How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Being a 'Super Dyke'

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/02/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-being-a-super-dyke/283931/

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Left: The 2012 Dyke March through Salt Lake City; Center and right: The author (in glasses) marries Nicole Christiensen at the Salt Lake County Clerks Office in December 2013 (Natalie Dicou; Reuters)

“Super Dyke!” A snarling voice spews the familiar words as I search for a seat on a junior high school bus jammed full with backpacks and pubescence. The voice, the dreaded moniker—I don’t need to look. I know the yell is for me.

I find an open spot and slouch low, propping my knees against the brown plastic seat in front of me. I want to suck my head into my chest, turtle style. I pretend not to hear the taunts. I start conversations with the girls around me, laughing too loudly to demonstrate I don’t care. Or I stare out the window at the snowy pastures and shivering cows that line the route toward my rural Utah hometown.

In lieu of standing up for myself, saying anything, I keep mum and fantasize about deep-frying Nick in battery acid. That’s his name, and he is the Big Bad Bully of My Childhood, a boy as cartoonishly sociopathic as the braces-wearing Farkus from A Christmas Story. At least that’s how he appears to my 13-year-old self: a hulking monster to fear. My adult brain now realizes he was small for his age—not quite a “pipsqueak,” but close.

Call me a dyke nowadays, and I’ll grin and puff out my chest. But when I first hear the word, it isn’t so much spoken to me but projectile-vomited in my direction. I have no clue what it means. After a rough ride home one day, I head straight to the living room bookcase. It’s 1994, and there’s no Internet—at least not on my family’s computer, which is useful for little more than word-processing and a floppy disc version of Family Feud. So I plop an enormous dictionary on the carpet and kneel in front of it, flipping to “dike.” An explanation of Holland’s ingenious damming system fails to bring me closer to an answer.

[burrowowl]

1. Dike! LOL!