Reach Out and Brush Faith

erik fuhrer

While shopping with my friend in a Glaswegian Salvation Army on a crisp late Spring day in 2009, I found a cute pink low-cut V-neck tunic stashed away in the electronics section of the store. The tunic reminded me of Link from The Legend of Zelda. Link was one of my og hotties and fashion faves. He knew how to walk through hearts so that the love soaked him in. And he thwapped his hair long around his shoulders. He knew the power of gold.

“You have the same fashion sense as a teenage girl,” my friend laughed when she saw me holding it against my body. I hated the shame that statements like this made me feel but a giddiness still galloped beneath–Epona riding through the fire untouched while Link wore a sexy tunic unscathed, long hair flailing, unsinged. “Do you think it will fit?” I asked, too worried to bother the cashier to try it on after my friend’s reaction. She nodded, “yeah, if you want to look like a teenage girl, then sure.”

Teenage girl is a look I denied myself during my own teens. Afraid people would call me gay as I ached for bodies that looked like my own while wishing my own looked otherwise. Ultimately, it came down to hair. A lot of my life I wished I was a woman so I could float a fountain of Auburn locks down my back without having to explain them. They’d just be “normal.” Girls would braid each other’s hair in high school and I’d sit and sigh, wishing I could twirl my finger around my locks and join.

Whenever I tried to grow my hair out in high school it was viewed as “redneck.” I'd have to live in that problematic shell because living in the pearl of beauty felt too dangerous. Embarrassingly, I leaned into the “redneck” narrative and performatively eyed pick-up trucks while taking driver’s ed. I hated that I was reinforcing and propagating a stereotype but it felt safer than admitting that what I really wanted was a purple Volkswagen Cabriolet convertible so my hair could blow in the wind while I blasted Elton John on the radio.

I tried growing my hair long multiple times in high school. Eventually, I ended up in the chair. You don't have to be a man, I wish I could tell myself. Each fallen lock felt like dropped blood.

“It will grow back,” I’d be told. Sure, but who am I until then? “Does one day you will get to heaven” make waiting any easier for those who want to taste God? So was the Goddess within myself caught in the throat of limbo every shearing day.

Long hair didn't feel related to a gender, it felt like a resurrection. And now that it swings at my back, I am phoenixed into a new aura that spiders its light beyond a checkbox on an airwhite page, the sketch of me Pixared into a rainbow too bright to swallow.

“Long hair, like Samson!” I’d hear. That was one of the only approvals for my desire. That I’d grow into a brawny Biblical stud. But I didn't want to pull any pillars down. I wanted to soften. To ripen. And I also wanted a beard. But only when it felt pretty. All the most beautiful fruits have some fuzz. Toss a Kiwi my way.

Listen, I’d whisper to myself, if I had another chance at my life. You can be beautiful in your own body and wear a tunic like Link. And wear a white dress like Buffy. Your body only has to ever look like your body. Whatever that looks like. Whatever that will look like. You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

Let your hair down. Let it weep around you. If you drown the water will run from you and unfill your lungs. Like it did from Buffy. Like it has done many times from you when you thought you weren't going to survive.

Listen, I’d kiwi softly through my lips, these twenty years later, you are still here and your hair is long and you wear pink eyeshadow to parties and you carry your inhaler in a beautiful leather handbag.

Listen, at your twenty year high school reunion you will scarf tie your way through the room and everyone will look. And this time you'll glitter out loud. Like a vampire in Twilight.

Only, my twenty year reunion is next month, and I’m not going because I know that I’d spark that room into a flame it couldn’t extinguish. Because I am now all the light that I was once eclipsed from.

***

I bought the pink tunic and wore it on a walk to my friend's house one early evening that summer. I pulled a light gray cardigan on top, despite the fact that Europe was going through a heat wave at the time. As I walked down busy Byres Road in Glasgow, I felt as if everyone was staring at me in disapproval of my shirt. Some people admittedly probably did, like my friend, hate my outfit, but my reaction obviously said a lot more about how self conscious I was in my own body than about what anyone was thinking about my outfit. I ended up buttoning up my cardigan, choosing sweat over shame.

I gave the shirt another attempt on my plane ride back to New York that September. It had been almost 9 months since I had cut my hair, and my curls and waves had started to drop closer to my shoulders than they ever had before. Even though the air conditioning on planes is always way too cold, I wore the tunic without any covering. I was Link in the tundras. I was closer to a version of myself that sparkled.

