I'm From Driftwood

“I’m From Sugarwood Canyon”

Story by Perriwinkle Pussycat; artwork by featured artist, Brian Ness

See more artwork by IFD Featured Artists and their respective stories here!

True stories by gay people from all over, indeed. Emphasis on the “from all over.” This story comes from the imaginative, creative mind of regular IFD art contributor, Brian Ness. He produces a quarterly zine called Kitten Punch, about the goings-on at a theme park/commune for sissies, called Dandyland.

*Story transcript available under the cut

-(Share your story with us!)

Read More

“I’m From Watford City, ND”

Story by Kelley Halvorson; Artwork by featured artist, Brian Ness

*Be on the lookout for work by an IFD featured artist every Sunday!

It was 1976, the year I won a Soprano spot in the North Dakota State Honors Choir. A small-town gal, I was thrilled to hang out with other music geeks for 3 days. The festival was fabulous — I learned to sing gospel music for the first time, and to improvise. I met so many great people that I found I didn’t even miss my sweet boyfriend, whom I left back home.

But what really mattered — what really, really mattered — was that every day, for about 8 hours, I was able to stand directly across from you — this gorgeous brunette in the Alto section — about 6 feet tall, and your legs were about 5 feet of it.

In 1976, girls didn’t have visible muscles, but you had actual muscle definition in her shoulders and arms! I asked a fellow soprano who you were — she said you were a gifted athlete from Dickinson. Rumor has it, she said, that you were a lesbian! I couldn’t stop staring–you often looked back. I blushed several times a day, lost track of the song measures and conductor’s direction. And looked again, heart pounding.

No, I never talked to you. I enjoyed you every day, felt tingling in all my 16-year-old private places, fantasized — then went home to my boyfriend. I forgot your name.

But I never forgot how I felt. I came out 2 years later. I thank you so much for my awakening. And gospel music still makes my heart pound, thirty years later.

-(Share your story with us!)

“I’m From San Francisco, CA”

Story by Kate W.; Artwork by featured artist, Brian Ness

*Be on the lookout for work by an IFD featured artist every Sunday!

I find my femininity sometimes, lurking, like the sticky film left when melted ice cream is too-quickly mopped up with an unclean sponge. It’s cloying but almost ignorable. It’ll emerge while I’m showering. I’ll think of how silky my legs used to be when I shaved them. I’ll pick up a razor, contemplate it, turn to my shampoo, rinse, towel off and don boxers. Sometimes the skirts that still hang in my closet call to me but their persuasiveness has waned as I’ve aged. I’ve noticed that each skirt and dress, while she employs different words, sometimes different languages, always speaks with my mother’s voice.

While others have doubts, I have no doubt that I am a woman. The “sir”s I receive are usually a pleasant reminder of gender’s visual landscape – a vista with so many crevices and hillocks that it is impossible to describe its variation. For simplicity’s sake things have been narrowed down to two options – boy and girl. I am not a huge fan of bowing to the power of simplicity.

The “pink or blue” binary first irked me when preschool taught me “pink is for girls.” I responded with a war against the color. Pink dresses and shoes moldered in my closet. I despised pink for the implication that I would like something simply because it was mandated by my sex.

I still dislike pink on principle. But I find, off-principle I enjoy pink’s many layers. I am thoroughly appalled by manufactured pinks but the natural ones, the ones you see walking around every day the pinks that fade into the browns of skin tones, the pinks that emerge from the green of flower stems or from between new leaves on trees, those pinks are life and renewal. Pink is not for girls.

While I have a soft spot for purple, green was and remains my favorite color. I coveted G.I. Joes and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I wanted desperately to be a tomboy. I didn’t know how. I told my mother about my aspiration. I was handed a pink dress and a bow. My mother forbade both G.I. Joes and Ninja Turtles.

Not without irony, a late 1960’s era feminist, Mom also forbade Barbie. Her Barbie-Ban was a welcome excuse when I went, without dolls, to friends’ houses. My friends took pity on my Barbielessness. They all kept one Ken and a huge collection of Barbies. Each time they received a “Barbie and Ken” set, they would strip the Ken doll, keep the clothes, and give the naked Ken to me. I knew that I was supposed to find Ken attractive, and with his muscular shoulders and lack of penis, how could I object?

Part of me wanted to love Ken, but part of me wanted to be him, after all, in my friends closets, he had so many girls.

-(Share your story with us!)

“I’m From Irvington, NY”

Story by Hugh Ryan; artwork by featured artist, Brian Ness

*Be on the lookout for work by an IFD featured artist every Sunday!

At this distance, it’s hard to know whether the comment on my mid-year report card – “Hugh is the best-loved child in the second grade” – was wishful thinking on my teacher’s part, or an attempt to willfully deceive my parents. Rarely are effeminate nerdlings the best loved individuals in any social circle, but in the world of public education, it can be safely said that we were at the bottom of the heap, along with the poor kids who had patched, off-brand clothing, and the fat ones who smelled funny. Woe betide the child who was all three.

