Former female Sam Peterson describes his forays into a brave new world of masculinity via therapy and testosterone: one that involves "manfirmations," sublime hilarity at the expense of self, and just general all'round trananigans.
This has been an amazing ride. Writing this blog has not only been a great source of relief for those transitioning times that were especially challenging – unbeknownst to me, other people actually read it too! And so I made some friends here, forged some relationships I have come to value as we bolstered one another through some stormy seas, told one another how freaking adorable and hot we are, teased and tickled, and otherwise bonded in this strange interwebbed vitreous cyberland. I made a couple videos and got published in Bear Bergman and Kate Bornstein’s ground-breaking anthology “Gender Outlaws – The Next Generation.” It has been deep and silly and fun and heartbreaking, this tour-de-trans.
Now, with the help of my mentor and Papa, J. Megel of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Performance Studies department, I am writing a show. I’ll let you know how it goes – or – you can see it next year when you come visit me in NC! I hope it beams back the love I’ve been given, from you and from the Great Blue Horned Salted Octopus that made me. The salted part is actually taken from all this chocolate I’ve been eating, with sea-salt and cayenne. Because that’s how I ROLL.
Anyhoo, I may come back to this space in a week, or this project may have ended. We’ll see! Meantime, much love from me, the kittens, any deep sea creatures lolling about, and D.
Don’t ask me to be the spokesmodel for trans-etiquette – when it comes to gendered language, I’m just as dick-fisted and cunt-mouthed as the rest of you. There’s something about the presence of a gender non-conformist in the room that incites an outbreak of trans-tourettes, and there are some inelegant slang words I’ve been accustomed to using since before I was even noticeably a girl, much less a boy. “You guys,” for instance – it simply won’t leave my vernacular, even though every time I utter it I experience the noxious fumes of its jet stream backwashing my face. “Guys,” like Bugs Bunny, simply had no gender whatsoever for me for the longest time. I remember asking myself, “is Bugs Bunny a girl or a boy?” It seemed like the kind of oracular conundrum of classical literature, or like those obnoxious smarty pants riddles about the hanged man and the water puddle. Bugs seemed to inhabit a space between those clearly delineated outcroppings of “boy” or “girl,” at least for this five year old. I could only distinguish between genders by play, both forms of which – either brutality or dolls –repelled me. My love for Bugs began with a purely dopaminergic response to a being who playfully donned, mocked, trounced and flounced gendered presentations in a way I’ve yet to experience – but work to emulate – in real (non-animated) life.
I find myself “Madame-ing” the blurry, and “Sir-ring” the lady. I am as awkward and as prone to subterranean blurtations as someone who doesn’t know better. I have experienced and invoked the sensation of falling like Jimmy Stewart down a vertiginous rabbit hole of disassociation, the place where deep shame can take you, the place of no voice. Shame from either side is rarely a helpful emotion, I find. I’m sure it has value, I’m sure it’s larned me a thing or two, but more often it’s clipped my wings, or merely stuck me in a cage and left the door open and laughed as I believed myself too disabled by it to leave.
I’m going to try to look at this phenomenon another way. What if, when people mispronoun us -what if, when I trip all over my big clown feet in room full of transpeople - what if I’m experiencing an outburst of confusion, one that perhaps I do well NOT to suppress? What if gender-confusion is WONDERFUL? The very fact that I’m being so neurochemically disrupted is FANTASTIC! Of course I don’t wish to hurt anybody – there are only about two people in this world I’d like to hurt intentionally, and one of them likes it. But I see this phenomenon, in me at least, as part of the neurochemical rewiring process, one which must begin with interference and disorder, a static intrusion violent enough to force my brain to its default setting. Which, again in my case, is sometimes idiocy.
