I.

A followup post to the one the other day on Imposter Syndrome. Posing and pretending got me thinking about acting, and how I’m bad at acting, and how I’m afraid of it. If you ever want to get me the worst gag gift, sign me up for an improv class and make me enroll.

What’s scary about acting is being wrong or not being believed. It’s attempting the proper accent and sounding instead like I’ve got marbles in my mouth, or saying sad words in so wooden a way the audience laughs. Adorable. Oh, look! He’s trying to be somebody else but he’s really only always himself.

In other words, the scary thing about acting is other people dismissing my hubris or delusion. That too-big-for-his-britches quality. Which brings to mind the closet. In truth, I acted like a straight man for more than half my life, and the latent feeling I had during that performance was always: Am I doing this right? What if they find out?

Every time I got called a faggot, there was a critic panning my performance.

II.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about acting not as a thing certain handsome people do on stage, but as a thing we all do when we leave the house. I act the part of a writer most mornings, and then I act the part of an MFA program director (me! they actually gave this job to me!) and then I act the part of a teacher, and then I go home and act the part of a loving partner. We all have roles to play, with different scripts and settings and sometimes even costumes.

But further, I’ve been thinking about acting in opposition to passing, given “active”‘s opposition to “passive”—in voice, in sex, in everywhere.

You can pass as anything. Most people’s experiences with passing is when somebody comes up to you at a store and asks you where the restrooms are, or the kosher salt. “Uh, I don’t work here,” you go. Passing involves appearing to be somebody else when you’re not even trying, when you’re just being yourself. Passing creates an audience outside of any performance.

I love passing. I have thought so much about strategic passing I even wrote about it in an essay for The Normal School (on, tellingly, impersonations). I love passing because I love boundaries and borders. Anytime a line in the sand gets drawn I want to stand right on it. I want to be the one person who gets to cross, because taking sides means giving something up. Some freedom maybe.

Passing, though, is passive. It lies low, on the DL, while other people make assumptions and suppositions. And in queer communities (urban ones, mostly) it’s Not Cool. Passing as straight, or cisgendered, implies that you’re trying to pass, because you’re ashamed of being queer.

I think about my friend Clutch, who once told me about the street harassment they get as a trans person. “It’s always guys,” they said, “and they always think I’m trying to pass, and like, doing a bad job.” Clutch embraces their trans identity. They only date trans people, etc. So it’s shitty, the experience, but also confusing—like somebody coming up to you at a store and criticizing what they think is your work uniform.

III.
Another dichotomy at work here: expressing vs. impressing. When people exhort you to express yourself, there’s always this feeling of authenticity and truth. You do you, gurl. Or people who insist they write to “express themselves.” Expressing is active, and acting is expressing, even if what’s expressed is a pose, a lie.

Impressing is passive, in that I can’t act to impress you. You are the audience, the arbiter, of whether to be impressed by me. And when I look at these I see how much I love being impressed by people. When I meet new people, all I want to do is ask them dozens of questions. I like to follow a conversation, at a distance, more than I like to play my part in it.

Where am I going with all this? I’ve got some developing ideas that posing and artifice is, paradoxically, the way toward an authentic life. In three more weeks I’ll begin a 1-year break from having to perform two key roles in my life: program director and professor. I feel I’ve done a poor job keeping up the roles of writer and partner (and friend, and brother, and son) lately. Those guys need more plotlines, more time in front of the camera.