When I was two years old, my favorite TV show was The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.  It was 1972. Perhaps this is my first memory or perhaps my mother has told the story so many times that I think I can remember it.  I believe I do remember watching one of the many times when Sonny and Cher used to close the show by bringing out Chastity for their final number.  I would insert myself into the TV with them.  I might have made my first petty comparisons between my cuteness and Chastity’s cuteness, preferring my own.  Perhaps I might have thought that I would make a more suitable famous TV child.  Apparently, I used to carry around a picture of Cher with me wherever I went.  I also told my day-care providers that was, in fact, Sonny and Cher’s child and that I was just on loan to my parents.  They must have told my folks, because my parents started calling me Tara Bono, which was eventually shortened to just Bo.  This is the name my parents have called me my entire life.  Fortunately, it has  enduring gender neutrality.

Thus began the paranormal resemblance of my life to Chastity Bono’s.  We are almost exactly the same age.  We both came out as lesbians at around sixteen.  We both transitioned later in life.  I didn’t think about it much over the years.  It was a cute story my mom liked to tell about my childhood.  My mom.  She is not like Cher in so many ways.  Who is?  But, she is pretty and thin.  There is also something relatively uncommon about her femininity and presence that is quite Cherlike. My mother has a larger than normal life aura surrounding her, like Cher.  Not in a theatrical sense (although she has that side), more associated with her superhuman competency.  Think Annette Bening in American Beauty or Robin Wright in House of Cards.  I just realized that Kevin Spacey is the husband in both of those shows – weird.  She is super capable and really pretty and she is kind of a big deal in her own community.  She also has a sense of entitlement that borders on the masculine.  Many pretty women know that they can manipulate because of their beauty.  Caroll and Cher seem to bend cumulative human folly to their will, using their beauty merely as a jedi mind trick that disguises their true alien forms.  Their looks are not the most significant thing about either of them.  They are significant people.  As to their femininity, there is something additionally performative about it for both of them, almost as if it is not a naturally occurring gender role.  There is a similarity to the way Cher wears a Bob Mackie spider web dress and the way my mother dons a St. John’s knit pant suit.  They are intimidating, not titillating.  I think what I am saying is that my mother and Cher actually are drag queens.  What choice did Chaz and I have but to become men?

There is a huge difference between a drag queen and a masculine woman.  One is entertaining and powerful.  The awkwardness of the other is just uncomfortable for everyone.

Occasionally, we would do our best to make our mothers happy.

But the transitional lesbian mullets happened…

which is actually the fault of…

And this, of course, happened…

 

but then this…

  
Unlike my mother, Cher has another child, a son. I think his name is Who Gives a Shit.  I believe Cher rolled her eyes upon hearing he was getting married.  Cisboys with drug problems are boring.  I think Chaz and I have mothers who actually ended up really liking us as people.  And I’m pretty sure we are the only ones who understand our mothers.

While I was at grad school in Boston, about a year after I had started transitioning, my mother called one night.  Her voice was a bit frantic.  “I need you to send me a current picture of yourself.  A good one.  I can pay for you to have one taken if you don’t have one.”  I say, “I think I have one, ma.  What do you need it for?”  She explained, “I got tickets to Dancing with the Stars…and it’s for the night that Cher is going to be there.”

Because my mother is magic, she just assumed that she was going to be able to meet Cher and tell her the whole story.  She also told me I was more handsome and a better dancer than Chaz, but she is my mother.  I sent her a picture I had actually taken for my girlfriend back in Minneapolis, so I was trying to look hot, which of course, my mom loved, because she’s just so happy that I’m good-looking now.  “You always did suck at being a girl,” is what she said when I told her I was transitioning.

My mother took the picture with her to Dancing with the Stars, but she didn’t meet Cher.  They stuck her way up on the third tier in the back.  I’m sure Cher would have taken care of that shit had she known my mother was there.  I’m not sure if Chaz and I are evidence for some obscure psychological template.  This is what happens when magic drag queens raise butch dykes.  I’m sure we are very different people, simultaneous hairdos aside.  I wonder if Chaz dresses in drag every Halloween like I do.  I bet I walk better in heels.