This was, of course, what Joan of Arc was partly burned at the stake for by the English — not just heresy against God, but also heresy against dress because she wore men’s clothes. But Joan of Arc was not playing with fashion conventions. Before her imprisonment, she had practical reasons for crossdressing — to conceal her identity, because a suit of armour did not easily fit over a bodice (and possibly even for ‘gender performative reasons’; in other words, she wanted to dress like a man so she could act like a man, at least in the ways in which men were then understood to appear).
After Joan’s arrest, she continued to wear male clothing — to protect herself against rape. According to the transcript of her ‘condemnation’, or show trial, presided over by carefully selected French clerics who were eager to undermine any claim of Joan’s to divine legitimacy, she wore two layers of clothing over her legs. The first layer was woollen hosen, fastened to her doublet with more than twenty thick cords. The outer layer was long, thick leather boots that jutted above her waist and were also looped tight to her tunic. Usually nuns watched over female prisoners, but only male soldiers guarded Joan, a teenager whose virginity was made much of. Her frequent requests for a female companion were denied, as was her request for protection from the church. She complained repeatedly, to at least three people, that the English guards, as well as a ‘great English lord’, had tried to rape her several times. (The court notary testified that this had been the case, and that she narrowly escaped one sexual assault because an earl responded to her cries.)
Under questioning, Joan argued she had not breached any laws because medieval theology allowed for crossdressing by necessity, when required for safety. One of the assessors at her trial, Friar Isambart de la Pierre vouched for her need for protection, writing on 5 March 1450 that he and a number of others were present when Joan was defending herself for wearing male clothing again, publicly ‘stating and affirming that the English had committed, or caused to be committed, much wrong and outrage against her in prison when she was wearing female clothing’; and in fact he ‘saw her weeping, her face covered in tears, contorted and distressed in such fashion’ that he felt ‘pity and compassion for her’. When they labelled her an ‘obstinate and relapsed heretic’, she replied publicly: ‘If you, my lords of the Church, had brought me to, and kept me in, your own prisons, perhaps it wouldn’t be this way for me.’
But it was that way. One of the court’s knights testified that he had met Joan when she was locked up in Beaurevoir Castle, and had spoken with her many times. He is also recorded as saying that ‘many times too, in sport, he tried to touch her breasts, trying hard to put his hands on her bosom’, though Joan pushed him away as hard as she could. In sport.
Imagine being burned alive because you didn’t want to be raped. Or being cast as an evil witch because you were raped. Think of Medusa. We remember that she could turn men to stone with her rage, that she was monstrous and ugly and to be feared. But we forget, or are not told, that, as Ovid recounted, she had once been a beautiful maiden who was raped in the temple of Athena by the god of the sea, Poseidon. And for this, she was cursed and turned into a monster. Punished for being a victim.
WHEN WE WERE GROWING UP, a typical way for men to dismiss — or try to cast as sinister — women’s close friendships was to call them lesbians. This was often the case in aggressively masculine places, like the pubs in coastal towns, especially in the great Temple of Slime and Sexual Harassment — Surfers Paradise. Just walking down the main street of that town, where the air was pungent with smoke and possibility and blokes clustered at entries to nightclubs or to eat burgers on the path, seemed to invite unending commentary on our sexuality, especially if we refused their enticing invitations to perform a variety of delicate sex acts.
Jock wrote to me once about a book she was reading about attitudes, and slurs, that control female behaviour:
The quote says, ‘When a woman hears this word tossed her way — lesbian — she knows she is stepping out of line. She recoils, she protests, she reshapes her actions to gain approval.’ But we never did, Jul. We arched our backs, sharpened our intellectual claws, linked arms gently and sauntered down Cavill Avenue, daring them, challenging them, provoking the cry ‘fucking lezzos’.
This may have been how I missed the fact that Jock actually was a lesbian.
When we were about nineteen and studying at university, Jock grew her hair long again, and, alarmingly and uncharacteristically, started wearing modest dresses speckled with flowers. Just one floral frock was a screaming neon flag. She told me she was depressed, she complained about her weight. I failed to comprehend that she was pulling back into her past like a slingshot before launching forwards.
Shortly afterwards, she came out, and she lopped her hair off in giant chunks and dyed it platinum. Not long after we turned twenty (our birthdays are two weeks apart) I wrote to a friend in New York: ‘Jacqui has just had her hair cut . . . So many guys said to her they wouldn’t talk to her if she had short hair, “Keep it long, it’s so pretty,” and half out of spite, she trashed her golden locks.’
Jock zipped herself into short shiny dresses and slid into the queer community with a joyful exuberance: she had found her tribe. I tagged along with her as she dived into another world, which was a true revelation, one of joy, acceptance and a blurring of identity that we, even as white middle-class girls from the suburbs, had craved, especially, of course, Jock. In the heaving, grinning masses of people dancing on pavilion floors, wearing beautiful, eye-bogglingly creative costumes, in all the sweat and delirium and joy, it did not matter who we were or where we came from or what we thought. It was delight.
Jock’s hair turned black, red, brown, white blonde, wispy, cropped, pixie. I toyed with streaks. Then she fell in love, intensely in love, with a leather-clad girl called Josie who had curly black hair, thick chains around her neck and eyeballs that burned attitude across crowded rooms.
Until then I had been the one to tumble sideways into consuming relationships and emerge, hair electrified, after a couple of years; Jock stifled yawns and shrugged off boyfriends like loosened capes. Now she cartwheeled happily into her new love, only appearing for brief moments to telegraph her joy.
Her hair didn’t change much, ever again. She had found another life.
Meanwhile, I turned from my law studies to write a PhD, and kept writing, working and studying until I was able to return to the country where I had my first and worst, haircut, the country I had always known I would return to: America. First I went to Boston alone, as a fellow at Harvard, then I went to work at Newsweek with the brilliant writer and editor Jon Meacham, dragging along my baby daughter and then husband to New York. I slid into a job I loved, working alongside nerdish editors and journalists who shared my obsession with history, religion and politics. Opinions, the currency of our work, were welcomed, devoured and dissected, the more irreverent and counter-intuitive the better. It was intoxicating. I was overwhelmed by an unfamiliar, instant sense of belonging. I was so happy.
A few months after arriving, I found myself walking down Lexington to a hair salon on East 56th street and unwittingly blowing my weekly budget on a cut.
I looked at the hairdresser: ‘Cut it all off. Make it edgy? Whatever you like.’
For the first time in my life, I had short hair.
SOMETIMES IT IS HARD to know if home is where you return to or where you start from. It is intangible things: people, not postcodes, and conversations, not couches. When you start from a place, with a friend, you will find you are bound not to the suburbs you grew up in but to the person or people you left with. And these skeins of friendship, knitted by billions of words over decades, bind, then act like kites, allowing us to soar while knowing we can return to talk to someone who will remind us we were not just fools with shaggy hair who danced marathons to escape monotony and restraint, but also women who were escaping strangulation; who will tell us that it’s okay to run, stumble, fall in love, cry, make mistakes, dye your hair red, want to write or want to be a full, equal, complicated human being, that’s it’s okay to dream of more. To want to ‘Get. The fuck. Out of here.’