Why he refuses to be shamed
A man’s voice, vaguely familiar, answered my telephone call. “Jared?” I asked.
Silence. I introduced myself and asked again. “Is this Jared?”
A long pause, then a hesitant yes.
I’d interviewed Jared Nayfack eight years ago for a column I wrote about proposed legislation to protect gay and transgender students from hostility and discrimination.
Then, Jared was a UC Santa Cruz sophomore who had been openly, defiantly gay for years.
During high school in Orange County, he’d been taunted, shoved and spat on by classmates because he wore nail polish, makeup and 3-inch heels. School officials urged him to drop out and get his GED. “Why,” he remembered being asked, “do you want to look like such a freak?”
I thought of Jared as I read about Oxnard student Larry King, an eighth-grader shot to death in computer lab allegedly by a 14-year-old classmate in what authorities are calling a hate crime.
Larry had recently taken to wearing makeup and high heels with his school uniform. That “freaked the guys out,” and they taunted him, a classmate said. Larry fought back, and classmates said at least one of those fights involved the boy accused of killing him.
I wanted a way to understand, some perspective from Jared. He agreed to meet with me.
“But one thing you should know,” he said, before I hung up: “Jared” doesn’t exist anymore. “I’m Shakina now.”
--
Shakina Nayfack and I met Friday at a coffeehouse in Sunset Junction, a few blocks from his Silver Lake apartment. He was wearing jeans and a loose sweater with splashy orange letters. He’s tall and handsome, with expressive eyes behind black-rimmed glasses, a shaved head and neatly trimmed beard and mustache. His ears are pierced with giant holes big enough for me to slide a finger through.
Now 27, he has a master’s of fine arts from UC Riverside and is working on his dissertation. He’s a teacher, performance artist and choreographer, now directing the play “Zoot Suit” at Cal Poly Pomona.
Middle school in Orange County was tough for Jared. “I called home crying every day,” he said. He hadn’t told classmates he was gay, but kids started a rumor that he shaved his legs, and “everywhere I went on campus, people would reach over and rub my legs.”
“I was physically accosted, over and over,” he said. He was so frightened that he began carrying a letter-opener in his backpack in case he had to defend himself.
He said that when he got to high school, “I reached a point when I was, like, ‘You will deal with who I am.’ ”
“A lot of the in-your-faceness, at least in my experience, was refusing to feel ashamed of who I was and putting that out there instead of suffocating with it. . . . Especially in a place like Oxnard or Orange County, that’s really, really conservative, there’s something to be said for wanting to be visible . . . and taking pride in that publicly.”
Caring teachers wished he “would just calm down,” he said. “But I was claiming my space, expressing my identity.”
I think back to my own high school days, when big Afros and black berets signaled emerging strains of black militancy, and the hippie kids declared themselves with headbands and peace-sign necklaces.
“Larry clearly felt he needed to be out and about in all his glory, which is makeup and nail polish and blue eye shadow,” Nayfack suggested. “And he had every right to assert that feeling.”
--
At UC Santa Cruz, Nayfack majored in Community Studies: Cultural Work and Social Change. He declared himself a feminist and began working for immigrant rights and against racism.
He was nurtured in college by a “holistic, spiritual, intelligent, creative community” that helped heal his adolescent wounds, he said. On graduation day, he renamed himself Shakina, a derivative of a Hebrew word that refers to the female presence of God.
On Friday, we talked for a long time about why crimes like this continue to occur. He’s convinced it’s because kids don’t learn enough about our nation’s recent history to see the links between homophobia, racism and sexism.
“We have to look beyond the specificity of being gay, and talk about the more universal truth of being oppressed,” he said. As we spoke, it struck me that there is nothing particularly feminine about Shakina, nothing girlie in the manner in which he gestures or speaks.
But then, there is nothing that stands out as specifically masculine, either. What does any of that mean anyway? Maybe that’s what makes others uncomfortable about people like Shakina -- or Larry -- who are unwilling or unable to stay within their assigned roles.
What to make of the girl who wears basketball shorts and baggy T’s and enjoys shooting baskets with the boys; the black kid who hangs out with a white punk rock crowd; the artsy boy who “glams it up” at school in high heels and jewelry?
After Larry’s death, a family friend created a memorial website that now has more than 800 messages from around the world and a listing of local tolerance and antiviolence forums. Its slide show includes photos of Larry as a toddler dressed like a pumpkin on Halloween, as a smiling Little Leaguer with a baseball bat poised to swing, as a grinning child with missing front teeth and cascade of black hair curling down his back.
A pretty baby, who grew into a pretty boy, and wound up an unwitting martyr.
“His skin, his smile, his heart . . . it’s the same as anyone else,” Shakina pointed out. “It’s blue eye shadow, that’s all it is. What about that is so threatening?”
--