The Battle of Your Bulge

So let’s review, shall we? Since the dawning of Testosterone, the little human called “Sam” has been observed:

Wearing the same shirt for days at a time, or at least desiring to

Ascertaining a heretofore unknown appreciation for AC/DC and Ted Nugent

Spitting the “c” word* at humans engaging in “poor driving skills”

Discovering that his eyeballs have their own dirty little agenda and that it requires all his new muscularity to divert their disconcerting predation on human parts, of which he has nothing to do with.

Thanks be to The Great and Wise Tranny Gods that I have stayed out of a relationship for a year. Almost exactly. My first 9 months of transition, my gestation, required a self-absorption and return to focus that another human would have diverted me from. The Gods, in their sagacity, withheld another from me until I had basted in my manly gravy long enough to be something savory. And a transguy, no matter how delectable, is not to everyone’s taste.

I wondered how it would be to make the sexy times on testosterone. Would I come a lot? Would I come once and then have to wait for it to get back up? Would I be an attentive lover, or would the urgency of my own overweening drive find me begging like a teenage boy for “just a blow job…no? Okay baby but touch it, go on, touch it…Please baby, please!”

For those of us who, as ladies, could have sexy times all day, T will not present all that much of a difference. My drive has always been high and I have always been able and willing to fuck the day away when given the opportunity. My therapist sees this as prima facie evidence that I was prehistorically a dude-in-the-making, that my sexuality has ever had a masculine flavor.

There is an…exigency, a demand from the nether regions, that distracts on occasion. I heard myself the other day, say with utter seriousness, “Baby, if I don’t come now I will die.” I do not recall any such utterances before T, issued with such fervor and conviction as I feel now. I feel I was rather more gentlemanly, BT;** there is pressure here that hadn’t existed prior. I meant it: I will die without release. There is a violence, or perhaps I’m surrendering to an already extant condition, in my sexuality, an athleticism and muscularity enhanced by the pressure-cooker of hormones, a cock-teased cocktail laced with spinach, an iron, heat-seeking depth-charge one must quickly find a barren island for its detonation.

I’d like to think it makes me a more interesting partner, hotter, but that may be more evidence of (delusional) masculinity.

Speaking of masculinity, it appears I have fallen for the charms of a sweet Nelly Boy. I assume this makes me a fag, but I know this is treacherous terrain for assumptions. Nevertheless, I heart faggotry, and so will embrace this construct, whilst hopefully ripping the sweet hell out of it. It, not s/he. How do gay men feel about dykes and trannys appropriating their culture, their desire? For whatever reason gay male culture is always the most marketable, the most fantastically designed, pre-packaged, hanky-coded bundle of semiotic hot mess – you can’t say that about dykery, really, which certainly has its own cultural signifiers. Dykes are to fag culture as white people are to black culture, only less successful at marketing. Dykes will assimilate fag culture, but it’s always too specific and marginal, too – dare I say – amateur, to be mainstreamed immediately. Don’t mistake the use of “amateur” as a pejorative: I have deep abiding love for the amateur, way more so than pro anything.

Take Kinging, for instance. Drag has been around forever, but Kings as Dyke Kulture are really recent. Lip synching men dressed like Vegas showgirls have never done it for me. Well meaning people have taken me by the hand to performances they regarded as “edgy” – queens yanking fetuses from their Hershey-coated loins; dragging to Yoko Ono or L7 – but I remain strangely unmoved. Kings, on the other hand, always seem to have a sort of boyish (!) exuberance, an Andy Hardy “hey kids let’s put on a show” vivacity that appealed to me, even if, again, I find most drag oddly unmoving. I love cardboard props, seams and strings, crowns of aluminum foil and commitment to “let’s pretend!”

I had a good friend in Manhattan who did drag, lived drag. His daily drag was Rock n’ Roll Bad Girl, Bikini Kill drag. I played guitar for him at the Pyramid Club one night as he sang “Sister Morphine” – we were both smacked out of our minds. It’s a performance that gives me The Shames to this day; I was that fucked up. He was brilliant, high as a kite, Marianne Faithful to no-one, not Mick, not Keith, and certainly not his own gender. He had AIDS, I remember, and every shot we took together made me feel like I was helping to load his gun for Russian Roulette. In those days I wanted to die myself, and everything made me sad.

