Over the Top Read online

  First, there was winter. My brother and his bounding straight-boy energy, which was like nails on a chalkboard to my gay self, would be at soccer or baseball tournaments. I would be in the living room, watching the figure skaters in the Olympics. (Or, if it was a non-Olympic year, it would be one of the six events of the ISU Grand Prix competition leading up to nationals, then worlds, or maybe a pro tournament with Katarina Witt and Kristi Yamaguchi.) I was not a casual watcher of figure skating—any Olympic sport that was on TV on a Saturday or Sunday would dominate my world. Tennis. Volleyball. Track and field. Synchronized swimming. Diving. Moguls. Aerials. Long jumping. Speed skating. Honey. Any major network sports special that wasn’t heteronormative—I was here for it.

  But I was here for nothing more than the two sports that really blew my gay brain and made me into the adult that I am today: figure skating and gymnastics. Of these two sports, I watched every moment available to me. Like my life depended on it. All of them. Nancy Kerrigan, who lost her gold with no fall, which was controversial, but those judges had had it with the Harding and Kerrigan American figure-skating scandal, so Oksana Baiul won out in ’94. And don’t even get me started on the fact that 1992 was the last year they had winter and summer games in the same year, and then in 1992 the International Olympic Committee decided it would be cuter if they alternated them in two-year cycles, which is why Michelle Kwan, the love of my life, is an Olympic silver medalist and bronze medalist instead of a two-time Olympic gold medalist, because she was untouchable in 1996 and 2000. No one could even think about touching her. But talk about accepting what is with grace and dignity and being the queen you are, Michelle Kwan.

  Anyway, I’d watch the Olympics and make two cinnamon and brown sugar Pop-Tarts in the toaster, eat two more of them cold while the other two were toasting, then wash that down with a few powdered donuts. After the figure skating was over, I’d go on the trampoline and if it wasn’t too snowy I’d do my own gymnastics routines, pretending that I was winning world championships—and if I messed up, it was always okay, because that was really just the short program, and I still had the long to create an epic comeback story, which also meant that we had some beautiful interstitial vignettes to film before we went back inside to finish the last of the family-size pack of cinnamon brown sugar Pop-Tarts (or maybe s’mores—those were great too) and the last few Diet Pepsis from the cube. (That’s two twelve-packs on top of each other to make a twenty-four-pack.)

  The 1992 Olympics were in Barcelona, but I felt like I was right there with them. It was the first time the US women’s gymnastics team had ever won a medal—we took bronze—and I was so proud of my girls. I loved their g-force-proof hair spray fringes and how athletic they were. I wanted to be their best friends, to do flips with them, to be a fierce gymnast just like them. I would stand up and wave to the walls and pretend like I just stuck my landing, imitating their grace and their poise. If Shannon Miller could fill the void that Kim Zmeskal left in the women’s individual all-around and come through as the American hero that she was with that silver medal (which should have been gold, even though that gold medalist was fierce too; Shan-Shan got screwed, much like Beyoncé got screwed to Adele in the 2017 Grammys)—if Shannon could do that, then I too could be graceful on my little midwestern cornfield.

  Maybe most of all, I loved the little montages where you saw where they came from, their origin stories. A little song would play over footage of the gymnast with her family in her hometown, and she’d say something like, “My mom and I drive three hours to and back from the gym every day, and even though people overlook and underestimate me, I know if I work hard I can make it.” (Which is literally Shannon Miller’s story, because all the world was focused on Kim Zmeskal since she was the first American woman to win the individual all-around at the World Gymnastics Championships, in 1991, so everyone thought she was going to come in ’92 and be the next Mary Lou Retton, but—pressure!—Shannon Miller stepped in and came out with silver in the individual all-around, even though she was an under-the-radar baby diva with a paper-towel-roll fringe to boot.)

  Those little vignettes gave my life purpose. So did Michelle Kwan. So did Kim Zmeskal. So did Shannon Miller. These stories were my motivation toward ferocity.

