A pure moment of unadulterated teenaged glee, here, but: Adam Ant has written his autobiography. A couple of years ago when he was first really struggling with manic-depression he got a “1%” tattoo on his body somewhere – yes, I’d like to know where – because 1% of the world’s population suffers with mental illness of some kind.
And I thought he rocked then.
But this just thrills me; in a sense it’s been a book I’ve been waiting for my whole life, or at least since I was 13 or so. I still have dreams about finding Ants stuff I don’t own, and there’s precious little out there that I don’t. And now, this, as a grown-up; it’s even better than the time he was on Northern Exposure, which was my favorite show at the time, & a little surreal, for my favorite person/hero to be on what was my favorite show. Like the kind of dream you have when you’re 16 & your life sucks.
(& by god, but look at his face! i think he’s the most perfectly formed person who ever lived, i swear it.)
Five Questions With… Richard Docter
Dr. Richard Docter is a clinical psychologist and gender researcher from Los Angeles with 20 years of experience in the transgender community. Together with Virginia Prince, he is co-author of the largest survey of cross dressers ever published. In 1988 he published the book Transvestites and Transsexuals. He continues to be a frequent contributor to transgender conventions throughout the nation.
1) Your Transvestites & Transsexuals was one of the only books (other than Mariette Pathy Allen’s Transformations) that actually mentioned spouses when I was looking for information nearly a decade ago. What encouraged you to include spouses?
< Dr. Richard Docter with Christine Jorgensen, 1987. (Photo by Mariette Pathy Allen.)
There were a number of published articles about the concerns of wives published prior to 1988. I was interested in the views of wives because important family dynamics are almost always affected by cross dressing. Few wives were totally rejecting, but few had worked out an accomodation that felt good for both. The wives who seem most interesting to me are people like you, Helen, who defy the societal view that all of this is sick, sick, sick. Instead, some wives, as you point out, not only put shame on the back burner, but find ways to enjoy the joy of cross dressing that means so much to their husband. I hope you will keep collecting their stories so they can be shared with both husbands and wives.
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Memoirs
I’m reading Joan Didion’s remarkable The Year of Magical Thinking right now, because the book got such outstanding reviews (and a National Book Award), but also because I’m writing a memoir-ish book that will also go into more abstract issues – like gender, & marriage, & things such as that. I want to see how Didion did it; I like to learn from the best. (Actually, the best writing advice I ever got was to read good books.)
I was wondering if anyone else has recommendations for other good memoirs I might check out – obviously, ones on the serious side.
Way, WAY Too Much TV
Okay, I’m going to hope this is the last installation in my recent series about my TV viewing. (Previous installations includes posts about Coke and Adam Ant, Jenny Craig and street harassment, Beauty & the Geek, and one about a reality show that never aired, despite its feel-good homo-friendly vibe). Okay, I might still write about the Abigail Adams biography that’s been running on PBS, but not right now.
Right now I want to talk about the most lovely and bizarre – and uniquely American – merging of capitalism and philanthropy I’ve ever seen: Extreme Home Makeover.
Here’s the premise: family beset by hardship or doing really cool stuff is recommended to the show and its host, Ty Pennington, by a friend or neighbor and occasionally a member of the family.
The Extreme Home Makeover team show up at the family’s door, send them on vacation for a week, and during that very same week, completely re-build their entire house.
They use products that get prominent display during the show and on the show’s website: tools from Sears, and appliances from Kenmore. Basically, it’s free advertising in exchange for donated goods to use for the home makeover.
Local construction companies help out, and/or volunteer types, and often a celebrity gets involved. The family returns home, their community gathers, everyone shouts “move that bus!” and then everyone cries and smiles and hugs everyone else (especially the Design Team).
It’s the corniest shit ever and I love every minute of it. It’s so bizarrely American. In a way, it’s all win-win: cool families that do things like rescue injured animals get a great house and free dog food and kennels, Sears gets to show off their power tools, and millions of viewers are entertained.
Really, Betty and I have been watching weekly for a long while now, and we fight over tissues. Dunno, maybe during such shitty times, it’s a relief to see nice people who do good stuff get rewarded – and the only strings attached is a little bit of ‘good karma’ advertising for the companies that donate.
I think shows like this are what we should be exporting to the rest of the world instead of Baywatch or whatever other crap we export (there are some cultures, I’m sure, that find those damn Survivor shows insulting, since so much of the world’s population isn’t living in much better conditions than the contestants). We all know that Ford isn’t going to give any trucks to the employees they just laid off when their families apply in a year or so after not being able to find replacement work. No, of course not.
But at least it’s not crap news, of which we’ve got plenty.
Out of the Freying Pan and Into the Fire
Oprah just said that she doesn’t want kudos for admitting she was wrong because it was the only thing to do, and that was after cutting off Nan Talese mid-sentence. (Nan Talese is not the kind of person who is used to be cut off mid-sentence – she’s a Senior VP of Doubleday and owns her own imprint there). But Oprah is angry, and James Frey is starting to feel like the meat industry, I bet.
Frank Rich is angry, too, and just pointed out that being honest is usually the first step in any addiction recovery journey.
Stanley Crouch wants to know how much Doubleday had to do with coercing Frey into publishing it as a memoir.
And Maureen Down suggested Oprah cast Frey out of her kingdom.
A journalism professor (whose name I didn’t catch) just pointed out that when you doubt one memoir, you start to distrust them all; as someone who has put the truth of my life on the line, I really resent James Frey and even more the slick rationalizations of Nan Talese. Her attitude is exactly what sucks about the publishing industry.
Granted, our whole culture cries out for sensationalism: they don’t want to hear one woman’s story of pregnancy and childbirth; they want the post-natally depressed nearly-killed-her-baby mother. More than once members of the media (okay, including a producer from Oprah) stopped being interested in our story because Betty hasn’t had “the operation.”