Today nothing makes me sad for long. How sad can I be when I’m living this ridiculous, delicious, hilarious trope, this parody/homage to man/woman? Believe me, you can laugh or you can cry, or both: streams of tears and I am pissing my pants I am laughing so hard. It is riDONKulous to be a transperson. HIGH Larious. Be yourself in a gang of humans. Choose the group. Watch them. Observe yourself with them. Are we not funny? And by “we” I mean Every Last Manjack of us?

Dude, I’m a cartoon. Maybe that’s why drag never drew me in, although given my history of homo- and transphobia there may be more going on there than garden-variety ennui. I live drag. I’ve been dressing like a twelve year old boy since I was..well…a twelve year old boy. You should see me: I’m nearly 50 and everything I own has skulls on it. It’s ridiculous. I’m ridiculous.

So again, what have we learned today? Let’s see. I have a truly raging hard-on. I think I am very, very sexy, but have a nagging suspicion this may be the wonderful symptom of living in a T-bubble. I have a big freakin’ crush on a big hompin’ Pansy, with whom I yearn to dance and jazz-hand, between bouts of royal reaming and schtupping. I may actually be wearing a clown suit, RIGHT NOW. I tell you, I wouldn’t know it.

So laugh, Tranny, laugh. It’s the best medicine, better than porn even. Honk on your boobs, or your surgically tweaked boy-nips, sashay Shanté, do-si-do and make a left, grab a Drag King, turn her round, and plant a big wet one on her moustached mouth. You can do no wrong; just keep dancing. We’ve got a war to win, don’t forget, so let’s keep up the morale of the troops while we’re at it.

*thanks, Jessica, for reigniting a love of the juicy “c” word.

**Before Testosterone, for the uninitiated.

Sworn Enemy of the Smurf!

The problem with transitioning, and depending on who you are it can be a big one, is that at the end of the day you’re you.

I am always, ever, snorting surf against the riptide of my own personality.

Par example: Last night I was with a semi-organized gang of homos in a meeting of same. We convene in what I imagine a Rotary or Lion’s Club might meet in, a high-ceilinged outlier building, possibly made of cinder blocks, with an enormous central fireplace adorned with a crest, naturalmente, because it can. The meeting is chock-a-block with ritual, Robert’s Rules kind of things; nonetheless, because it is an unwieldy gang of gays, there are little “extras” thrown in, asides and gang-chanted rejoinders. Because we can.

As we adjourn, and members push outside to fill the glorious near-Spring dusk air with smoke, I overhear a guy spit out, “I’m just not gay enough for all that!”

I’m intrigued, so of course I cup my ear and lean in.

Dude is really angry about all the furbelows and frills that come with our group, the commentary and chants. “I’m not gay enough for this shit!” He’s really angry, sucking his fag hard, pacing like a tiny lion. He’s saying that the gayness of the group pisses him off. What’s really hilarious and touching and heartbreaking about this particular tableau is Dude is possibly the nelliest queen of the bunch. He actually IS gay enough.

Now, I’ve been body-slammed by another human kind enough to show me my internalized homophobia. Queeny, angry Dude? C’est moi. The world is a gentle place this night, and thus he is allowed to rant, suck and rant. Perhaps his awakening will come later, some other sweet eve; it will, eventually and it will sting.

I’ve been hanging out with a lot of transpeople recently. It’s time. It’s the best thing for what ails me, which is basically terror. I couldn’t even really put a finger on exactly what’s so terrifying, but I can share with you a protracted history of judgements and harsh asides muttered by me about people and whatever it is they’re doing that irks me. To this very day I have a knee-jerk revulsion for a certain breed of butch. Now it’s quickly followed by an acknowledgment of my homophobia, my fear of my own female masculinity, but for years, and by years I mean YEARS, I was just another dyke h8er.

Hanging out with a bunch of trannies is a mixed bag. Sometimes it’s like being in soft, snuggy blanket printed with spaceships and cowboys with a gang of sweet children, and other times it’s like being in the center of said blanket, while the mob from Lord of the Flies throws you up in the air with it as they consider whether or not they will catch you, and if they do, how to best disembowel and cannibalize.

