“I laughed and rolled over on my back. The sky was crayon blue. I pretended I was lying on the white cotton clouds. The earth was damp against my back. The sun was hot and the breeze was cool. I felt happy. Nature held me close and seemed to find no fault with me.” 

Jess’s painful childhood includes strangers asking her often, “Are you a boy or a girl?” and those who are supposed to accept her, such as family, viewing her as willfully deviant. Jess finds nothing wrong with herself and is happiest alone, out in nature, or with her warmer and more accepting Native-American neighbors.

“I couldn’t find myself among the girls. I had never seen any adult woman who looked like I thought I would when I grew up. There were no women on the television like the small woman reflected in this mirror, none on the streets. I knew. I was always looking.”

Jess experiences a thrilling sense of self-validation when she tries on her father’s clothes and evaluates herself in the mirror. This is the self she feels most accurately depicts who she will grow to be. She longs to find some role model for this self in life or in popular culture, but none is available to her. She feels like she has to invent this identity herself. 

“What I saw there released tears I’d held back for years: strong, burly women wearing ties and suit coats. Their hair was slicked back. They were the handsomest women I’d ever seen. Some of them were wrapped in slow motion dances with women in tight dresses and high heels who touched them tenderly. Just watching made me ache with need.”

When Jess first arrives at Tifka’s, the gay bar in Niagara Falls that her friend Gloria refers her to, Jess encounters a world she didn’t know existed She finally meets people who reflect her vision of herself and her future. She makes friends who help her learn how to dress, how to act, how to survive in this world.