Is the Spin Pin Gay?

The first time I held spin pins I too was mystified: Twin coils of metal the length of my pinky finger. A dollar fifty from the dollar store. They knocked around in my palm until I twisted them into each other, slipped the small double helix into my pocket, and stepped out my door.

Let me backtrack, zoom out. For most of my life I had real short hair. Childhood was marked with a mushroom cut, ending right below the ears, administered in a pink-tiled bathroom by my mother. She wielded nail scissors with deft economy: a flash of silver, a falling of dark fuzz, the new window into my surrounds from beneath a thick-ass bayang.

The other week I watched little children in Central Park wearing vegan leather leggings and blue-dyed hair and registered awe. When I was in fifth grade, living in Muscat, Oman, I’d asked for permission to grow my mushroom down to my collarbone. I still sported the bangs, perpetually untrimmed, and my hair is thicker than Democratic election strategy, so I looked like Cousin It.

My breasts shipped in seventh grade and I knew horror. I wanted them gone. To me, femininity was womanhood, womanhood a prison. I developed this tic of reaching into my shirts and repeatedly snapping the too-tight elastic of my training bra against my ribs. I looked up through my curtain of hair once after and saw one of my aunties staring at me, eyes full of derision and pity.

When I was in eighth grade I asked to tie my hair up into a high ponytail, since I had grown concerned that no one would fall in love with me when my entire face lived behind a keratinous niqab. My request was denied. I proceeded anyway—you have no idea, the kind of place I came from. At this time in my life, I had no sense of style, and in fact silently believed putting effort into how you looked was a form of weakness, invented to trap women into wasting time that could be spent starting schools, designing blueprints for cities, writing books. This of course was complicated by the truth that I wanted so deeply to be effortlessly, congenitally beautiful that I would have given up an organ for it.

When I walked into class with a pert little horse’s tail erupting from my skull, a murmur rippled. A boy said, Yo Sarah tied her hair. Someone replied, Dood, she’s actually not too ugly. Girls said to me, side-eyeing each other, Looking quite nice, man!

I was learning how to do something without a whit of understanding what it was or what it meant, much like trigonometry. Which in Indian schools in Oman was taught beginning in eighth grade, because there existed a narrow range of accepted tracks along which one's life could trod, and all of them required heterosexuality and advanced maths.

Nobody fell in love with me, until someone did. And then I had to leave.

When I began college in the US I went to an Aveda School of Cosmetology in Wisconsin and requested a $22 cropped cut from one of their students. Long hair seemed ugly to me. Mediocre, girly, ordinary. I felt burdened by the chalky softness exuding from my every pore, a softness so disconnected from the jagged core of me. The pixie was cut with a razor. I felt astonished at how light my skull felt after. Hair is heavy. I hadn’t known. Now, a new ripple of murmur hit when I walked into the room. I liked this one. The boy I’d been lazily flirting with made his newfound disinterest clear. My first love, who’d sported what we called a boy cut since the age of ten, who had been called ugly to her face endless times by the same people for whom a ponytail was a gossip-worthy event, wrote me a Facebook comment back from Oman: It’s good, man.

For the next many years, I oscillated in a sine wave, moving from bob to pixie and back. For fellow dumb bitches who missed the boat on advanced maths, a sine wave is a smooth, continual graphing of one trigonometric function of an angle, rather resembling a corkscrew. I never used product and I cut my hair every ten weeks, which is inadvisable for the very-short-coiffed among us.

I was an immigrant, I was trying to stay above water, I didn’t know how to do so many things that not knowing how to do hair was not a pressing concern.

At 26 I left my job in politics to do an MFA in fiction. I decided to try my best to make money work, in the present and for the future. Things I could do without: new clothes, takeout, my own place in Iowa City, Spotify Premium, haircuts.

Frankly I expected I would feel dysphoric and straight with actual long hair, but once it inched past my nips, then my rib cage, I rather loved it. More than normative, the dark cloud down my back felt witchy, powerful. You could lose a hand in it. You saw it and looked again at the face it belonged to. Cousin It no more.

Alright, I decided, I did care about style, the ability to locate yourself outside of you. Here, a wine-dark lipstick; here, a gothleisure varsity jacket in black mesh; here, thrifted Valentino that had me looking like money; here, an actual good haircut.

Last year my friend Hanna told me with loving patience that I in fact have curly hair, and that curly hair should be treated differently than straight. She dropped off low-poo shampoo and gel, leave-in conditioner and instructions for how to do something called a plop. I wrapped my wet head in a cotton T-shirt and looked exactly like a headdress-wearing camel I once rode in the Omani desert. Ringlets materialized in my hair out of nowhere, long dark spirals that fascinated me and occasionally snagged on zippers and wall hooks.

My hair had never looked better, but I also wished sometimes to forget it, to have it up and out of the damn way. My methods were lacking. Elastic hair ties broke my hair or gave me headaches. I found claw clips aesthetically unappealing; they often snapped when trying to force their jaws wide enough to swallow a large knot of compressed keratin. Once I thought that it could be a lack of collective effort that was failing to keep ye old knob up and shoved 27 bobby pins into my bun at various intervals. After this failure, I consulted more knowledgeable parties.

Enter the spin pin. Hanna and Rose informed me about them, Rose pulling a pair out of her topknot to show me at dinner. “They’re so fucking small,” I said, confused. Wondering how I could be 30 whole years old and still be in the dark about this sort of thing. The next day I forgot what they were called and vainly and repeatedly googled “hair spirals.” Once I procured them, I carried them around for a week, intimidated.

And then on a particularly windy day, exasperated by it blowing every which way, I gathered my hair in a coil at the crown of my skull, reached into my coat pocket. I twisted the first small metal spiral through my hair like I was tightening a screw, then twisted the second one in on the bun’s opposing side. The two helixes locked into each other. A triumph. My hair stayed perfectly behaved and out of the way for the next 12 hours until I went to bed. As elegant a solution as any trigonometry proof.

I had thought femininity an inherited prison, when it was in fact a value-neutral technology, available to deploy at will.

My hair now knocks on the small of my back. I’ll have it very short again eventually, but I like it like this too. In the past decade I’ve had my share of presentation-related, hair-inflected anxiety spirals: too short, too femme, aimed for futch and missed, should you wear that shirt when you know you’ll see family, is the leather vest giving poor man’s Shane, is this chain too much or just enough. Hair is heavy. There’s no doubt. Pull on one strand, then another, see the split ends of the old self-protective disdain for girlhood, for the ways of women. Note the follicles of inheritance, all the aunties who tried to reform their irrepressible Malayali curls with chemicals and heat, the village-descended rituals like hot oil infused with peppercorn and tulsi. Hair’s mutability, its politicization, its ability to change so much about how we appear to others—these things cause it to snag on the zippers of gender and queerness and respectability and race.

I should pronounce a verdict somewhere amidst these various digressions. Is the hair spiral gay? Straight? A value-neutral technology? Here I simply mean the spin pin. Anxiety about one’s presentation vis-à-vis one’s communities and one’s self is not gay but one of the great universals of modernity, is what actually connects freaky queers and frat boy chads, my bony androgynous tween self and the aunties of my youth.

Gavel bang. The spin pin—charming, sweet, prone to lostness, unrespected, industrious—is bisexual. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but our representation is lacking.

Sarah Thankam Mathews currently lives in Brooklyn. If you like the sound of it, you can read her novel All This Could Be Different (which is in fact, gay).