It’s comforting to be with dudes in various stages of whatever, who want to share, are eager to discourse about this or that. To see the gendered spectrum, its nuances and delicious complexities, loud and proud, a rainbow with a swagger, is to rejoin the human race in a spectacular way. The flip is in fears and agendas writ bold in our speech and dress. Guys have often created or acquired rules about transitioning, how it should look, what needs to happen. Other dudes look really good, and one cannot help but hold oneself weakly against their flaming masculinity without feeling at least slightly singed. As with any social group, to be there productively means submitting to some discomfort, as my failings are highlighted by the success of others, while allowing myself to be elevated by the energetic, enthusiastic bonhomie of my peers.

I want to cradle some men in my arms. They are suffocating in a cave of their own design, one in which they might have explored as a small boy, that initially offered sanctuary, a pile of comic books, Playboys, some candles and milk cartons and maybe even a sleeping bag and flashlight. Somehow this place of supreme joy and haven has become solitary confinement, and now these boys have so many rules no-one else is allowed in. One “must” pack to be a good transguy; one must have short, masculine hair, a manly job; one mustn’t be a fag; one must never ever no never let one’s guard down lest one be “read” as less than a man even ‘though most of the world can’t even access scrutiny so detailed as to have clue one how to identify a transperson. Sweet brother, you have fallen prey to the Gargamel of Masculine Social Construct and his Sorcery of Shame. God bless you Beautiful Boy; someday our love will penetrate your cave and you will be compelled to exit, led by your nose to the smell of our delectable cupcakes, the transperson’s dessert of choice.

On a rough day I’m destroyed by the overarching presence of my breasts; I’m ashamed of my soft hairlessness, my dykiness. But other days, and these are more frequent, I see myself in that multihued dimension, a facet of an infinite crystal that is expanding exponentially even as we speak. And while I can revel in my deepening voice, my thickening torso, the added muscularity, the presence of other transpeople is humbling. Our sincerity and commitment in the face of mordant demons, external and within, is nothing short of transcendent. And so, my brothers, friends, and even my enemies: I bow, deeply, to you. You remind me to stay “right-sized” and present for the ride of a lifetime. You remind me who I am: Tha Man Sam.

The Incredibly Shallow Birdbath of Loneliness

Lesbians.

Lesbians are complicated. Rather, my relationship with lesbians is complicated. My relationship to lesbianism is complicated. People in AA occasionally say, “it’s Alcohol-ISM, not Alcohol-WASM,” after which I always mutter “it’s Lesbian-ISM, not Lesbian-WASM!”

Is it Lesbian ISM or WASM for me? My friend (and favorite painter) Ed Larson ran into me and my new paramour on the durty streets of downtown Chapel Hill. He turned to his wife, afterwards and said “So Sam is a MAN, and he’s dating a LESBIAN?” Jessica prudently shushed him with a “just don’t even think about it. Don’t even think about it.”

I don’t know that my friend identifies as “lesbian.” This is more of a Queer dimension we inhabit. But for sure, the uninformed and unimaginative will certainly read us as two dykes. And Ed was only partly kidding – the bafflement exists. For many of us, Queer an’all, who is with whom can be perplexing. Just ask my friend S, whose daughter is now her son, who now identifies as “heterosexual.” S can’t wrap her brain around her son’s sexual declaim, largely I think because she knows what’s in her “son’s” pants. It simply doesn’t make commonsense to her.

I was raised by perverts, once I left home. In PervLand everything exists simultaneously. You’re a puppy, perhaps, maybe even neutered. By day you’re a banker, but you keep your bowl in your bottom drawer, your secret “real” life anchoring you to emotional security like Linus’ blanket. For some, trans is a paraphilia. What do I have in common with the guy who wears a skirt, has boobs, but still identifies as a guy and for whom these are sexual talisman, turn-ons? His perv trip is way out loud. Transitioning has its psychosexual elements; to find one’s way home can contain the fiercest surge, the sweetest charge. I learned to be comfortable, or at least amused, with sex and gender nuance, is what I’m saying to you.

