Fried & True (28 page)

April 2006

LETTERS FROM CAMP REHOBOTH

TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES

Indulge me please, as I need to have a rather serious conversation here. I've stewed about this topic since last fall in Provincetown and it's been increasingly on my mind since I began watching the Logo network. If you don't now have the incredible luxury of watching Gay-TV 24/7 on Logo, I wish you all access to this cable channel in the near future. It's a blast.

Among Logo's pleasures, guilty and otherwise, is the show
TransGeneration
. It's a documentary about several college students who, leaving the physical and emotional confines of home, become ensconced on campus, find others like them, and begin transitioning from their natal gender to the one which they feel they rightly claim.

I get their struggle. Really understand it. And no, it's not because I think I was born in the wrong body. Although one with a faster metabolism would have been nice.

For my part, I was a total tomboy kid, a barely passable excuse for a straight woman through my twenties, and a liberated lesbian as I crept out of the closet wearing my current identity. I like women, I like being a woman, and I like being married to a woman.

And despite wishing I could have been blessed with smaller pores, I feel right in
MY
skin. I cannot speak for others.

Those others include the leading lady in the movie
TransAmerica
starring Felicity Huffman, who should have won the Oscar for her dead-on portrayal of a pre-op transsexual. There was not one single moment during the movie when I didn't believe that this warm, funny, needy, determined person was becoming the woman she felt she was born to be.

I get it. If a person is absolutely sure they were born the wrong gender I applaud the courageous decision to make things right. I am thankful modern medicine can assist them.

These brave people choose to leave the “otherness” of gay life (although not all transsexuals identify as gay before their journey) for a life as the gender they believe they truly are—although, even with a more comfortable gender, the chance of facing “otherness” is still pretty high—but at least it's “otherness” that feels more truthful to them.

Which brings me to thoughts of a night at the Provincetown theatre last fall. Before the curtain went up, I noticed dozens of young people, looking very much like young boys, in ultra-masculine outfits, crew cut hair, with various stages of hairy upper lips and chins. They had been very obviously taking male hormones. I mean no woman can grow a beard like that until she's at least 60. Seriously, though, who is prescribing hormones to these youngsters?

Many of these kids held hands with very feminine dates. Several of these youngsters paired off together. It was quite clear that these were teenagers or early twenty-somethings living as, or transitioning to become, the opposite gender.

So here's my problem. Neither the gang at the theatre nor the kids on Logo's
TransGeneration
were women transitioning to men or men transitioning to women. They were girls journeying toward boyhood and vice versa.

Have they really lived enough life to know they are making the right decision? Okay, before you start excoriating me for being insensitive and/or clueless, let me say that I know that for many people there is no “decision” about it. There are cases of children as young as three years old clearly demonstrating that they have been born the wrong gender. So, too are there teens and adults for whom the path to transition seems like the right answer from the very first.

But what if the recently uncloseted discussions, television shows, movies, magazine articles and books about transgenderism shine an overly bright spotlight on this subject? What if the 18-year old effeminate guy can't imagine a future as a handsome gay man who can comfortably camp it up socially?

What if the dearth of role models for butch lesbians has left
some of them thinking that changing gender is the only answer? Would you want to live with the consequences of some decisions you made as a teen or twenty-year-old? Not I.

When I was 18, I was determined to follow a high school boyfriend to college in a tiny, wintery, conservative town. What a bad idea that would have been. Thankfully, the school rejected me. When I was 23, I smugly said to my boss, “Give me the duties you hired me for or fire me!” Guess what happened.

Hell, at age 24 I married an accordion player. What if I had to live with
that
the rest of my life?

Take the skinny white kid with the goofy clothes and dreadlocks standing in front of me at Staples yesterday. He probably sees himself that way permanently. In ten years he might be in a three-piece suit hawking mutual funds. Or not. But his choice probably shouldn't be etched in stone right now.

I just think that for almost every path we take in life there's an opportunity to veer off or turn around onto another road. I'm worried about these youngsters who are jumping on the Transgender Express, full speed ahead, toward a pretty irrevocable destination—without stopping at a lot of stations to experience options along the way.

Am I alone here? Is my worry politically incorrect?

I know that much counseling is required before hormones are prescribed and a great deal of time is spent evaluating and educating pre-op transsexuals before many of the required surgeries take place.

But these transgender kids are getting their hormones from somewhere. In many cases, I bet counseling and safeguards don't come with the drugs. All I'm saying is that I wish our strong young butch girls and our adorable nelly boys wouldn't shoot themselves up, cut anything off or make any permanent changes until they have explored the richness of life's choices.

I don't go to work these days wearing a Roy Rogers holster and I don't come home to a man playing “Lady of Spain” on his instrument.

