You've Gotta Suffer to be Beautiful
On the fallacy of the beauty ideal, dance recitals, and hot DJs.
Did you know that you can get grey eyelashes? I didn’t. You can be going about your merry business one day, pause to regard yourself in the reflection of the brass urn you haggled down to $9 at Goodwill, and gasp. You can step closer to confirm (it’s hammered brass) and moan a sound that’s a combination of no and how and flail a single arm above your head in horror for an audience of zero. It will not change the fact that one of your eyelashes has gone completely rogue and left the others; has decided she was through with the banality of brown and was destined to be REMEMBERED. Never in the whole of the human sensorium has a person resented their own biology the way I did when I found that eyelash. Now, I had other hair going grey. Hair across the expanse of my pallid body had for years been turning on me. By age thirty-two I had taken to plucking them with tweezers, then displaying them each on my dresser like a fish monger with a proud row of fresh halibut. I would examine them with a frown before discarding them in the trash bin. Occasionally during the week, I would remember having discarded some a few days in a row and would return to the trash bin to see how they had accumulated. Once, I snapped a photo on my phone and made it my background photo, before realizing someone might see it and begin to understand just how deeply disturbed a monster I am. I switched it back to a photo of Judy Dench dressed as a lobster and hid my phone in a drawer, just in case.
I want you to know that I’m better than this.
I want you to know that I realize beauty is in the eye of the beholder and aging is a privilege. I understand. Agism is aus and nobody likes a narcissist. Allowing oneself to be bothered by the antiquated western ideals of youth and beauty is rooted in misogyny and the patriarchy and is generally understood to be the mark of the unevolved. I want you to know that I am not unevolved. I am fully volved. I am a Volvo. I know that, eventually, I am going to die.
And still.
I do not want my eyelashes to turn grey.
When I was seven, I was still a year away from realizing that being in dance classes was a cruel scenario for everyone involved. I was, in common Broadway parlance, “a mover, not a dancer” and no one seemed particularly pleased to witness this. My dance teacher used to give me high fives at the end of a harrowing hour of barre work even though we both knew it was a ruse. Good dancers do not receive high fives. Good dancers are simply told they are good. There were actual good dancers in my class and they would cast me looks of pity while huddled together, despondent, at the shoe cubbies. My parents had somehow cobbled together the cash it took to keep me in tap, ballet, and jazz classes at the Dale Meyers School of Dance, a fabled institution located in a strip mall and which was, we would later find out, teeming with black mold. I loved dancing. I knew I was bad at it but I was desperate to be around anything creative outside of the praise band at my megachurch. I loved ceremoniously, and way too slowly, pulling on my leotard and pulling my hair into a bun so tight it would effect my vision.
The actual crafting of the bun was done by my mother, who would punish the whole of my thick, wiry mane into her hands with a flat-head brush before securing it with an elastic hair band and roughly seven hundred bobby pins. Once, before a dance recital, Mom was putting the finishing touches on a hair sculpture meant for one of my jazz routines. In ballet, you wear a bun but in jazz, you really get to go nuts. This particular style was in the Toddlers and Tiaras family and featured a giant silver feather that ran the length of one side of my head. As Mom sprayed me down with the industry standard amount of Aquanet (3/4 a bottle), I coughed and waved my tiny hands in front of my face, scowling. Mom stopped spraying and fanned a single arm through the cloud of fumigation.
“You’ve gotta suffer to be beautiful.” She smiled the kind of smile meant to say “Lighten up, I’m kidding!” without having kidded at all. I adjusted the giant silver feather as my eyes glazed into soft focus. You’ve gotta. To be beautiful.
If you were to line up every single one of my childhood crushes, they’d each look like Elizabeth Taylor, almost certainly because both the men and women in my family worshipped, exclusively, women who looked like Elizabeth Taylor. Somewhere, in an attempt to shield my brother and I from the dangers of sex and the secular world, my parents had landed on the idea that films made before 1970 were, by virtue of their era-specific censorship, wholesome. And so we existed entirely on a diet of Bob Hope and Carmen Miranda and Danny Kaye and Liz Taylor. The result, should you follow this model, is pretty quick and simple: your kids learn what you think is beautiful.
I knew by the year of that dance recital that I was gay, and it was around this time that I began a decades-long journey of compensating for my gayness with a gender presentation that talked like Bob Hope and tried to look like Ginger Rogers. The old MGM musicals I adored had trained me well: men were witty and slapdash and women congratulated them for this by walking around chain smoking in gowns. Men landed punchlines, and women landed men. I wanted to be both, so I quickly distinguished the two and committed to the bit, insisting on pencil skirts and heels but adopting a trans-Atlantic accent and miming a cigar when nervous. This seemed to confuse the other children at school, none of whom understood that this was a curated affectation. Beginning questions with “Say!” was equal parts cultural posturing and really fun throwback. I was a madame demure but I talked like a bookie at a 1930’s racetrack. I had swapped 1994 for 1949 and I was convinced I was pulling it off.