Lesbian was always rather more challenging for me. I was uncomfortable around the lesbians from the git. My homophobia seized on the Mary McCarthy “The Group” paradigm of lesbianism, which was that it was inbred, incestuous, riddled with unappealing drama, rife with poor boundaries and busy-body-ness, obsessive, unattractive. The first lesbians I knew were these two characters from High School. They were absolutely insane. One of them, a hide-tough, prematurely leathered blonde wanted to borrow a syringe we kept in my house for my brother’s allergy medicine, because she wanted to try shooting cocaine; the other, a less hardened, cheerleader blonde had literally fucked the entire football team. They terrified me.

They were lesbianism pathologized. I was 15 and out by then myself, at least to my friends, and drinking beer at their party. The blond, coke-shooting scary one passed me a nearly depleted bottle of tequila, and in what appeared to my ingenuous ears as a gesture of lesbian bonhomie, said “Here, drink up, Sam! Go’head, finish this shit!”

From across the room, as time inverted, I saw the buxom blonde’s head snap. Immediately she appeared between us, and wrapped her hand around the bottle. “Isn’t that the tequila that made us really, really sick?” she asked her generous partner. “Oh right” smirked Leathern, who turned her gaze full on me, with a face full of glory and hate.

In general, women terrified me. This persisted until my forties I’d say, when I finally sank into the warm, inviting waters of me and my own sexual power without needing another’s validation or invitation. It is no coincidence that at this time I discovered my need to explore my nascent masculinity. Or whatever you want to call it.

Can I ever fully relinquish my Lesbo card? Is it ISM? I have always felt like a fraud around lesbians, but is that simply a metastasized outcropping of my alcoholism, which is always finding ways to isolate me, keep me from connecting? Or am I a fraud because I’m actually NOT A LESBIAN?

Feeling fraudulent would explain my discomfort, my homophobia, my occasional nausea. It feels like a club I never fully fit in, yet another social sphere that seems to have implicit rules, behaviors, dress-codes and handshakes, possibly its own language, and I will never, ever be given that manual, led by the Lesbian Illuminati to the inner-sanctum, a labial labyrinth where women actually do run the planet, like the Jews control the media.

For now, I’m a straight dude and a dyke, who is neither terribly straight, nor totally dude, nor really a dyke. I guess I’ll float around Queerville for a while; these are my people, the outliers, the fetishists, the sublimely ridiculous, the ones who own costumes because they sometimes just feel like being an old lady from Weehawken, whose politics are interstitial and connective, who are the literal fluid between social cells, and who fear unlovability even in the face of astounding love and compassion.

Queers and octopuses. Did I mention the octopuses? At the end of the day, we’re all the freaking same, even with eight legs and a huge head. It’s human ISM, not human WASM.

Early Mornin' Singin' Song

Sometimes I feel like I’m slapping myself upside the face with my own shlong. I feel just as stupid and clueless as I imagine a man can feel, rendered ever more helpless by the overarching urge. I’m leaden like a paperweight in the head yet emboldened like a fire-dancer in the pants.

Ah, the effervescent yodel of testosterone in the groinal regions.

Immersed in the realm of the transgendered, is where I’ve been. Traveling to and fro, hither and yon, for coffees, dinners, group shares, cupcakes and board games, dates. We’re an often blurry gang of folk, being neither here nor there, yet clearly in a place of our own. The blur is that in this trans-space/time we create, non-trans people may be incapable of focusing on us. Even other trans-people may have to squint. Nonetheless, there we are, vibrating like a fantastic sexual Easter egg, pastel and perhaps sequined, for your delectation. Or not.

I don’t want to be part of a group. I never have. But I have found my own survival often depends on it; to stay in the center of the herd is to perhaps not be swung by the entrails by some larger, less friendly beast on the edges. Typically the less friendly beast is whatever dreary tune is top ten in my head. A fine example might be “Who Will Love Me in a Body Like That?”

Echoing my fears were the brave men, women, and beyond at the tranny Round Table last night. How bold, how chivalric, how generous to share aloud our fears of unlovability! Who will love me in a body like this? Who do I love?