I was skinny and unathletic, with a bowl cut given to me monthly in my kitchen by my Aunt Eileen. This was the mid-80s, when Ocean Pacific had become – inexplicably – a big brand in the Northeast. I wore shirts that changed color when touched, and said things like “Surf Legend: Gateway to the Sun.” I don’t think I’d ever willingly gone to the ocean. Certainly, I wouldn’t have gotten in it. It was cold and filled with squishy things that might have touched me. All I wanted in life were a crew-cut with a rat tail, a Nintendo, and my own collection of My Little Ponies.

In our small suburban school there were fifteen students to a class, four classes to a year. By the second grade, everyone was a known entity. Like the contestants on a reality TV show, we were all branded early: spaz, hottie, the kid who eats his own boogers, nerd. I met my eventual prom date – Tanya Zheng – in kindergarten. She lived four blocks from my house. Kyle Pogue, one of my (few) second-grade frenemies, lived far away – about a five minute walk. His mother was the town librarian; his father the 8th grade social studies teacher. I was too young to name it claustrophobic, but the world felt constrained to an incredibly limited number of possibilities, which was both lulling and deadening. I dreamt of far-away places like boarding school and New York City and Narnia. Each seemed as impossible as the next, though New York was but a short train ride away. 

Thus I was the natural market for that dorkiest of games: Dungeons & Dragons. Or as my Grandmother called it, the work of the Devil. For a child with few friends and an active imagination, it provided something to do with the long hours between school and sleep. It created a simulacrum of friends and adventure, without any of the messy reality. An asocial life. I didn’t play the game – that would have required other people – but I read the books and daydreamed. Sometimes I used tracing paper to copy the cover art, so I could color it in with those markers that smelled nothing at all like the fruits they were named after. Blue mango was my favorite, though I wouldn’t know what a mango was until college.

In the third grade something changed. I’d like to say it was me, but aside from suddenly comprehending my multiplication tables (thanks Dad), I was largely the same. Usually, fads came and went like distant airplanes: visible from where I stood, but with no direct effect on my life. Occasionally, I would come to one late and get caught in the turbulence of its wake (for example: the time an unfortunate confluence in the popularity of roller skating to music and my favorite Beach Boy’s song Kokomo led to an embarrassing moment of accidental karaoke, when the sound system cut out and my caterwauling soprano was heard throughout the school gym). For a brief period in the third grade, however, I was not just on the plane, I was the pilot. One day I woke up, marbles were out, and Dungeons & Dragons was in. By extension, so was I.

At first, it didn’t really penetrate. Yes; suddenly other boys were reading the Dungeon Master’s Guide and – occasionally – talking to me on the playground. But I lived so far off in my dreams that they were like cobwebs through which I drifted, mostly unaware. Until, that is, the day Rory Smith invited me over to his house.

Rory-motherfucking-Smith.

Rory’s house had an indoor pool and a room with wallpaper that looked like a forest. There was a rumor going around the jungle gym that his family owned a private island. He was elementary school royalty. He had sandy brown hair, but we called it blond, because this was the 80s, and blondes were in.

I still remember the sting of chlorine in my nose as we sat on the tiled poolroom floor and tried to figure out the rules by which a level 13 thief and a level 10 warrior would fight a Shambling Mound. The piles of paper and mounting frustration were indicators that this fad would be short-lived. We quickly gave up on playing the game, but I was gloriously happy nonetheless. I would remain so for approximately eighteen hours.

In the way of small children and people with autism, it never occurred to me that others might embrace something I loved with a different motivation. My heart was pure; I loved all things magical. It seemed only natural that others would realize the coolness of elves and wizards. But the popular boys came to D&D with an ulterior motive, which I would only discover upon being allowed to eat lunch with them at the back of the classroom, the day after Rory Smith deigned me a person worth inviting over.

Our class was shaped like an inverted lower-case letter d. Our desks and cubbies were all within the bulbous circle. The long skinny part jutted out to the back of the room. It held a few tables, and a counter where a profusion of small, doomed animals spent their short, tortured existences. The floors were gray linoleum and the walls were covered with ugly things in primary colors, designed to explain the letters of the alphabet and the capitals of states.

There were four of us at the table: Rory, Jimmy, Kyle and me. Three princes of the playground with their thoroughly modern names, and one simple peasant boy, whose name evoked moth-balled old English men, and who was mere seconds away from being ejected from the kingdom forever.

Even as I sat down, I could tell something was going on. Their heads were down and their shoulders were tense. They were trying so hard to act normal that they’d forgotten to talk. Rory had something on his lap, which he eventually passed to Jimmy, which he in turn passed to Kyle, who – after a moment’s hesitation, a spasmodic glance around the room, and a slight chuckle – handed it to me.

