IT’S NEVER BEEN A GOOD TIME to be anything other than a white cis male in this country. From there, we might debate which identities and preferences are the most persecuted but can probably agree that now is an especially terrible time for anything that’s not the muscled, racist, and American brand of, say, Joe Rogan. Our self-described “king” of a president (read: the repulsive tyrant half of us voters elected) has made it a priority to oust trans soldiers from the military at a time when recruitment is at an all-time low. Similarly, he has banned trans women from competing in female sports (this sentence alone is enough of an oxymoron to ridicule the order). No doubt these efforts to purge the culture of its humanness are just the beginning.
So it’s a pretty rage-inducing time to be reading and thinking about Torrey Peters’s new book, Stag Dance,which is about trans women in particular and male sexuality in general—the confused and tortured feelings some men have about their birth bodies and “masculinity.” Stag Dance is good in some ways and downright spectacular in others. It’s a collection of three short stories and a novella, and if the effort here is uneven, no matter: the novella alone is such a beautiful, ridiculous, and painful thing, it more than steals the show. But first, an overview.
Throughout the collection, Peters explores her subject in a few ways, often relying on the power of premise and genre. One story depicts a world bioterrorized by an infectious agent that destroys the body’s ability to make sex hormones (male or female); another features a large and oafish logger (think: The Dude from The Big Lebowski) who gets the chance to play lady at a dance; a third features roommates at a Quaker boarding school for boys. Peters is very good at staging a setup and then pressing her thematic concerns through that setup to see what happens.
The plot changes, but in many ways, Peters’s interests remain the same. There’s rage and violence, self-loathing and self-sabotage. A leitmotif for this collection is the painful extent to which men in their various stages of denial or transition despise themselves and their feelings and their trans counterparts who feel similarly. In this collection, the hatred radiating toward the trans community from the maga right is easily internalized.
In the first story, “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones,” there’s an especially affecting moment when a trans woman goes to Trans Beach Pride at a local beach. On instinct, she catches a football with all the athleticism of the man she was. But when she throws it back, she doesn’t muster the same brio. The response from the other trans women? “You don’t have to throw like a girl to impress us. Just throw it like you normally would.”
The cutting and competitive sniping among trans women is on full display in this moment—and several others throughout the collection—which is useful for reminding us that no one is exempt from the exacting standards the culture sets up for us or the self-conscious despair that ensues. The sniping (the jealousy and hurt) are also highly gendered as female, which plays out to somewhat comic effect: in this first story, a trans woman feels so scorned, she infects the person who rejected her with a hormone inhibitor that ends up changing the world. Hell hath no fury much?
The other two stories are more successful, each exploring a facet of male sexuality that rarely gets covered in mainstream literature. In “The Chaser,” there’s a closeted high school boy who’s gay, yes, but whose real secret is that he’s turned on by the “femininity” of his roommate. The narrator’s steeped in all the homophobic posturing of the other boys at his Quaker boarding school (setup!), which only makes his transgressions feel all the more . . . transgressive. And predictable. He tries to repress his desire or at least to rationalize it (the roommate is a femme and what’s wrong with getting hard for a girl?). He tries to write off their sex play. And then he steals a nightie for the roommate, which catapults the story into a dark and violent place—a metaphor for the versions of ourselves we trample on the road to self-discovery.
The last story picks up where “The Chaser” leaves off, featuring a young cross-dressing man who confronts just how impoverished our language is for capturing what’s what when it comes to desire. When does a fetish end and gender transition begin? What even constitutes a fetish? What constitutes gender dysphoria? And what do these labels do for us? Peters will tell you: they get us to self-immolate.
Which brings me to the real achievement of the collection, the titular novella, “Stag Dance.” The first thing you will notice about the novella is that it’s spliced throughout with so much old-timey loggers’ jargon, it’s hard to know what these people are even talking about. They’re a band of timber pirates working in a camp in the middle of the Montana woods. It’s probably 1935 or some such, given how much “cougar milk” they drink—a Prohibition-era woods liquor. How do I know? Because I had to consult a website I never thought I’d have reason to check: Forestry Forum’s lumberjack lingo. Yep, this site exists.
At first, the jargon reads like part of the story’s world-building (it establishes bona fides), but as the story proceeds, the jargon—now superfluous—doesn’t recede. On the contrary, it starts to feel ever more prominent, which might put some readers off, but which, for this reader, turned into a bacchanalia of language that performs the outsize sensuality of our hero as he gets increasingly attached to his bush.
Let me back up. In “Stag Dance” we meet Babe Bunyan (The Babe), who is notorious for his size, strength, and general homeliness. Like “The Chaser,” the story features a horde of men who are menaced by any hint of each other’s queerness. These are manly men! They chop wood. They gleek chew juice. They are gruff, rank, and talk a lot of smack—“These cruel axemen! They made easy terms with malice and stupidity when they numbered three or four on one.”
And so of course we find among these totems of masculinity the Babe, who is outwardly their kin but inwardly an old soul and also, maybe, female. The Babe tells us: “Daylight had just then summited the peaks and shone through the ramparts of the boneyard trees left ruined on the east side of camp. The broken limbs cut the pink light into beams that alit here and there on the moisture of breath.”
The Babe is a poet. A romantic and hopelessly trapped in a body that becomes wholly alien to him only once he gets the chance to play “a skooch” at the stag dance. The leader of the camp tells the men that anyone who dons a brown fabric triangle over his crotch will signal to the others that he is looking “to be courted.” And with that, the Babe’s life changes for good: “This, too, seemed one of God’s attempts at humor: a desire unbidden by me, unspoken, and flummoxing to me, a desire that, without my desiring it to, made itself manifest in sessions of feverish blanketed self-abuse—and that now against all odds presented itself to me in the tantalizing possibility of a brown fabric triangle.”
Pathos comes in many forms, but one of the most pronounced has got to be cross-dressing men and trans women who want to pass as traditionally female, but who can’t. Who don’t even come close. The Babe has this problem from the moment he flexes his snatch (forgive my taking on the language of this novella, but it’s fun), and the result is just a gorgeous and heartbreaking read.
The Babe tells us that he “had a feeling of simple stupidness. That I was performing something for which I’d no talent, and certainly no natural gifts, and the falseness was obvious and embarrassing, without even the thrill of perversion or menace.” And yet he persists. He wears the triangle and experiences a “judder of sweet pain” as he toys with how the triangle makes him feel and what he wants.
As in the other stories, the Babe endures an indefatigable tension between the “maleness” of his body—his strength, agility, genetic handling of an axe—and his notions of “femaleness”: “The difference between what I had somehow hoped and the dull clay reminder of my actual self effected in me a mortal frustration, a certainty that I was not deserving of any loveliness—a hatred of my own person that as I experienced it, I knew was laughable.” And it is laughable—now and then. There is something comic about this hulking timber pirate succumbing to the girlish preoccupations of middle school: Does he like me? Does he know I like him?
“Stag Dance” ends exactly as it should, with a kind of glorious transubstantiation I won’t forget anytime soon. The same goes for the anguish and sorrow of the Babe’s experience belying his dreams—his and the dreams of all the protagonists in this collection: “I had a helpless notion that I might have been lovely to someone.”
Fiona Maazel’s most recent novel is A Little More Human (Graywolf, 2017).