  And compared to the truly titillating content on MTV at the time, figure skating was just good wholesome fun. Don’t get me wrong, I loved sneaking a peek at the softcore that was early ’90s music videos, but that took major effort, even when my parents weren’t around and I was left with my babysitter, Natalya. She had an unfortunately boxy perm and very high-waisted pants (usually salmon-colored, but sometimes seafoam green) and a terrible attitude. She made a hamburger casserole, though, that was so good it would make your dead grandma cry. Natalya was always getting in the way when I was trying to watch Madonna videos. “You can’t watch this!” she’d snap, turning it off. It made me feel so ashamed—I just wanted to hump a pillow to “Erotica” in peace! I wanted to chill to a Madonna music video marathon and let her hot backup dancers soothe me. Life was hard enough without Natalya’s heteronormativity.

  But the Olympics—those everyone could agree on. I watched them with my family, because we were the kind of family who thought that was cool. Which I think is great! More families should watch the Olympics together. To me, those are core American family values: Cheering on a corrupt institutional body that’s super problematic with money and opportunity but we all pretend like it’s an equal playing field and celebrate it—what’s more American than that?

  I tried to do gymnastics, or what we would now call power tumbling, because they took it one step further to make it less “gay” to the boys, so at the end of the tumble track would be a basketball hoop where other boys would do flips and dunk, making it less threatening to their straightness. All the other boys were actually really good at tumbling, but I wasn’t. I had no core strength, so I just used my momentum to hurtle my big gay body through space. Also, I couldn’t go backward because I was deathly afraid. But I never gave up.

  Another thing I learned from these vignettes was that there was always an extremely involved parent putting all their hopes and dreams and failures into the sparkly leotard promises of their child’s talent and nonstop training. My mom was an account executive in the advertising section at the local newspaper. She didn’t have time to ride my back all the way to the Olympics. I would have gotten myself there with my work ethic and passion and drive—I was sure of it. I could have been Adam Rippon if somebody had only made the time. If I could go back in time, I’d yell at my mom to stop her newspaper advertising excellence, find a damn ice-skating rink, and cheerfully drive me the two hours to Springfield, Illinois, or the two and a half hours to St. Louis five mornings a week like a normal parent. Am I asking for so much here? I could have been an expressive-arm-movements-on-the-ice prodigy, or at the very least an ice dancer. Instead, I had to wait until I was a grown woman to get an apartment in New York City two blocks away from an ice-skating rink so I could live in relentless pursuit of my Olympic truth. (But also, Mom, thanks so much for giving me clothes and feeding me and raising me, I love you so much! Also, how much fun was that when we watched Bewitched and The Mary Tyler Moore Show together? Nick at Nite used to be really good.)

  I tried Boy Scouts, and that didn’t go much better. I finally convinced my mom to let me quit after a hideous experience at paper airplane assembly. All the boys lined up and one at a time had to throw their airplanes across an emptied-out cafeteria. With one limp wrist, at exactly ninety degrees to the ground, a pointed toe, and all the good intentions in the world, I released my paper airplane—only for it to land behind me. All the other Boy Scouts laughed. “Give it another two weeks!” my mom said, but I was done. I didn’t have anything to talk to them about! It didn’t help that I was extremely knowledgeable about the Miss America and Miss Universe organizations and was ready, willing, and able to talk ad nauseam about it to anyone who entered a three-cubic-foot radius of me. Whether
you were a six-year-old boy or a seventy-year-old woman, I was ready to gab. Is that so wrong?

  So I’d stay home, watching my girls. I’d embrace a gorgeous Tower of Pizza moment (my favorite hometown restaurant ever, the second of which would be El Rancherito—pepperoni, sausage, and onion pizza, with so much white cheese dip) and watch a great episode of Dateline with Stone Phillips and Jane Pauley, or some episodes of The Nanny, and every so often there would be a Bowflex commercial and I’d gaze, mesmerized, at the shape of the man’s chest in the ad. I wanted to run him down. Why am I so soft? I wondered. Why doesn’t my body look like that? When am I gonna get my abdominals? Why don’t I get to nuzzle my face into some gorgeous pecs? And then I’d put the thought away for a while and eat some more. That was a perfect winter day.

