Tomboy has, of course, adopted a less racist, less heteronormative, and more inclusive meaning since then. It is typically used to describe girls who act or dress in a masculine fashion and is often associated with early identity development among queer women. Androgynous clothing companies claim the word as a banner of pride, and queer communities have embraced it as a word to describe not just an appearance but an identity. Some research suggests a correlation between girls who identify as tomboys and those who grow up to identify as queer, trans, or nonbinary. Not every tomboy grows up to be queer, of course, but a lot of us do.
In rural spaces, girls grow up on the land. We play in the fields and the forest; we climb trees; we help our families garden and farm; we join the Future Farmers of America or the 4-H Club or the Girl Scouts, where outdoor skills are encouraged and honed. Where I come from, women are strong. We’re built like barns, built to work. We might look more masculine, not least because we tend to do more traditionally masculine work.
This is true of many of the women in my family—including my late grandmother, my mother, and several of my aunts—almost all of whom have worked factory jobs or service jobs or both. I worked these kinds of jobs too. I started working when I was twelve, helping my parents take inventories of rural gas stations; crouched on our hands and knees in small dusty convenience stores across the state, we counted everything on the shelves by hand. My parents, who are now in their late sixties, still do this work. As a teenager, I worked on the floor of a discount clothing store—work both my parents did for much of their lives—and as a waitress and bartender at a pub in my hometown. I tended bar and waited tables in college too, and later worked as a barista, to pay my way through school.
I was the first in my immediate family to get a degree. Where I come from, we don’t necessarily go to college. We might not have the money; we might not have the interest. We might have a family farm or business to take over; we might develop a skilled trade instead. We might join a union and stay in it for life. If we do go to college, we might go to technical and two-year programs for such trades. And we dress and present in a way that makes those jobs more efficient. Middle-aged and older women in particular tend toward the androgynous, with close-cropped hair and functional, less-than-fashionable clothing. (The slow cross-country crawl of fashion is a factor in this too. Not only do trends make their way to the flyover states at a snail’s pace—a realization I made when I moved to New York, in 2009, and didn’t own a single pair of skinny jeans—but sometimes they never make it at all. And if they do, few rural Midwesterners have the money or time to care.)
It’s no wonder when people think of the tomboy, they often think of a Midwesterner, of a boyish little girl running around the prairies of Middle America like Laura Ingalls Wilder. They think of a farmer, of a woman in coveralls fixing a faucet. They think of a bartender, serving Miller Lite to construction workers at happy hour. Tomboys exist in other parts of the country, of course, in rural and urban spaces alike, as do women who work backbreaking jobs that keep them on their feet all day. But when I think of the rural Midwest, I think of it as a place where a girl’s body is uniquely connected to the land in which she was born: where girls hunt and fish and fight and don’t always shed their masculine characteristics as they get older. When I think of the Midwest, a place whose boundaries and borders are contentious, a place given so many different names—from the Great Plains to the Great Lakes states to the Upper Midwest—I think of a place that transcends boundaries, that defies definition, a body that holds within it a multitude of identities. When I think of my Midwest—the heartland, the hinterland, a place of farmland and factories, of forests and rivers and lakes—I think of it as Tomboyland.
In sixth grade, a new girl moved to town. We shared the same birthday, and I swore to myself I would make her my best friend. I did, somehow, and for a few years we were inseparable. One night, I sat alone on my bedroom floor with my yearbook open and ran my finger over her photo. Without thinking, I bent down and kissed the page where her lips, in grainy black and white, were locked in a half smile, my little heart hammering in my chest.
In college, there was the girl in my poetry workshop who wrote an ode to new Chuck Taylors. There was the barista with a shaved head and a sleeve of tattoos. At the dawn of social media, when our MySpace pages became Facebook pages, we of the analog childhood discovered such platforms offered a new coded language to describe our sexual and romantic proclivities without actually having to name them. In 2005, during my fourth of a five-year college degree, I put together my first Facebook profile—carefully curating the songs and books and films that painted the best picture of my uniquely subversive and interesting self. With the fear and exhilaration that only the internet—with its new promise of anonymity and opportunity—could bring, I arrived at the “Interested In” section.
I had three options: “Men,” “Women,” or “Men and Women.”
I hesitated. My heart raced. I felt dizzy, and my vision blurred at the edges. I clicked the third option. For a few minutes I panicked, my fingers hovering above the mouse, ready to change it. But eventually I moved my hand away. I sat at my desk, alone in my room, and considered the implications of this little virtual box. The options it offered seem limited now, but it was liberating then. It allowed me to say what I wanted to say—to call myself what I was pretty sure I might be—without having to use the word for it.
When you do a Google search of the word bisexuality, or at least when I last did, the fourth option on the auto dropdown was this: Bisexuality doesn’t exist.
Bisexual erasure is a problem, and one I’ve experienced for years. I’ve gotten it from straight people, who say bisexuals are just deviants, just experimenting, just promiscuous (as if being attracted to multiple genders necessarily means you have more sex). But I’ve gotten it far more from queer people, many of whom have suggested, however subtly or not, that those who claim to be bisexual are repressed or pretending or both.
“That’s not a real thing,” a gay woman once told me.
“Girl, you’re either one or the other,” a gay man once said.
“Lesbians only!” the young girlfriend of a friend said once as a group of us planned a trip away for the weekend.
“The straight girls are stealing our signifiers,” a friend once said of a queer-identified woman who was dating a man.
This isn’t anything new. There is a long history of biphobia and erasure in the queer community. Bisexuality has been called antigay and antifeminist; it’s been called a lie. More than once, Pride organizers have attempted to exclude bisexuals and trans people from marching in parades—the irony being that the very first Pride march was organized by a bisexual woman—as if those third and fourth letters in the acronym were just as imaginary as the people they represent.
For me, my body becomes the problem. My body, the lens through which people perceive not just my gender but also my sexuality. Because of how I look—the way I’m built and the signifiers I wear—people can’t look at me and believe I could be anything other than a gay woman, or else a man. They certainly can’t fathom that I might love a man. When I meet new people, queer or straight, I carry this anxiety with me—that as soon as I reveal I’m in a relationship with a man, I will be questioned or invalidated or both. Sometimes I don’t offer this information. Sometimes I get outed. Sometimes I keep it like a secret.