The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You
by S. Bear Bergman
Arsenal Pulp Press. 192 pages, $18.95
THIRTY-SOMETHING S. Bear Bergman has already lived several lives and is leaving a trail of documents for us fortunate readers to decipher. A performance artist, memoirist, educator, and more, Bergman’s elegantly written collection of essays chronicles life as a gender non-conformist—on the “transmasculine spectrum”—with a laugh-out-loud sense of humor.
In a 2006 collection of autobiographical essays, Butch Is a Noun, Bergman presented a previous life that included marriage to a femme lesbian in Northampton, Massachusetts. Bergman divorced, moved to the Toronto area, and married j wallace, a female-born, self-described “display-model transsexual” who’s a gender educator for the province of Ontario. Anyone wanting to read fulsome compliments about all things Canadian—except the weather—will find it here, especially Canada’s health-care system.
Bergman, who uses the gender-neutral pronouns “hir” (his or her) and “ze” (he or she) and requests the same from us, hir readers, is now “read” by some as a gay man, by others as a straight man, and occasionally (especially by biological family) as a female. In a provocative essay, Bergman turns the tables: why should “reading” place the onus on the person being read? Shouldn’t the person doing the “reading” have to do some work? There are no easy answers, but there are well-reasoned arguments.
The origin of the name Bear is disclosed in Bergman’s on-line interview with Ron Suresha in Bears on Bears (2002). Dubbed “Mother Bear” by friends in the early 90’s, “Mother” was gradually dropped. Long before learning about the Bear subculture, Bergman considered the bear attitude to be a blend of both motherly and fatherly affection and caring for loved ones. Bergman was born Sharon, a name that’s used now only by a select few relatives and very old friends. As a youngster, cruelly but descriptively self-described as appearing like a Mack truck, Bergman—with a Bat Mitzvah coming up—had to learn to daven “like a girl” in addition to wearing the expected girlish outfit and hair style. Looking back, Bergman realized that ze’d been imitating hir father’s style of prayer. The Jewish faith and traditions continue to play a major role in hir life, and the esteem in which the Bergmans were held in the family’s temple trumped all gender matters. Bergman is not the first writer to find parallels between gender transgression and various aspects of Jewish religion, and in this memoir they’re disclosed in the context of family stories.
Calling hirself “an egg timer in a forest of hour-glasses” just about sums up Bergman’s alienated experience: As a butch, Bergman says, ze was too girly, without interest in stereotypically butch lesbian pastimes, and in “trying to figure out which gender really seemed like the best fit” kept coming back to what one might call hir own perceived definition of gay (or perhaps not stereotypically heterosexual) masculinity. With a self-knowing wink and a smirk, Bergman provocatively discloses enough interesting facts about hir intimate life to let the reader know that there is, indeed, quite a life, as a “a homesteader on the landscape of gender.” Bergman has not undergone gender-reassignment surgery and states “I retain all of my original equipment in unmodified format.”
The Nearest Exit exhibits a style that’s grown remarkably in elegance and eloquence, and this engrossing memoir is highly recommended.
