he had seen through the shop window, and gushed at how beautiful it was.

It wasn’t too long before I asked him point-blank, how he perceived himself. Turns out, he himself was confused. He didn’t think he was gay and definitely didn’t want to be a woman. Yet, the boy certainly wasn’t happy.

Clarence challenged all my perceptions about gender expression and sexuality. At a time just before meeting Julia later in 1997, I was beginning to see that there were other shadowy figures that populated the fringes of society. Meeting Julia was the turning point that initiated for me the process of cutting through the shadows and finally start seeing the people behind the haze.

Unfortunately, it was only last year that understanding fully dawned on me with my discovery of another book written by Leslie Feinberg, Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue. The author describes a gathering at which he is giving the keynote address:-

"...I faced 350 heterosexual cross-dressed males and their spouses. I was the only person in a suit and tie in a room filled with people in dresses...This event gives us the puberty and senior prom we missed...it is necessary to accept that there are tens of thousands of people ...perhaps millions...who want to express both a masculine and a feminine side - and many, many of those people are heterosexual. Like closeted lesbian, gay and bisexual people, a large segment of the bi-gender population has lived in airless, confining closets of shame...

After the suitcases are packed and hotel rooms paid for, when the dresses and the wigs were hidden in the luggage, many people in this room would appear to be very different...to the casual observer, they might look like other masculine men. But when this event ends, tears will stream down the cheeks of many of these men...because these are the only days out of their entire lives that they could be themselves - and the event is over.

If you look at their hands you would see that it is so painful for these males to pack away half of their gender expression - one-half of who they are as human beings - that many will not have removed their red nail polish. When nail polish remover has erased the last visible trace of their transgender, will they be distinguishable from other masculine men? ...What an important reminder that there are a lot of assumptions we make everyday about people based on whether they are female or male. Assumptions about consciousness, experience, relationship to oppression...and those presumptions are not always true."

I never kept in touch with Clarence after graduating in December 1997. I think I understand him now.

I hope he’s finally come to terms with himself. I hope he's happy.