Gender non-conforming people change space and time. We queer everything. Just yesterday a young person came up to me with tremendous sincerity and asked,“is this going to be part of your one-woman show?” after I had literally just invested ten minutes performing the heartbreak of being misconstrued as female. I’m going to revisit these moments as being ecstatic, as serving as part of the architecture of Awakening, for both of us. Whenever a human blurts something, the thing they’re trying to avoid saying, the thing they may be subcutaneously grappling, the gendered stutter of the mind that is attempting to do something new against an ego that is mired in the old, perhaps there is something healing in it. I’m not speaking about the resolute, those awful humans who will not pronoun you correctly because it “goes against their belief” (in their own absolutism, their superiority), or who repeatedly “forget” because they’re too self-involved to really care about how you feel, or even your benighted family members, although it could end up working on them too: I’m talking about the Trickster Tic, the mischievous brain spasm ejaculated from the mouths of We Who Know Better, who stand frozen in our tracks as the leaden word balloon leaves our mouths and thuds to the floor, or the feet, of the transperson we’re addressing. The Trickster Tic, or Trans Tourettes, is simply a symptom, some gas expelled from a depth that has been newly churned.
I’m going to embrace this idea, to save myself another shame enema, and to witness neurologic/shamanic alterations in others. Loki dances everywhere, but especially where there’s need – a signifying monkey in the lair of the lion. This is what Trans does, this is our job, I am an ambassador (I wrote ambassODOR first, which is more accurate) of interstitial mischief, a messenger from the Gods, so if I think I’m going to be exempt from humiliation it’s only a sure, short amount of time before I’ve got to display my humbled rump for the masses.
So “she” me, “he” me, what can you do me? I love you.
After a panel discussion last night, someone in the audience leaned his head in close to mine and said “So. You were pretty vague about your gender up there.” I said “’transman’ isn’t vague” but he was insistent. “Well, later, you were saying something about this other space…”
Oh yes, the “other space.” The interstices. I imagine bodily gender as a cellular structure, within which floats two, oh, let’s call them mitochondria. These objects, "male" and "female," in their solidity, have been mistaken for the entire organism. Trans, using this metaphor – I know, bear the fuck with me – is the cytoplasm. In this way we can begin to see the fluid as having substance, of being substantial. I haven’t been around here much lately because I have been hella writing for dumb school – every class I’d chosen requires what amounts to a paper a week, of the kind that demands a works cited page – the creation of which takes more of my time than the actual writing. I’m that guy. Works cited is like algebra to me. Anytakepityonanancientundergrad, I recently wrote a paper about consumer identities vis a vis transgender, in which I suggested that “transition” become a gender placeholder.
Transition, as typically understood, is a deceptive verb because it relies upon moving between fixity that exists only as an idea – that is, as an idea of gender as two poles (no pun intended). It’s not that these two genders don’t exist – male and female are not “constructs” entirely, they’re real, they have substance, right? But whatever they’re composed of makes man/woman appear different depending on where you’re standing. Nonetheless, as subjective and illusory they sometimes seem, there they are. They are floating in the buoyant and balmy jelly of transition. If gender were a map, then Male and Female would be two delightful (if demanding) little islands. Rosie might take her cruise ship there, and, depending on which side of the island the liner landed, shipmates might be greeted with jeers or joy.
I’d like to offer transition as a place, as a “sea of possibility,” if I may quote my beloved Patti Smith, and I believe I may. I might on occasion hoist my anchor and harbor myself in the Bay of Manlitude, but I don’t have til sundown to build a lean-to and find water because there’s no need to stay. It’s not that I don’t feel some relationship, a kinship, with man – I do. But I think my kinship makes me more of a cousin than a brother. Man is something once removed.
