Unmasking Family Secrets and Fierce Truths: Jackie Domenus’s Raw, Unfiltered Memoir Challenges Everything You Think You Know
“Tomboy” also reminds the queer reader of those moments of denial we construct as we realize — and then push back against — our authentic sexuality. “My Myspace bio reads something like ‘Yes I skateboard. No, not all girls who skateboard are lesbians.’” One vignette, one paragraph later, and Jackie writes, “I am twenty years old and realizing most girls who skateboard are in fact queer — including me.”
The second essay, “Of Dogs and Men,” uses even more lyric technique (the narrative is interwoven with footnoted descriptions of the Michael Vick dogfighting case as well as the origin of the phrase, a dog is man’s best friend) to not only portray a young Jackie’s poignant relationship with Lucky, their childhood dog, but also with their father, an impatient and gruff man who, at the moment Lucky needs to be put down, collapses into grief as he hugs his child. This heart-rending moment of sadness takes the reader beyond grief, however, and illuminates an important awakening for Jackie and an excellent refutation of the gender binary for all readers: “What a relief it was to know that tenderness could coexist with the boyishness inside of me. What a relief that I did not have to be one thing or the other.”
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