meredith, from trunk books, really liked my essay i sent her, about my beard, and it has a fair to middling chance to being in the book she is including. here is the drat i sent her:

Thirteen Personal Anecdotes About My Beard


One:

My father had a beard. He has a beard, for decades, from living in Vancouver in the 60s, to raising me, and leaving at 7, his beard is a constant. It is the only constant thing about him. I have a beard, have had one since I was 15. Not a small one: big, bushy, and unkempt. It is the only constant thing about me. Seeing us together with the beards is a mirror to a primal scene; At least in terms of the hair, I have become my father. (I am also going bald the same way he is)

Two.
There is another kind of primal scene that my hair invokes, I grew up Latter Day Saints (e.g. Mormon), and the Saints have a weird relationship to beards. For most of the19th Century and into the twentieth century, the prophets have had beards. Majestic, sagacious cascades of white down their chests. I grew up in Sunday Schools with drawing that lined up all the prophets. The beards started with Brigham Young, and ended with George Albert Smith, who died in 1951. The rise of protestant mainstreaming in the LDS church began when the beards ended.

Three:
My favourite prophetic beard (well prophetic in this context, I have a soft spot for the beard of Charlton Heston as Moses, of St Wilgefortis, St Francis Assisi, and others) is Lorenzo Snow. He was more of a theologian then his predecessor; he had to clean up the messes of statehood and polygamy. He had to maintain calm, while the church was at risk of collapsing in on itself. Seeing his photo, during Sunday school lessons and early morning bible classes, was to be inspired. It was a perfect cone of white wool, growing over his craggy face, it embodied everything eternal about this man. This beard was both orderly and chthonic. (Think of Gandalf or Merlin but from the Missouri, then Utah.)

Four:
I remember when I was 6 or 7, growing up and thinking, I will have a beard as wonderful as Snow's. My hair does not grow to a point, it just sort of collapses into shaggy layers of wool. I would notice, as I grew older, there were no members of the bishopric, stake counsel, which had a beard. They were all clean-shaven. Those who had beards, or moustaches or even goatees were not chosen for positions of power. I asked a woman in our ward about this, because she had a reputation for cosmic wisdom, she responded with an anecdote about Spencer W Kimball, the prophet who was in favour of African Americans and the war in Vietnam, but against homosexuality and the Equal Rights Amendment.

Five:
Here is the anecdote: LDS members believe in a profoundly personal, corporeal God, and the place where that God is the most visible, where the veil between heaven and earth is the most transparent is the temple. So a young man, about to be a missionary, who had a beard, met the prophet in a temple, sometime in the late 70s. Kimball told him to shave. The missionary responded but Christ had a beard, and Kimball said, not last time I saw him. At the temple, literally, in the flesh. This story was supposed to awe me with the closeness the prophet had with the spirit of God, and also tell me about important lessons about obedience. Kimball was not found of women, of queers, of dissidence. The book told me that my masturbation, lead to mutual masturbation, which lead to homosexuality. My secondary sex characteristics were interlaced with my faith. My desire to fuck men and my desire to grow a beard interlace into a perversion of the mystic union between the Bridegroom and the bride.

Six:
I could start shaving in grade 9, at 15. I took my grade nine at an adolescent psychiatric facility. The staff had two goals: to socialize me and to save me from suicide. Every day they would give me a razor, and I would shave. Then I would give the razor back. I was poor at shaving and because I had no idea where my hands, my face or my body would interact, I would cut my face to ribbons. Last year, when I was in the hospital again, for the same reasons, I told the nurse how much I felt like my gender was fluid, that I was not real man or a real woman. She said but you have a beard, I said and I have a penis. She couldn't make the leap.


Seven:
In grade 10, I decided not to shave, again. I would go to the barber once a month for trims, but never bare faced. I also started wearing outrageous clothing and painting my nails. In my suburban high school, this was not only viewed as confusing, it was viewed as dangerous.

Eight:
My grade eleven class photo makes me look like a Mennonite.

Nine:
I keep telling myself there something radical in my beard. It's a signifier that I think about deeper things, that I make instead of follow trends. The previous few paragraphs suggest that the prophets had beards when they were hearing from G-d, and stopped having beards when they became technocrats. The beard and belly mean that I am not vain, or silly, that I am not the typical fag. The beard makes me better, and besides I look better with one. However true those ideas are, it is mostly, that I am incompetent in daily tasks, and that besides I'm lazy.

Ten:
A couple of years ago, I tried to shave it off by myself, at my friend Raymond's house, because I wanted to look nice for someone coming from out of town. It has become a story dragged out every time someone asks, why don't you just shave it off. The results were disastrous, they looked like I had the mange: empty in some quarters, patchy in others, and whole sections completelymissed. To rescue me from my own disaster, Ray had to shave the whole thing completely off. I looked like Chuck Lorre in M, if Chuck Lorre was dating a feeder.

Eleven:
I have found, lately, that beards turn me on. But not the beards that look like mine. I find skinny hipster boys at rock and roll shows with a chin strap or the mooks and frat boys with goatees and soul patches, or the just out of college, awkward finding yourself forgot to shave, or the businessman with the five o clock shadow, or the working class men in the semi rural town I live in—even the just baptized Hutterites during farmer's markets during the summer, all have sexy beards. I stop when a film or television show has a boy with a beard in them, Ryan Reynolds going crazy with the ax in that execrable Amityville Horror remake, or Tim McGraw/Toby Keith, or this episode of One Life to Live that had a bearded boy tied up with belts, a double whammy, and of course, playoff beards. All of those Slavs, or Russians, or from Saskatchewan, with the beards, and the ritual, the magical thinking, the devotion to a cause, but that cause being winning a silly kids game, play off beards are the greatest boon to jerking off post jergens.

Twelve:
I have a secret though, sometimes I get sick of the beard, and I want to shave it all off. But I cannot imagine my life without it. It has taken over my life. I have become the person with the beard, with all of the semiotic weight that attaches itself. I can only do drag as postmodern performance, I get food caught in it, I look a little too devoted to abstract causes. In my ongoing negotiation between being normal and being queer, between being radical and being conciliatory, my beard is a site of contention. Could I get a day job, and two kids, and a husband without the beard? But my friend Joe, an Anglican priest, orthodox, but wise and kind, has three kids and a wife and a steady job, and a fantastic beard, a beard sort of just barely kempt, and very much about dropping out.

Thirteen:
So I think, I will keep my beard, as a commitment to competing signals and heterodox holiness, because like Samson my beard contains my hair contains my strength.