Mirroring Gents is a series of essays on Gentlemen tropes as a hegemonic sublabel. In Part 1, I discuss performing manhood in the American South. This essay mentions weddings, gender tropes, and chivalry. Comments by Davis Mercer,
, , and cited in the footnotes.Part 1: A Southern Masculinity
What if his manhood was my manhood?
Quick Ballad of the Fox Hunter, after W.B. Yeats. In the new issue of Sarka.
I watched fraternity alums cheer for my friend. She was getting married! The wedding was lavish and chic, a swamp tea party. Lush floral arrangements embedded borders of a Baton Rouge marsh. The evening was golden, champagne merriment. A string quartet accompanied both vows. The cake cut up against a backdrop of mosquitoes and tea lights. My friend, E, was perfect. Her dress long and white with a bustier corset top. Her husband was a Southern Louisiana man with a childhood spent on boats, rivers, and nature.
I cried as she said goodbye to me. A handshake we had created from childhood, a reminder of all those years of sleepovers, our hands made a pinky promise, and a kiss. I stayed at the wedding. I tell E's family about my novella idea. This novella is about adultery and Southern beaches, masculinity. I need to do more research, I said, but I don’t know where to start. E’s uncle tells me of an island off the Carolinas. You travel by ferry, and once you arrive, you can’t get back.
When they left, I mingled with the Best Man’s father: all small talk, big smiles, subtle brags. Conversations about salaries (whose is bigger?) and hunting (not my thing) leave me with a redness to my cheeks - a regression.
I dreamt that night. In it, I packed my bag: three books, a Brooks Brothers suit, and a pen. I stayed in a hotel just off the island. Once there, I drowned myself in queer, Southern men. Men from Texas, men with money. Men from oil, men in tech. Men in law. Men in tourism. Men on cocaine, men on a bender. Men who found god, men who found men. Men who found yoga, men who found me. They were captivated by my subversions. We sat touching knees under tiki bars. All of them had one thing in common: their gentleman’s spirit. In all the men in my dream, each of their Southern male qualities outshone a toxicity that might also be found at, say, a Midwestern bar. Those men are void of a drawl of swaying eyes1.
Amanda Landwehr
I was not a lavish kid. I thought wax candles were decorative fodder for a lack of imagination. I knew no cathedrals. When we were children, E and I would attend each other’s churches. I was Pentecostal, Baptist. She, Lutheran. As we were older, I thought less of playmaking and more of beauty. Art was bodies of people.
For most of school, my eyes were on only one. I’d visit him at church, a few miles from my house. Let’s call him C. C was two grades above me and a soccer player. He had a feminine frame that could melt. His sweet back, his strong legs. A charisma so thick I could chew out and spit. He never smoked, and he only drank socially. He had big, focused eyes and a full head of hair. A mascot for all farmers, straight from Reese Witherspoon’s 1991 film, "The Man in the Moon."
C was a Southern gentleman in that his looks superseded his manners. C had the image of a gentleman, but my eyes were far too rosy to see a difference.
By high school, E and I spent less time together. We attended different schools - hers was Christian, mine was public - both of which were football-centric.
One Friday, E and I’s campuses were battling each other. The football field was a 15-minute walk from my subdivision. I asked her if she would be there. Yes! As they walked up, C had me in a fight.
He was giving me a spiel, smug and sad, in a tank top and a layer of sweat. Talking about remorse, pleasure. He didn’t want to take me to homecoming anymore. Earlier that day, he had traded me off to someone else, a friend of his I liked much less. I found this friend a bit rude, hyper-sexual, and too buff for my taste. His hobbies included warfare video games, shooting guns in bayous, and driving large vehicles.
Mostly, I felt humiliated. C said that he didn’t want to disappoint me. I was yelling to the point of ignoring E. For years, I forgave moments like this. I succumbed and was complicit in his behavior.
I was patient in the margins he spilled over because he was beautiful.
From Anne Sexton, "You, Doctor Martin," from To Bedlam and Part Way Back
“My first kiss was with a boy who played baseball upstate; we went skeet shooting, and I laughed like a girl as I let him teach me how to balance the rifle, pretending I had never held one in my hands before. We kissed on the beach under the stars, our skin sunburned and red. His mouth tasted like the chewed dip he had just spit into the sand and I remember thinking that it was not him I wanted to be with but that I just wanted to be him. I pressed my tongue into his mouth and devoured. I was only ever taught one way to be a Southern woman, and it was to be just like the Southern man, but better. You had to know him inside and out. You had to be willing to eat him alive if it came down to it.”
Spencer George, folklorist and writer of Good Folk.
Despite an abuse of their charm, I don’t view men “performing the gentleman” as a de facto harm. In general, I think it’s good to want to be good.
Southern gentlemen often perform meta-masculinity, but they aren’t supposed to be rude! Southern gentlemen are chivalrous, not chauvinists. The point is to be kind, to maintain their family values. Gentlemen live beyond American depictions, but the Southern men in and out of my life have the upper hand in their caricature2.
Southern men, and I’m talking about white masculinity, focusing on cisgender men in this example - perform gentlemanliness by opening doors, closing doors, paying for dinner, looking up to God, smiling real big, talking suave, having a positive outlook on life, being athletic, nurturing, going to reputable schools, conventionally intelligent, and and and yet…I pity the role. Masculinity demands many things. It’s just a problematic trope to live up to3.
So I’m back in Chicago now. Gentlemen’s bodies move for me. They let me claim first dibs on buses, chairs, and currency exchanges. Midwestern gentlemen tend to be silent when they do this. Is it an obligation? Many of these men are older than I, their bodies moving slowly to the bus ramp. Should a perceived gender take precedence over old age or disability? I feel that disability supersedes male chivalry.
My appearance is becoming less womanly each day. But when does it get obvious? Am I getting away with anything? I get on the train and look.
Further Reading:
Challenging Queer Metro Normativity: The Case of Southern Trans Masculinity (Rogers, Baker A. Lanham)
https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-8890649.
The Masculine Domination (Pierre Bourdieu),
https://archive.org/details/masculinedominat0000bour.
The Masculine Self (Christopher Kilmartin),
https://archive.org/details/masculineself0000kilm.
Reading and Resisting White Masculinity (Carlos L. Dews),
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24907821.
Southern Manhood at the Margins (Joshua A. Lynn)
https://repository.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3102&context=cwbr.
Reference to a quote from Carolina Chauffe, of Hemlock. A riff from her text to me, reading: “soft-spoken chivalry with a Louisiana drawl
swagger with sway, bright eyes, and abundant “yes ma’am’s”
In reference to Carter St. Hogan on Southern gentlemen’s efforts to be good men: “When I think of the southern gentlemen I actually know, they all share caregiving duties for this one dog named Rupert. Or they do beers on the porch and cry to songs about mamas. Misogyny and racism and classism and homophobia are everywhere, but the southern men i know try really fucking hard, even as they fail, and that is extremely beautiful to me.”
From a conversation with Davis Mercer, the book review editor at Gigantic Sequins, a magazine in New Orleans.
“am i getting away with anything?” is such a good line!!!!