Olivia Werth: Episode II: Attack of the Bigots

There is unrest in the American

Nation.  Several thousand people 

Lay dying from a terrible disease

Ignored by society–AIDS.

The government, under the leadership

Of the evil Ronald Reagan, has done

Nothing to provide support or help

To those affected by this disease.

Olivia Werth, the girl pretending

To be a boy, is slowly beginning 

To see the world outside of her bubble

And finds herself horrified by

The absolute lack of humanity on

Display from most humans 

Welcome back.  This is the third installment of the story of my life.  In the last post, I talked about what happened when I was five years old and told my grandparents that I was not a boy.  And I talked about the mask I started building, to make sure no one ever saw anything but the boy I could not believe in, and how isolating and exhausting that was.

And I also mentioned how my parents had given me a purpose in life–at least one that would lead me through my childhood.  I had been told that I was going to go to college, and that in order to do so I needed to earn as much scholarship money as I could.  In one sense, this script was limiting, forcing my life into a certain path that I would have to follow whether I wanted to do so or not.  But in another way, especially in hindsight, this script for my life was exactly what I needed in order to get through these years.  Trying to figure out what I was going to do when I grew up would have required a lot of energy.  And all the energy I had was needed to keep my mask up, to keep anyone from seeing that I was a girl.  Even with that, there were moments when I felt my act may not have been enough.

The first time I felt I had let myself slip came in the second grade.  And, probably not surprising considering that the birth of my hidden life came from being forced into a haircut, this crisis had to do with hair.  (I use the word crisis here because to me that was how it felt.  I doubt anyone else in the school was even aware of the situation, but such is the paranoia of a kid forced to hide themselves.)  See, there was a girl in my class.  She had the longest, most beautiful brown hair of anyone in the school.  The kind of hair that I really wished could be growing out of my head.  (By this point, I had discovered hair metal and was begging my parents to let me grow my hair long–after all, those were clearly men with long hair, so I could have long hair without people realizing I was a girl.  But it would be another decade before I was allowed to grow it out, and by then it was too late.)

Anyway, this girl.  Her last name was near mine alphabetically, so we were seated near each other in class.  And every day I would sneak a glance or twelve at her hair, wondering how good it must feel to have hair like that.  At least, I did until the day she came into school with her hair cut short.  And I was devastated.  It felt like a personal attack directed squarely at me.  I know how ridiculous that sounds, but hear me out.  First off, remember that I was going through life feeling like I was completely broken.  One of the consequences of that feeling was that I blamed myself for everything.  And yes, I mean everything.  When you are trying to hide yourself, you develop a paranoia that never leaves you, that makes you look at everything that happens and wonder if it happened because someone found out your secret.  

So, I assumed she cut her hair off because of me.  That she had noticed me looking at it, had realized why I was doing so, and chopped it off because she could not bear to have something that a broken person like me might admire.  Which meant she had discovered my secret.

   And, once I got over the initial shock, I became convinced that every kid in class had now discovered my secret.  Because when I saw her, I stared at her for minutes, horrified.  And I was convinced that every kid in class saw me staring, and figured out exactly why.  So for days, stretching into weeks, I kept waiting for the end to come, for someone to call me out, for that punishment my grandparents had promised to fall upon me.

But it never came, and gradually I relaxed, came to feel that maybe no one had noticed.  That it had all been a coincidence and I was safe, as long as I strengthened the grip on my mask.

The mask would slip again the next year, even more strongly.  And it again involved that same girl.  (She was very smart, probably the smartest kid in the school, so is it any wonder I kept thinking she saw through me?)  In the third grade, our teacher announced a contest to see who could read the most books.  Now, I would have probably won that contest anyway, because books were my one real escape from the hell that was my life and I read constantly.  But there was another reason I needed to win–the prize of a University of Iowa themed Care Bear.

I loved the Care Bears.  I watched the cartoon every chance I had, getting away with it because I had a younger sister and only one tv in our house.  And I was a huge Iowa Hawkeyes fan (remember, loving the sportsball was a big part of the mask I had created for myself, and Iowa was the team for me–maybe because my aunt and uncle had both gone to Iowa State, so rooting for their rival was a way to oppose my family safely.)  But the need to win that prize went much deeper than that.  Stuffed animals were not something I had (personal choice as part of the mask, or family edict?  I can’t remember).  But the jealousy over my sister playing with hers was so great I’m surprised it wasn’t obvious to people on the other side of the planet.

But here was an opportunity to get one.  First, it was Hawkeye themed, and collecting merch with beloved sports team logos is a common thing among men.  But even more, the only way it would be mine was if I won it–which would make it a trophy.  Putting it up on a shelf alongside my sports trophies was a perfectly manly thing to do.  Of course, those were just the explanations I could give to everyone else.  For me, it was the chance to have something soft to cuddle with, to hold and feel like I might be safe–something I sorely lacked.

So, I did what I needed to do–I read.  In the end, it was not even close, with the girl who cut her hair coming in a distant second.  The teacher handed me the bear in class one day, and I thought nothing more of it until lunch.  When we took our break, the runner-up approached me and tried to take the bear.  To her, I think, I had only won the contest because I was an egotistical kid who always had to come in first in everything, and winning the contest was the prize I had been after, so I would have no problem handing over the bear.