  Then there was the perfect spring day, which would happen at my grandparents’ condo in Florida, where my mom would whisk me away for our birthdays, which fall a day apart, and I would play hooky from school for a couple days. In the mornings my grandma would make me the most voluptuous breakfast: Cinnamon Toast Crunch with a cup of Café Français, this delicious instant coffee she had, and two cinnamon rolls from a tin container of four, with ooey-gooey realness in the middle, and I’d eat the beginning of the roll and when I got to the center I’d scrape this ball of cinnamon sugar out with my fork—truly, it was everything. Except for when I needed a third, and my grandma would fat-shame me by saying two was enough, and I’d say, “Anne! I need a third cinnamon roll!” I went through them quickly. We’d have to go to the grocery store to hunt them down, and they became harder and harder to find. After this one year, they had just fully disappeared from the grocery store, and we had to switch to Pillsbury, which really wasn’t the same. If anyone at Sara Lee is reading this and knows how I can get those back, please hit a bitch up. Let’s get some research and development going and bring back a classic. Reboots are in these days.

  In addition to the Cinnamon Toast Crunch and instant coffee and cinnamon rolls, there were four pieces of bacon and a little cup of orange juice, and eventually my grandpa would lumber out in his bathrobe and eat eight full pieces of whole wheat toast with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter while we watched The Today Show.

  Those spring days were perfect, too, because they gave me six whole days out of Quincy, a desperately needed respite from the constant feeling of not fitting in and being bullied and always having to fight to have a little safety. I didn’t have the vocabulary then to explain just how much every day was a battle. Being removed from that battle and plopped next to a gorgeous tranquil beach with your witty grandmother who took no shit and loved to chat was really essential to baby Jack’s sanity—and while I loved my brothers, it gave me six whole days with my mom where I didn’t have to compete for her attention from the rest of my family or her demanding work duties. My mom was my moon, my sun, and my stars. It meant so much to me to be away from everything with her. When I started to realize it was coming to an end, I felt a bottomless pit grow wider within me that only buying a gaggle of guinea pigs would eventually fill. (But it took at least six years of convincing my mom to even get those guinea pigs—it didn’t happen until 1999. The last one, Teddy, died the same day Ronald Reagan died in 2004. His brothers and sisters were named Sugar, Emma, and Nut-Nut. His parents were named Nilly and Nut the First.)

  It all made me want to control what I could, which brings me to fall, when I would make little stations for myself that took me through my day: an hour sitting at the kitchen table watching TV and eating dry Cap’n Crunch, then an hour playing tennis with myself against the garage door, then an hour watching TV on the couch while I ate more dry Cap’n Crunch, then an hour choreographing some gorgeous carpet figure skating, then an hour calling the six people on my phone list to walk around and chat for an hour, then an hour practicing the violin, which always made my dog Ginny groan from a guttural place in her belly, then laboriously get up and wander outside to get away from the noise. And every year we would make hot apple cider—real apple cider from the apple orchards outside Quincy, and I’d get to play with the kittens and eat honeycomb and eventually I probably would throw a temper tantrum because I wanted to go rollerblading instead.

  But the most perfect, absolutely flaw-free kind of day could only happen in the summertime. And it was in the summer that I figured out, for the first time, exactly who I wanted to be.

  In Quincy, Illinois, if you were of a certain group of upper-middle-class people, your children would spend their summers at Quincy Country Club. And let me tell you, it was gorgeous.

  First of all, there were the pool ladies. In every country club watering hole across America there’s a group of glamorous pool moms. Early on Saturday mornings, all the most fabulous matriarchs would parade out of the changing room, nab the best recliner chairs, layer on the tanning oil, and gossip their faces off. While the rest of the little boys were peeing in the water, shooting their Nerf water guns, or playing some capture the flag game, you could find me gossiping with a group of the most notorious pool ladies. We would talk manis and pedis, whether so-and-so had ever tried a certain face mask, or if they had heard that another lady had left her husband for her female secretary. They helped foster my love of beauty by reading magazines with me and talking shit about everyone else’s hair.

