How Being a Child Elvis Impersonator Helped Me Find My Non-Binary Self

I was thirteen when I was forced into retirement from my career as an Elvis impersonator.

Before my final performance, I looked into the mirror and tucked my bright blonde hair into my dark black wig. It was as if I was suddenly in an unplanned HR meeting with myself. I scanned my body in the mirror, stopping momentarily on my budding breasts and said, “You’re getting too old for this, Addie.”

Moments later, I performed for the expectant crowd, but my heart just wasn’t in it. That night, I went home, stuffed my wig into a dark corner of my closet and moved on with my life.

The birth of Elvis was as spontaneous and abrupt as it’s ending. As a child, I would go to the bathroom, close the door behind me and stare into the mirror. Engrossed by my own reflection, I slicked black my hair like a crooner from the 1950s, and tried on various one-liners. One day, I curled my lip and said, “Thank you, thank you very much.” It was then that Elvis was born.

For hours in our family basement, I would watch Full House, the syndicated 1990s sitcom, mastering Uncle Jesse’s Elvis impersonation. I started singing the songs that he sang, moving my hips like he did, but in the spirit of putting together my own routine. By the age of nine, I emerged from the basement and was able to floor a room with my rendition of “Heartbreak Hotel.”

I stole the spotlight in the school-wide talent show. After that performance, adults and children alike fawned over me. “Were you lip-synching?” they asked. With a mix of humbleness and pride, I told them nope, it was just me.

Summer camp was especially exciting. Cute girls would drag me by the arm to show me off. It didn’t take long for word to get out. “Look what my friend can do!” soon led to camp-wide performances. I’d curl my lip, deepen my voice, swing my hips and belt out,

Well since my baby left me. I found a new place to dwell.

It’s down at the end of lonely street at heartbreak hotel.

I was addicted to the rush, the look of surprise on people’s faces when I, a little blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl, transformed into the King of Rock n’ Roll. There was no feeling like it. Each performance provided a hit of adrenal love. I lived on it. I survived off of it. Until, that is, that moment in the bathroom when I was thirteen.

After that performance, I tried my best to ride the wave of hormones that were coursing through my body. I was sprouting curves, menstrual cycles were on the horizon, along with a more intense attraction to girls. Not able to perform normative femininity, I became a class clown. I kept people laughing in this odd balance of pulling attention towards me while simultaneously keeping my distance. I wanted to fend off my loneliness, but not be close enough for people to see beneath my disguise. My routines became so embedded in my personality that even I could not differentiate the act from the truth.

Elvis lived on through comedic story-telling, long after the wig disappeared. Even through coming out as a lesbian, and my gentle movement towards a more masculine gender presentation, Elvis was relegated as an anecdote, a funny story about my youthful shenanigans.

A few months ago, I found myself in my familiar routine. Without even thinking, I launched into retelling my days as an Elvis impersonator for my friend Hez. When I got to the climax of the story, the final performance, I said the line that had received so many laughs in the past, “So I looked into the mirror and said to myself ‘You’re getting too old for this, Addie.’” I paused and waited for my audience to laugh, too.

I kept people laughing in this odd balance of pulling attention towards me while simultaneously keeping my distance. I wanted to fend off my loneliness, but not be close enough for people to see beneath my disguise.

“Yeah Addie, I remember you telling this story back in graduate school,” Hez said, “And it really stuck with me. It actually made me feel kinda sad.”

“What?” I thought. “Sad?”

Over the next few months, Hez’s words coursed through me like shock waves. They broke into something that had felt so solid, shattering my well-crafted story into fragments. Hez, a non-binary trans person themselves, saw something missed by everyone else. They released me, in that moment, from the separation and distance I had created, between performer and audience.

Over the next few weeks, I began a process of re-remembering my childhood as an Elvis impersonator. A few months back, I had attended a training on psychotherapeutic work with transgender people. “The most important thing that trans clients need” said the trainer, “is mirroring.” She went on to discuss the invisibility that trans people often feel as what they see in the mirror does not, always, mirror how they feel on the inside.