There’s something so magnetic about that mantra, so compelling. It’s the Minotaur in the center of our labyrinth, waiting to flog us with our own purse, beat us with our European man-bag. Interesting that a minotaur should mock the body of another. I know I’ve wrung my own hands, watching with despair as I succumbed to the unpluckable charms of another straight girl, feeling doomed like Tantalus to stand in pool of water that recedes every time I kneel to drink. I wasn’t interested in straight girls until I got my T on, which is hilarious only because my last two partners were heterosexual.

So I’m listening to these humans, sorting out their fears and their desires, and I’m reminded that people are either into me or they’re not, and I have no control over that, AND, it’s unpredictable. Every time a straight woman’s “gone south” on me I’ve had that moment of terror: oh, here comes the gag, but it’s never happened. Whatever they had fallen for in me seemed to make all my parts palatable, if not downright delicious for them.

As for my own desire, I had this mix-tape jammed in the boombox, that it was girly women I had to have, femmy-femmes. I had begun to create this narrative about high-maintenance chicklets, and my penchant for them. I had donned the headphones of painful, if glittery, limitation.

You could practically feel it in the room last night, the collective and icy breath of a future alone, unloved, unloving. “I’m a man and I want to love men, but who will love me without a penis?” “I’m a man in a relationship with a lesbian who wants her lover back, wants her woman back.” “I’m a woman with a penis; what man will love this body?”

I had to unclench my own claws around ideas of what love should look like. Why this need to define, always, my desire, my focus? “I like femme women.” Oh, really?! Granted, most of my partners have been more “feminine” than me, and certainly femininity has fetishistic elements for me. It’s so exotic. I really don’t get it. Also, I love when a feminine person punches my masculine card. It’s a total hard-on.

But the truth is more delicious, more fluid. I climbed atop the conical Mt. Girl and turned to face it, spreading my arms and falling backwards. Down I fell, past Brazilian waxes and pedis, flying flash past plucked eyebrows and thongs, lacy undergarments and vast skin care regimes, flipping my head from side to side to see ass and thigh, tit and neck, smelling exotic smells, feeling overly soft well-scrubbed skin. Is this what I need for love to happen?

Thank the gods I land in the arms of another. This other is perhaps a boy, perhaps a girl, maybe even a man. I don’t get to know what love looks like. Peen or no peen, puss or not puss, the sweetness is in our relating, your finger on my pulse, my hand on your forehead. We know what each other’s temperature is: it’s HOT. I find myself, in this trans-place, open to another kind of experience entirely, one of a gender so kaleidoscopic, so acrobatic, I can only hang on for the ride. Once I limit myself to an idea of desire, I’ve fallen into the net again, and the ride is over, the big-top falls down. My desire is HUGE. It’s astronomical. Sir Isaac Newton will tell you it’s attracting everything, all the time, and it’s attracted to everything, all the time. I’m on some tranny ellipse, pulled towards your sun and I hope it’ll be scorching, scorching hot. I like that you’re wearing boxers, I like that you have breasts, I love your hairy ass, I’m hot for your estrogenically reduced dick, your hormonally enhanced clit. It’s you I love, and me you’re hot for. Me. Always and forever, in trans-time and space, amen.

Brothers, Sisters, Others, let's be Lovers.

I Call Shotgun!

I’ve been traveling deep, deep undersea, feasting on the marine snow of my old dead ideas. Marine snow, for you for whom cephalopods don’t fascinate, is the soft, downy flakes of detritus, composed of dead fish, fecal matter and plankton, that travel from the floaters atop down to the briny leagues. It can gather some girth by the time it hits the ocean floor. Me, I don’t let anything go to waste, especially not a good meal.

There’s this adolescent phenomenon, whereby youngsters tear down an institution and then rebuild it while trumpeting their ingenious originality. What I’m saying to you is that I forget, sometimes, that I didn’t invent transitioning, or that I have anything at all to offer to the larger world, regarding my own experience.

It’s humbling, to meet 17 year old transpeople who have waaaay more experience at this thing than I. I’ve discovered, in my dotage, that there’s a lot of stuff I know little about at all, boat-load of opinion aside.