Does trans longing ever cease, ever cede to something else? Whatever alterations I make, will I always ache for something else, something more? I like my body just fine – and having a “mussy” (you can break that down yourself, Smarty) seems like the best of all possible worlds sometimes…but I would be lying if I said I no longer suffer phantom limb syndrome. Do bodies born with penises ever long to experience what it might be like to have a vagina? To not have this mess of giblets always cluttering their plates? How strange must it be to have one’s insides enclosed in a drawstring purse between one’s legs! It’s like being permanently at a Renaissance theme park somehow – oh, there’s my clove orange! It seems obtuse and archaic…and yet…
Well. I can visit the island, but this transperson can never stay. It’s up to me to embrace the ocean – less defined, indefinable, peppered with terrifying, wondrous creatures; it’s briny, moody, and capable of scattering me like hermit crabs on the shore. It’s so way bigger than me, so way bigger than anything I know – those two islands for instance, and anything else that may emerge from its depths, I’m incapable of fully understanding it. Nevertheless, I know it’s real.
So swim with me, transpeople, nontranspeople too. Let’s join, let’s link, and be tossed by these waves. They’re feisty now because they’re disgruntled with those islands – the ones that think they’re all there is. But the islands are really just toddlers – they haven’t matured enough to understand that an entire universe exists around them, with them, in them – not for them. It may our oceanic mission, to wash up upon their baby beaches, and let those island dwellers ponder what else might be out there beyond their carefully limned, yet ever shifting shores. They fear a return to the sea, my friends, as do we all. We’re just lucky we live there already.
Several things distinguish humans from other beings – three that come to mind immediately are the making of art, morality, and fixity.Or maybe it’s the combination of these three: octopuses make art but they don’t register time, even when wearing eight swatches. These things are sometimes at cross-purpose - for instance when I want to get my homo on and fag out at Urban Outfitters but can’t because someone told me (the internets) that UO is E-vil. One of these is not like the others but seems to be a hearty human urge, indeed, can feel like the only thing between one’s staying intact and one’s pixellating into a human solvent -and that’s fixity.
When I read people saying things like “I’m a man! I am a man and that’s that!” I’m always a little surprised by their vehemence. Buck Angel comes to mind – now I don’t know him and he seems like a perfectly nice guy - he’s always affirming to journalists especially that he’s a man. To which I say, “hats off to you, Sir! You are indeed a man! And a very manly man as well!” He’s a man. Maybe you’re a man. Maybe you’re a woman. I’m sure it’s just me and my mutable fire sign but these sorts of declarations always feel a little frantic – understandable in a world that often looks at us down a very judgey cis-nose. But let me be clear – I don’t feel that way, so “normal” for me is not “feeling like a man.” I totally get that your baseline allows for this feeling that I cannot experience. It may be a flaw in my design, I concede that. And I would like to share also that I need to be “seen” as a man. I need my outside to appear masculine. Why this is I could no more tell you than why I like toffee in coffee ice-cream so much more than cookie dough. I need you to read me as male, but I do not really in my testosterone-enhanced heart of hearts believe that I can be a man. And here’s maybe another critical difference between me and someone else: I do not want to capitulate to what I’m convinced is a social grouping that has done ever so much more harm than it has good.
Yes, this posture is easy for me who doesn’t think they are a man anyway. I’m not doing yoga here. I don’t know how I came to be born to this body that confuses the mind, or this mind that has some other ideas about the body. But, and sometimes it grieves me to say this, I wasn’t born a man. The state of trans – “for me, today,” as my friend Sheila loved to intone – is an acceptance of the mutable, the dynamic. It is, for me, not the rugged embrace of Paul Bunyan but more of a dance with the blue ox Babe.
ANYTRANSMASCULINITY, what I’m really trying to say here is that identity policing is pissing me off. Of course, in this I run the risk of alienating all the police, thus creating more us’n’thems, but here goes…
If you’re an activist, you’re probably a bit of a control-freak. I will suggest to you that you probably have alcoholism or mental illness in your family. I say this because it’s true for me, and many, many, MANY of the activists I know. When you combine this sort of chemical askance with the human instinct to identify oneself against another you get the kind of person (myself) who is unutterably convinced of both their best intentions and their superiority.
Neither of these things is entirely true.
