It started with a promo of RuPaul’s Drag Race. In a pink, flowing Roman princess gown draped out from the arms, Roxxxy Andrews fawns herself with a large golden fan in front of four pillars with pegasuses flying around her. Her blonde hair fans out from her golden brown face, and black eyeliner and lashes hide the color of her irises.
Alesha Heitmann was 14 years old and thought Andrews was beautiful, she said. She saw someone who looked like her— “pleasantly plump” and multiracial — living a life she didn’t know was an option, that wasn’t just dressing up and pretending.
For the next almost five years, Heitmann performed at-home drag shows until Veterans Day in 2017 when, at 19 years old, she performed her first live drag show at Be Here Now in Muncie.
“The more I kept doing it, the more I was like, ‘I should do this all the time,’” Heitmann, a transgender woman who works in Muncie, said. “This isn’t just a costume for me. This is who I am.’”
Brandon Million, assistant director of the Ball State Office of Inclusive Excellence, has been told trying on a dress for the first time as a transgender woman is a magical experience.
“Sometimes, it’s the first step to being able to show your true, authentic self,” he said.
In 2018, the idea of clothing and the gender-nonconforming community was on the minds of the sorority Gamma Rho Lambda, where talk about gender-affirming clothing for students was active among its members and within committee meeting rooms. Failure to find resources and get the idea off the ground caused it to lay dormant.
However, for four years, the idea never truly left the mind of one member: Mikayla Yohe, vice president of Gamma Rho Lambda in 2018 and a future practicum student for the Multicultural Center.
Earlier this year, The Lavender Door — a resource for Ball State students to get gender-affirming clothing on campus — opened.
Huy Huynh, assistant director for the Multicultural Center, said students fill out an appointment form on the Multicultural Center’s webpage with their name, information and times they can meet. Then, staff brings them to The Lavender Door, where the location is kept secret to be as discreet as possible. He also said the clothes are washed and cleaned and organized weekly, and only one student goes at a time.
“Our main goal has always been to serve students in any capacity we can,” Huynh said. “Serving an underserved population is what really was a green light for [The Lavender Door] to happen.”
The LGBTQ community and lavender
The color lavender is often associated with the mixing of blue and pink — standard masculine and feminine colors — blurring the lines of gender norms, according to the LGBT Queer Resource Center at California State University, Fullerton. It is also seen as a combination of the pink triangle gay men were forced to wear and the black triangle lesbians were forced to wear in Nazi Germany, according to the Human Rights Campaign.
In the late 1940s through the 1960s and during the same era as the Red Scare, thousands of gay employees were fired or resigned from their jobs due to their sexuality, which was known as the Lavender Scare, according to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. On Feb. 20, 1950, Sen. McCarthy said two people on his list of communists — “Case 14” and “Case 62” — were homosexuals and, over a week later, John Peurifoy, deputy undersecretary of state, went before a subcommittee of the Senate Committee of Appropriations and said the state department had expelled 91 homosexual employees as security risks, creating “a press frenzy and public outcry.”
Former President Eisenhower in 1953 signed Executive Order 10450, which added a statement on “sexual perversion” to Truman’s federal employment regulations, according to the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce. This was because the federal government believed LGBT individuals posed a security threat and may not be able to keep government secrets.
Lavender became associated with the LGBTQ movement, an example being Betty Friedan calling lesbian women in the women’s suffrage movement “the lavender menace,” excluding them from the suffrage movement, according to the National Women's History Museum. Some women from the lesbian community created a group called the Radicalesbians and wore T-shirts reading, “The Lavender Menace” on the front as they went to the Second Congress to Unite Women on May 1, 1970, according to the personal website of one of the women who did this, Karla Jay.
Clothing and Expression
To A.C. Fowlkes, LGBTQ sensitivity and transgender inclusion expert, clothing is part of social transition and a way for people to show up authentically as themselves.
Heitmann, unless she was expressing herself through drag, turned to food and was 375 pounds, she said, which she attributes to lack of expression.
“I would perform once a month, and I would put all that pent-up feminine energy into one night or one weekend a month,” Heitmann said. “And then, I’d live the rest of my life hating myself.”
Coming from what Heitmann refers to as a broken home, she said she was lonely and when she got attention, “[she] clung to it like a life raft.” One reaction to her being transgender that sticks out to her to this day was the reaction of her ex-husband, who she said threw hateful words and negative energy toward her.
“It really made my self-loathing and self-hate a lot stronger,” Heitmann said. “Someone that I married and wanted to spend forever with was seeing me in a light that my parents saw me in when they kicked me out.”
Ande K., a Muncie resident who identifies as gender queer nonbinary, thought during puberty he’d become a boy. However, he learned through starting to transition that he wasn’t like trans men but also didn’t feel he was like lesbians, he said.
He used his own money to buy gender-affirming clothing and said his mother was bipolar and, during manic episodes, would get rid of the things she didn’t want him to have, including his gender-affirming clothes.
“She wanted me to have long hair and wear tight girls’ jeans and daisy duke type shorts,” he said. “And that wasn’t who I was. I was a skater. I was a goth … I lived in jeans and sweatpants and shirts from the skatepark.”’
Ande K. thinks forcing a person to wear clothes they aren’t comfortable in is “a form of child abuse,” with the exception of school uniforms.
Cam Winter, 2013 Ball State graduate who identifies as nonbinary, knew they were different around 13-14 years old but didn’t have a word for it until their early college years. Their mother allowed them to shop in the male section of stores, which Winter said was “super affirming.”
“Something as simple as stereotypically feminine clothing is enough to make somebody who’s nonbinary or [transgender] just uncomfortable in their own skin,” Winter said.
Having access to gender-affirming clothing, Sarah Myers, former Ball State student living in Muncie, said they dress how they want to dress and learned clothing doesn’t have a gender. Originally coming out as transgender but not content with the inability to express their feminine side, they detransitioned and felt confused about how to express themselves after identifying as non-binary.
“I have this pressure to ‘look nonbinary,’” Myers said, “but I don’t think that’s something that’s achievable because there’s no set definition for what that looks like.”
As a transgender man, Fowlkes said he always felt like something was different about him. When other people wanted to play with Barbies, he wanted to play with Hot Wheels — but the cool kind that change color when you put them in water, he said.
“Instead of having an ‘aha!’ moment or a light bulb switch, I think there was a slow chipping away at the internalized homophobia,” Fowlkes said. “Eventually, [it was] me getting to a place where I was able to see beauty in the fact I was trans.”
Dismissal and Denial
Fowlkes first acted as a therapist in a prison center when a gay inmate expressed they were sexually assaulted by another male inmate after being met with dismissal from officers who said things like, “Well isn’t he gay anyway? That means he must have liked it.”
After seeing situations like this, Fowlkes started working to create safe spaces for the LGBTQ community.
Million worked at a domestic violence center before coming to Ball State and went to Indy Pride, where he heard stories from gender-nonconforming individuals who experienced dismissal from domestic violence shelters.
“It still bothers me, to this day, just thinking about all of those services they were denied because they were gender-nonconforming individuals,” Million said.
Yohe said Ball State is in a transitional period when it comes to the inclusivity of gender-nonconforming individuals, which they believe The Lavender Door helps push forward with clothing accessibility.
“The Lavender Door tells our transgender students, ‘We see you, we care about you and we want you to feel comfortable as your authentic self,’” Yohe said.
Contact Elissa Maudlin with comments at ejmaudlin@bsu.edu or on Twitter @ejmaudlin.
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