When I came out as lesbonian, there actually weren’t many doing it my way, and so I did feel slightly original, if by “original” one means lonely and weird. In that, I was no groundbreaker. But there weren’t a ton of arty Patti Smith-style dykes, even in D.C. in 1978. We did manage to find each other, thank the gods (and who would they be? MC5?) but I do remember walking a gauntlet, in a women’s bar, of drunken flannel-wearers, who, to my newly-out 18 year old horror, groped my tuxedo pants-wearing legs and ass in a dykey approximation of a Pasolini film. It was the seventh circle of Hell. There was no-body who looked like me, no dyed-black, teased-up tresses and heavy eyeliner, no flat-soled soft boots, no chicken bones taped to their faux leopard jacket. Yet.

Those of us who were punk or New Wave queer found a place; we gravitated to each other with near desperation in clubs like 9:30, gouging our gay niche with Klaus Nomi, Bauhaus, Bush Tetras.

Now, here it is, 2009. I’ve lost my transgressive card, have you seen it? Last I looked it was the nineties and I used it to get too many facial piercings.

Trans? I got nothin. Show me something. You kids have been doing this shit for a while now. I got hip to the trans-thing sometime in the early new millennium. Women I knew started changing, first their names, their pronouns, then something else, ineluctable. It was the testosterone what done it.

In my forties now, I find myself kneeling at the feet of wiser, younger men and genderfucks. These guys, these people – they’re so fucking smart. They have a generosity of spirit, a compassion I never had. I was always too afraid, too scared you’d scope me out for who I really was, which was someone who was basically scared and afraid. Who knew? You can’t travel deep when you can’t catch your breath, you’re corseted by how you want to be seen, who you think you are. Transitioning is so good for me. I’m forced to disrobe, unbuckle, riiiip the Velcro and unstay the whale-bone so you can see my real gut in all its splendor. Diving’s easier then, too, naked and curious.

I guess I’m reminding myself not to reinvent a good wheel. I’m remembering to thank all my brothers, sisters, and whatevers for having paved this sweet golden trail. For me. There are so many helpmeets along the way. There’s a nearly unfathomable regression to puberty with hormones, so I know my kin will be kind when I mistake myself for a trail-blazer. I’ll probably break curfew, too, and embarrass my family in public. At least, I hope so.

What men and women and others have endured, to become themselves! I salute you; I’m in awe. And I want to thank the dudes who have connected with me, buoyed (boyed?) me in these occasionally choppy waters, dudes like Amrit, and Vegan BattleBot, Elliot and the rest of you guys. This shit is weird and hard. This shit is fantastic and transcendent. Only my boys (and I see us all, the boys under some tranny Fagin) know what I’m on about: the mood swings, the dysmorphia; the ecstasy of leaning into something new entirely; the sublime terror of same; the frustration, the tears, the insane sexual yank, in and of itself a new organ; the grief; the lost relationships; the deepening of old friendships; the family drama; the new wardrobe….

I’m going to borrow my mom’s station wagon and drive for miles, until the college radio station fades and I don’t even notice - I’m too deep in my desire, too tantalized by the road, smitten with the scenery, too captivated by your company. You can stretch out now, relax into the rhythm of asphalt and white lines, knock off your kicks, and hang your feet out the window. We’ve got nowhere to go but someplace amazing. Thanks for holding the map.

Fire, Walk With Me and While You're Here Could You Get Me Some Ice-Cream?

I just got off the phone with one of my fellow spirit-travelers, Kat Nas, who was preparing her fire-walking workshop in Long Island. She’s going to take a gang of New York men and women and show them how to break arrows in half by jamming them point-wise into their own necks. She’s very brave, that one. Kat and I used to do the S/m circuit in Manhattan; it’s what many of us stumbled into on our search for expansion into freedom and bliss. Now she workshops fire, and I stick myself with hormones. I jest, sort of; my freedom and bliss, my dive into sublime Consciousness continues organically, and my body is like a crystal in a kaleidoscope, rearranging into newer, sometimes just different, glorious calls of love to my creator.