  I loved a pool chair moment, but the real action took place over by the cabanas. That’s where they served the jumbo pretzels, chicken fingers, nacho cheese, and ranch dressing and marinara sauce and ketchup with some mayonnaise on it—that’s a quadruple-threat dipping sauce situation, but who’s counting?—and ice cream sandwiches. But more importantly, that’s where the cabana girls hung out.

  That’s where so many of my formative memories come from—in the shaded part of a cabana where I would concession-stand like there was no tomorrow. The cabana was attended to by these teenage models with names like Stacey and Nicole. (I also wished that I had been named Stacey or Nicole, but it wasn’t in the cards.) They wore uniforms that included these little white pillbox hats, and underneath them, they wore their hair in these cute little low-slung buns and permed ponytail configurations. This was, like, 1991, so all the boys had this long, shaggy hair tucked behind their ears. So messy and gross. And here these fabulous girls were, parading around with style. I was obsessed with that silhouette, with that little chic hat and low-slung bun. I was all about it. They were young and beautiful and they owned that pool deck. I wanted to grow out my hair, walk fiercely with trays, and be the cabana girl boss of my dreams.

  One day during a gossip sesh, I asked the pool ladies what you call the people who do hair and they told me that if you wanted to do it all—the hair, the makeup, the nails, and even give massages—you had to be a cosmetologist.

  So later that summer when my dad’s incredibly gorgeous, super-masc best friend asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said without any hesitation at all, “I want to be a cabana girl—or a cosmetologist.” I can still see the shocked look on his handsome, stubbly face as he asked me what a four-year-old could possibly know about cosmetology. I calmly replied that it was someone who perms hair, does nails, or even gives massages, because cosmetologists get to do it all—just like one of the fabulous pool ladies had told me.

  He blinked slowly, three times. In that moment, he’d helped me realize my dreams. That was the first time I remember seriously considering becoming a hairdresser.

  It fit for me: I didn’t know it then, but to anyone’s untrained eye, I was clearly extremely gay. And soon enough, I’d see for myself that growing up feminine in a rural midwestern town was . . . difficult. In a gorgeous way. When I say “gorgeous,” that’s really a coping mechanism for me to make light of the fact that it wasn’t gorgeous. That same man told me weeks later that I couldn’t sit back in the cabana and help anymore. We couldn’t have a little boy wearing the girls’ pillbox hats and pretending to be a waitress, could we?

  But I’ve always been in touch with my feminine side. I
loved to carry purses with checkbooks, pens, ChapStick, and little baby things for my Cabbage Patch doll. I wanted to be a modern mom on the go just like my mom. I wanted to wear dresses, rock heals, play with makeup. But I could also be into the WWF wrestling my brothers were obsessed with. I could wear boy clothes. I could be boyish when necessary, but identifying male and female in the same day is something that has always been possible for me. The binary always has felt like something that I didn’t quite fit in to. As a kid this presented itself in a lot ways. I had two cousins, Anastasia and Stanislava—obviously those aren’t their real names, but remember we are concealing people’s identities using glamorous Russian pseudonyms—and when we were little, we would play with evening gowns. I loved everything about beauty pageants. I guess I have always felt gender queer, either both of the genders or somewhere in the middle. I just never knew that had a name that I could identify with. I was really quick to put on heels and a gorgeous puffy-shouldered evening gown. That really terrified my father. I remember him walking in and me being torn out of this poufy black gown, and then there was a new rule that I wasn’t allowed to play dress-up with my cousins. But my aunt Ludmila wasn’t really about that, so we’d sneakily play with whatever we wanted, though it sometimes took an hour and a half to get out of it and hide the glitter before I went back home to my dad’s house.

  Here’s what I imagine was going through my dad’s brain: A boy playing with makeup? Impossible. A boy wants to carry a purse? Not my son! Find a boy playing dress-up in an evening gown? Tear it off his body. A boy playing with Barbies? Panic. This cannot be my son’s life. I will shake, scare, and rattle it out of him. This has to be a phase. I knew my dad loved me, but he was a young father doing his best to come to terms with what was, for him, a scary reality.