I Met My Lesbian Lover at Cowboy Bible Camp

Photograph of Quince Mountain by Alli.

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This is an excerpt from Believer Beware: First-Person Dispatches From the Margins of Faith. To hear Quince Mountain do a reading of this piece, please go to KillingtheBuddha.com.

I came of age as a God-fearing, transgendered horse wrangler, which is not as surprising as it may sound; we gender-variant folk often fling ourselves toward some semi-hostile home-away-from-home. I was only 7 or 8 when I heard the tale of my grandmother’s Chicago Tribune co-worker, Nancy Hunt, who published her autobiography, Mirror Image, the year I was born. My grandmother told me how Nancy, a male-to-female transsexual formerly known as Ridgely Hunt, had joined the military to assert her masculinity. It was a gender trial undertaken with the belief that Uncle Sam, if anyone, might transform this feminine creature into a man.

I understand the principle. I remember my welding teacher towering over me as I placed my project—a lap joint: two pieces of metal stock welded one over the other—in his custom-made double vice. I watched the big man grin sadistically while using a foot pedal to increase pressure until the thick metal snapped in two. If the metal broke along one of the welded seams, I’d fail. If the metal broke elsewhere, I could proudly place the useless remnants of my project in the pocket of my leather apron and move on to the next assignment.

I think of young Private Hunt like that, shipping off to Korea with steely resolve, not knowing if he would manage to hold together his masculine image long enough to die at the hands of enemy soldiers—in which case he would have passed his gender trial. His mother could proudly bury the remnants of his body under an American flag before she moved on to her next project.

I returned to my grandparents’ copy of Mirror Image often, trying to soak up some of Nancy’s transgender savvy. Her company offered great comfort, even when sought only in the solitude of their cold downstairs bathroom while my grandparents were busy. And the bathroom seemed an appropriate as well as a discreet place to contemplate this tattered scripture. My grandmother claimed to have been one of the first women to use the facilities at the Tribune Tower alongside Nancy, asserting proudly that she just did not understand the inordinate discomfort felt by her coworkers. I often sat on the toilet for the greater part of the afternoon, emerging only when I heard my grandfather roll up the garage door.

It’s difficult to say how conscious I was of my identification with Nancy Hunt. I remember feeling sympathy for her even while I was confident I would grow into an honorable if often-unshaven cowboy. I did not anticipate the betrayal that took place when I hit the double digits: not only the realization that I wouldn’t get the rawhide man’s body I had thought was my physical inheritance, but also an awareness of the widespread expectation that a feminine social orientation would come just as easily to me as to any tomboy-grown-older. Transgender theorist Jack Halberstam describes adolescence as the shrinking of her world. For me, that shrinking happened when my grandfather caught me reading Mirror Image in the bathroom and returned it to the shelf where it would collect dust for the next decade.

Junior high school was, of course, hellacious. “Are you a boy or a girl?” kids would ask, sometimes jeering, sometimes in earnest. Try as I might to achieve a passable femininity—shaving my legs, wearing hoop earrings, keeping my hair long, clasping a useless bra across my flat chest —I knew as well as they did that I was a failure. The harder I tried the more obvious it became.

It wasn’t until Christian camp that I found not only a way to trade my bike for a horse, but also a modicum of acceptance. It was my megachurch-going mother’s idea to send me at age 10 to the Wisconsin Northwoods for a summer of frolicking and fundamentalist indoctrination.