Sissy

I've been called a lot of names in my life. Being gay, it's just part of the job. “Ugly” was the first name I remember being called, in kindergarten, by a girl named Tina who had blonde hair and blue eyes and pink cheeks. She was considered pretty. I remember that, too. I, with brown hair and green eyes, was ugly. I didn't argue. These were things we worldly kindergarteners just knew.

Kids that age don't have a broad enough vocabulary, so “ugly” didn't necessarily mean I wasn't aesthetically pleasing. It just meant Tina (and her friends, of course) didn't like me. I didn't like her, either. She was “mean,” which was the only word I could come up with at the time to convey my dislike for her. These days, she’d be a bitch or a twat.

I didn’t get called a sissy until later. The summer I turned seven, so between second and third grade. I was in Alabama visiting my father’s side of the family because that’s what poor kids did during their summer vacations—they visited family. Sleepaway camp was expensive and Disneyworld was out of the question. My older cousin Randall (he was early teens at that point; like, thirteen or fourteen) spat it at me because I wasn’t interested in the car he and his older brother were fixing up. “You a sissy, then?” he asked. He didn’t wait for an answer. He didn’t really need one since he’d already decided I was.

I mean, I was gay. I didn’t have the vocabulary for it, but I knew I didn’t like girls. I also somehow understood that for a boy to not like girls was not a good thing for some people, so I knew to keep it to myself.

I knew what a sissy was, and I knew I wasn’t one. Sissies acted like girls and their voices were soft and when they sat for the class photo on picture day, they sat like the girls sat, with their hands in their laps and their knees together. I wasn’t a sissy. There was a boy in my first and second grade classes named Jon who was a sissy. I decidedly was not one, even though I knew I wasn’t like other boys and I’d told my mother, when I was five years old, that I wanted to marry Hoss Cartwright. But I liked boy things: I liked to play in the dirt and I liked to shoot BB guns, and I had cap guns and a cowboy holster, and I watched Bonanza reruns, and Star Trek, and I’d seen Star Wars. I wasn’t a sissy. I wasn’t.

As queer kids, our first bullies tend to be family members. I’ve already mentioned my cousin Randall, but there was also my cousin Chris. He was larger than I was and always mad about something. His father, my uncle Joe, was a drunk and his mom was clinically depressed so that was probably most of his problems. I didn’t know that then, though. I just know that he looked like a weasel and he was mean and he’d want to fight me for no reason. One time he knocked me out of a tree and chased me around the corner of our grandparents’ house where I ran into the clothesline pole and cracked my head open. (I actually just remembered this happened the day of my grandfather’s funeral.) I got him back the following summer when I convinced him the chocolate Ex-Lax I’d found was a Hershey’s bar and he snatched it from me and ate the whole thing. Fuck him.

Aunts and uncles, too. And their word of choice was always “sissy.” They meant “faggot,” but they said “sissy” because they wanted me to believe they did it out of love for me. I’d rather they’d called me a faggot. The way the word “sissy” came out like a hiss. Like snakes. I hated it. I still hate it. And I hate that I called that boy Jon a sissy when we were in second grade together, too.

My point—and I do have one—is that if you are still using the word “sissy” unironically in 2022, you should stop. It isn’t sparing anyone’s feelings. So when your homophobic (and, no doubt, racist and antisemitic) grandmother calls someone a sissy you have to check her right there and then. Even if she gives you money at the end of every month to cover all the bills your paycheck doesn’t cover. Tell her to just say “faggot,” because that’s what she means. You know who gets a pass with the word? Gay people, and we’re only using it when we’re singing along to “Sissy That Walk.”

My aunt June (whose daughter was, coincidentally, a closeted lesbian) would always say “that way.” Example: “Is he… that way?” she would ask me, usually about some guy I was hanging out with. Or she’d be telling me about someone I should know and she’d say “He’s, you know… that way.” I was always like “June, just say gay. Fuck.” She’d be aghast, too. Like gay was the worst thing you could call someone.

Just say “gay,” people. I actually prefer “queer.”

Queer covers a lot of ground, in my opinion. Yes, I am attracted to men, but I have also never really felt I belonged anywhere. Stranger in a strange land vibes. Queer covers that feeling, too. And I’ve never minded being called a queer. Like that time in sixth grade when one of the bullies at school asked me “Does your mom know you’re a queer?” and I replied (and I still, to this day, have no idea where these words came from), “No, but your dad does.” He kicked my ass, but not before everyone within earshot laughed at my comeback. I was more upset that he kicked my ass, not that he called me a queer. I’d have been more pissed if he called me a sissy.

These days, I acknowledge one sissy, and that is Sissy Spacek

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