The cruel Midwest

I have a friend who shaves his head, is really tall and wears long skirts and platform boots to work. I also have a friend who has dreads past his butt and wears elaborate hoop earrings. Aside from their eccentric appearance, what these two friends have in common is that they are, at least in my experience, very comfortable with who they are. This is in contrast to many other freaks I know who have a certain insecurity about their freakish nature, who feel like outcasts. It just so happens that both of these confident friends grew up in small Midwestern towns, and the other day I talked about this to another freak from Oklahoma. He explained to me that when you grow up in an environment that is very hostile to freakishness, you develop a certain shell to the point that you don’t care anymore. The hostility just rolls right off of you. Then, when you come to a place like San Francisco which embraces freaks, you tend to feel very comfortable, like, “Oh hey, finally. There is all these other me’s running around here.” And I was like, well, I’m a freak from a small (not Midwestern but German) town, so why didn’t this happen to me? How did I grow up to be a freak with so much insecurity?

And I have two possible theories for this:

1) I didn’t get enough hostility and didn’t feel quite lonely enough as a youngster to develop the shell my friend spoke of: I always had friends and I never went through a period of being completely shunned by everyone in town due to my appearance. So maybe I just didn’t grow up in a black-and-white enough world to really feel the contrast when moving to San Francisco.

2) I was actually rejected by the freaks in my town, not by the “normal” people: There was a period as a teenager when I started dressing in a more freakish way but it was in line with a trend that many other teenagers were also embracing. And I ended up not getting along and feeling very intimidated by many of the very kids that dressed like me and liked the same music as me. Also, I don’t know if that actually counts as being a freak or if I was simply trying to fit in with the cool kids.

So maybe what happened to me is that I wasn’t actually a real freak and as a result I have felt insecure around people I perceive as real freaks. Maybe by the time I became a real freak, i.e. embodied my very own brand of eccentric, which was during my year as an exchange student in 1993/4, I had developed too much insecurity and not enough chip-off-my-shoulder confidence to feel comfortable among my own.

It wasn’t until I entered the darker communities in the Bay Area about five years ago that I felt truly embraced by a subculture that felt like my own. And now this comfort is expanding outwards to other communities. I think the reason it has been such a difficult and serpentine journey for me is that I felt rejected by my own subculture in Germany and instead of dealing with it, I ran away to America. At first America seemed like heaven with its kneesock-wearing thrift store whores, but my internal conflict soon caught up with me. Am I really a freak? Do freaks really like me? Yes and yes, I think.