A few nights ago, as I was going out of the door to the gym, one of the muscle guys was coming in. We made eye contact, and he said, "Hey Bro." (pronounced Brah) Now; I am accustomed to being invisible to these guys, and the joint insecurity of everyone who works out there can make any gym feel like a fairly hostile place, so it was nice to be acknowledged. I am smart enough to know he was using his own vocabulary to acknowledge that he's seen me there four - or more - nights per week, that I've worked very hard, and that I've gotten results. Like, check it out, I've lost - or converted - the equivalent weight of an average three foot tall toddler. So, Muscle Guy was just being nice. Why was I slightly repulsed at the idea of being called Bro? Haven't I been working on my physique? Haven't I wanted to feel more like I belonged in that gym? Haven't I been preaching - and living - being physically active, and eating well, and burning cortisol, and taxing your muscles? Haven't I spent the past year being obsessed with form, consistency, and muscle gain? Doesn't that sound a little like a jock to you?
Here's the thing: I own a mirror. I know what my body looks like. I know there's hair on my face, chest, arms, and legs. I know I have a muddy but distinctly baritone voice. No one would mistake me "on sight" for being weak, or unmanly. Outwardly, Bro isn't that inept an epithet for someone who looks like I look. And other than the fact that I use words like epithet, it's not the worst, or most ill fitting name that's been applied to me: by far! Still, I've never identified myself that way.
In school, certainly throughout grade school, I was overweight, not good at sports, and good in music, and art. I also cried when I was angry, excluded, or shamed by the teachers, which happened often because I have some combination of ADHD and Dyslexia which my teachers could not even begin to handle. As a result of all of those factors, I got labeled a Sissy, and being gay, it kind of fit. If by fit you mean, I knew I was different, and different was something I did not want to be. I was terribly bullied in school, excluded from all but a few groups, and mercilessly tittered at every time I opened by mouth to speak up in class. When I got old enough, and big enough, not to be bullied and excluded, I excluded myself. By high school I had learned to focus all my time and energy into people and groups who didn't seem to care that I was a different, because they were different in their own way too. So, the reasons I don't readily identify myself with Bro are, lets be honest here, pretty damn obvious.
BUT, I like being a guy, I like other guys, OK I really like them! I don't have any gender dysphoria, or uncertainty, and any gender curiosity I had was literally played out of me before I reached puberty. I was a theater, dance, and music major, in college. Opportunities to explore gender and cross dress were plentiful, if not in character, then when I studied costume design, make-up, and hair. If I wanted to be anything other than a guy, even temporarily, I would have found a way. After college, I studied floral design, planned events and weddings, and now I'm an informed and educate semi-professional cook and full-time caregiver to my in-laws. I like writing, working with fabric, interior design, and I obsessively collect paint swatches. I'd like one day to spend a year learning millinery, or how to make shoes. I also enjoy cutting down trees, growing things in the dirt, power tools, (what's a sewing machine if not a power tool?) and building things with metal and wood. I could be content living in the city, or building my own log cabin in the woods. And yes, I enjoy weight training and being physically active. It gets me out of my head, and the mental clarity - not to mention strength and flexibility - I get from working out make all those other things possible.
It's interesting how narrowly we can define ourselves, even unintentionally, around gender. I thought, being a guy who does lots on non-traditional guy stuff, I was somehow above all that, when in truth, I am just as mired in it as the guys who's interests never ventured outside of the guy approved activities. I thought, perhaps wrongly, that by fully embracing being a Sissy I could protect myself from not measuring up to being a full on Bro. I thought, very wrongly, those two things had to be mutually exclusive. And, I turned my own fears into distain and used it to separate myself from the very narrow definition our society has for a 'real man,' by looking down on men who did fit the stereotypes.
So even if I feel more like, Muscle Bro-Peep, maybe it's time I owned it. Or, better yet, claimed it! I may be a gay man, but the sexual and romantic aspects aside, I am most definitely a man. I live with and am pair-bonded to another man. I am now legally bonded to that man, and I spend, probably too much of my time with that man. Counting my pets, and in-laws, my household is overwhelmingly populated by males. I'm so Bro-oriented I should go around fist bumping and grunting at strangers in the street.
But in all seriousness, maybe it's time I let myself off the hook for not fitting into the suffocating little box modern western society has for men, because it's no place to live. Yes there are aspects of my interests and personality which fall on the feminine side of the gender continuum, but there are just as many that land smack on the far masculine side too. And maybe we all need to let more men out of their boxes, because the world is definitely missing out on everything men could be - by which I don't mean more feminine - because we don't allow them to be genuinely who they are.
Finally, the next time I see Muscle Guy, maybe I should let him know that I appreciate him noticing my efforts and simply say, "hey Bro."