I know, don’t gag. I really feel like that though, like I’m fractally imploding into Love…I’m typing this and I looked up at this Klee print I have and it started expanding and moving with my third eye. That’s just how it is for me. Shut the fuck up. Get your own print if you don’t believe me.

Two weeks ago, I was deeply concerned about the shape of my body. Dysmorphia plagued me. I was a dolphin trapped in a tuna net. These breasts, these thighs, this overall inclination to a certain, dare I say, Zaftig physiognomy? Oh this female fat threatened to smuffocate me, headlock me with larded thighs; I was half-nelsoned with swinging underarm ladyfat, choking on a mouthful of Secret, bitch-slapped by two mammoth teats. Could this really be my body? How could I possibly go on, much less leave my room, if this was the form I took?

This was a whole ‘nother level in self-loathing. Of course, dysmorphia is an American illness. How am I different from someone who has come to believe they cannot have love with their current nose, cannot find a job without a more substantive bosom, cannot go on one more day with this wretched body, this betrayer, this Thing – what did I ever do to deserve this Thing?!

Yes, arguably the transgendered host their own insidious breed of discomfort, and perhaps it is righteous even. But I’m old, and I want peace.

The fire-walker learns to transcend, not pain, but space/time. The universe will accommodate this, is what I’m told. The fire-walker, the one who rends arrows on her neck, is the one who has transmuted her terror into joy, who has shifted energetically into a state of willingness to meet some goal. This is my goal: to walk twenty feet on burning coals. This is my brain: how the fuck am I going to walk on fucking coals without scorching my fucking feets!? How am I going to be a Sam-man if I’m blanketed with delicious womanly lady-lumpage? How the fuckity fuck!???

Transmute the terror into joy.

Well that’s easy for you to say, Tranny, is what I believe you’ll be muttering. Let me tell you what happened, allow me to guide you on my coal-walk…

Chapter One: Whereupon our lad reaches for his whaling knife, to scrape the blubber from the mammal’s skin.

I had a thought. It looked like this: if I could control my food, if I could diet, if I could drop twenty pounds, I’d have NO TITS. Because it’s true; I wouldn’t. I’ve been skinny, and I can tell you empirically “I have no tits.” I would have no mams, and no hips. Easy peasey. When you’re on crystal meth!

Chapter Two: Our hapless hero is daunted by this Sisyphean task, and so regroups for a more...economical solution.

I realized, no matter what I did, how I “controlled” any bit of my body, there would always be something. I was never going to have peace with this Thing. That’s a stunning piece of information, that’s very useful. It means I need to make some peace, find a place of ease in this…me…this corporeal construct.

JL said to me “You’re on a journey. I used to think ‘when I lose this 10 pounds, when I get this job, when I have this money’ in some future I would be happy. But you’re where you’re at right now, and in this moment you can’t change that. Be happy for Sam! He’s changing, every day! Be sweet with this person!”

I didn’t throw up in my mouth. You can hear certain things from certain people. JL is one of them.

I’m standing on the coals but I don’t feel them now. I can’t make the world “see me for who I am” – when do we ever see one another for who we are, except by intimacy or by accident? I have to love this little Sam who is on this scary, wondrous journey, who likes the wind and the tumult yet wishes it weren’t so tempting to hide beneath the bed.

This body, it’s a body. It does wonderful things – it makes all kinds of pleasure, and noises which I like, and movements, although last week it threw up out of its butt. I love this body. If it loses weight, cool, that’s awesome. Two less things to worry about. Perhaps. If it doesn’t, I’m still me, still making toast of the soles of my dogs, watching and laughing aloud because there’s no meat sizzle, no blistering, and you’re still holding my hand, which means we’re both standing in the middle of a motherfucking fire, yo, and look, look what’s happening right now. We just alchemically transmuted pain into joy.

Faigelah Verklempt

You know, just when I begin to fall into the narcotic and compelling fantasy that it’s all about where there’s hair, and what makes a man, I’m jostled awake by the weirdly sweet, clotted cream voice of Antony. If you don’t know Antony, let me introduce you briefly. He’s a deep-visioned, deceptively gentle-voiced singer and performer who identifies as transgender. His work is hard to take…his sound can be challenging and he can, at first listen, read lyrically very dark. I’ve always stuck with him, though, since being introduced to him a few years ago – stuck it out through my discomfort and unease because his work is so transcendent.

