Gender-bending for Halloween

Gender-bending for Halloween

“Girls will be boys and boys will be girls
It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world…”
– Lola, The Kinks

Born in 1952, I grew up in what was then a small southern Ontario municipality called Georgetown, an epicenter, I decided later, of what has been dubbed the Southern Ontario Gothic:

 

Southern Ontario Gothic – Wikipedia

In those distant and receding days, so much of daily life was menacing, arbitrary, and left unsaid.

Unmarried men were categorized as “bachelors,” a designation with sterling connotations, at least among men like my father, while spouseless women, generally pitied and disparaged, were simply dubbed “spinsters” or “old maids.” Sometimes the folks so labelled had a “roommate” of the same gender and category, although local unwed residents usually lived with and looked after aging parents. My father had several “bachelor” friends – deemed extremely fortunate to have escaped the shackles of matrimony – whom he held up as male role models for me to admire and eventually to emulate. The church choirmaster and glee club organizer, Ken Harrison, was one, but my dad’s favorite was a work companion, Percy Gilbert, whom Dad envied like no other. Percy would occasionally accompany us on our ritually doomed fishing expeditions and on murkily motivated trips to the “big city,” where he would chortle and gulp, his balding pate beaded in tiny bubbles of glistening sweat, as my father maligned their boss, Mr. Friet – whom I always imagined sizzling in Crisco – referring to him as a “fairy nice boy” because he eschewed profanity and expressed discontent by uttering the bizarre phrase ”bugger damn.”

Dad was a member of the Georgetown Glee Club and would prowl our family home, crooning tunes from upcoming musical performances, such as “ Clancy Lowered the Boom”:

Oh that Clancy (Boom! Boom!)
Oh that Clancy (Boom! Boom!)
Whenever they got his Irish up
Clancy lowered the boom…

And “Consider Yourself”:

Consider yourself at home
Consider yourself one of the family
We’ve taken to you so strong
It’s clear we’re going to get along…

Each year also featured a minstrel show, and Dad would don blackface in the company of his fellow glee clubbers and perform in such masterpieces as were dredged from the playbooks of the genre and included immortal tunes like “Carry Me Back to Old Virginie,” Way Down Upon the Swanee River,” and “My Old Kentucky Home.”

Minstrel show – Wikipedia

Minstrel Songs | Popular Songs of the Day | Musical Styles | Articles and Essays | The Library of Congress Celebrates the Songs of America | Digital Collections | Library of Congress

Blackface: The Birth of An American Stereotype | National Museum of African American History and Culture

 

A lead performer in these enthusiastically received extravaganzas was the town’s only black resident, Tom Darcy, who by general consensus, was the best singer in the entire community; gifted with a mellifluous tenor voice, Mr. Darcy uplifted our church choir from the prosaic to the sublime, rendering the congregation misty-eyed with his stirring rendition of “How Great Thou Art.”

Oh Lord, my God
When I, in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder
Thy power throughout the universe displayed
Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee
How great Thou art, how great Thou art…

How did Mr. Darcy feel about playing a lead role in the local minstrel shows, performing among neighbours in blackface, who shambled about the stage in the roles of Brudder Bones, Brudder Tambo, and Mr. Interlocutor?

The question never seemed to cross the minds of the other performers or members of the audience.

Incidentally, the roles of women in these annual dramaturgical masterworks were almost always played by men in drag, my father included.

For children growing up in such a seething cauldron, fueled by unmentionable racial oppression and ironclad sexual repression, the defining moment for disguising, role-playing, and gender-bending came at Halloween.

Indeed, every October 31, for one momentous evening, my sister and I traded genders: I became a woman and my sister, a man.

My sister dressed up as a “hobo,” inspired by Freddy the Freeloader, a character created by an esteemed comedian of the day, Red Skelton:

Freddie the Freeloader – Red Skelton’s famous Hobo clown

Meanwhile, I went all in as a “gal,” sporting one of my mom’s smartest dresses and completing the transformation with crushed newspaper breasts plumped into a borrowed bra…aspiring to become what the Playtex ads of the day called “a full-figure girl.”

The lipstick; and the eye liner; and the rouge; and the nail polish… the intoxicating, sparkling nail polish…
My mother meticulously applied and removed it all.

And my father, an unrepentant serial misogynist, didn’t utter a peep.

I only wanted to be a woman for a few hours every Halloween, returning to the realm of boyhood without a backward glance once the trick or treating parenthesis came to its inevitable end.

Given the prevailing norms of the day, why were my parents – and the community at large – so accepting of my Halloween disguising? And what motivated my desire to express my inner woman, if only for those brief shining moments?

Was I ritually exploring some nebulous, temporary waystation along the unmarked gender- identity continuum?

Or was the costume donned and the role adopted as an unconscious tribute to my mother, an act of love and an expression of solidarity for a woman so sorely oppressed?

How would parents from the conventional “liberal” society of today react to such proclivities?
***
As an adult, I performed in and directed numerous plays and taught theatre for umpteen years.

Whenever the boys of my classes or productions chose or were assigned the role of a woman, they invariably produced a caricature, “hamming up” the part to the unadulterated glee of their audiences and classmates alike. In stark contrast, female student actors invariably played their adopted male roles “straight,” with subtlety, nuance, and attention to character. What is it about a man playing the role of a woman that generates such hilarity born of discomfort?

And why did I “play my mom straight,” if not out of profound affection emanating from a wellspring of sympathy and respect?

P.S.
At around three years of age, our son Daniel began to tell every adult he met that he was a girl.

When cloyingly well meaning strangers or genial family friends or relatives would make fatuous comments such as “What a fine fella!” or “ How’s my boy?”, Daniel would categorically bark, “I’m a girl.” This phase lasted at least six months before gently melting away like a morning snowfall in early spring.
Never to return.
And for us as parents, if this self-conception had remained intact it would have been just fine too.

Take a Walk on the Wild Side
-Lou Reed
Holly came from Miami, F.L.A.
Hitch-hiked her way across the U.S.A.
Plucked her eyebrows on the way
Shaved her legs and then he was a she
… She says, “Hey, babe
Take a walk on the wild side”
Said, “Hey, honey
Take a walk on the wild side”

Author’s Note

I’ve written a book of creative non-fiction titled My Time with You Has Been Short but Very Funny, recently published and now on the market. The book is based on stories that I told over the years as a writer/ broadcaster and host on CBC radio based in Quebec City, Canada.

The book is available in English and in French via my website. The purchase links are at the bottom of the home page.
Here is more about the French version:

Le temps passé avec vous fut bref mais tordant/Commander la version française de mon livre – Robert McBryde

 

“Gender-bending for Halloween” is an excerpt from a new book of vignettes I’m cooking up, titled It’s All in the Condiments. It is being posted today to wish you all a Happy Halloween!

If you have comments about these posts, I’d love to hear from you. You can contact me via Facebook or my website, and I’ll get back to you asap. That’s a promise!

Happy reading! 😊
Your friend,
Robert

Robert McBryde – robertmcbrydeauthor.com