Drum Story

I own an etched copper doumbek hand drum, an instrument traditionally used in belly dance. I bought it for myself as a graduation present when I finished my Bachelor’s degree eight years ago. I knew very little about hand drums at the time, and nothing about Middle Eastern percussion (and nothing about belly dance), but it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen, and when I held it, it felt like it was designed for my hands. Leaving the store, that felt like a very, very good decision.

 

About a year later, though, I decided that buying a drum had been a mistake. Everyone I knew that played hand drums were (white) hippie lesbians. Of course, they all played djembes, which are very different from doumbeks, and djembes are originally from West Africa anyway, and not white hippie lesbian-land, but at the time, none of that mattered to me. I was someone who had been born female, who people saw as a masculine woman (and who people assumed was a hippie lesbian), but who was actually a guy! And I was beginning a gender transition — asking people to change my name and to refer to me as “he” rather than “she” — and so I wanted to separate myself from hippie lesbians as much as possible. A hand drum, I thought, would not help with that. I needed an instrument that would affirm who I was.

 

So I sold it back to the music shop. And with the money, I bought a harmonica. But, it turned out, THAT was the real mistake. As soon as I sold it back, my heart ached for that doumbek drum. I was able to get enough money together to buy it back from the shop in just a few weeks, before someone else bought it, and it traveled with me to the three states I moved to after that, and I got to play it in several drum circles. Unfortunately, though, a few years back, because the drum counted as “luggage” on one of my flights somewhere, I decided it was a good idea to save on space and packed three shirts inside of it. This led to the head being stretched out, rendering it unplayable. I’ve taken it to several music shops since then. But I haven’t been able to find anyone who has ever worked on a doumbek, and no one has known how to replace the head (it is not pre-framed). So I’ve been lugging this broken drum around with me for four years.

 

I also managed to acquire a small hand-held steel drum from Trinidad. The drumsticks for this drum were recently stolen (they were in my backpack that a thief stole from my car), and it is very out of tune, and I have no idea how to play it.

 

So I got to thinking the other day that maybe I was a drum person at one time, but maybe that time has passed now, since I haven’t played either of these instruments in so long and obviously haven’t taken the care to get them fixed. In fact, I haven’t even really looked at them much at all.

 

I got to thinking about how I used to own a guitar and how, even though I only managed to learn two or three chords, how much I liked owning it. (I’m a big folk music enthusiast, and also a poet, two things guitars come in handy for. Plus, it’s good to have one around for camping trips with people, because someone’s bound to know how to play). So I thought – maybe it’s time to trade in these two drums – and to get another acoustic guitar.

 

I packed up my drums and went into a music shop this morning. My plan was to initially get an estimate for repair and tuning, and if the cost was more expensive than the drums themselves (which I assumed it would be), then to ask about trade-in possibilities and potentially walk out with a cheap acoustic guitar. But a weird thing happened. As I was standing there talking to the cashier guy, who had never seen a drum like my doumbek before in his life, and who was stalling for time for his manager to get back, I suddenly felt very defensive. He told me that if they would be able to repair it (it turned out they weren’t equipped to repair it – his manager let us know that just a few minutes later), it would take ten business days. I found myself saying, “ten business days?! that’s a long time!” not wanting to surrender my instrument for so long. It might become lost or something in that span of time.  Something might happen to it!   After the manager came, he told me that no, they would not be able to repair it, after all (they aren’t equipped to work on doumbeks there), and he sent me away with the name of a potential repair shop sixty miles away.

 

I walked out of the shop and realized I was tapping out an alternating rhythm on the rim, base, and broken head on my way to my car like I used to back before it was broken. But my drum was still broken. And I did not have a guitar in my hand. And yet, I felt — victorious. I felt — happy. Like I had successfully accomplished some narrow escape.  I would like a guitar, and I would like to learn how to play. And maybe I will get one. But now I know it will not happen if it means having to give up being a “doumbek person,” whatever that might mean.