What’s really jacked me up is the pecking, the regulating I see coming from my trans/queer community. The nit-pick and the scrutiny, the “you’re not doing it right” and the “you don’t speak for me” is craven responsibility-denying. My understanding of queer and trans is that they are the essence of inclusivity - especially queer. I know many transpeople are very committed to a gendered status quo; that’s fine by me, but I’d appreciate if you’d stop blaming your lack of freedoms on those of us who speak out. Really, I don’t know why I even fight for equality for you people.
Okay, so here’s what I’m suggesting. Let’s stop micro-managing one another’s message. Let’s let “our community” be where they are. I promise not to check your ID for “queer” if you promise not to weigh what’s twixt my fleshy thighs. If I’m going to critique your message, I promise I’ll offer my own version, framed with love and compassion, and only a soupçon of snarkery. Let’s leave queer enough alone. And know this: my shop is open for any of you, all the time. I don’t care how you identify, if you’re straight and white and male even. And have dreads and like Eminem. I don’t even care. I love you Brother, I love you Sister and I loveloveloooove you Sisterbrother. Welcome, everyone. You are all loved here.
In an ongoing effort to extend my tentacular reach, I’ve been having chats about the impact of language and symbol on the disenfranchised at large. For instance, when I began my transition, I used the word “tranny” a lot. It seemed to mitigate the seriousness of my decision, and the flippant, and I hoped insouciant, way in which it fell out of my (full-lipped, sensuous) mouth helped those closest to me feel less threatened. I was being, in a Tom Cruisian sense, “glib.” This wasn’t calculated; it was initially unconscious. You could say I used my own transphobia* to bridge my transition, for myself and for others. It was useful for a while, and then it began to chafe. This was because as I began to fit in my own skin, I felt genuinely less pejorative about it. “Tranny” seemed less and less enchanting, and hearing my (non-trans) friends use it began to feel awkward. This I could not articulate until I began reading that some transwomen take real offense at transmen appropriating language used specifically to diminish and dehumanize transwomen.
Being as old as I am and having shown my ass on entirely too many occasions, I was willing to concede I had been thoughtless in my word choice. I mulled over the “t-word” conundrum, until I could finally feel some compassion, and then of course what I’d been avoiding all along, shame for having so blithely embraced such a rubber-bullet word. Aaah, so here is the crux of the biscuit, as Mr. Zappa used to say! The “S” word! One must avoid shame at all costs, even at the expense of others! The moral of this story is that I always have things to learn, and I must be vigilant with my own ego to do this.
Crap.
More recently, a friend of mine was edited from a Pride-Fest lineup because she has dreadlocks. She’s white, so dreadlocks are challenging for some people. I had forgotten this myself, until it was brought up by the group that snipped her off, if you will. It seemed dated, this posture, unhelpful, emotional. I wasn’t there so I don’t know what happened, but I can tell you what happened for this transguy: I had to do some deep dish diving. When our soi-disant “own community” censures us, it’s unsettling. It seems counter-productive, fascist even, an attempt by the marginalized to wield whatever watery power they feel they hold. It was absolutely none of my business, but the conversation kept sticking – I needed more information. I made pilgrimage to one of the wiser, more judicious persons I know, someone who wore dreads for a very long time herself, Shirlette Ammons.
I intuitively understood that Shirlette would not hold with white people sporting dreads, but I also knew she could shift the dialogue for me enough that I would see it from a new perspective. I am extreeeeemely lucky to have friends and colleagues I can ask to extrude my being into some new space/time dimension, like I’m play-doh and they’re the template; I relish this sort of travel. Also, I enjoy being Technicolor spaghetti dough but this is neither here nor there. I said, “I get it – it’s like ‘this is one of the few things I can call mine and you white people are taking that too, for a fucking fashion for godssake!’” Shirlette retorted, “I wore dreads as a symbol of struggle, rebellion. They had deep significance for us, those of us striving to keep our culture from this kind of liquidation.”