May 2006

LETTERS FROM CAMP REHOBOTH

LANDSCAPING FOR DUMMIES…

It's Spring at Food Lion Estates. If I'd known just how much of my disposable income would go for mulch, I'd be writing from my condo instead.

I didn't know it was possible to go to Lowe's three times in a day. I socialize more over shredded hardwood than cocktails. And it's the same couples there every weekend. We've conducted entire friendships in the Garden Supplies check-out line.

Have you seen the platoon of Subaru Outbacks in the parking lot? It's becoming the standard vehicle for team lesbian (I love their ads: “
Subaru: It's not a choice, it's the way we're built
.”). These cars are piled so high with mulch they hardly need the identifying rainbow stickers.

So we've been landscaping. With a zeal formerly reserved for shoe shopping, I careened around the garden section acquiring all manner of variegated, compacted, dwarfed, pygmy holly things. I don't know much about plants, but all their names sound like medical conditions.

Of course, Bonnie always has to stop by the tool department. Now I'm not intentionally stoking the fires of stereotyping, but what is it about girls and their power tools? No matter how many battery-operated screwdrivers they have, they want new ones. I don't think my mate will be truly happy until every electric socket in the house has some kind of re-chargeable, chuckless, 14 volt appliance hanging out of it.

Meanwhile, back at the south forty, while I was in the house stretching the making of a couple of sandwiches into a full-time job, Bonnie got the new plants in the ground. Then she proceeded to connect a bunch of intentionally leaky soaker hoses (named, no doubt for their cost) around the planting beds. Oops, we were a couple of clasps short.

So I was re-deployed to Lowes, where I realized I didn't understand the project. Did I need male-female connectors, male-male connectors, female-female, female-to-male, male-to-female? It was like choosing from the list of local support groups. Finally, I grabbed a pansexual assortment so the gender identity specialist at home could decide.

Once those super soakers started splurting, we moved on. Lesbians, rev your engines. Step One: level the playing field. In order to install stones leading from the deck to the garage, Bonnie explained that we had to dig the Panama Canal along the house and transfer the resulting rubble twelve feet away.

I found this somewhat ironic since once, back in Maryland, we did a project requiring adding a yard of dirt to our lawn. Being math-challenged, I pictured a yard of dirt as the height and width of a yard-stick. Fooly, fooly. A dump truck deposited Mt. St. Victoire on the driveway. I still remember frantically being called into service to help spread the soil before a monsoon came and washed $300 worth of dirt down the storm sewers and into Chesapeake Bay.

So now, in a stunning example of what goes around comes around, Bonnie's telling me we must dig up a yard of dirt from one place and shovel it over to another.

“I'll dig and toss,” she says. “You just tamp.”

You know, when we used to have a boat, and needed to redistribute weight aboard, I was always sent to the bow as ballast. If you ask me, tamping is the same unskilled labor as ballast, only for landlubbers. I was instructed to march around on the newly dumped dirt, packing it down evenly.

Dutifully I pounded the fresh dirt pile, knees high, arms swinging, getting into quite a rhythm. Bonnie decided this backyard Bolero looked like fun and soon the two of us were tamping and stomping in circles. The tired, thirsty Saturday morning herds diving past our house to the beach must have thought they were hallucinating. Was that Lucy and Ethel stomping grapes?

Naturally, before we could set anything in stone over the
mud pile, the rains came and continued for an entire week. Add two Schnauzers and God save the carpets.

Three times a day we'd lure the dogs back in from the mosh pit, grab them up before their paws or snouts touched any carpet or wall and toss them into the tub. One memorable moment at Schnauzerhaven Day Spa came when we lathered and rinsed the filthy pooches, then focused on cleaning the tub. Sadly, since we'd used all our limbs just to get the boys into the house without touching anything, we'd neglected the teeny little task of closing the sliding glass door.

While I was scrubbing the damn tub, the beasts were right back outside rolling in the mud patch.

So we went to the pet store and invested in puppy galoshes. Those were incredulous little dogs when we made them put boots on before going out to pee. At first they just stared at the foreign objects hanging on their feet. When they finally tried to walk, they shook their booty and high stepped like Clydesdales.

Of course, if we didn't get the Velcro fasteners closed tightly, they'd go do their business, come back for a booty check, fail to produce 8 for 8 and I'd be sent to the tar pits with a flashlight. There is no rap tune about searching for this kind of booty.

But after a week, the rains stopped, the yard dried and we were able to host a season opener for the blender. Friends arrived, Margaritas got mixed, it was great in the great outdoors. Lovely dusk in our beautiful yard.

Maybe it was all that rain, or our proximity to wetlands, but suddenly our garden party was beset by mosquitoes so big they had serial numbers on their sides. Quick! Get the Off! Light the Citronella buckets. Battle Stations!!!

I'll have another Deep Woods Margarita, please…and if you need me, I'll be in the house.