Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels
Justin Vivian Bond
Language: English
Pages: 144
ISBN: 1558617477
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Hailed as “the greatest cabaret artist of [V’s] generation” in the New Yorker, Mx. Justin Vivian Bond makes a brilliant literary debut with this candid and hilarious coming-of-age tale.
Bond recalls in vivid detail how it looked and felt to first discover Mom's lipstick (Iced Watermelon by Revlon), and how dreary it could be for a trans/queer kid to join the Cub Scouts. Always haunted by the knowledge of being "different," Bond began to create intimate friendships with girls, and to feel increasingly at risk with boys. But when the bully next door wanted to meet secretly, Bond couldn't resist. Their trysts went on for years, making Bond acutely aware of how sexual power and vulnerability can be experienced at the same time. With inimitable style, Bond raises issues about LBGTQ adolescence, parenting trans/queer children, and bullying, while being utterly entertaining.
powerless to do anything about it. AT THIS POINT, NO ONE KNEW ABOUT OUR PRIVATE encounters. His mother didn’t like me because of my earlier encounter with her older son, but she was clueless to all of the activity that was going on under her nose. Sometimes we would be in his swimming pool while his mother was in the kitchen cooking and one of us would be below the surface giving the other a blow job. In winter we would build snow forts high enough so that my mother couldn’t see us from
older sister (I say sister even though she was actually her adopted cousin who lived with the family), had terrible fights with Lesley’s father, which often resulted in physical violence. Evidently Nancy’s mother had been pretty wild and Mr. Pearman was determined that Nancy would not end up like her. He was brutally strict with both her and Lesley. I rarely saw the full extent of his temper being unleashed on them, but I heard about it and was terribly aware of the skittishness and moodiness
women but the women controlled the rhythm of the couple’s movements with a shift of the hips, a turning away of the head; the women contributed greatly to this moving picture of love gone awry by projecting their powerful difference and anger while drawing the men into their interior world; all that aside, I loved looking at those doomedseeming partners as they moved through that abstraction known as dance; it was like watching a sentence unravel; or sometimes I imagined the dancers’ sinuous
in Hagerstown would be a great tragedy. I knew she was right, so I resolved that I would somehow get through high school and as soon as I did I would get the hell out of there. THE SUMMER BETWEEN EIGHTH AND NINTH grade, while Lesley was away, my father and I began to work on refinishing the bed that I had gotten from Pop-Pop’s attic. The old cherrywood had been blackened over the years from many coats of varnish, which had cracked and made the whole thing look like it had been in a fire.
because I bottled so much up that when feelings finally did come through it was in the form of an explosion. Nevertheless, my sister Carol and my mother believed that I was always trying to be the center of attention, and this simply wasn’t true. “No, actually, I think I was made uncomfortable by the fact that I received too much attention.” My sister didn’t seem to believe me. “It’s okay to want a lot of attention. I did. Everyone wants a lot of attention.” “Maybe you wanted a lot of