I responded with a possibly weak analogy – race is deep, but I was seeking a foothold. “Tattoos were like that for me! When I was getting them, they were so meaningful, they were like thoughts and dreams I had about myself coming up through my pores. We were this tiny little gang of artists and visionaries reacting to being suffocated by our culture, our political system.” In 2004, when I briefly apprenticed again at an Austin skin shoppe, I was appalled to see how much had changed in two decades. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what tattoos are now; they signify various things, but mostly they seem to semaphore a capitulation to an external pressure, not an internal one.
“But Shirlette, I think we’ve had this conversation, this dreadlock thing. I don’t feel it’s helpful.” She pulled back, clearly agitated, and then sat up in her chair. “This is just the third or fourth tier of us not having this conversation!”
I believe she’s right. Clearly, at least to this transguy cuttlefish, race – and gender inequity - is a conversation that needs having, all the time. We will keep attempting to have it until we have it. It requires openness, the possibility of experiencing deeply unpleasant feelings, it means becoming able to see one’s part in a social/economic system that absorbs the meaningful and renders it for market.
I would also suggest using trans as a lens for re-imagining these conversations. “Life,” as my good friend E. would say, “wants to make life happen! Life wants to explore all its possibilities!” Transgender is one of those life “possibilities,” an evolutionary high note in a soaring aria. If we can envision ourselves as a racial, ethnic, sexual (or non), speckled (or not), gendered (or no), shoot of Life’s curling tendrils, then we are simply another (spectacular) branch on a tree. Trans exemplifies this desire of biology, of God via nature, to create. And create and create and create – exploring every possibility, every permutation, without fear or judgment, simply creation for creation’s sake.
Nonetheless, our capacity to eat our own is also a symptom of the sickness suffered by the societally tortured. When white people critique others for wearing dreadlocks it feels, well, a little like privilege – maybe like when non or even trans people critique transpeople’s fashion choices. I’ve done it and so have you. Who else gets to make these decisions, these excisions, but those of us marginally empowered by our righteousness? We are all activists, and we are all in different places at different times. Jockeying for position to the top of the Activist Heap by elbowing others, critiquing one another’s commitment to fight The Power, means we have gotten lost somewhere, we’ve diluted the Nectar of Connexion we receive when we awaken to our trans/queer/ally/otherness.
My dear, beloved friend, may we always keep the conversation open and flowing, the way life moves after a rain, hither and yon, over and under, but always to the deep bluegreen sea. I will practice being aperture instead of right, soft instead of brittle, maceration rather than laceration. Put me in your mouth, friend, and let your enzymes diminish the shell I have made around me; that which protected me, now keeps me from others. Amen and atranswomen. And always, never forgot that I love you.
*although I think “transphobia” is too neat a package. I found the word itself, “tranny,” to be delightfully playful and archaic, like “fanny.”
There are entire economies devoted to the belief that humans are the ultimate life form, the pinnacle of creation. The survivability of the lowly cockroach in a nuclear storm renders that courageously upbeat faith moot, but what of it? I happen to think we are one more step in evolution’s grand trek, a stop along the way like Stuckeys where we can get our pecan-log on. Bill tells me that all great evolutionary change is precipitated by catastrophe. He reminds me that prokaryotes evolved from eukaryotes for whom oxygen was poison. Those early anaerobic eukes were well adapted to living in our highly nitrogenous, cO2 rich atmosphere, and living in water kept them safe from the ultraviolet radiation of our sun. But that had to change, didn’t it? My own smaller universe’s great shifts have been punctuated not by ellipses but by several loud, comic exclamation points. And catastrophe is of course merely a word describing a big event; to an alcoholic those seven DUI’s are the thing that got her sober, not just a series of tragic-comic inabilities to put her finger on her nose before an officer of the law.