Whole, Not Trying: Identity and Giving Up Simplicity

I have been trying for as long as I can remember.
First (for a long time), I tried to be a girl. I tried to stay out of trouble. I tried to be smart so my teachers would like me. I got older, and I tried to be a straight woman. Then, I tried to be a queer woman. I tried to be a soft butch, a stone butch, an androgynous (but visible female) dyke. I tried to care about the future, but couldn’t imagine it.
I decided to transition. I grew a beard. I had chest surgery. The trying didn’t stop.
I tried to be different kinds of men: Tried to be the gruff, straight man. Tried to be mild-mannered and reserved. Tried to be sensible. Tried calling myself a gay man. Tried being feminine-acting and visibly gay.
And I tried to be a transgender man, the way other trans guys described that experience: I tried packing. I tried a strap-on. I tried peeing standing up, I tried feeling like there was something wrong with my body down south, I tried everything they said, thinking that these guys, if anyone, would know the secret to helping me feel whole.

Our cultural mythology is that trying really hard at something will ultimately pay off.
But this past month or so, I’ve stumbled across wholeness, and I’ve realized that maybe trying is actually the problem.

Trying to be simple or to simplify ourselves can also be a problem, even though everyone’s always saying it’s something we should all strive for in our lives.
For example, let’s take my favorite ice cream – moose tracks. Now, moose tracks ice cream involves a bunch of stuff: peanut butter, chocolate, fudge, so on and so forth. But let’s say it decided take advice that people are always saying to each other and “stop being so complicated.” Okay. So then what do we have? We have vanilla ice cream. Or, we have peanut butter. Or, we have chocolate. And we have a very confused bowl of what used to be moose tracks ice cream, wondering why it feels broken and incomplete. Moose tracks ice cream is not itself unless it is a composite, a compilation of many things.

It might be bad to compare myself to ice cream, but I think it’s a good comparison for what’s been going on in my life and identity. Just like how moose tracks ice cream is not fudge sauce, I’m not a gay man. Just like how it isn’t mashed-up peanut butter cups, I’m not like other FTMs. There are little pieces of a lot of things that make up who I am, and when I try to leave out some of them (to simplify and just be a few of them) then I don’t feel like myself.

Yes, I’m a transgender man. I was labeled female at birth and I always felt weird about my body and I went on hormone replacement therapy six years ago and grew a beard, and have never doubted that decision. I had chest surgery four years ago and have never once looked back. And I go by male pronouns in my every day life, and at work, and at the store, and so on, and I like it that way. But I also like my body below the belt just the way it is, the way it’s always been. And I like having sex with men in the way that “straight people” do. I don’t like it when partners use words for male body parts to describe my junk. To me, what I have is very different from what my male partners have, and I like it that way. Having facial hair and a flat chest is a core part of my inner peace, but I don’t wish I had a penis. This is part of the reason I don’t really identify as a gay man, even though I’m into men — because when it comes down to it, my relationship to my body is different than a gay man’s relationship to his own(including a trans gay guy’s). The power I feel related to my body derives in part from the fact that it is a crazy centaur hodge-podge. If I was given the choice to have a “normal” men’s body, I wouldn’t.

I was never really a dyke, and I’m not really a gay man. I consider myself queer across the board, though. In one sense, that means I’m a guy who likes musicals and modern dance – which I am. But I also like to drive around in my pickup truck, and drink whiskey, and follow baseball, and go camping – and this feels equally “queer.” In junior high, I was seen as a girl surrounded by girls who wanted to watch Titanic and do their makeup… not sit in an aluminum boat pulling up trout at 7 a.m., and I cannot erase two decades of that.
I was butch way before I was femme.
And I’m both of these but also really neither.

And maybe all of this is contradictory and maybe it doesn’t make a lot of sense. But this is where peace lives for me, whether or not it makes sense – in the space between, in between everything and somehow, nothing. “Simplifying” doesn’t work. Pretending doesn’t work. And trying really doesn’t work. What works – or what works for now, anyway – is taking time to consciously honor the simultaneous circus of everything happening all at once. For me, this really is something sacred; this really adds up to something whole.

Worship at the Temple: A Stranger and A Hotel Room

Sure, we grow up hearing “your body is a temple,” but for many of us that phrase is akin to “everyone is beautiful.” People say it, but they are words in theory, not in lived practice. Those who weigh more than society thinks we should, those who are not considered “able bodied,” those whose penises are “too small,” those who have survived breast cancer and whose bodies tell that story, those who are survivors of sexual and/or physical assault, those who are struggling with sexual orientation, those who are transgender and whose bodies have betrayed us since middle school – for some of us in these categories and for many more, our bodies can feel closer to prisons than to temples. Sex for us may not be a frolick. It may be a walk through shame and apology, for even as “everyone is beautiful” floats through our minds as a sweet abstraction, we still beg for the lights to be turned off, and afterwards, we move as quickly as we can to the bathroom, hoping to get the door closed before we start to cry.

