My gender performance: Ohio 1968

(Urbana, Ohio—1968) A red pair of Chucks All Stars, Hot Wheels, The Hardy Boys and television shows like Bonanza and Gunsmoke informed my sense of identity then. I named myself Frank, after the elder Hardy brother. When that didn't stick, I adopted the name George under the pretext that I had a crush on the boy by that name in my class at South Ward Elementary. I knew I was a boy, had understood since well before kindergarten. But as I got older, resistance started coming from the women in charge of raising me. They didn't understand: my mom and my babysitter, Auntie Garnet. 

Auntie Garnet began insisting that I wear a shirt in the summer. The group of kids who spent our lazy, sunny days out of school in the grass of Auntie Garnet's backyard fit easily into our roles pretending attacks on enemy forts from behind hedges and competing for champion bee catcher in the clover.

Then came the day my friend Larry told me that a club for only the boys had formed and I wasn't allowed in. Faced with my insistence, he offered me membership by ordeal. Meeting his challenge, hand over hand, I grasped the cold metal pole and pulled myself up to the top of the green and yellow swing set. Straddling the A-frame, I could feel my heart, like beating wings, as I towered over him. I stretched my arm to grasp the cross bar and swing myself clear, when he stopped me. "Wait! You don't have to do that last part. We'll let you in. You're in." But I didn't want a pass. I was proving myself fair and square. I reached and, after an interval of darkness, came to, flat on the ground, surrounded by my friends and a frantic Auntie Garnet. My dislocated elbow required surgery and by the time I got out of the hospital the club had disbanded.

In those days, we played fantasy war games, sometimes as G.I. Joe Marines and Green Berets, unaware of the neighborhood boys being lifted away to the slaughter of Viet Nam. Sometimes we played cowboys and Indians, hypnotized by television and public school narratives of innocence and bravery. My grandfather's only concern about me cocking my six-shooter, pretending to be Jesse James, was that I should be Kit Carson instead. Jesse James was a murderous criminal, he said, but Carson was a frontiersman and Indian agent. 

I was a just a boy then, a white boy then.