Mertz - Burning Butch

Burning Butch is a necessary and important memoir. A wonderful addition to underrepresented voices. Honest, insightful and moving.

Angie Cruz, author of Dominicana

This book snuck into my heart like a song Id never heard but always wanted to, and now I cant stop humming it. Burning Butch is an urgent reminder that in any community where people read the same stories, sing the same songs, and pray the same prayers, there are stunning souls buzzing with contradiction, pain, beauty and desire, voices which create gorgeous polyphony rather than discord. With generosity and disarming honesty, R/B Mertz has written a book to help all of us survive being alive, being alive, being alive.

Will Arbery, author of the Pulitzer Prize-finalist Heroes of the Fourth Turning

This is a tale of resilience and hope penned by a writer whose singular artistic voice is like no other. Burning Butch is an account of a life lived bravely, honestly, and above all else, proudly.

Alex Espinoza, author of Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime

Burning Butch by R/B Mertz howls against the dogged mouth of the past as much as illuminates the present, evoking the legendary Leslie Feinberg and their struggle for selfhood in the classic memoir, Stone Butch Blues. Mertzs extraordinary and stunning debut memoir extends and deepens the tradition begun by Feinberg for butch life, butch recognition, gender non-conformity, and queerness by writing the catastrophic and world-shattering repressions that radical Christianity can inflict on children, adults, and communities. In this gorgeously written, powerful and moving literary accomplishment, Mertz reminds us of the sheer miracle that any of us queer kids are alive. Burning Butch is sure to be a new classic. It will lead us into a brighter future.

Dawn Lundy Martin, author of Good Stock Strange Blood and Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, University of Pittsburgh

a memoir

R/B MERTZ

The Unnamed Press

Los Angeles, CA

AN UNNAMED PRESS BOOK

Copyright 2022 by R/B Mertz

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to info@unnamedpress.com. Published in North America by the Unnamed Press.

www.unnamedpress.com

Unnamed Press, and the colophon, are registered trademarks of Unnamed Media LLC.

ISBN: 9781951213503

eISBN: 9781951213510

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available upon request.

The lines from Power. Copyright 2016 by the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright (c) 1978 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., The lines from Poem XVII of Twenty-One Love Poems. Copyright 2016 by the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright (c) 1978 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., from COLLECTED POEMS: 1950--2012 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Cover design by Robert Bieselin

Typeset by Jaya Nicely

Manufactured in the United States of America

Distributed by Publishers Group West

First Edition

God is in the details.

Stephen Sondheim

In an effort to tell the truth and protect the privacy of everyone whose stories intertwined with mine, I made a genuine effort to obscure identifying traits without altering the narrative. If I was going to lie, I wouldve gotten laid a lot more.

For the big kids & the little kids

& for Mom & for Bob

I found that life was beautiful

only because I found that your life was beautiful.

Francesco (1991)

Love. Its a new style. On the other hand,

our old ways were once new.

Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

2019. I sit on the table at the front of the room, waiting for my new students to arrive for our first eight oclock class. Its fall, theyre first-year students, and its Monday at 8:00 A.M. Ill be their first college professor. The first thing theyll notice about me is my clothes, my hair, my gendertheyve gotten into a semi-exclusive Catholic college, and they arent expecting to find a queer in charge of them, at least not such a loud one. They wont know how to categorize me, and itll scare them.

Are you the teacher? a student asks me, entering the room, looking a little excited. She has long blonde hair.

My mom always said my hair was strawberry-blonde, but as I get older it gets more auburn, like its settled solidly in between two poles. Most of my head is shavedqueer right out of the proverbial gate, like a proud anti-Samson, giving Gods power right back to him. There was a time I couldnt have imagined looking like this, when I was afraid to even cut my hair above my chin, when I had to imagine being stranded on a deserted island like the girl in The Swiss Family Robinson to be allowed to cut my hair as short as I wanted, like a boy.

Since Im getting better and better at being broke, Im as thin as I get, even muscly in some places, with a little feminist belly. Im wearing tight jeans, a bright blue button-down shirt with a tie and a vest, and black nail polish on one hand, the one without LOVE tattooed across the knuckles. I look far less traditional than any of my students, but theyll never look conservative to me if theyre not wearing t-shirts with the Virgin Mary on the front, tucked into long cotton prairie skirts, like the girls I grew up with. In a shirt like this one, with the sleeves rolled all the way up, they can see the tattoos on each of my biceps: an unfinished Howard Finster angel on my left, and the circle drawing from Hedwig and the Angry Inch on my right.

Yeah, I say, chuckling, Im the teacher.

Those words ring a little in my ears, because to me, teachers were always special people, like actors or priests, up there performing one-person shows for everyone. Sometimes with music. I always had crushes on them, from kindergarten onward. I remember kicking my feet under the dining room table, chattering on and on about Ms. Souder; Mom looked at me like she was amused and scared at the same time, and I could tell she wasnt saying something that she was thinking. What? Id asked. Nothing, shed said.

The twenty-two freshmen assembled before me look more or less the same. Almost everyones skin is the same beige color, their hair the same shades of light brown and blonde. Nearly all the girls have long, straightened hair, and all the boys have short hair, even for boys. All but two or three are wearing something that says the name of their school across the front, in navy blue or blood red.

When I was their age, I had long hair, too. I remember not understanding how to choose clothing and not feeling good in any of it. I was the oldest of seven kids and paid for everything with student loans. I didnt have enough spending money for a hoodie that bore the name of my college or even a t-shirt, but I remember wishing I could have one, wishing I could look just like everyone else. Still, no matter what clothes I wore, I never seemed to look like them. For years, I only shopped in the girls section, then the juniors section, then the womens section, like I was supposed to.

I write my name on the board: Mertz. My bad dads name, the name I didnt share with my mother, since shed remarried and become a Tuttle. Every situation that required us to produce identification resulted in confusion because we had different last names. Was I really hers, or was I his? As soon as Id started teaching, the summer after grad school, my students started calling me Mertz and nothing else, intuiting that the Ms., Miss, and Mrs. theyd relied on thus far wouldnt work for menor was I a Dr. or a Professor or even, technically, an Instructor. Eventually, I accepted what I had resisted for most of my childhood: I was just Mertz. Most people had been resisting the girl name I was born with since I was a kid, opting for the last name that had that satisfying