These words transported me to a time right before the emergence of my Elvis. I was seven and had just come home from the hair salon, sporting the short bowl cut that I had always wanted. It had seemed like a safe time to ask, since most of the girls in my class had already gotten the same exact haircut. I sat for a long time in front of the mirror, brushing my hair to the side to fit the style of the boys I knew. In that moment, I felt so good.

Then my mother walked by.

“Look mom!” I said spontaneously, “This is what I would look like if I was a boy!”

“Oh! yeah, I guess that’s right!” she said. But then she paused, looking at me in the mirror. And with a palpable edge of anxiety, she followed up with, “Okay, great! Now, put it back like a girls’.”

The early ’90s had not yet provided my mother with manuals and websites on raising gender expansive children. She did not know how to mirror me as I attempted to find myself in the mirror.

I think it must have been some time after that, that I started shutting the door behind me. In all the hilarity and rush of my Elvis streak, it’s easy to forget that I didn’t initially intend to become an eight-year-old drag King. That day, messing with my hair, I was just trying to become myself. Elvis was a detour.

Recently, I began low dose testosterone therapy, in hopes of physically affirming my non-binary gender identity. Since beginning this process, I have been enacting a weekly ritual of singing and video recording the same song each week, “Glory Bound”, by Martin Sexton. It tells the all-too-familiar story of a straight white man, a struggling artist, leaving home and taking on the vagabond lifestyle. He is on his own Odyssey, but indulging in one last rendezvous with his love before leaving her for the open road. He feels he needs to blaze his own path, make his own mistakes and, perhaps, recover a lost piece of his soul.

This song has accompanied me through some important points on my own queer Odyssey. As I sing, plucking the strings, I am reminded of the path that led me to put away the wig and pick up the guitar. Down in that same basement where I taught myself Elvis routines, I also began to teach myself guitar chords. I worked at it, daily, until my fingers bled. The music that emerged was not like Elvis, but more like Joni Mitchell. And I appeared more visually congruous, with my high vocal range and long blond hair.

In my early twenties, I listened to “Glory Bound” on repeat, during a severe depression. Unable to fend off the denial of my deep and compelling attractions to women, I began the process of coming out as a lesbian. When I was well enough to re-enter my college courses, I returned to campus and performed “Glory Bound” in front of my peers.

The weekly ritual of setting up at the altar, drinking a sip of wine, pressing record, and singing “Glory Bound” is something like a holy communion. In the slow, but persistent process to be myself, I have taken many forms. This ritual serves as a sacrament to my sacred journey.

It is also a song that takes me into the farthest notes of my range, ideal as I want to track the coming changes in my voice. And, perhaps I want to have something like a dirge, where I can sing my own requiem for any notes that I may lose in this process.

As a teen, shame and confusion prevented me from giving Elvis a proper funeral. Perhaps we didn’t have adequate mirrors, then, for such a ceremony. Because of this, the full essence of the character that I embodied was somewhat lost. I stuffed it away, along with the wig that sat dormant for years in my childhood closet.

Elvis was more than child’s play. He was a complex and brilliant coping strategy, born out of necessity and desperation. He was a socially acceptable way for me to be myself. Underneath the wig was a creative, self-obsessed, entertaining, desperate, peculiar, joyful, sad, lonely, tragic, and very queer child.

Sometimes when I watch myself sing, I catch a glimpse of my lip curling much in the same way it did during my Elvis routine. When I see this, I pause, smile and say into my iPhone, my modern day mirror, “Oh, there you are.” I’m speaking not only to the eight-year-old drag king inside, but also to the child who wanted to be a boy. Now, with my hair styled just the way I want it and my jaw sprouting a bit of peach fuzz, I am beginning to see myself in the mirror. As I do, I find myself falling in love with the child I was, the person I am and the person I am still becoming.

• 0