Sissyphilia: thanks daddy

(If there's sissyphobia, why not sissyphilia. I prefer my own Androgynosexuality.)

Hypermasculinity inspires admiration of the inverse.

He could pick up the back of a 1960s American car and bend bolts in his hands. He knocked his young wife's teeth out. I remember photos of him when he was young. If you liked handsome, dangerous rough trade you'd have wanted him.

He was my daddy.

my childhood upbringing biased me against strong manliness which may have pushed me in the other direction.

Something I wrote recently in an email. "Would I like to elaborate on that?" my correspondent asked. Ha. My long time Live Journal friends have watched my elaborate on it with the finicky delight of an archaeologist with a rare discovery in his hands. I've sometimes pursued this part of my sexuality with the windy vigor of a monomaniac.

Mack Emory Lee was a cocksure virile redneck. Unlettered but not unintelligent, I've been grateful for his genetic legacy. I never shared his pastimes. A shy, eventually precocious boy to me he was a stranger who irregularly invaded the calm of my life with my momma. (Yep, talk about your queer stereotypes.)

He made me nervous. Even when his irascible temper didn't flare into violent tantrums I found myself scared shitless, wondering what some sudden nasty whim would lead him to do to me.

I hid in my comic books, then books. Science, eventually segments of high culture continually distanced me from the man.

Shamelessly, happily I'll confess that I was my momma's precious boy. I loved her; she loved me. However much she'd frustrate me, as is the way with parents my momma's unconditional love insulated me. (Unconditional childhood love is a booby trap that explodes again and again in later life.)

I never wanted to be anything like the irrational old bastard. I'd learn that I did want to be like my momma.

But not a woman, nor feminine. I've wondered why I didn't become a queenish guy. But that is lost in inexplicit details I'll never know. I grew up masculine or at least indistinguishable from heterosexual men.

Over the years I've said my inner sense of self is ungendered, androgynous / masculine, some times I've removed the androgynous. Much of my sense of my sexual self is responsive: what do you want? A nice guy? A very butch guy? I've had to face up to admitting that I like being a nice butch man. Working through the revulsion I feel for my father's sexual presence I've come to consciously enjoy being thought to embody kindly manliness. But for me being masculine is my way of being the woman my mother was. (With the deadly desire for unconditional love.)

Maleness isn't always strength or assertiveness. Femaleness isn't always surrender, passivity. Pop culture clichés, nothing more.

This didn't have to express it self in love, love, admiration, tenderness for psychic hermaphrodites. Gender outlaws, genderbent - they put an extra spring in my step, I feel goofily happy knowing they are still alive.

Sometimes I've wondered if I came to admire them so much because the nelly gay boy of the 1970s admired me (well, some didn't give a damn). But I was a fattie the day I discovered I liked guys in a carnal way. So they didn't give a damn about me at first. I remember Charlie with his dark eyebrows, the boy with the long neck, and a host of other 'sissyboys' that I may have only seen once a long, long time ago.

The special place andro lads would have in my life the day the recruiters for the gay agenda dropped by my house (the Jehovah's Witnesses who'd left moments before weren't so lucky).

My daddy would've puked himself to death but I guess I do owe him my appreciation of the sometimes sweet, often bitchy girlish boys, male girlfriends or whatever in the hell you might call the diva boys who've added so much to my life.