My relationship to my own body has been a strange one. I am transgender, of course, the kind known in common parlance as “born as a girl, now a guy”, which naturally leads to certain assumptions: People assume I’m interested in women, for one thing (“why would you transition if you’re interested in men?” people have asked. “Why not just stay a girl?”) and also that I should hate every “female” part of my anatomy. And I’ve spent the last twelve years or so questioning what attraction even means. I’ve wondered: if I think someone is nice, funny, cute – but if sex does not once cross my mind – is that still attraction? Is it attraction if someone says “I’ll sleep with you, I guess, even though you don’t have a penis?” These questions may sound ridiculous – the kinds of questions twelve-year-olds ask – but I always thought the things people said about actual attraction somehow did not apply to me. I’ve always been outside easy exchanges and supposed instinct, subtly encouraged to “make do,” to not ask for too much.

I’m writing this now, though, knowing it wasn’t just because I’m trans. It’s also because desire is something buried, something secret, until we choose to share it. No one can speak to us about thirsting our want unless they actually know what it is we want. And though we may carry it within ourselves for years and decades, that doesn’t mean anyone else – anyone else on Earth! – knows what that is, unless we tell them, which means that until then, anything they tell us about it is, suggest to us about it, should be completely and utterly disregarded. And it also means that we should get down to the truly important business – reaching into ourselves to pull our desires out of the shadows and into the light so we can get a good long look at them.

I’m writing this because, a few weeks ago, I spent two hours with a stranger in his hotel room. A stranger who was one of the hottest men I have ever seen. A stranger who probably very few people in my life would imagine me being attracted to. Most people in my life think that I’m interested in women, even if I’ve told them otherwise. But even those who know I like men, I think, imagine I like gentle, men, – boys they can imagine as non-sexual if they try, boys who they can imagine me cuddling with rather than having sex with. But this stranger – a man who was kind, but strong, a grown man, who was clearly a sexual being – and I did not gently cuddle. And I did not question, even for a fleeting second: What is attraction? I’ve been on this planet for around three decades, and for the first time ever in bed with another person, I did not feel broken.

Yes, in some ways, this is just a story about a one-night stand.

But it’s a story of something else, too – a story about holiness. When we think of the word baptism, we usually think of a body of water: a pool, a river, a lake. But when we become washed in the dual tides of genuine want and genuine pleasure, when we become anointed by sweat converging in slick, sweet patches, when we realize that “I” no longer lives in the head, but in the toes, the shoulders, in the body of another whose edges are blurring with our own — we do not enter the sacred as broken or striving; we enter the sacred as whole, as complete. We are transformed because we are, in that particular moment, in that particular place, fleetingly, but, for once, ourselves, and it is so unlike the heaviness of what normally hangs above our shoulders. We realize, suddenly, that we are not the answers to all of the complex questions that hound us. We are simply a collection of muscle and laughter, of surrender and wanting. We are, in that moment, in that place, blessed beyond the mumblings of any priest, beyond the singing of any choir. We are blessed beyond any measure; we are transcendent – because we can truly see that we are human and that we are alive.

I’m writing this because I know now that the answers are not easy. Not for me, and maybe not for you. But just because they are complex for us, it does not mean we are exempt, that we are outside. I am a transgender man who is attracted to men, and maybe that doesn’t make sense to some people. And I’m drawn to men who like my centaur body for what it is, not those who like me “even though” I’m trans, and maybe that doesn’t make sense to some people, either. But here’s the thing: It doesn’t have to make sense to them. Those “shoulds” are not determined by law or by ethics, just people who have very particular ideas about gender and sex that are different from my experience. Because what I’m talking about here – it’s about adults, attraction, absolute consent, and joy. And the last time I checked, there is nothing that doesn’t actually make sense about that. It’s about basic things that others take for granted: wanting and being wanted, feeling whole.

I’m writing this because all of us have a right to these things, even those who might need a reminder.