The heartbreaking reason I said goodbye to my Snow Queen: Goran’s story
Tonight, the sirens went off again, this time in a different sound piercing the sky, like a raging dragon. I could clearly hear a couple of detonations in the distance.
“It’s the air raid they are expecting, we should be moving on quickly,” says Mum, showing me the way to the ground level where we’ll spend another sleepless night under the stairs.
“Are we safe there?” asks our 75-year-old neighbour, Ann, who has been living with us for the past few weeks.
“Nothing can penetrate three layers of concrete,” I said, brushing off her concerns.
It is winter 1994 in the middle of the Bosnian war. We haven’t had electricity since last February. That’s now almost a year. Mum plugs an old lamp to the car battery and throws a few tiny blankets on the freezing tiled floor. We listen to the radio for a while, taking in the announcements about the number of dead and wounded soldiers, before eventually winding down and falling asleep. Well, at least some of us. I spend these dark hours wide-eyed and imagine traveling to remote islands in the Pacific that I will probably never have a chance to visit.
The morning always brings relief. Light filtering through the house means we have survived another night. Despite the war that has been raging for more than a year, my mother is still working.
“She is a teacher, and children have to go to school — even in wartime,” my neighbour snaps at me, just to say something before going back to her house where she usually spends her days.
The workday mornings are almost always the same. Mum gets quickly ready, pens a brief note with a list of chores I need to finish before she returns and dumps on the table a can of corned beef that she gets from the Red Cross for my breakfast. I hate corned beef. It expired almost a decade ago, but we all eat it because it’s the only thing we have. Today, I don’t even bother opening the can. The sound of the door locking usually signals it is time for action. The most exciting part of the day, when this seven-year-old boy turns into the Snow Queen.
I run to my parent’s bedroom and pull a beautiful brown dress out of their closet. It’s a gorgeous sweater gown with puffy sleeves and varsity stripe detail on the cuffs and hems. I really don’t understand why Mom doesn’t like it. She only wore it once to a family wedding and then left it to be eaten by moths. This dress is always accompanied by my sister’s prom shoes (she is 21 and has the smallest feet) and a straw hat my late nanna used when gardening. At the top of the endless staircase that is the centrepiece of our home — I think I counted once there are about 40 steps — I set up a dining chair and voilà: my palace is finished.
I always act out the same scene. The Snow Queen receives visitors from all over the world who take turns at the foot of the staircase presenting their gifts, bearing the greetings of their rulers …. and leave.
Sometimes the queen gets tired, so she runs to the bedroom and takes a nap for a few minutes. Kind of a beauty sleep. I only play this game when no one is home. Dad has been at the frontlines for months; Mum is teaching at the local school and my sister works as an apprentice at the gas station in the village nearby.
I am a super-emotional Snow Queen, at times I shout a lot, issue orders: “You should just all go to hell! Utterly useless!”
But you could also hear me sobbing while reading the love letters I received from my Prince Charming.
“Your Highness. Prince Philip of Dreamy Meadows.”
“What does he say? Read, fast,” I urged.
“My sweetest rose, my heart is hollow when not in your presence…”
Stop it, stop it, please.
It was a rainy winter day when I became the Snow Queen once more.
Just as I was expecting a visit from the German envoy, to my surprise, my sister Lana appeared at the front door. I later found out that the gas station she worked for was robbed overnight, so they sent all employees home. I remember thinking at first, oh Lana decided to take part in my little show, so I muttered, “You have come a long way from your distant lands, my fair friend.”
My sister looked at me in complete horror, her beautiful blue eyes that I loved so much kept getting bigger and bigger… until, I think, they tripled. And then she screamed out loud as if she had just seen the ghost of our late aunt Anka or, God forbid, the devil himself.
I don’t even know how she managed to reach me so fast, the stairs were so steep and there were so many of them, but she ran up in a few seconds and threw herself onto me. She grabbed my thin arms so tightly that I could hear my bones rattling. I moaned in pain, while she kept yelling out threats over and over: “Take it off, you little bastard! Take that dress off!”
I stood frozen, numb, the only thing I noticed was the smell of gasoline coming from her jacket. Somehow, I eventually managed to pop out of the dress and to get rid of the shoes before she noticed they were hers. And only then did I burst into tears. I cried uncontrollably as if I had lost my best friend — and in fact, I did.
Instead of trying to comfort me, Lana pushed me against the wall, so hard that I bit my tongue and started bleeding.
“Wash that mouth and say nothing to Mum. Because if I tell her what I saw, you will be finished. Do you hear me, you will be finished!” she said, looking at me in disgust.
What did you see, I wondered to myself? I was just making theatre. I always dreamt of being an actor! What is so wrong with that?
Wrong, wrong, wrong …
That was the last day that the Snow Queen came out on the stage of my staircase. The closet in which I left the brown dress that morning was shut forever. At least I never dared to open it again. Instead, I spent hours in the silence of my room in front of the mirror, often observing my movements and listening to the tone of my voice, which suddenly sounded strange and twisted. I practised how to move my wrist, so it didn’t hang loosely, how to walk without wiggling, how to sound confident and act like a bro. When I finally started school, I realised that my sister was not the only one who believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with me.
My schoolmates bullied me, calling me sissy because I wouldn’t take part in sports. Once, they rubbed Tiger Balm for pain into my eyes. I cried walking back home but never said a thing to Mum or anyone else. The burning was nowhere near as strong as the shame I felt. But why? What was so wrong with me? Why don’t they just leave me alone?
A few years later, I took the entrance exam for an acting course. I still loved theatre and kept performing in amateur productions, though I only ever played exclusively male roles. I walked out before a five-member committee and recited a well-known national poem, to which one of the members commented: “He has this beautiful, thick, mature male voice.”
God… I wanted to hug him, throw myself at his feet and kiss his shoes. He did not notice. I managed to trick him. No one noticed my little secret!
I didn’t even know how much the harassment I experienced as a feminine boy in wartime Bosnia had left me deeply wounded, covered in scars.
It wasn’t until I started dating men that I realized that I was still that seven-year-old boy lying on the cold stairs of my home with his mouth bleeding. Terrified and full of self-loathing.
“I don’t do feminine guys,” I said once in a conversation with friends, “if I wanted to date women, I would be straight.”
I built this crazy system of preselection that would allow me to distinguish whether the guy was more masculine or feminine. I called it a fem-trap. If I suspected the guy was “girly”, I would ask him to send me a couple of photos, or to call me. If he didn’t want to call, I told him to at least leave a voice message. If it turned out that his voice was soft, I would immediately think of a way not to meet him in person or expedite the now-famous transition from a romance into a friendship. It took me almost a decade of hard work with my therapist, Ben, to finally learn to accept and love myself, my vulnerable, gentle, soft-voiced self.
In the stillness of the night, the snow queen often visits me in my dreams. Beautiful and innocent she slithers into the brown dress like a snake shedding its skin. We both laugh like two kids who just got caught with their hands stuck in the cookie jar.
“Before we part,” I say while giving her a hug, “I want you to know something. Don’t let anyone keep you from playing.”
She licks blood off her lips, pulls up her dress, puts on the shoes and slowly walks up to the throne. When she finally arrives to top, she turns and looks at me for a moment. She nods, closes her eyes and whispers: “I do belong here.”
This story was published in Episode 2: Masculinity on the podcast, Different Kind of Gay.
