Fridae

"A sissy is a male who is not a man and not likely to become one."
- Frank Rose in his essay Sissyhood Is Powerful

Much to my initial disappointment, I was born Alvin Tan.

If I had had my way, I would rather be Janet Jackson.

Like many gay men, I was in my childhood what many homophobes and cruel schoolchildren would term a sissy.

Like many gay men, I spent a sizable portion of my life trying to deny and curb my prissy tendencies because of the pressure I found myself subjected to.

But unlike some gay men, I finally came into terms with my inner fairy and accepted myself for who I am.

It all began when I was but a child. Ever the creative and imaginative type, I discovered that I would rather memorize the lines to The Sound of Music, play with my cut-out paper dolls and tie my mother's Hermes scarf Jackie O style over my head than participate in rough-and-tough games of the cowboys massacre Indians sort favored by my heterosexual cohorts.

When I was of the school-going age, I hung out with a femme gaggle of effeminate boys distinguished by our trail of perfume, the perpetual flutter of our hands and the sway of our dislocated hips as we walk along the school corridors ogling at the handsome school prefect and the delectable school jock.

Indeed, it is with fond memories and misty eyes that I look back upon my turn as the crotchety nymph in a now forgotten school musical when I skipped onstage half blind with mascara and dumb with lipstick. Fortunately, being "butch" was not one of my O-level subjects. Otherwise, I would have been flunked out of school faster than Victoria Beckham's slide into pop mediocrity.

Unfortunately, being a sissy has its downsides too. My clique and I would often find ourselves a sure target for mean jocks and other narrow-minded kids. On a regular basis, we would find our maidenly modesty affronted with taunts of the "fairies", "faggots" or "homos" variety (and those were the kinder terms).

As a result, many of us as we grew older would resort to measures (sometimes drastic) to deny or curb our fey selves. It is with much shame and head-shaking that I confess to skirt-chasing (collective gasp heard throughout the homoverse) during my junior college days to deflect suspicions about my sexuality. One of my former classmates, SK, even resorted to listening to Aerosmith, Metallica and Iron Maiden (instead of his favourite divas Diana Ross and Patti Labelle) in a bid to find masculine credibility.

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While it may appear that I am merely drawing from my personal experience, it would seem fair to say that a considerable percentage of the gay population have been considered sissies at one point or another in their lives. And it would seem equally fair to say that almost all of them go on to deny their sissyhood later on in their lives (unless they happen to make a living as drag queens or are terribly well-adjusted and brave sistahs who just don't give a damn).

Today, more and more gay men are turning to the gym (and steroids) to transform their once nubile body shapes into bulging masses of muscles and going to great pains to create the fa�ade of heterosexuality (including getting themselves trophy girlfriends with hilarious boobs or worse, shopping at bargain basements). In fact, I have a theory that the amount of muscles a gym bunny packs on is in direct proportion to the amount of taunts he received during his adolescence but that's another story altogether.

Then there are other gay men such as WK who claim that they were never sissies in the first place. In the case of WK, the validity of his claim remains highly dubious - for while he is indeed muscle-bound and swaggers around the gym like John Wayne after a particularly trying ride on his horse, I have caught him taking ladylike sips of his Long Island through a skinny straw at the club and fanning himself with a broken wrist at the water cooler the day the air-conditioning at the gym broke down.

Perhaps the reason why gay men are so desperate to dissociate themselves from being sissies and to distance themselves from other sissies stems back to the need to prove the name-calling kids back in school wrong. Or perhaps it is due to the need to develop protective colouring in order to blend in with a straight society that frowns upon men who act like women (or women who act like men).

Whatever the case may be, society in general should not be accorded the full blame for why more and more gay men are rejecting the sissy in them. Gay culture has a sizeable role to play as well. How can one claim otherwise when the gay community itself worships and deifies homosexuals who represent the same ideals such as masculinity, toughness and macho-ness extolled by heterosexual society?

So until the day gay culture is able to celebrate sissyhood as a crucial aspect of the gay man's personality and recognize its importance as a stage of development in many a gay men, sissies will never find acceptance within even our own community.

And that to me seems to be a terrible waste. For what could be more appealing than a sensitive man who can do a mean impersonation of Julie Andrews, cook up a storm, coordinate your wardrobe and style your hair all at the same time?