Last month Thomas, a small, goateed man Iwas on a group meditation retreat with, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “All this time I thought you were a Rainbow Man, but people tell me no.”
I’d never before heard that term—Rainbow Man—and I was tickled by its campy strangeness.
“They’re right,” I said to Thomas, a hospital chaplain and former choreographer, “I’m not a Rainbow Man. Though once,” I admitted, “a guy in Chelsea told me
I was good enough looking to be gay, and I took it as a high compliment.”
“That is a high compliment,” Thomas concurred.
The fact is I’m often mistaken for a “Rainbow Man,” though I doubt it’s due to my appearance. To my knowledge, I don’t speak or walk in an effeminate way, but here are some possible data points: I’ve worked as a schoolteacher and as a concert jazz dancer. I’m a poet,
I live in Greenwich Village, and I’m not married. I have two pierced ears, am not averse to crying, like to cook, love drag, and appreciate tasteful interior decorating. To quote the poet Elizabeth Bishop: “Rainbow, rainbow, rainbow.”
But here are some other data points: I’m good with numbers, logic, tools, and spatial relations. I dress like a slob, I’m extremely competitive, I’ve got a deadeye jump shot, and can reel off ridiculous quantities of sports trivia. I’ve even been informed by book reviewers that my poetry is “masculine”—though writing poetry like a man might be tantamount to dancing ballet like a man (which I do).
I don’t mean to make this a referendum on my masculinity. It’s just that, having recently turned 50, I’m realizing how often my life has been a referendum, on the part of others, of exactly this.
At 17 I was befriended by a gay teacher, and due to that friendship, everyone in my town assumed I was gay. My father, who was never very present in my life, had recently left our family to remarry, and here, in this teacher, was an older, wiser man who took an interest in me. We’d drive to the beach together and spend the day talking about our lives. Looking back, I can see all the opportunities he was making for physical contact that I didn’t see at the time. But maybe this was also because I was even more “rainbow” than he was: I assumed that males of different sexuality could simply value one another as friends, and so I took him at his word when he said he just liked spending time together. I trusted him—something perhaps no other kid in that town, straight or gay, would have done.
My friends, sure of their assumptions, stopped associating with me. At the time, I didn’t understand why no one would return my phone calls. The following fall this teacher made a pass at me, to my shock, and I later realized he’d been grooming me for months for that moment. The grooming had started before I graduated, when I was still his student, so the pernicious aspect of this is not lost on me. (He is no longer a teacher—rest assured, I’ve checked.)
There’s more: A group of boys were vandalizing my family’s mailbox. Every so often they drove up in the night and tossed a lit M-80—a quarter stick of dynamite—into our newly replaced mailbox and blew it up. They were all boys I knew. (One, who had been a friend since elementary school, remorsefully admitted his involvement, but wouldn’t say why.) The events were confusing at the time, and traumatic in retrospect: These were hate crimes pure and simple, and I was the target, despite the fact that I wasn’t, in actuality, a member of any oppressed group.
Because of the experience of losing every friend I had as a teenager and feeling despised by my town, I’ve never been very comfortable in groups. Groups often regard me with confusion, often make assumptions and misread me. I’m not out to confuse, but neither am I interested in going about “correcting” people’s assumptions—much the way the actor Matt Damon, erroneously rumored to be homosexual, elected not to respond to the rumors. He felt that such a public relations rollout, as these things are generally handled by the media, would be offensive to his gay friends—“as if being gay were some kind of f—king disease,” he told Playboy last December.
While I am as prone as any straight man to the occasional stupid act of bravado—as likely as any guy to size up just about every other guy I see, wondering if I could take him, and just about every woman I see, wondering if I’d have sex with her—I’ve never felt I had anything special to prove as a heterosexual. When I was in the dance world a lot of people assumed I was gay, and that never mattered to me either.
About 10 years ago I had a meeting with a woman who had, some might say, shamanic qualities, and to whom I had not previously spoken. At the beginning of our meeting she said, “This is the first lifetime in which you are a male.” Though I felt no need to apply any belief or certainty to what she said, it did seem to fit: As a guy, maybe I am a rookie. And there are deep familiar echoes of the feminine inside me—perhaps from some unknown past.
I could be some version of transsexual—when we finally figure out what that means. In New York City, I know men less feminine than me who have undergone sex reassignment and live as women. And I know men less masculine than I am who don’t get mistaken for being gay.
I’m not particularly proud—and I try not to be ashamed—of my femininity. I understand the politically vocal “pride” others rouse to combat shame and mistreatment. At the same time it makes no sense, and it can get pretty annoying, to trumpet pride for something you can’t help being—male, female, bisexual, a racial minority, whatever—as though it were an achievement. I look forward to a society—and with same-sex marriage and widening transgender recognition and rights, it seems to be fast approaching—in which having gay pride is as frivolous as taking pride in being 5’3”. I look forward equally to the retirement of the word “tolerance,” a word that reeks of condescension and entitlement (as in, “We have decided to tolerate your nonconformity to us.”).
And if my gentle friend Thomas is reading this, I’d like to change the answer I gave him: Yes, I’m a Rainbow Man, but not the kind anyone has in mind. There doesn’t seem to be a group for me yet. The thing about rainbows is they’re there and they’re not. Meanwhile, their holographic rings contain more possibilities than we can imagine. Word around our meditation community, for example, is that Thomas has a female partner for the first time and is engaged to be married. If so, I welcome him to my part of the rainbow.
Douglas Goetsch is the author of Your Whole Life, The Job of Being Everybody, and other volumes of poetry. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Scholar, Best American Poetry, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. An innovative writing teacher who has taught at colleges, conferences, MFA programs, and in group workshops in his New York City apartment, Goetsch is also the editor of Jane Street Press.