Our economies and ecosystems are currently anchored to the binaries of him/her, us/them. Public systems and institutions are rarely ahead of the curve, so we can’t really fault them. From my perspective at least I see all current social dialogues – about marriage, about immigration, about social policy – as the dying grip of the tribalists’ attempts to force reality into a “manageable” package. What’s painfully evident in the arguments for things like “traditional marriage” or “keeping America American” is how they are not grounded in any sort of logic or even actual history, how they are excruciatingly emotional and even childish. As raw as it is for me to feel persistently ejected from social discourse by virtue of being a queer former woman must it be mind-numbingly painful to feel that all the structures holding your universe together are falling apart, or being blown up by pansy, homosexual, unpatriotic terrorists. I can relate, believe me.
All forced conflict is by nature absurd, but catastrophe on the other hand can be exhilarating and generative. At the heart of any argument for war, whether on the battlefield or in one’s own kitchen (“If I spill one more jar of honey from a jar you have left improperly sealed you are exiled from this kitchen!” Those of you who have roomed with me may pause now and shake your heads in sweet nostalgia) is something absolutely ridiculous, like “this here is mine.” The great gift of transitioning is the molecular understanding that not even your own body is yours – everything really is just energy we shift from shelf to shelf, kicking up dust mites and memories and hope for some room. The creamy center of catastrophe is maybe “there seems to be some sort of logjam here – maybe it’s time to move some tectonic plates around!”
We can see the transgendered as biology “fucking up” or we can view ourselves as ahead of the social curve. We are a genetic error, a mutation - or - we are the budding beginnings of evolutionary tendrils. Or both. It doesn’t matter to me – it doesn’t change what is, for me personally. Either way it was a wonderous catastrophe that shifted me from Samantha to Samuel, a starfish beginning in a Spongebob sea. To be literally cut open from port to starboard, a wanton cicatricle twist of scarring and fate – to have imprisoned the hormonal body in testosterone only to have it escape its ordained estrogen death and mutate into something beyond the imaginings of its inhabitor, is to fucking know some evolution.
I try to sidestep my own obsession with the “why” - technologies avail themselves to me only as I live in my present moment. I can now view my own past through the lenses of addiction, transgender, spirituality or vis a vis misogyny, pop culture, 70’s blockbuster films, the slow food movement, tramp art and more but I had to stay more or less in motion to be able to really look behind me. Any discipline I may use to update my understanding of history is just another place holder on the landscape of the cosmic dinner table.
But know this: you are not a biologic cock-up. You are here with reason and purpose and cunning and calamity. You are here with some really great shoes. You are here to take me out to the ballroom, take me out to the crowd. You are here to exhibit your tentacular disaster, your twisty limbs, your sass and frown. You are here to get down, sisterbrother. Don’t truck with the naysayers – tell them you’re just the next babystep towards God’s great genius and you can’t help them if they won’t leave the crib. Come slither beside me – what everybody knows but will never say out loud is that in the race between the tortoise and the hare, it is the stopwatch who wins. Let us then be cuttlefishies and leave the racing for the quads.
In the abstract, transgender men having babies seems a little like having cake with your frosting and eating it too, if only because transitioning itself is already like making a really big baby. To carry a child in this baby seems rather like an infant carrying a fetus, if you can follow my logic. But of course, in reality, this is the most mundane phenomenon of all – pregnancy. Yawn. I know more people these past 9 months – trans or not - who have had babies and I know a shocking number of currently pregnant people as well. Since I’ve lost several friends this year, this must be the Imax 3-D summer of the whole life-death cycle thingum. It seems rather extravagantly generative and almost oppressively Spring-ish however, like, having concluded we are indeed careening towards the Endtimes, the seasons are throwing themselves a White Party on Fire Island with Marianne the Maenad.
What I had not anticipated by transitioning was becoming an entirely new person. The narrative of transgender is that we get to be “who we really are.” I held to the string of that flighty balloon – the bladder of Becoming More Deeply Oneself – and looked to it to lead me somewheres. Where is a balloon going to take you but to the troposphere where you shall surely get sucked into the jets of a Southwest 757? Transitioning did not free me to find myself, like a divorce or a week with Outward Bound – it put me in a genetic splicing machine like The Fly and created something new, wondrous, horrible, as humdrum as pregnancy. I can tell you I am not more purely myself; I am something new entirely. As with a child, I can taste the flavor of my parents in everything I do but my parents are the boychild and grownuplady Sam. And they have about the amount of control and impact on me as Ward and June did on Eddie Haskell.
