A Faithful Tribute to a Man
By Nora Vision aka Jonathan Mourant
The thing about masculinity is that it’s always been a performance for me.
A set of clothes, patterns of speech, types of posture, all collected over time to disguise what was already there.
To hide myself as I was under what I thought I was supposed to be.
I think I was twelve when I began to consciously observe. I would watch the boys in my class - the way they moved their hands, rigid and fixed in space, to see if I could replicate them.
I could, of course.
Movement, even when reflexive, is learned. For someone like me, desperate to address the displacement I felt, copying gestures came naturally.
Eventually, without even recognizing it, my body became a state of the art recreation.
Soon enough, it was more than the body. I studied their interests - sports, cars, shoes. I regurgitated information from one boy to another. I acted as though I understood what they meant, so they would never notice that I was not like them. I took their language and made it my own. I cheered for their teams. I modified my being, with careful adjustment, to be like them.
A faithful tribute to Man.
But it wasn’t anything more than a costume. A layer of protective clothing. A disguise that allowed me to infiltrate the boys club.
A cloak of visibility.
A mask fabricated out of the need to fit in and a feigned interest in football.
Perhaps contrary to expectation, nobody ever told me I needed to hide. I was never called a sissy, a fag, a queer (at least not to my face).
I almost wish someone had. That someone would have named the feeling for me so I could know in universal terms what I was. I think if someone had just told me I needed to be more manly, I could have had someone to say no to. Something to rebel against instead of rebelling against myself.
I don’t know if I was ever even particularly good at it - the whole closeted thing. I know that I didn’t convince anyone of anything, save for maybe a few oblivious family members.
In fact, in name and identity, I don’t know that I ever was “in the closet” - I didn’t pretend. I wasn’t hiding away, refusing to acknowledge the self-evident queerness.
By the time people felt comfortable enough just to ask me what my sexuality was, I was seventeen. I felt comfortable telling them - trusted friends that they were to ask me such a question - I was bisexual. Looking back, straightness was never an option if I was ever to feel peace.
Plus, I seemed to have no delusions that anyone might see me that way.
But a man….surely I was still a man. What else would I be?
I was twenty-two when I began using “nonbinary” as an identifier of my gender. I approached it logically, the way so many queer youth seem to in this century.
“Well, I don’t believe gender is innate in anyone, therefore why should I hold onto the gender I never chose for myself?”
Is this dysphoria? Is this aesthetic? Is this transness? I don’t fucking know!
But it was freedom - for the first time in my life, I didn’t feel trapped in a category I had never asked for. There were no standards of expressions I felt bound to, other than the handful of epic queers in the Winnipeg arts-adjacent community. Still, it was only in words that I felt the safety and confidence to express myself.
I accepted myself as “non-binary” - a title. An idea. Before I was able to accept or even look at the parts of my being that were not binary.
The way my hands move when no one is watching.
My voice when I forget I can be heard.
The aspects of being too complex to even name.
I first performed in drag when I was twenty-three. I wore a tiny dress, a leather jacket, combat boots, and a Hedwig-esque wig which I promptly lost while performing “Mr. Brightside”.
It wasn’t high femme.
But it was another first - the first time in my life I felt genuinely safe and comfortable in expressing myself as I was. Physically. Aesthetically. Honestly.
It wasn’t because I was dressed as a “woman”, but because I was dressed as me. It was a costume, but it was one I had chosen, picked out for myself to demonstrate a side of me I had not yet shown to the world. And sometimes the greatest thing about a costume is the ability to take it off when you’re done
