Copyright L. Daniel Mouer 1997
This essay was first published, in an earlier form, in my original "Genderwonky" blog. I then included it as a chapter in my memoirs book. In resurrecting "Genderwonky," I am now returning this piece to it's proper home.
My
mother taught me to knit. Mind you, I didn’t learn
how to knit from my mother, but she taught me nonetheless. She also
taught me to sew. I don’t know why. My brothers weren’t taught
these things, as far as I know. I don’t even think my sisters were.
Maybe I was the only one who seemed interested. Maybe I just tended
to hang around Mother too much.
I
think I was probably 9 or 10 when she taught me to knit,
but I didn’t actually begin learning how to knit until I was 58. I
enrolled in knitting classes at a local knitting shop. Richmond, my
hometown, has at least five knitting shops. For reasons I can’t
fathom, I chose to take lessons at the oldest, best established store
in town: the “West End” shop, whose habitués are mothers of
children enrolled in the city’s exclusive local private academies.
They are the wives of lawyers and doctors and politicians—no that’s
not quite right. They are the wives of judges, chief surgeons, and
governors of the Commonwealth. I drive to my lessons in my ratty
little ‘72 Beetle. They drive in humongous Lincoln Town Cars,
700-series Beamers, and Range Rovers.
There
are other places to learn knitting and to buy yarn. There’s the
store with all the high-fashioned glitzy yarns and the workshops
taught by international knitting stars. There’s the newer shop full
of hip, high-end luxury fibers, all natural of course, down in what
passes for Richmond’s version of Greenwich Village. Then there’s
that newer shop with the laid-back, crazy, funny women who smoke too
much and, I wager, keep bottles of whiskey or brandy tucked away with
their stashes. They are fun-loving yarn-addicts, pure and simple.
But, for reasons still unclear to me, I wound up in the high-brow
shop with the tennis-club and equestrienne set. Go figure.
Let’s
make one thing very clear. I am the only man taking these lessons. I
continually hear rumors of other men who knit, but, so far, they are
just rumors. “Lots of men knit these days,” says one of the
shop’s owners. “But Dan’s the only straight
guy, isn’t he?” Straight guy? But I knit! Some would say I can’t
be straight by definition.
I
point out to all who will listen that men do the knitting in Peru,
that men were traditionally knitters at various times in “The Old
World,” and that male soldiers in World War I routinely knitted
their own socks! I get quiet, knowing smiles. No sense trying to tell
anybody anywhere anything about gender. It is, after all, completely
“natural,” and everyone knows all about it practically from the
day they’re born.
I
am working a cable row in the front on my alpaca sweater. I hope to
complete it by the time it’s cold enough to wear an alpaca sweater.
The ladies of the shop love to talk about the multi-colored socks I
knit myself last year. “He even wears them,” one hastens to add.
While I quietly knit away, my teacher, the shop ladies, and the other
students all talk about babies. Always. Someone at the table is
always knitting a baby sweater, or baby booties, or baby blanket, or
a baby hat. Sometimes these items are being knit from a pure-white
soft cotton or washable wool. More often, they are either pink or
blue.
The
talk invariably turns to when “the baby” is due, and whether the
mother or grandmother in question yet knows “what it is.” That
means, in case you didn’t get it, whether the fetus in question is
on its way to becoming male or female. Even in this day of sonograms,
lots of people don’t know. The parents-to-be all know, but they’re
not saying. So even the expectant mothers are not revealing the big
secret: they knit in white, or they make one item blue and one pink…
“just in case.”
“Why
don’t you make something green? Or purple?” I ask, playing the
devil’s role, of course. Nobody bothers to answer. It can’t
possibly be a serious question. I don’t follow up, because I’ve
tried dozens of times. That conversation just doesn’t go anywhere,
and, anyway, I’ve just dropped two stitches in the middle of a
“cable back,” and that demands all my attention.
When
the conversation isn’t about babies, which is rare, it’s about
the older children: the boys in St. Benedict’s and the girls in St.
Catherine’s. They don’t talk about the students’ grades or
their sports accomplishments. Instead they discuss their summer art
programs in Florence, and their intensive language programs in
Moscow, and their pending appointments as congressional pages. But
the real concern is not for this ascending generation, but for the
babies, for what is being knit for them, and “what they are.”
Doing
It In Public
My
cousin recently needed someone to accompany her to the hospital for a
surgical procedure. I knew I’d be stuck in the waiting room for
three or four hours, so, naturally, I took my knitting. As time
passed, other patients and their drivers/helpers/loved ones arrived.
And every so often one would have a bag of knitting. Each of these
knitters gravitated to my side of the room, made friendly inquiries
about what I was making, gave their compliments, then took up an
adjacent seat. After a couple hours, we had a phalanx of knitters,
all sitting along one wall of the waiting room, chatting away
merrily.
