Late September is a lovely time of year for so many reasons: Misty mornings, warm sunny afternoons, and especially, the fruition of the plants and animals that emerged, tender and unformed, at the beginning of the spring. Now the tomatoes we planted in May are ripe and the herbs yielding the juiciness of their full grown leaves. In the animal kingdom, the baby birds are fledging, going through an awkward adolescence as they transition into adulthood. This is my favorite part of this late September fruition: watching the newly fledged birds.
One of them, in my yard, is a juvenile cardinal that can’t decide whether it’s going to be a male or a female, or even whether it’s going to be a cardinal or a robin. It’s as if this bird, in its juvenile adolescence, is trying on various identities before it becomes a serious member of cardinal adulthood.
Read on to learn about a different, serious member of cardinal adulthood, a human, who also has tried on different identities.
The cardinal in my yard is hard to photograph, because ze moves so quickly. But I was able to get one shot the other day. In this one, the brown back and red breast make me think ze is considering being a robin…
except for the black mask, which definitely identifies zir as a cardinal
The funniest thing about this juvenile is its crest. If a normal cardinal crest has, say, 300 feathers in it, this juvenile has 50. It’s the sparsest cardinal crest I’ve ever seen.
See how sparse that little crest is? Here’s another shot, not mine but from the web, of the measly crest on another juvenile cardinal:
Ze wants to look punk, but it’s tough without a pompadour.
Can birds even BE genderqueer? I’m no ornithologist. But I do know that among turkeys, males sprout chest feathers, called beards, in the middle of their chests…and so do some aggressive females.
If there’s gender fluidity in turkeys, then why not in the rest of the world’s fauna?
Like the feathered adolescent in my yard, whose gender fluidity has been a backyard entertainment for the past week.
But there’s another genderqueer cardinal in my recollection, one whom I learned about from my hair stylist, Vinny. Vinny was a handsome man if there ever was one: chiseled cheekbones like Willem Dafoe, courageous jaw like Arnold Schwarzenegger, lithe body like Rudolph Nureyev. Before he was a hair stylist, this handsome man was a model. In Manhattan. Hanging out with other handsome male models, and I imagine, doing a lot of partying and a lot of nightlife. Vinny told me about all this as he cut my hair. One of the guys in the group, he said, was Franny, an older guy all decked out in black leather everything, down to hat and gloves, and riding some kind of impressive motorcycle. Franny hung out with these guys enjoying what New York has to offer at night.
Vinny was a practicing Catholic, and one day when he went to Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, there, amid the pillars and pomp, up at the front, facing the congregation, was Franny. Wearing priestly vestments.
Francis Cardinal Spelman.
Or so said Vinny.
Was Cardinal Spelman genderqueer? I don’t know. I only know what I heard from Vinny.
At least we can see that Cardinal Spelman liked fancy clothes.
I now see that I’m not the only one who thinks this human cardinal experimented with different identies. Take a look at this:
http://queerhistory.blogspot.com/2011/09/cardinal-francis-joseph-spellman.html
As for this other cardinal, the one in my yard, well, I’m enjoying him as he explores different personas and comes to his full fruition. As the rest of nature does in September.