When I was around 14 years old, my 7-years-older brother Jorge (I pronounce it the same as “George,” if that matters) took his girlfriend and me to a free Blondie concert in Brooklyn. I couldn’t have told you anything about Blondie, their contemporaries, or anything else about the new wave movement, but this particular concert is important to me because it’s the only time I’ve ever seen my older brother put on eyeliner.
It was a tense moment. You have to understand; my brother was the kind of guy that was born and raised a New Yorker, but in the 5-boros “I grew up playing in the streets” sense of the term. He drove a big red Ford Expedition with the Eddie Bauer seats that looked and drove like a yacht. He sagged his pants over his Wheat Timberlands when he’d wake up on snowy days and start shoveling the walk out front of our house. He grew up listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and NOFX but later switched over to gangsta rap, He loved 50 Cent in particular, because Curtis, like us, is also from Queens. He dyed his hair as blue with Kool-Aid in the summer and then grew it long and bleached it like Kurt Cobain in the fall. My brother would play the drums until his calluses tore open, wrote graffiti on bridges and signs, and skateboarded until bones broke and he exploded a few of his toes. He bought an airsoft pistol once and shot me in the arm as I walked into his room, and then immediately shot himself in the arm when I started crying, just to prove it didn’t hurt—we both walked around with golf-ball sized bruises on our forearms for days; we refused to explain anything to mom. My brother was the kind of kid the other goons would watch their girlfriends around, the kid who’d actually put his reputation or even his permanent record on the line for people he called his friends, and the kind of boy who’d count every transgression against him with knuckles, as in, five knuckles makes a fist. In terms of childhood role models, my brother Jorge was the first and last name on my list of people I wanted to be like at 14 years old.
Yet absolutely none of that hyper-macho aura was present when he asked the tiny blonde girl he’d been seeing at the time to do his make up for him. As if swallowed up whole by the request itself, he looked simultaneously embarrassed to have asked while also relieved she didn’t ask many questions. I, however, was not as polite. At 14 years old, I’d learned the proper response to something I didn’t understand was to make fun of it.
“Jorge, you’re wearing eyeliner? Makeup is for girls, sissy!” Or something along those lines with a few voice cracks thrown in for good measure was my knee jerk reaction, which he exchanged with a quick and heavy thump to my chest. The open palm chest thump, for those of you without lots of siblings, is simple posturing. It’s not enough force to wind someone, just enough to be loud, to show who makes the rules in the relationship. The unspoken sibling doctrine states older brother always makes the rules, and that rule, as spoken, was:
“Shut up, man. It’s not like that, you know? Everyone will be doing it, you know? It’s not that serious.”
So obviously, I got my eyeliner done too. We drove on down to Brooklyn in that big red boat of a truck and sat on a blanket behind a crowd of thousands of middle-aged people as Blondie performed in between a deafening chorus of cheap beer cans being cracked open. It was close to midnight, I didn’t notice if anyone else was wearing eyeliner, but nobody seemed to mind ours. Either way, it didn’t really matter, it wasn’t that serious.
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This week I bought a tube of lipstick. For me. On recommendation from a friend, I went with Illamasqua’s shade of red that they insisted on naming “Impulsive.” Disregarding the amusing coincidence there, there are things even I can admit made me feel silly to do, so for all intents and purposes, it’s just red. To avoid proselytizing, I have every intention of wearing it at some point. I want to be noticed wearing it, and I’d be lying if I said that the fact that it might make some people uncomfortable didn’t have a role in it.
Now I understand we’re all into weird things, and I’ve gone on the record for loudly championing a few within my social circles, but so far I’ve noticed a palpable difference from the way people responded to my explanations as to what would possess me to do such a thing. In general, the couple of girls I’d told I’d ordered makeup were actually so supportive that I almost suspected that if I decided not to follow through, they’d actually be disappointed, and the couple of guys I’ve mentioned it to all sort of grumbled some quiet support and then kind of gawk awkwardly and change the subject.
The thing is, I just don’t think it’s that weird. On some level, I think you’re weird for thinking wearing makeup is weird. I like to change the way I look often because I get bored of seeing the same thing all the time, that’s about all there is to it. Earlier this year David Bowie died, earlier this week, Prince tapped out too. I’m not claiming I was into either of them while they were alive, but the posthumous analysis of their legacies is compelling, at least the androgyny in particular (although that’s not to discredit their music, it’s just not what I’m talking about here) because it’s different from what I’m used to. In the past semester here at CMU we’ve been surrounded by celebrated, high-brow or high-concept incorporation of androgyny on a spectrum of seriousness from multiple avant-garde student-run fashion shows to the in-your-face, oddball drag show this past month. Check out the pictures for yourself- everyone looks fierce, or off-putting or uncanny; everyone looks compelling, everyone looks like how they made themselves look, no apologies or explanations necessary, come as you are and all that feel-good acceptance-type shit without judgment that we talk about being so prevalent. Those people are, at least as far as I can tell, clearly having a good time, and if makeup has anything to do with that it’d be a shame to relegate it just to the big campus-wide events.
On an even simpler level: how you look is one of the few things you have complete expressive control over regardless of things like your major or your background. About half the population has this relationship with cosmetics that I’ve never gotten to opportunity to explore for myself, to determine its relationship with me. And ultimately, I’ve decided that I’m going to be the one to determine just what that relationship, not anyone else. That’s not weird.
You know what is weird? The number of times I’ve been approached by other “totally straight” drunk usually-frat guys at parties who’ll take it upon themselves engage me in conversation and then, oddly enough, in between spilling cheap beer over their own boat shoes and lack of subtlety, start throwing out suspiciously “unrelated” musings about how “everything is homoeroticism” and how they’ve “never hooked up with another guy before” and how maybe that “might be a shame” if they graduate. But I spent $30 on this tube of red lipstick, my man, I’m not screwing around. So hopefully next time, you poor repressed soul, I’ll be ready for you. You’re getting interrupted with a wet one right on the cheek so it leaves a full stain, hopefully slightly marled by my facial stubble on the pull off, too. I’m even gonna practice until I can get that cartoon smacking suction-y sound on release, it will turn heads, that’s a promise. Maybe if I’m feeling particularly cocksure, you’ll even get the combo into the patented fraternity-and-varsity-sports-team classic, the incredibly homoerotic “job-well-done” a**-slap.
Hey man, if it makes you feel better, you could always say a girl gave it to you. It doesn’t really matter either way; it’s not that serious.