Knitters
don’t just knit when they get together. We shared knitting stories.
We shared knitting tools. We commented on color combinations and yarn
choices. All the other knitters were women, of course. One of them
noted my wedding ring and asked me if my wife were also a knitter. Of
course I (and all the other women) took her question to really mean,
“So, are you married or available?”
And
so I comfortably lounged away a few hours, surrounded by women of all
ages, knitting, knitting, knitting. Were I to suddenly find myself
single, it would never dawn on me to go seeking company in a bar,
when I could find myself a corner in any public space—say, a
Starbucks Café—open my knitting bag, and soon have plenty of
company.
Of
course, not everyone is happy to see a man knitting in public. There
is clearly something odd, suspicious, maybe even frightening about
such a scene. I remember one time taking my knitting to the clinic at
the VA hospital. It always takes my doctor way more time than seems
reasonable to see me on appointment day. No sense complaining,
though. I might as well just plan on getting some knitting done. And
so I do.
On
the day in question, I noted that my knitting had just the opposite
effect as what I had experienced the day of my cousin’s surgery. I
soon found I was sitting surrounded by empty chairs. Other patients
were giving me a rather wide berth. But then, none of the other
patients was also knitting. You see, most of the other patients were
men: men my age or older. Men wearing their veteran’s hats, their
combat colors, their manly accomplishments on their proverbial
sleeves. These guys don’t knit. Or, if they do, they damn sure
don’t do it in public! I’m the odd man out. I’m also a war
veteran, and I’m wearing my colors, too. My combat engineer’s hat
is set off nicely by the colorful stripes in my latest silky-soft
scarf.
Finally,
into the waiting room came a couple. They were much younger than I.
Both were wearing some indications that they were in or had served in
the military. I later learned they had both served in Iraq. She
carried a knitting bag. After registering at the desk, she walked
directly over to me, asked about my project, asked if she could join
me, plopped down beside me and pulled out her work. Her partner—her
husband, I soon learned—stood across the room glaring at me. He
stood! He couldn’t even bring himself to sit. My knitting companion
kept gesturing to her hubby to come join us, but he insistently stood
and glowered.
After
a few minutes, a nurse appeared and called the wife’s name, then
took her back into the clinic to test her vital signs, etc. The man
slowly approached me. I stopped knitting, met his eyes, and held my
hands with the #3 needles angled just enough to suggest that they
could serve as defensive weapons if need be. (For some reason, I tend
to knit a lot of things with sporting weight yarns and small needles.
For once I wished I had been working on a bulky Icelandic sweater. I
would have been holding # 13s instead of # 3s!)
He
stared into my soul and, I suppose, something he found there told him
I was not really a threat to his marriage or his masculinity or
anything else. Or perhaps he decided I was too dangerous, or too
deranged, to tangle with. He grabbed a hot rod magazine off the rack
nearby and walked back across the room to sit by himself.
What
would happen to our planet if, all of a sudden, infant girls were
swaddled in baby blue blankets? And what disastrous consequences
could ensue if baby boys came bedecked with little pink pom-pom hats?
What in the world can the world possibly find frightening about a
6’2” 200-pound man with a bag full of wool and knitting needles?
What in Heaven’s name leads some people to a murderous rage at the
very thought of a man in a dress and panty hose?
A
former high school friend is a highly accomplished and respected
poet. He’s 60 years old and holds a professorship at an major New
England university. He has published numerous books and won many
awards. Lately he has been writing to some of us, his former
classmates, online, pouring out his heart full of hurt and his
still-hot fury about how he was treated by the bullies in high school
nearly a half-century ago. I, myself, harbored a fantasy of taking a
baseball bat to one punk’s head for more than 30 years for beating
me up and calling me a sissy. A recent study suggested that the rash
of violent school shootings we have experienced in this country over
the past few years were almost all perpetrated by boys who had been
bullied and hounded and terrorized for not meeting some arbitrary
norms of masculinity. In our culture we seem to think that violation
of gender codes is an egregious offense upon society, punishable by
torture and death.
It
starts, innocently enough, by choosing to knit pink or blue. It
proceeds from there by making girls who would rather have a Jedi’s
light saber play with Barbie dolls. And if the gender variance hasn’t
been shamed out of our children by the time they reach high school,
we find it acceptable to let society’s goons try to beat it out of
them. Besides schoolyard bullies, we have skinheads, good ol’ boys,
queer-rollers, tranny-bashers, and many other sorts of “concerned
citizens” waiting to finish the job. Call me Pollyanna, but I think
we could end this sort of violence by knitting the rainbow for babies
without first stopping to inspect their plumbing.