So this is what I think: Nan Talese and Frey should figure out how much money they made from bullshitting everyone, and they should give it back. There are definitely 12-step programs that need funding and tons of individuals who could use some money to re-start lives that addiction has made a mess of.
And I know there are memoir writers out there that could use a grant. I just know it.
Five Questions With… Bradford Louryk
Bradford Louryk created and performs in Christine Jorgensen Reveals – as Christine Jorgensen herself. In the play, he lipsynchs a recorded interview with Jorgensen that was conducted by Nipsey Russell and recorded in 1958. The show, as directed by John Hecht, has garnered rave reviews, including at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Louryk did his BA at Vassar, and has acted at varied theatrical venues, from Studio 42 (of which he was a founding member) to Playwrights Horizons to hERE. Christine Jorgensen Reveals plays in New York until January 28th.
1. How has this piece affected your understanding of gender? Is this the first time you’ve played a woman?
This is not the first time that I’ve played a woman, but it’s the first time I’ve played an historical human being who happens to have been a woman. My previous experiences were with Greek tragic heroines – Klytaemnestra, Elektra, Medea, Phedre – and with biblical figures – Judith from the story of Judith and Holofernes, and I’m currently developing a piece about The Virgin Mary called “Version Mary.†I like to stretch myself as much as I can as an actor every time I’m onstage. Whether that’s through language or physicality or playing the opposite sex, I always want to grow as a performer through whatever role I’m creating.
That said, since I first became aware of cross-gendered casting as a politicized choice (when I was exposed to Charles Ludlam’s writing) when I was about 15 years old, I have understood gender as a fluid construct. Thus, my approach isn’t about being male or being female, but about realizing the character in an honest manner. Men are not exclusively masculine and women are not exclusively feminine, thus, when you paint your character with details from the spectrum of what we understand gender to be, you arrive at – I hope – a fully rounded person, with whom the audience can interact.
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Five Questions With… Vern Bullough
Vern L. Bullough is a SUNY Distinguished
Professor Emeritus, was a past President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, was honored with the Kinsey Award for his research, and is the author of Crossdressing, Sex, and Gender, along with 50+ other books on various subjects, most of them involving sexuality.
< Helen with Vern Bullough at IFGE 2004.
1) In terms of trans and gender subjects, what do you think is the most important piece of your scholarship?
The field of trans research is rapidly changing as it moves more into the mainstream of variant sexual behaviors. I think the best back ground is the book that my late wife Bonnie and I did, entitled Cross Dressing, Sex and Gender. The best survey of the field up to l997 was also one that Bonnie and I edited entitled Gender Blending. The best for female to male transsexuals is that by Holly Devor, entitled FTM. There are more specialized books coming out now but I think these three are the basis for a good understanding.
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Gender Queer History: Calamity Jane
I was up late (as usual) and a movie about Wild Bill Hickock was on, with Ellen Barkin playing Calamity Jane.
Calamity Jane started wearing men’s clothes in 1870, when she was 28. She said: “Up to this time, I had always worn the costume of my sex. When I joined Custer*, I donned the uniform of a soldier. It was a bit awkward at first, but I soon got to be perfectly at home in men’s clothes.”
About two years before that, she was described as “extremely attractive” and by another observer as a “pretty, dark-eyed girl.”
She “set herself apart from other women in that she could work and socialize with hard and tough frontiersmen: from digging for gold, drinking in bars, cussing and dressing like a man, she was mostly accepted by them.”
Interesting to me – she slept with men. Wow: a butch het woman, the kind that Judith Halberstam says don’t matter.
* It was probably not Custer, as there was no record of him being where she was at that time.
I found the above bits and a more complete biography about her at this website.
Five Questions With… Abigail Garner
Abigail Garner is a writer, speaker and educator
who is dedicated to a future of equality for LGBT families and communities. She speaks from her own experience of having a gay dad who came out to her when she was five years old. Bringing voice to a population of children that is often overlooked, Abigail has been featured on CNN, ABC World News Tonight, and National Public Radio. She is the author of Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is (HarperCollins, 2004).
1) As a child of a GLBT parent, you’ve effectively become a ‘lightning rod’ for others children of GLBT parents. What has that been like?
It’s is really a joy to connect with “my people.” It’s really not what I originally set out to do, because I subscribed to many of the same misperceptions as the general public. Namely, that there are very few adult children of LGBT parents. My advocacy initially was to be a resource for younger children and their parents. In the process, however, I have been contacted by so many peers that I hadn’t let myself believe were out there — adult children in their 20s, 30s and older. I even chatted with a woman born in 1938 who had a lesbian mother and gay father. And despite whatever differences there are between us, when the common experience of having queer parents is reflected in another person, it’s exhilarating.
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The Next Book
It just occurred to me that not all of you would know that you were missing some info about my next book by *not* reading Damian McNicholl’s interview with me. The last question he asked was:
DMN: Are you working on anything new?
to which I responded:
HB: I’m working on a book now called Boy Meets Girl, which is about the things I’ve learned about gender in relationships as a result of being with Betty and as a result of meeting a lot of gender variant people since I published My Husband Betty. What I’ve noticed is that until or unless there’s a problem with gender, it’s invisible. We make huge assumptions about who a person is and who they’re supposed to be as a partner and lover based on gender – and I came into this relationship thinking I was pretty smart about gender, and didn’t do any of those things. But when your husband starts wondering if he should transition (that’s the PC term for a ‘sex change’ these days), you have to think a lot harder about gender, and learn a lot more. Boy Meets Girl will be a memoir of my struggle to figure out what it might mean to our romance if my husband became my wife, and how what I learned in the process might help others in relationships of all kinds.
So there you have it.