I was 10 years old the first time I was basically told I was ugly.
After a swim in my family’s pool, I was racing up and down the street with the neighborhood kids in the cul-de-sac where I grew up when a woman bunched up her nose and lobbed a barbed question: “Who’s that?” she asked a fellow mom, the one all the kids loved. “Oh, that’s Chrysi’s daughter.” (Not my mom’s real name.) The woman replied incredulously, “That’s Chrysi’s daughter?”
I didn’t hear the response. I only remember retreating from the scene of pool-drenched kids shrieking this way and that on Cord Avenue in Downey, California. I pretended I needed to use the bathroom and went home.
I had already understood that the aesthetic chasm between my mother’s traditional good looks and my own was wide. But I’d never heard, until that moment, anyone outwardly express what I inwardly felt. My mom, perhaps sensing the silent critiques, always tried hard to convince me that I was “beautiful,” but it was difficult to believe when the culture was telling me otherwise.
It wasn’t until I came out in my late teens that I found my community — and felt attractive for the first time in my life.
Tomboy daughter of the popular girl
At 10, I’d already gone through puberty. I had a full face of acne, alarming buckteeth and an ample bust. My tomboy getups — a mix of ratty T-shirts, surfer shorts, scuffed-up Chuck Taylor low-tops, and knees covered in scabs and bruises from failed skateboard tricks, began to attract curious once-overs.
My mom — blue-eyed, blond-haired, full-lipped and high cheekboned — looked like she belonged in a 1980s ad for a chic label: big feathered do, semi-maximal makeup and bright, fitted clothes for the golf course.
When she was a teenager, her peers anointed her best figure, biggest flirt, best sense of humor, and runner-up for prom queen in high school. Her life then was parties, cigarettes, beer and make-out sessions with her schools’ most desirable boys. Mine was lunch in the library, social obscurity, bulky clothes that desexualized me and total inhibition.
In fact, I’ve long attributed our highly divergent experiences in the world to her genetic luck and success — and my failure — at “performing” pretty.
Whenever people learned I was her daughter, their faces would recoil like they had just smelled something unpleasant. The fact that she was my mother was unbelievable — and seemed to inspire contempt. That animosity, I believe on reflection, had something to do with my patent inability to fulfill my duty to cultural imperatives around femininity, beauty and male desire.
My subpar looks, however, weren’t the only thing that made me a curiosity to onlookers. Tomboy clothes and ways are cute on prepubescent girls, but underneath my boyish outfits, I looked like a grown woman, a gender outlaw, a freak.
My friend’s parents weren’t the only ones who saw something peculiar — queer — about me. My schoolmates saw something crooked about me, too. As much as I tried to hide any signs of my queerness with my teased-up bangs fixed in hairspray and fake interest in boys, something about me didn’t land “right.”
Walking behind a friend in fifth grade, I overheard her tell a mutual pal she thought I was a lesbian. How did she zero in on that in elementary school? Was it the goofy way I behaved around girls to make them laugh? Was it the way my gender didn’t quite align with femininity? Was it something about the way I moved?
To call someone a lesbian back then was to call them ugly. In some ways, it still is. Historian Lillian Faderman has documented a long history that shows the ways society sought to thwart the goals of feminism by lesbianizing women who rallied for their rights. “Lesbian” was shorthand for “masculine” or “abnormal woman” and thus ugly.
In every direction, I seemed to register as odd and unappealing — and it mirrored how I saw and felt about myself. That feeling of “not-rightness” shadowed me, like a bully who never lets up, through my adolescence.
Shedding ‘not-rightness’
Things started to shift when I came out at age 19 and started hanging out in San Diego’s Hillcrest, an LGBTQ neighborhood, where a more expansive definition of beauty and desirability thrived and nearly every iteration of woman could register as attractive.
Down the runway of those gay streets, you could be a “woman of size,” to tap “Bad Feminist” author and cultural critic Roxane Gay’s useful phrase, or bony thin. You could have a deep voice and big muscles, or a high voice and no muscles at all. You could be hairy and tall or bald and short. You could be flat-chested with a sexy swagger like Shane McCutcheon on “The L Word” or big-bosomed in high heels with sleeves of tattoos on your arms. You could be dark goth or candy goth. Or you could be a typical tomboy like me.
The style configurations seemed limitless, and every type of woman or man seemed uniquely desirable — stunning in their own startling way.
I spent two years stomping on those queer-affirming pavements in my usual tomboy duds, sometimes even venturing into shape-defining clothes with a mild dose of makeup. I wanted to be visible, and any which way I presented, I felt more confident in who I was and what I looked like.
I had not changed to fit into the current definition of beauty, but my cultural context had. In the queer community, the definition of what reads as attractive is far wider and more diverse than in the mainstream. Certainly, a fuller experience of self-esteem is one that doesn’t rely on external approval, but narrow ideas of what makes someone attractive make it more difficult for certain individuals — whether due to race, body type or gender expression — to feel adequate.
That’s not to say that conventional good looks aren’t an aspiration in queer culture. Of course, they are. The pressures to look a certain way — hypermasculine, muscular and stylish, for example, among certain subsets of gay men, can be just as harsh and punishing. But just by virtue of being in a setting where people congregated because they didn’t fit in opened a space for existing against the norm. There was room for me to see myself outside traditional paradigms of beauty and to play with — or poke fun at — what it means to be a woman.
Over time, especially today as a 50-year-old woman, I’m better able to take my space and honor my own way of being — and appearing— in the world without as much of the angst and discomfort I experienced as a younger person.
That might be because of the invisibility that comes with age in our youth-centric culture — it’s a much less pressured existence five decades in, and I don’t feel as seen and critiqued. But it’s also the result of years spent in queer enclaves in San Diego, San Francisco, New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts, where it’s OK to be as freaky or as “normal” as you want.
At the Pride Festival in Brooklyn, New York, with my 10-year-old daughter and her best friend a few weekends ago, they saw full-figured women — and men — proudly showcasing big bellies in tie-dyed and sequined tank tops, large-haired bedazzled drag queens full of sass and fun, and customized T-shirts with messages affirming trans rights. The event captured a modern-day vision of what I saw on University Avenue in Hillcrest back in the 1990s.
When we got home, I couldn’t stop thinking about how lucky they were to get an early introduction to a more expansive definition of gender, sexuality and aesthetics. I might have felt less ugly if I’d known earlier on that there was a broader definition of beauty that included me.
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