The Capes and the Masks.

I met my first drag queens in 1976. I was five years old, so playing dress-up was still well within my wheelhouse. My uncle was living in Boston, working for the railroad, and needed to rent a room. He fell in with two middle-aged gay men who, knowing what I do now, were risking their very lives by being so flamboyant in the mid-Seventies. All I knew was that there were these two really nice guys who laughed a lot and weren't trying to be Italian (I lived in New Haven, a convoluted mass of immigrant identities that, post-Godfather, spent an awful lot of money on velour track suits that never got dirty.)

Later that year, I recall being at 7-11 and picking up a comic book, one of my first. It was a Marvel Super Action reprint of Captain America 111, a completely insane story that ends with a bullet-riddled Cap uniform, accompanied by a discarded Steve Rogers mask(!), being fished out of the river. I was stunned, flummoxed, dumbfounded, at sea. If Steve wasn't Cap, or Cap wasn't Steve, maybe those old guys in Boston were as much woman as my mom. (Okay, this is hyperbole. My mom was my male role model, growing up, due to Dad's increasing health issues. Those two men could have held Guadalcanal without assistance and Mom would probably pimpslap both of them into oblivion.) I'd worn Cap Underoos...who was I? Was I not me, even the me who wanted to be Cap so badly that I put industrial staples through my hand while trying to make a shield? (It would take years to track down the conclusion, especially since Marvel started reprinting the Avengers the next month. Suffice to say, I could wear Cap Underoos again, although I'd now need a 4XL top and XL briefs. Such are the devils of puberty.)

I knew about costumes. I knew that Adam West, handsome devil with Shatneresque inflection, could put on a sateen cowl and become the onomatopoeic defender of Gotham. I had often put my blue bib on backwards, put my yellow one on my teddy bear, and saved the city from, well, I'm not sure what. I had no idea what evils lurked beyond the driveway. Now that I know, I want my teddy bear back. I knew that Roy Gage was a male-pattern-baldness Slav who had to slide down a pole and suit up, not unlike Adam West, to fight fires and rescue people. His cohort Chet, albeit a tad feckless for lifesaving and hapless in social situations, was the inspiration for my first imaginary friend. He, too, had to dress the part. I knew what turnout gear was before I knew how to ride a bicycle...it was like Iron Man's suit, Batman's utility belt, Spider-Man's web shooters, Nixon's Kissinger. You could not be your truest self without the proper apparel.

When the theater crowd discusses the depth of an actor's performance, I've heard them use the term "investment." I'm sure that there's an emotional component, as well as the obvious dedication of practice hours, but I also think that it applies to costuming. While improv troupes can do their work in street clothes (or whatever they decide; it's meant to be spontaneous, but you know there are people with Lucky Improv Shirts or Inspirational Underwear; it's in our psychological makeup as humans), even the most minimalist theater has some demand for a costume. In some cases, the audience is asked to imagine the costume, or the costume changes; this creates a highly interactive experience, but allows for subjectivity. That subjectivity is linked to our identity, perhaps even our secret identity. If we can resonate with an actor, dragging them unto our personal frequency, what does it say about our own self-concept?
(I'm not entirely sure. I have my suspicions, as you've seen, but I can offer no concrete answers. It's about perception, above all.)

Alter egos are not new. We change names, faces; we add masks or rename countries or assume titles. Do we have a core identity, or do we have a cloud formed of facets, aspects that join to form a fractal, perhaps endless, of self? Every day, new studies appear in my news feed, telling me that I am secretly bisexual or prone to certain behaviors because I am an INFJ, ENFP, introvert, extrovert, Democrat, Libra towards the cusp of Scorpio, Generation Xish, post-hippie baby, white guy from the suburbs, person who didn't watch Seinfeld...all of these are spitballing, just as I am now. The intimidating thing is that I think all of them ring of some truth, or fragment thereof. I don't possess the arrogance to think I see the whole story. Those Cap reprints taught me well.

Why do the clothes make us so brave, so much better? Is it that we feel them as armor, or a second, more appropriate skin? Are we dressing the part when we don't wear the special uniforms of our construction? It occurs to me that a similar argument can be made for transgender individuals. It's a number of plies down, so to speak, but they really just want the outside to match the inside. That's not strange, sick, weird, or even unusual. It's a change in perspective. You dress for the job you want, I was told as a twentysomething. These people are just dressing for the life they want, so they are, technically, living that same principle. There are other trappings, such as the controversies over bathroom use or sexual identity, but the heart of the matter is parity. Just like Batman, they are trying to achieve synonimity between the self-idealization and self-realization. (The fact that there are genitals involved is a bit beyond Adam West's work, and for that I am duly grateful.)

As far back as I can recall or research, there were masked men (and the occasional woman, which may have spurred early puberty) in my life. The masks sometimes extended to whole costumes, whole lifestyles, but knowing what I do now, changing pronouns from the inside out, or dressing unlike the expected norm, or just standing up for being different is a bravery beyond most. There are no Jokers, no Riddlers; nobody is poisoning the water supplies (except for the usual corporate suspects, sadly.) The villains, if there are any, are the misguided souls who are staring at the idea, if not the actual hardware, of gender. They wear costumes too, but they tend to dress alike. They don't require the pow-sock-bam-whammo approach of the 1966 Batman show, or the Captain Kirk drop-kick of its interstellar cohort, but they are a danger to society, a million times that of the weirdos they mock or harass. Anyone who espouses the evils of "abnormality" or "being a freak" is revealing themselves as being ingrown, a stunted follicle amongst the world's pubic hairs. We live on a sphere, after all. Anyone who would divide up the world, particularly if they would assume or announce that they have no secret identity, is mentally unfit.

My uncle is not the most urbane of souls; if he had been living alone in Boston, I am sure that he would have been mugged, brutalized by those who sniff out kindness and seek to profit from its lack of sociopathic tendencies regarding violence. Those two charming old men, regardless of how they lived, or who they thought they were, provided him with shelter, companionship, and the location of good seafood. Does the fact that they were homosexuals who dressed as women make their love less heroic, or more so because of its endangered status? This is only seven years after Stonewall, and the year before Jody, Billy Crystal's character on Soap, made homosexuals less than utter caricatures in pop culture...and they had been together for years.

We all have secrets. Some of them wear capes.
(To be honest, this is the first planned blog entry or monograph I've done in some time. It may have to be continued, because identity, love, and heroism never go all the way out of style. I hope this finds you well, and in the proper attire.)