But the bear was the prize I wanted, and in my shock at her attempt to take it I got upset and told her it was mine, that I wanted it and was going to keep it.  It was only later, after I had gotten it home and put it in my bed (there was no chance it was ever going on a shelf, but I think you already knew that), that I began to worry I had messed up.  Maybe the reason she had thought I would give up the bear was because boys don’t want stuffed animals, and my refusal had given away that I was not a boy.

So, again, panic mode.  Weeks spent waiting, watching, afraid that a dire punishment was about to befall me.  But either she once again did not pick up on my secret (in which case, thank you backwards Iowa of the 1980s), or if she did she kept it to herself.  (I would love to think it was the latter, because the thought that somebody saw me and accepted me back then just feels so powerful.  But it was probably the former.)

The worst crisis of my elementary years came early in fourth grade, when for the first and only time of my school career I was given detention.  I have no memory of what I did to deserve that, but I do remember the overwhelming terror that I had just ruined my life before it could begin.  I had gotten in trouble, in school of all places.  This would definitely be going on my permanent record, jeopardizing my chances to get into college.  (Getting into trouble in public–huge nope.  Getting in trouble at home was a different story, as then I would be sent to my room, the only way I could ever be sure of being alone.)

So when the teacher gave me detention, I started bawling.  SItting there at my desk, surrounded by other kids, tears just poured out of me at the thought of what I had done.  Later, after I had pulled myself together, I became terrified.  Because boys don’t cry, especially over something “little” like detention.  This time the weeks stretched into months, waiting for that doom that had been foretold to come and claim me.  But once again, I managed to escape the fate I had earned myself.  Three times I had given myself away, three times I had escaped.  I did not imagine that I would survive a fourth, so I began to work even harder at holding that mask in place.

It was not long before I would be very glad of that extra work.  It was around this time I really began to pay attention to the news.  And it was a couple of months later, early in 1986, when I first heard of a 13-year-old kid two states over in Indiana named Ryan White.

For those of you too young to know this story, or who may have forgotten, Ryan White was a kid who had hemophilia, and needed blood transfusions.  In one of these transfusions, he was given blood infected with HIV.  For those of you who lived through this time, I’m sure you remember what this meant.  And for those of you who didn’t live through it…well, you are very lucky.  1986 was the heart of the AIDS epidemic.  1985 had been the first year AIDS deaths topped 5.000 in the United States, and those deaths had included actor Rock Hudson, the first high profile death from the disease.  So talk (and misinformation) about AIDS was everywhere.

There was no treatment for AIDS.  There was no cure.  The US government under Ronald Reagan had refused to do anything to try and alleviate this disease.  (Reagan himself had only publicly mentioned AIDS for the first time at the end of 1985, despite the disease being all over the news since 1981.)  The reason for this?  Because it had first been detected among gay men, and gay men were still the demographic seeing the majority of cases.  AIDS was seen as a gay disease–or even as something other than a disease.  They saw it as God’s punishment on gay people for sinning against the laws of God.

The first time I heard about gay people was in the context of AIDS.  And this is the message I was getting–gay people were sinners, because they chose to have sex with people of the same sex and that was wrong.  So wrong, in fact, that they deserved to die horrible deaths, isolated from everyone.  (And I do mean isolated.  Hysteria was out of control in the 1980s about how AIDS spread.  Not to mention that hospitals, with their family only visitation policies, would often keep gay people from being able to visit those they loved.)  Just think about this for a moment from the perspective of a young kid who was still not yet developed enough to know what their own sexuality was, but was completely confused as to their gender identity.  When I grew up, would I be gay?  Would having sex with men mean I was gay, since everyone told me I was a boy?  Or would having sex with women mean I was gay, since I knew I was a girl?  I had no idea, and I could not ask anyone since I couldn’t talk about this to anyone.  But I did know that I was just as guilty, just as worthy of punishment, and thus this was the fate in store for me if anyone found out.

It was in this context that Ryan White contracted AIDS through a medical procedure.  He did nothing wrong, nothing worthy of punishment.  But when he tried to go back to school after it became clear that he was not going to die immediately, everyone lost their minds.  The school refused to let him in.  Once the state of Indiana ordered that they had to, a lot of parents pulled their kids out of the school.  The school itself held a fundraiser to pay for lawyers to keep this poor kid from stepping through their doors.  

And this was all for something that he had absolutely no control over, a disease he had gotten because of a routine medical procedure.  Yet he was met with all of this hate, all of this rage–people calling him a monster just because he had a disease, people shooting bullets through the windows of his house, people threatening to kill him on a daily basis because he was “endangering their children” (sound familiar at all?). 

And all I could see in these stories was myself.  Because if this kid was getting this horrific response just for having a disease that was not any threat to them (doctors had already confirmed this fact, though much of the public refused to listen–another familiar refrain), and who was attacked as something he was not–what about me?  What would be the response if anyone ever found out who I thought myself to be?

For the first time, I truly began to fear the world.