Dresses, toenail polish, ballet do not diminish masculinity

My junior year of high school, my sister Keely – then in her senior year – was doing some… My junior year of high school, my sister Keely – then in her senior year – was doing some inexplicable project for school, apparently requiring her and a friend to dress up in 15-year-old clothing belonging to my mother, then to take pictures of each other.

Now, in my family, we rarely did projects by ourselves. When Kelley, who is a year older than Keely, had a biology project, I felt obliged to make the project require twice as much work by insisting that it should be done on Mario Paint and recorded on video. I’m pretty sure she got an A, even though her two weeks of experimental plant growth were condensed to about 12 hours.

And, of course, I felt no less of a commitment to Keely’s project.

When pictures of me in skirts and jewelry, wearing lipstick, eyeliner and mascara, were passed around to my friends, teachers and my ex-girlfriend, I was amused but adamant: anyone but Dad could see those pictures.

I don’t know if he ever did see them, but I know he knows about my toenail painting. I recently doffed my shoes in front of a woman with whom he is friends. They were painted a vaguely pewter color with purple racing stripes.

The first time I painted my toenails was my senior year of high school, about the same time that I borrowed a car to “go to the library to study” about twice a week. At the end of the marking period, my grade-point average was something like a C-, so I gather he knows I wasn’t studying. I was actually leaving to go to rehearsals for, and eventually performances of, “The Nutcracker.”

By no means did I have secret dreams of being a ballerina. My friend Dawn was in the ballet company in question and asked me if I would take a small role.

My mother and sisters knew, but not Dad. And why not?

Well, in the words of his friend who spotted my nail polish, “What are you, some kind of f—ing queer?”

This is really the only conclusion that one could draw in such a situation, short of deciding that I was actually a woman. As everyone knows, when you go to a store and try to buy nail polish, they demand photographic records of you having sex with a man.

I could care less about being called gay. What really upsets me is the total lack of logic used to arrive at such a conclusion – not to mention the implication that being homosexual makes you less of a man. Granted, the woman in question comes from a time when such ideas were not yet widely regarded as ignorant.

The problem is that my father does, too.

I suppose he knows as little as he does about such aspects of my life because I’ve always thought that he places a great deal of emphasis on traditional masculinity, and I don’t want him to think I’m not a man.

Despite being the only male child in my family, I face some stiff competition in terms of traditional masculinity. My sister Kelley, for instance, lettered in two sports, tennis and lacrosse, while it took me until my senior year just to make the golf team. Kelley also hunts and fishes, and I have quit both.

When I was still a hunter, I saw Kelley grab a wounded deer by the head, slit its throat, then burst into laughter; she had blood on her hands and cheek.

All in all, a very Hemingway moment.

There’s really no contest. Kelley is twice the man that I am.

My role in “The Nutcracker” wasn’t difficult, but I nailed it. I nailed it exactly the way I didn’t nail my performance in any game for the first two seasons I played little league football and baseball. My teams did not win a single game those two years.

Yes, the ballet was great fun, and significantly less emasculating than the pee-wee football game where, just a few minutes into the game, I hyperextended my elbow and skipped off the field. My parents had it on film. When we hosted the team party, that was the tape they put in – though by no means intentionally.

My father came to see almost all of my football, baseball and basketball games, no matter how poorly I played. I can only wonder if he would have come to see me in a ballet. As I remember, we brought the house down.

If only I had been man enough to ask him.

Marty Flaherty would like to wish his sister Keely a happy birthday. You can do the same at kaf80@hotmail.com. Marty can be reached at xgrp@hotmail.com