Snakes and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails, hormones and name change and chest reconstructions – these are what little boys are made of. Are you still finding your voice? Do you know who you are? As a transwoman, as an ftm? My condition (Gender identity disorder? U.S. artist?) means I shall ever be standing next to myself, observing, critiquing, wincing. I meet people of many persuasions who at least appear to be inside their own skins, but if I asked them I suspect I would learn they are a potato twice baked and terrified of being eaten. I myself feel rather underdone…but I’m closer now to something…
Disorder doesn’t touch it. I am nothing but order. My orders come in magnetic waves, a magnet wand moving iron shavings around a face – look, a Van Dyke beard! Now a Fu Manchu! I’m at the mercy of the magnet, people, I’m Wooly Willy. Only I wish I had that kind of facial hair. Transitioning is in the hands of people best suited for Etch-A-Sketch, Wooly Willy, Mr.Potato Head, our childhood selves who are imagining our adult beings. When I was six I used to roll up my pants legs and pretend to be a “Gridiron hero.” I didn’t exactly know what the “gridiron” was but its masculine significance captivated me. I confess, I rarely watch sports of any kind, and as I’ve grown older the sort of masculinity attached to the NFL has little appeal. I pine for the lace-up knee pants of yore, with leather armor and an actual pigskin.
So my boychild infects the adult. I make a fetish of ties and cufflinks and if it didn’t smell so much I might VO5 my hair like my father did. The man I’m becoming, and when I say “man” I mean quotey-hands man, is an amalgam of testosterone, surgery, and Bobby the camp counselor when I was nine. My library of manlitude is one ludicrous and scratchy reel after another – my godfather Gary Belt and his amazing, perfectly tanned, Mark Spitz-type body, or Mark Spitz himself, with that flagrant seventies soup-catcher and excellent bangs. Let us neither mention nor forget the Speedo, come to that. Stuffed with nuts, a banana hammock – stars and stripes forever, Ma! It was treacherous, to linger too long there; the effect of a man’s package on my pre-teen brain might have been enough to expose my inner longing, but alas I had no tongue (!) for it and I dared not give it name.
Today, who are we? We mutants, who has created us? If I were a woman I would be Ava Gardner in Iguana, Ingrid Bergman from Notorious, Butterfield 8 era Liz, Nico, Violette Leduc, Gerty Stein – but I’m not, so I won’t. Once upon a time, when I was a lesbian, I hosted a “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Party” and wore stilettos and a silk slip to my suite at the Plaza Hotel and left bright red lipstick on everything. My head pounded with red wine and Percocet because I knew the truth even then: I was Big Daddy in drag.
So from the head of our childhoods we issue, now Yul Brynner, now Speed Racer. What gets mashed in these templates is up to your cocktail of choice: estrogens, testosterones, accessories, plumage, fiberglass hulls, pantyhose, tricorn hats, or powdered hoof. We think we get a choice – and perhaps in some karmic, celestial way we do – but in the here-and-now, Baby, you’re lucky if you’re more Willy Aames than aimless willy. Surrender Dorothy, to the amalgamated tramp art of transition, all hand-madey and hobo, slapped between slabs of neutered silicon and stitches. Be grateful you are less of your own choosing; let the magic fingers (a quarter a pop!) of JesusMaryandJosephlizard massage your cortex into a gendered submission. The gods are going to have their way with you, trust. Please, my sisterbrother, should you see me senescent and ambling down your garden path, know that I have become most truly myself - ineffably, righteously, magnificently me. And I will be wearing a pair of red, white, and stretched out blue speedos.
