TW: childhood sexual abuse; suicide
As I write this, it's LGBTQIA+ Pride month. In the Pittsburgh area, some 85,000 people were on hand for the biggest Pride parade to date in this city. But sadly, in many parts of the country, trans kids are under attack, as are LGBTQ rights in general. I began reading R/B Mertz's memoir as a reward for finishing the spring term—and rewarding it has been. I've just finished it in time to sing its praises to the Pitt English community. Burning Butch (Unnamed Press, 2022) reminds us of the high cost of demonizing and discriminating against sexual and gender minorities. Mertz, a poet who completed their Pitt MFA (poetry) in 2010, identifies as trans/nonbinary and currently lives in Ontario, Canada. Burning Butch takes readers through a childhood spent in the ultra-conservative Catholic home of their mother and stepfather—where they helped care for a growing brood of half-siblings—and the home of their father, the scene of haunting memories of sexual abuse. Living in a homeschooling community designed to keep the secular world out, Mertz struggles to understand their own desires in a context where homosexuality is deemed a sin more grave, as the growing child increasingly observes, than so many of the savage injustices overlooked by the evangelical Catholics in their life.
Coming of age early in this century, Mertz attends a Catholic university in Steubenville, Oh., part of whose mission is (according to their website) "to educate, to evangelize, to send forth joyful disciples"; there, Mertz makes the most of what they learn while questioning the prescription for young women to seek traditional marriage and give birth to as many children as "God" sends their way. They explore literature, philosophy, history, and theology in an effort to make sense of who they are and what they want. They yearn for a wider world where love is not so regressively policed, they endure heartbreak at the hands of love interests too afraid to publicly show their love, and they fear that enlarging their world will estrange them from the large family they deeply love, stranding their educated mother on an island of child-rearing and endless housework. One of the most moving testimonies to that love and compassion for the mother is early in the memoir:
Jesus just had to die for us on the cross, but our mothers' personalities died for us in laundry rooms, kitchens, delivery rooms, backyards, stairwells, driveways, long after we kids had fallen asleep. Eventually Mom's eyes started to look different, more still than they used to be. Her face, and everything about her, got harder and harder to recognize. She and the other homeschooling mothers were carving molds out of their own bodies, right in front of our eyes, that they hoped we'd fit into, too. It felt good to be who they wanted me to be, instead of trying to be myself. Day after day, I slipped further into their sameness.
One of Mertz's adolescent escapes from the control of religion is through listening to musical theatre, as well as reading and writing. Interestingly, though on the brink of attending a prestigious secular college in New England, they fall back into the sameness, especially after being told by adults in their homeschooling world that the college, Bennington, was "full of lesbians." Already suspecting they might be a lesbian and nursing an everpresent terror about burning in hell for this, Mertz makes the last-minute decision to attend the college founded in the 1940s by the Franciscan Friars of the Third Order Regular (TORs), rationalizing it for themself by noting that it was a lot closer to the family home than Bennington was. On one trip to pray in front of a Pittsburgh women's reproductive health clinic (such trips were made weekly by students at the school), Mertz becomes uneasy and steps away. In other moments, Mertz attempts to take their own life, backs away, and seeks help—only some of it affirming of who they were. Moments like these notwithstanding and in spite of the college's closeting conditions, Mertz's intellectual life flowers in their undergraduate years even as they work to play catch-up on some cultural capital due to having been narrowly homeschooled. Some of the most stimulating passages in the memoir involve remembered conversations about theology with classmates over contraband wine.
There is a brilliant clarity to this writing. Mertz exercises great restraint in staying with moments in their development without imposing later insights on the thought processes of the child, teen, and young adult grappling with all they've been told in comparison to what they perceive. The prose is crafted with the precision of someone who earnestly wants, and has wanted all along, to cut through dense, self-justifying religious doctrine and sociopolitical casuistry to arrive at a liveable truth. It's as if years of indoctrination have resulted in a style that consciously resists all traces of whopping rhetoric, opting for a patient layering that accumulates as the memoir progresses. When Mertz attends graduate school at Pitt to develop as a poet, they allow themselves to cut their hair super-short for the first time and step into St. Paul's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue to commune with their mirror image: a kneeling statue of St. Joan of Arc.
I bowed my head and thought of all the times I'd tried to be one thing or another, my body tugged between places, people, ideas—Pennsylvania or Maryland, Mom or Dad, gay or straight, Church or world, God or self, girl or boy, good or bad? I'd heard something about there being a right wing and a left wing, and one bird. The two sides I'd been pulled between were just two of infinite points on a circle. I had to stop trying to choose.
This is not to say that the memoir lacks complexity. Anyone raised as a Catholic knows that complexity is tantamount to vitality, a life force in itself—when it is not weaponized to cow or silence. I won't spoil the memoir's ending here, but I will say that Mertz's family, for all their homeschooling and ultraconservative leanings, embodies a rich complexity.
With the Marriage Equality Act and other forward movement in ensuring the civil rights of gender and sexual minorities in the U.S., one may have hoped the nation was finally getting it right. These days, to hear news from Florida, Tennessee, the Dakotas, and elsewhere, it's hard to believe that. But if you read Burning Butch this summer—and seriously, you should—you'll be reminded that the stakes are high, and you'll be renewed in the drive to make this country safe and welcoming for all Americans, regardless of how some people interpret the texts they hold sacred.
—Ellen McGrath Smith