2023-06-19 14:09:44
My idols were Superman by Christopher Reeve (I lost a tooth because of him, because with the towel that I improvised as a cape one summer afternoon I didn’t fly) and Michael Knight (pronounced, with my rag tongue, Nain) and his fantastic car (still today, every time I remember it, I hum the eighties song by Stu Phillips). I enjoyed watching soccer games in which another classmate and I were the only girls and watching them on television, riding my bike, playing tennis and table tennis, dressing up as Peter Pan or Captain Hook in carnival.
I always asked Reyes for a table football and a Scalextric, which they never brought me because they were too expensive, as I later found out with everything else. He hated the dresses, the skirts, the tights, the stockings, wearing long hair. And all of this made me feel different, strange and deeply guilty when I compared myself with the other girls, with my sister, a year younger than me.
It’s an unfair thought, both to my parents and to me, but I think they were lucky that she did like all the things that she was supposed to like because she was a girl. At least with my sister they didn’t deviate from the norm. I was the raritythe (I use the definite article, the word, once again, as a condition of gender) tomboy, and she more than made up for it, as she fit perfectly into the behaviors, hobbies, appearances, preferences associated with the feminine , all my supposed shortcomings.
I’m not saying that my parents thought about it rationally, that they felt relieved and talked about it, with the television in the background, when we went to bed, which is the only time of intimacy couples have left while raising their children. children. But it is hard for me to imagine (I have never been able to ask either of them for various, very different reasons) that in the context in which my sister and I grew up, in a town of just over a thousand inhabitants, my parents did not suffer the pressure social to see, to verify daily that her eldest daughter was not like the other girls, that she was not normal. That she was a tomboy. And yet at home, in my family, I never felt judged, coerced or mediated.
I was a free girl, as free as I could be, at least behind closed doors. That’s why it saddens me (it’s that, sadness, not anger or rage) to hear L.’s mother say, like someone remembering a cartoon, trying to provoke innocent laughter, that her little daughter only liked to play with guns. «I was going all over the house shooting and I thought: let’s see if she is going to come out rarity, from the sidewalk across the street.” That anecdote, which she continues to tell frequently, is from a few decades ago, but it continues to mark, from the distance imposed by the veiled, the relationship of both.
The only thing that was always saved from pigeonholing, from one’s own judgment and that of others, was reading. Certain books were never more for boys than for girls or vice versa. Not at home, not in the library, not at school, not in bookstores. At least that’s how I lived it. I could enjoy The Princess and the Pea or Snow White just as much without feeling bad about it. pinocchio the one of The cat with boots. then they came The fiveof Enid Blyton, The endless storyby Michael Ende, or all the stories of Roald Dahl, by Matilda a The witches. Thanks to those wonderful characters you could be whatever you wanted, also a girl who liked things that only boys could like. Literature, again, as a refuge against vital adversity, as a lifeline. I clung to her then and I still do today, every day.
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Hence this book, the result of my commitment and my sense of responsibility. It is, without a doubt, the text that I would have liked to read before judging myself without knowing me, and that is how I hope it will be received. I aspire to tell what I could never read, what I had no opportunity to listen to. The story of what is silenced, of what is stigmatized, of what is hidden, of the long groping path, if not in the dark, until the discovery of my sexual orientation, until being able to recognize myself as a homosexual woman. Without fear. With pride.
Because rights are not guaranteed and it is in critical moments, of instability, when it is necessary to take a step forward. She could have been a girl like the others, with her little shirt and her bodice, who liked dolls and loved dressing up as a princess and, moreover, a lesbian. Of course. The opposite would be an absurd argument and lacking reasons. But I wasn’t. And this is my story, own and yet universal. That is also what literature is for, to look at yourself in the mirror of others.
‘A homosexuality of his own’
Ines Martin Rodrigo
Destiny
136 pages
13,50 euros
Release Date: June 21
#pages #proper #homosexuality #Inés #Martín #Rodrigo