[Cin]

Well I fish, I enjoy a good steak every now and again and I love my video games although as I age I notice I don’t put the time in like I used to. But the love is still there. I talk plenty, it just might not be subjects that hold anyone’s interest. The operative word is really hold because you might initially be interested, but I can talk about the same thing for hours examining it from every conceivable angle, reviewing it, using every possible scenario until you either want to cry or stick something sharp in MY eye.

If you are pressed for time or even just bore easily you might want to skip the long version and jump down to the end.

LONG VERSION

A little background to explain the difficulty in bonding with the handy butch.

I could look at a pool pump until the end of time and I really wouldn’t be any closer to understanding what I might do to make it pump if it didn’t want to. I would love a pool though.

I wanted to take our AC apart and run water through it to clean out any possible mold cause it’s coming on 3 years old and mold just happens sometimes. My wife talked me out of it because she believes I will cut myself on something sharp. I can understand her reluctance. I’m sure she still remembers when I put together a TV stand for her step- mother. I did something wrong, not sure what, except that it was uncorrectable (at least by me.) Apparently once screwed in, using these kinds of screws on this particular place on the stand, you couldn’t remove the screws. Because of that I was not able to attach the shelf and the doors. So she really did just have a stand. I mean I’m sure someone with the know how could have just pulled out the old power tools and found a way to attach the shelf and doors. But I only had a manual screwdriver and zero ability.

I put together one of those big white cabinets once. My gf at the time made sure to explain to me that this project would be mine alone as she had no aptitude for this kind of thing. I cheerfully assured her this butch had it covered. I laid out the directions and began what turned into a 5-hour marathon. At the end, after discovering that I had some how put the shelves on upside down or backwards or something and the cans would just slide off the shelf, my exasperated “I wouldn’t know a Philips screwdriver from a carburetor” femme took over and fixed the shelves so our food wouldn’t slide to the floor when we stocked the cabinet.

After purchasing a crib my very pregnant ex and I discovered there are a lot of pieces in that box. More tiny springs and screws and oddly shaped paraphernalia than you could ever imagine. I laid out the crib pieces and began studying the directions while my partner examined said pieces. Before I ever finished reading the directions she had most of the crib put together. She didn’t even need me to lift the heavy parts. She put the whole thing together and never once looked at the directions. She has an understanding of how things fit that I couldn’t hope to duplicate. I had a butch friend who lived in the apartment below us who kept trying to show me how to fix my car every time it would break down. My partner would hang around with my friend’s wife while watching peripherally trying to hear what was being explained. Finally I told my friend you need to tell this stuff to B, she will be able to do something with the information. For me it’s just so much gibberish.

One of my sister’s exes, M., is like me in some ways. She doesn’t naturally understand how to fix the car or put stuff together. I remember staying up all night with her one Christmas eve putting together my niece’s bike. We finally got the thing together just before sunrise. I’m sure the beers didn’t help, but the truth is neither of us has a natural aptitude for this stuff. But M. had something I don’t. A more practical intelligence. I’m smart sure, but in a very useless way. I am a good thinker. And really you’d be surprised how unnecessary it is to actually be good at that. You can easily get by being an okay thinker. Being good at it is mostly a handicap really. Anyway M.’s strength was in her ability to persevere. She would find out what was wrong with her car and then get books out of the library (the olden days before the internet put it all at our finger tips) and figure out how to fix it. It might take her hours, even days but she would get it done. I only recently learned how I too can do this. Thing is I don’t always want to. But I can. There isn’t anything I can’t read about and figure out how to do given enough time and margin for error. I mean if I was trying to defuse a bomb, we all explode, that’s a given. But normal stuff that is forgiving and flexible I can eventually figure it out. But that’s not always fun for me. So I may or may not do it. However, just knowing I can has given me a bit of confidence that I never had before.

Another of my sister’s exes, T, was a butch of a different type. He could fix anything. He was an electrician and very much a dude. He teased me about my inability to fix anything, my choices in swimwear and often told me what butches did or did not do (kind of like my mother did about what girls did or did not do). He ended up transitioning and now lectures on what men do or don’t do.

END OF LONG VERSION

My straight male friends, especially K., but all of them really, are like me. They don’t fix their own cars for fun or shoot pheasant and duck out of the sky. They like to spend a Saturday afternoon walking around Harvard Square talking and looking in bookstores or maybe taking in the Museum of Fine Arts or the Aquarium or a Science Museum. They are politically active. They enjoy getting together for a barbecue or a day at the beach. Maybe meeting after work to take in a Red Sox game at Fenway. Funny thing so do my straight female friends. Not much difference in what the guys like to do from what the girls like to do. I don’t see them much anymore since moving to Montreal, but they all had one thing in common. They were easy in themselves. The French have a saying here, Bien Dans Sa Peau, comfortable in your skin. That would define my straight friends. There was an ease of gender for them. There wasn’t the underlying frenetic apprehension surrounding gender presentation that I found present in many of my butch buddies. But then there didn’t have to be did there? They fit easily, their place in the world was solid. They walked through their life without suffering much anxiety surrounding their gender. So while I find them enjoyable as friends, I also enjoy my hyper gender aware butch buds. They may be a tad annoying with their crap about my v-neck t-shirt being too feminine or their merciless teasing at my insistence on wearing a woman’s bathing suit, but they have walked in my shoes and know my heart, they know something about what my life has been. We don’t share the same life, but we understand what it means to live differently.

HB mentioned American style butch femme. I wonder if it is cultural to a degree. There may be more emphasis on gender in general in the US than there is say in Europe. I’m not sure, never been. But it is possible. Certainly the people I’ve had as friends who were from European countries as opposed to the US or South and Central American countries seemed less gender concerned. There interests were more generic and less gender specific. But I don’t know if that was just my personal experience. But if it is true it might account for the more gender post traumatic stress symptoms found in American butches and femmes. Gender is so much more of a thing for everyone in America.

I do know that I have more in common with my straight male and female friends who like to go to museums or walk around Old Montreal, Harvard Square or Faneuil Hall than I do my butch friends who like to fix cars and walk around Home Depot. I also have butch and femme friends who find visiting museums enjoyable as well. The difference for me is that while I would have no use for straight male friends who only want to drink beer, fix cars, shoot cans and take in a grand prix or straight female friends who spend the day baking, shopping, doing their nails and talking about their men, I would be able to be friends with the butch/femme versions. They have something else for me even when we don’t share common interests. Without common interests straight people just don’t have anything for me. Not so with butches and femmes. They inherently have something in common with me. A shared life experience. Not a shared life. Not the same life, but a similar interaction has occurred between them and the world, at least enough so that they get where I have been because they have occupied similar space.

Still the truth of my life is that my best friends have been straight men or women. Can’t really explain it. It just is.