His resonance, and what resonates most about this idea I call “transgender,” is this un-bittered place of violation; he sings from a waking dream of dancing motes in sunlight while being sexually abused. He speaks of transgendered children, and gay children too, as being those kids who were often found “dancing alone in the light.” He thinks of homosexuality and transgender as a gift.

It’s a very romantic notion and the cynic in me thinks it’s a delicious conceit – but there is some truth there too, for me anyway. I never felt a part of the rest of humanity, and I knew, I’ve always known it had something to do with my gender, my sexuality. It’s tempting to focus on the mechanics or the sexual aspects of the transgendered or gay but as Antony points out, this is reductive. It fails to reveal the true essence of the gender outlier, which is shamanic or alchemic.

The gay or transchild often lives in a place of beautiful magic. As we grow up, we think we are imaginative, that we developed “coping skills” of escape, of self-creation. Artists think this too. But what if that realm exists for all of us – what if we didn’t make up a “safe” place in our heads? What if we just went there?

I see us all, alone on wooden floorboards; all the children are outside playing raucous, bellicose even. We are dancing with a broom and all the things that are sparkling in this sunbeam. We are never alone: look at all our friends!

I was trespassed time after time after time. I know this is true for many gay and trans kids. This is the cauldron where this mettle is tested. I was trans, a true outlier, before I was ever touched, or made to do things I didn’t want to do, or lived in a kind of choked fear of my fellow first-graders and certain adults, day after day after day after day.

So we don’t retreat into this inner-world to hide, we expand inviolate into a dimension only some of us can travel, and I recognize you and you and you there. My whole family is a family of outliers. Weirdos, smarty-pants – never picked to be on the team, or only picked because we had developed tremendous ass-kicking skills and so were feared but not exactly liked. We find, by degrees, that these picked-on kids were sometimes portals, offered windows into other worlds, and that often they were sweetly eager to show us what they saw. I know I love sharing this place with you. It makes me feel connected.

There’s something about this culture that does want to take a trans-person and reduce us to titillating parts. Shit, we do that with everyone else, right? But if I’m incautious, if I’m not paying attention, I do it to myself. Sometimes the way I know to connect with you is to make myself a buffoon, a little less-than. Sometimes I just want to fit in, and what “fits” better than dick and pussy? And I’ll seek entertainment over epiphany many days – that’s why I’m more often listening to the usual indy pop than an artist like Antony. It is true you can only take so much.

The secret trick is to not get lost in that, not mistake artifice-for-art kind of thing. The artifice is make-up and passing; it’s the freakshow glamour of pregnant man or Amanda Lepore. That’s the E-Tranny Channel. Totally necessary, useful in its way. But at the end of our program what shall we have learned? Some of us break through Maury and become healers. RuPaul did it. Boy George not so much. The judges are still out on Thomas Beattie. Who do I want to be when I grow up?

The fruits rot when they ripen too long in front of a mirror. The temptation to narcissism is superb. That’s why flamboyant men and women get stuck; they forget all that peacock was supposed to be a spacesuit to another dimension, and fell asleep into a dream of a large showy bird.

I am not a man and I have only ever been a woman for minutes, and those are suspect. I think I’ve only ever been a woman as a sexual kink, a perv trip, kind of like I’ve been a horse and a gay man and a cop, depending on what you needed at the time. I really am something else entirely, or some midpoint, some gender chimera. I think I’ll spend less time worrying about the kind of man I’ll be, or what it means to be a man, or how I should act or dress or piss or smell, how I should swagger or cut a fart, how I should garden or tie my shoes or vote. I got into this meshugass to wake my damn self up, not to trip over the garden-hose of my own dick. Oh, I wish, don’t I!?

Let’s make a list of the gay people, the possibly trans-people we know, we grew up around, who changed our way of seeing things. Let’s test this thing, let’s see where it goes. I’ll start with my best friend in high-school, who taught me about Iggy and Lou, whom I “dated” and to whom I said “you know, when I put my hands down here, this is not what I expect to find.”

Now WORK.