My roles in the '80s were, like, gender dysphoric. I wasn't pretty, I wasn't this, I wasn't that. And I am kind of butchy, you know. That's just my thing.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I thought to be feminine was to give in to straight culture, or the beauty standard, but in my heart I had a flair for fashion and style. They were passions I kept secret because I didn't understand I could love clothes and hair and makeup and still like girls.
I was a weird but definite kid, and there were essentially no gender roles for me to fit into.
I always wanted to be the pretty girl, but I thought I wasn't. When I started acting and getting pretty girl roles, I felt like I was just pretending, and nobody saw I was just this big nerd.
In so much SF, either gender roles are the ones we're used to in the here and now, only transported to the future, or else they're supposedly different, but characters still are slotting into various stereotypes.
A lot of people get stereotyped into roles just from how they look, and I have played such a variety of characters.
I'm the tomboy so I got to be a little butch.
Around 2001, I started analyzing lesbians. I started to realize that even really butch-acting or -dressing women still had a strong female identity that I never had.
Because I didn't have any queer, lesbian, female role models I hated my own femininity and had to look deep within myself to create an identity that worked for me. Pop culture just doesn't hand us enough variety to choose from.
I was a child of the '80s.
Ever since I was little, I showed traits of both masculine and feminine energies. Androgyny was never something that I thought about or tried for.