In order to improve my qualitative research methods, I am part of a seminar this semester entitled Gender, Sexuality and the Body. In order to both generate experiential data to work with and personal means by which to experience the theorists we will be discussing, Dr. Coventry open endedly asked us to come to class the first day with a written personal identity narrative. We were told that it should narrate our relationship with our gender, sexuality and body, and to keep it short (a task that proved substantially difficult and ended up having large ramifications on the product).

Over the course of this semester, this entry will be rewritten through the lense of theorists like Butler, Foucault, Lacan, and as Coventry might say, other “vauge and abstract French philosophers.” So without any other dressing or taste correction, here is my approximation of the past.

An Approximate Narrative

Carden Memorial School, 1990. The halls of that conservative Christian private school were eerily quiet. Not dark, but emotionally empty, filled only with the occasional line of quiet students shuffling off to their next age-appropriate, regulated and approved, childhood experience. The unacknowledged anxiety was only amplified by the watchful gaze of teachers at the end of each line, the silence only torn apart by the deafening sound of starched uniforms in movement.

Carden was supposed to be my haven. As a boy, socially variant by nature and by my parent’s unintentional design, public school had presented challenges that I didn’t have the means by which to navigate, save the elaborate choreography of dodging punches inside taunting circles. But where public school lacked an institutional structure that would have saved me from the creativity of others, Carden imposed a structure at the expense of my own.

Amidst this bleached environment, however, was Jeff Lee. Jeff Lee was the most popular boy in my 5th grade class. His dark wave of conservatively fashionable hair left me in awe. I wanted to be his friend. Everyone wanted to be his friend. Where I was a chubby, gender-variant, social misfit, Jeff was athletic, assured, and surrounded by a constant circle of admirers. Jeff Lee was my first crush. Jeff was who I wish I could be. Jeff Lee was the personification of the expectations placed on any young boy, creating an overwhelming draw despite my latent sexuality.

I can’t look back to that time without making a comparison to the present. That anxiously excitable child has been replaced with an equally extreme adult who has never the less found strength in his exceptions, and contexts in which his peculiarities can reside. The past appears as a series of snapshots in my mind, a slow thematized progression into a tepid maturation. But on a day to day basis, my governing self seems far more arbitrary.

Adulthood has granted me the tools with which I am able to claim my free-agency. I can make choices about my gender, sexuality and body. And I do. My sense of self is no longer constrained by an external system of which I have no understanding. The choreography of the playground has transformed into a social dance in which my self-concept is now presented, re-presented, and ultimately affected.

In some ways, those past memories are resistant to this type of examination. They were encoded with a childhood comprehension, and when subjected to the scrutiny of adult reasoning, their qualitative logic begins to break down. Yet they are reliant on this adult knowledge as well.

I write with the knowledge that when reverse engineering my past, my memories have no integrity. Despite what I remember, I didn’t have a crush on Jeff Lee. I was not physically mature enough to have the emotions I lend to this narrative. My crush on Jeff is an example of the constant and elaborate revisionary practices of an over-active mind, socialized in a highly conforming community.

So who was I? I was a mildly gender variant child with ADHD, who was frequently depressed and would protest an hour of institutionalized mockery labeled as “Physical Education” by walking slowly around the perimeter of the field, making sure my required three laps consumed the entire period. On the other hand, I might have been the middle of middle children, desperate for attention, desperate to be involved with the activities of his older siblings, his sisters, not understanding the gender based prohibitions. Or perhaps I was an angry child with diagnosable Oppositional Defiant Disorder and Conduct Disorder, who would abruptly leave school at the drop of an insult, grabbing my book bag and walking the five miles home, only to be hunted down by the automobiles of Carden Memorial School.

All of these variations are constructed with information I did not have, and as such, hold little integrity. When I strip back the contents of my adult assumptions, and brush away the remaining conjectural debris, all I am left with is this: In 1990, I was going to a private school, and there was a boy named Jeff Lee.

You know, his name might have been Jake.