My grandmother hugged me tight at Newark Airport. Directly afterward, she frowned and said something to my mother in Swedish. My grandmother liked my hair short. “Handsome,” she’d say. I’d wince. She hated my longer hair. She tugged at it and frowned, “you are so handsome honey, why do you make yourself look so stupid?” She was nothing if not blunt. Then she pulled at the string of my tunic and asked me whose shirt it was. “Mine,” I replied. She waved her hand in the air in disdain, “oh come on now, honey, it’s a girl’s shirt. Take it off.”

My grandmother in many ways was my real mother. My biological mother was too busy kicking me through metaphorical windows. The kicking was often not a metaphor. Only the windows. Except those I tried to escape through when she’d barricade the house from within. My mother is the reason I spent these past 3 years exorcising onto the page trauma that could only be translated, let alone uttered, through the distance afforded by paratext and the safety of metaphor.

Now that my grandmother has passed, I realize that although my mother was often the one who pushed me, my grandmother was the one who kept placing me back by that goddamned window. I spent a typically violent couple of months living with my mother when I returned to New York complete with tantrums and attacks and the normal Fuhrer family fare. During that time, the tunic mysteriously disappeared from my closet. “I don’t know what shirt you are talking about,” my mom swore.

A year before my grandmother died, I started more openly identifying as nonbinary and wearing jewelry. I went to visit my family in New York that Christmas, 2019, for the last time, and my mother reluctantly gave me some of my grandmother’s costume jewelry, insisting I should be a “pretty man” rather than an “it or them or whatever.” At least she used the word pretty. I had to hold onto any positive moment or word with her. The jewelry did indeed make me feel pretty. A queen.

When I wear Mormor’s jewelry, I resurrect who I wished she was. I resurrect myself.

I have so many things to resurrect from.

I watch Michelle Pfieffer fall out the window and get bitten by cats.

Selena, claw my face. The milk of me pours. How long until I feral my way out of this life and into the one that’s always been waiting for me?

God is there so much I am hoping she will block for me.

How many cat bites does it take to get into heaven?

Reach out and brush faith.

***

I moved to South Bend in May 2015 to attend a PhD program at The University of Notre Dame. During the interview process a few months earlier, my body positivity was high. I wore my hair in a top ponytail. It was very 80s/90s jazzercise video. Unfortunately, Notre Dame would rob me of this euphoria and I’m still rebuilding it. I did not feel comfortable wearing anything close to my pink tunic there. Within the first few days living in Indiana, I had lowered my ponytail and registered myself back into a “male” note. My long hair stayed and was actually praised but for different reasons that I desired.

“He is returning, praise God” the clerk behind the counter at the Post Office exclaimed, her hand high in the air. Oh God, does this woman actually think I’m Jesus?

People had told me I looked like the iconic mass card and film versions of our apparent lord and savior before but this hysteria was a first. “Hi, I’d like to mail this to New York” I told her. She processed the package, all while continuing to exclaim “praise be to the lord his son has risen.”

Then, right before I left, “did anyone ever tell you you look just like Jesus? He’s coming back you know.” I smiled, relieved that I wasn't in some nightmare version of “Revelations” and replied, “thanks, have a good day.”

I hate the Jesus reference. And most similar others I received. The first time someone said I looked like Jason Mamoa, I was flattered. Now, it has also gotten old. It feels like both comments attach themselves to manliness. Perhaps that’s me adhering to a binary. Perhaps that’s me being unfair. But I wish for once someone would say Sarah Michelle Gellar or Diane Keaton instead, or a “girl, your hair is on point!”

Tori Amos sings, “we both know it was a girl, born in Bethlehem.” Perhaps it is her who I look like. And perhaps I just want someone to say to me, “You look like beautiful hair. You look like phoenix. You look as if Rapunzel would have tumbled down you.”

Is it a surprise that my favorite Addams family character is Cousin It? It must be soft in your world, cousin. A sauna. Total eclipse of the hair.

about the author

Erik Fuhrer is a queer, nonbinary poet, playwright, and scarf tie aficionado whose fashion sense is part Buffy Summers, part Blanch Devereux, and part the lion from The Wizard of Oz. Their most recent book, Gellar Studies (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023) hailed as “exceptionally delectable and devastating” by Addie Tsai, creatively engages with the work of icon Sarah Michelle Gellar to unfold personal narratives of queer trauma. Erik is also the author of 6 additional books of poetry and one play. Their memoir, My Buffed Up Life, which features Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a fictional interlocutor is forthcoming in 2024 from Spuyten Duyvil Press. A combination of My Little Pony and watching Sarah Michelle Gellar chew the scenery in All My Children, and everything since, solidified their queerness at a young age. Their Tenderheart Bear obsession may or may not be over.