Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey Into Manhood and Back Again

by Norah Vincent

There were the occasional gay or sexist jokes, but they, too, were never mean-spirited. Ironically enough, the guys told me that I, being the worst bowler in the league by far—my average was a mere 100—was lucky I hadn’t bowled with them in a previous season when anyone who averaged less than 120 incurred the label “fag,” and anyone who averaged less than 100 was, by default, a girl. At the end of the season, whoever had won the booby prize had had to bowl an entire ten frames in women’s panties. They each had the usual stories about being propositioned by a gay man, or happening on a gay bar unawares, but they told them with the same disarming bemusement and self-abasement as they told the stories about the habitually mysterious ways of rich people. Gay people and their affairs didn’t much interest them, and if gays were the butt of a joke now and then, so was everyone else, including, and most often, themselves. Nothing was beyond humor,