Alpha & Beta
By Jonathan Mourant aka Nora Vision
I am moving on from looking at myself with sadness.
It’s always been easy to see what’s missing. The pieces of myself I neglected, I squirreled away to protect after they were derided, mocked, sometimes even a quizzical look, a question that seeks to silence instead of inquire can be enough to never open oneself up to interrogation.
But when I block others from interrogation, I’m left to do it on my own.
I won’t commit to not judging myself.
I’m a critic of media and thought, and what am I but a fleshy combination of the two?
There will never be a day where I don’t look myself in the mirror and judge who I see.
(I’m just too damn good at it to quit)
But I’m shifting the lens. Changing the perspective. Recalibrating the expected results.
I am seeing what I am, what I hold. The abundance of self I have to offer.
The world of integrity and genuine nonsense that exudes from my pores.
Flowing through my blood is oxygen and contradiction.
White blood cells trained to combat the flu, the plague, and opinion.
My skin is not armor but it is a uniform
Conformity never to another, but pledged to the multiplicity in my being. I am hundreds. I am one in a million. I am a million to one.
I am mercury and venus
I am Lady gaga and Alexander the Great Elon Musk Candy Darling God The alpha the Beta
I am nothing
I am an empty vessel to be inserted with love + wonder + awe
(and cock)
+ Beauty + choice + judgement
There is no freedom without expectation
In contrast, humanity flourishes
In truth, subjectivity is obvious
In me, there is light
I can finally see it now
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A Faithful Tribute to a Man
By Jonathan Mourant
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