It was a paperback D&D book. Spine cracked with much usage, the pages opened naturally to an illustration of an athletic young man, bare-chested, with a knife in one hand, facing off against an equally topless half-woman, half-snake creature. I didn’t get why they were being so secretive. I stared at it, trying to understand, and the boys cracked up laughing.

“What?” I asked. Had I missed something? Was there a message written in number two pencil somewhere in the picture? Some bit of marginalia I should respond to? “Do you want to come over tonight, Check Yes or No?”

“Shhh!” They responded as one. Kyle spasmed another look around, and after deciding it was safe, leaned in and pointed.

“Boobs!” The word shot from his mouth as though he had Tourette’s Syndrome. When I seemed unfazed by this revelation, he elaborated.

“She has boobs!” he said. “She’s hot.”

I can’t remember what I responded, due to the crushing feeling of panic that overwhelmed me seconds after the words exited my mouth. Suffice it to say, it was something like “So’s he.”

This idea, or some variation upon it, had lived in my brain for as long as I could remember. Like an ember, it needed only to be exposed to air to burst in to flame. Or should I say, shame. In the split second when it crossed the threshold between thought and word, I realized this was the sort of terrible revelation that I should take to my (preferably early) grave.

Prior to this, it had merely been an unexpressed idea, something I might at any moment mention. The sky is blue. I love G. I. Joe. That boy is hot. Now it was a secret, something I would spend the next eight years trying – unsuccessfully – to hide. It was a slip of the tongue that would no doubt be forgotten the next time someone accidentally shit themselves during recess, but the stain on my reputation would linger forever. Despite my no doubt brilliant attempt at a cover-up (“I mean, she’s hot. Look over there!”), I was now officially queer.

More importantly, they – all of them, Kyle and Rory and Jimmy; the other students and my teachers and parents – were officially not queer. Amongst the many apparent ways in which I was different, my green eyes and my skinny arms; my skill at flipping Garbage Pail Kids and my inability to do much else on the playground; I now understood that this was something I did not share with my peers. The thought had never occurred to me. Though I must have known on some instinctive level, my conscious mind had never processed that liking boys meant being different. If I thought of it at all, it was like having a favorite color: I might like pink and you might like green, but that didn’t make us separate species. Except in elementary school, it did.

Dungeons and Dragons remained popular for another month or two, probably until someone managed to steal actual pornography from their father or older brother. I remained popular for the length of time it took Rory, Jimmy and Kyle to spread the story around school, or approximately an afternoon.

-(Share your story with us!)

I’m From Painesville, OH

Story by Robert P.; Artwork by Featured Artist Brian Ness

*Be on the lookout for work by an IFD Featured Artist every Sunday!

In the second grade …

Chris, a new kid at school, didn’t have many friends. Neither did I. We first met on the swings at recess. I don’t know why he talked to me; most boys didn’t. I don’t remember what we talked about, but day after day, he kept hanging around. I couldn’t understand why he liked me. Maybe, I thought, it was because he really liked the swings, or maybe it was because I knew songs with cuss words in them. Or maybe it was just because I was the only kid who would talk back to him. Whatever the reason, we became fast ‘recess buddies.’ I had no complaints, even though we didn’t have much in common; I had a friend to talk, laugh, and play with me. Every day, we would start recess by the swings and move on to some new adventure. One day, our friendship came to a fast and decisive close.

We were playing with what we called ‘helicopters’ — the seeds of a maple tree that spin like helicopters’ blades as they fall. It was a windy day, and some of the helicopters were taking flight and traveling further than we could have imagined before dropping to the ground. As Chris and I witnessed this phenomenon, we took this as a sort of challenge and spent the remainder of that day’s recess attempting to make maple helicopters fly from one end of the playground to the other. Just when the bell rang to signal the end of recess and call us inside, we decided to release one more helicopter on the wind. We watched intently to see where it would land, and to our amazement, it only flew higher. The helicopter was carried up over the trees and into the sky, where it disappeared in the distance. This was by far the most exciting recess adventure we’d ever had, and we were both jumping up and down and screaming for joy. The excitement overwhelmed me, and I grabbed Chris by the shoulders and embraced him. I felt something in that moment, something I had perhaps never felt before. It was a powerful connection in which I truly felt a sense of common experience and emotion. My attraction to him was so strong that I held him to me for as long as I could. When I pulled away, it was clear to me from the look on his face that he did not feel the same way. We were in northeast Ohio, and at our age, boys just did not hug each other like that. In his eyes I saw bewilderment tinged with fright. He could not understand what had just happened or what that hug meant to me. That was the last recess we ever spent together.

-(Share your story with us!)