For about fifteen years.
And then, a few months into my one year tenure as a twenty-two year old Chicago resident (it wasn’t the cold that drove me away, it was the niceties) I attempted to hit on a very cool DJ named Gemma Versache. She had tattoo sleeves and 80’s rocker hair and my then roommate, Carlos, had convinced me we’d “hit it off like gangbusters.” Having only seen a blurry Myspace photo and heard one of her playlists, which seemed awfully barky to me, I decided to give it a go and meet Gemma where she was DJing at a popular dance club. Having just graduated from theater school in a town that housed only soy fields, save my alma mater, a Walmart, and a Panera Bread, I had yet to fully realize a look that didn’t scream “feral youth.” The penchant for Mae West skirts on a budget closer to Mayflower had evolved over four years of “experiential movement” and “mask work” to a closet of thrift store slips layered as dresses, topped with a crocheted shawl that was actually a small blanket.
I’d arrived at the club and gulped down the well vodka tonic Carlos had bought me, before sauntering up to the DJ booth clutching my shawl. I watched as Gemma spotted me and followed her eye-line back to the bar, where Carlos was signaling a not-so-subtle She’s coming to talk to you. I didn’t want to ambush Gemma Versache so I found a beam to lean against. It was 2006 so the pulsing crowd of twenty-somethings were all poured into the inaugural round of skinny jeans, resulting in a crude kind of group movement that looked as though they could only move their arms. I couldn’t believe I was this cool.
Gemma and I made eye contact and she waved me over. I did my best to appear completely inconvenienced by this invitation and walked at a measured snail’s pace. When at last I arrived, Gemma, hands still spinning the hits, leaned over and shouted in my ear.
“Carlos said you were cute. Meet me at the bar after this song.” I wasn’t sure if “Carlos said you were cute” was a confirmation of this opinion or merely a confirmation that Carlos had indeed spoken to her. Either way it had to be good. I adjusted my slips.
“For sure.”
Two minutes later, as I leaned against another beam next to the bar (apparently the only thing holding up the roof), Gemma approached with two tequila shots. There was no other bar between the DJ booth and where I was, so she’d seemingly manifested them from thin air. She handed me one, motioning to the dance floor with the other.
“This isn’t really your scene, is it?”
“What do you mean.” I took my shot and focused my energy on not retching.
“I just mean, you don’t look like you hang out here, or like, this century. What is your scene?”
The repeated use of “scene” made me nervous, so I resorted to an old standby and mimed a cigar.
“I dunno,” I winked. “Ziegfeld’s Follies?”
Ziegfeld’s Follies was, of course, a reference to the Vaudeville Corps de Dance in Barbra Streisand vehicle Funny Girl, so I waited for a laugh. If you’ve never seen interest drain from someone’s face in an instant, I recommend donning a shawl and quoting a musical at the club. Any club will do, it’s foolproof. Just find a person, don a shawl, and quote the musical. You will watch a biological phenomenon play out right in front of your eyes. The blood will drain from their face as their shoulders tense into a sort of Gothic grotesque, and then they will attempt to flee.
In this incidence, Gemma’s body remained in place but I watched as her mortal spirit left her body and dissipated like a fog. I talked for a bit longer about Funny Girl until Gemma had to go to the bathroom. In my defense, the people you meet in theater school typically have a very different reaction to Funny Girl. I once quoted a song lyric from “People” to a girl at a party and ten minutes later she fingered me in a coat closet.
Gemma didn’t come back from the bathroom so I assumed there was some sort of trap door or secret exit to the street, said goodbye to Carlos, and went to wait for the bus home. I looked around at the other young waywards making their way home from bars and concerts and clubs. I looked at their angular haircuts; their monochromatic band tees and jeans. This wasn’t my scene.
My friend Doug texted me recently: god, remember your whatever happened to baby jane phase? It’s a crude assaying of two decades of a carefully curated look, but not incorrect. And I do remember. I remember feeling powerful when I was costumed and exposed when I wasn’t. I remember thinking the Feminine Ideal was a product of work; of abusing hair into place, painting on a lip and adopting a laissez-faire attitude that suggested neither had occurred on purpose. I remember when I started to realize that I had this all wrong. Gemma wasn’t turned off because I was wearing a shawl, Gemma was terrified because I was speaking like Groucho Marx and shouting song lyrics too close to her face. It’s taken me the thirteen years since to release my fucked up notions about power and humor and gender, and I’d like to think I was still very much myself under all those slips and shawls. I’d like to think the essence into which I evolved, let’s call it Huck Finn Overdressed for a Warehouse Party, is no less a costume, but merely a reflection of a time and place. Because I still quote Funny Girl and ten tears later, when Gemma and I matched on a dating app in L.A., we did finally go on a date and she did think it was my scene. For about three hours, after which she kissed me, got in her Camino, and told me she “wasn’t into it.” I had waited those ten years to show her just how hip to the real world I had become, only to realize it probably didn’t matter. Plus, who the hell drives a Camino?