phone booths, ii: the green room.

Authenticity.

It's a messy word. Here's another: organic.

Here's something I don't admit much, because it undercuts my claims at both authenticity and organic-ness: I am the only trans person I know (and I know, this is improbable) who is an actor. The skillset automatically marks me as someone good at faking, and this is a problem when your claims about your identity strike many people as either a delusion or a lie. Now, I grant you, I haven't been onstage in two years--that was for the Vagina Monologues--and before that, it had been another two, for a small show in workshop. I don't really do theater any more, other than occasionally helping a friend with tech work. People ask me, pretty frequently, why I quit theater mostly cold-turkey, since it used to be my primary hobby and mean a great deal to me.
It was taking up too much of my life, I usually say. Sometimes I continue, I was spending too much time being other people.

Theater's a funny thing, because you're supposed to lie your way into truth; by faking and faking being someone and something other than what you are, in good stage work--by flooding illusions all over a bunch of people who have paid to have a real experience--you're supposed to uncover something new, something true.

You spend hours, in a theater, pointing shakily-wired electric lights and shining them through different-colored sheets of plastic until the tints and angles combine to make something that looks like natural light--and you make sure not a scrap of actual natural light comes in to mess up your illusion. It has to look realer than real. You exaggerate the makeup, play up the marks and flaws, expand the features so they can be seen from a ways off, because "natural" doesn't look natural on a stage. When everyone's watching, the real thing doesn't look real enough.
You have to blur things in order to put the focus in the right place. You have to spend hours memorizing lines that, when you say them, have to come out as though they're fresh and new and spontaneous and you've never heard them before. You practice motions over and over until they look unpracticed, natural, organic. Genuine. Nothing matters more than the truth you're exhibiting, including the facts. The real experience of your performance matters more, is the measure of success, is paramount.

The word of the day is authenticity. It's just that, in order to create an authenticity that's satisfying for the audience, you have to construct it. You have to bring in the artificial, paint the pocks on your brick walls with a sponge, carefully form tree bark from papier-mache, portray. It's like the Parthenon--the angles and proportions are just barely off, so that the building will look perfectly square from the perspective of someone looking at it, because if they were actually trued, the size of the thing shown would distort its image, and the truth of its perfection would be obscured by the fact that actual perfection looks off when you're standing on the ground. ("True" angles. "True" arrow-paths. It's funny, isn't it.)

I got into acting right around the same time I developed a masculinity habit. (Bad one. Couple of packs a day, for a while. Nasty withdrawal symptoms.) This is not a coincidence.

I was an obsessive character actor, beginning in my mid-early teens, and people would comment now and then on the singleminded, self-obliterating drive with which I threw myself into my chosen art. I was addicted to the moment at the beginning of opening night, when the self vanished, when there was no thought, no worrying, no past or future, only the moment--where words and actions tumbled out of me with exact and studied naturalness, and all there was was to be keyed into the movements and reactions of everyone else. There was no me. There was only the character, the role, the action. My push for that feeling became increasingly ritualized.
I would spend hours listening to tapes of an accent, or carefully listening to a friend with a cadence I wanted, and mimic until I had it just right--rewind, play, rewind, play, one word or phrase over and over until the tilt of the vowel was spot-on. For a role, I would alter the positions of my hands, the shape of my cheeks, my gait and carriage, the octave I spoke, the rate, the inflection, the customary facial expressions, everything. I began to develop a sort of self-hypnosis between curtain and curtain, and wouldn't break character backstage--I began to write extra scenes I could do, by myself, until I went back on. I would develop childhoods for walk-on parts. In one show, I had to play a character playing another actor's portrayal of another character, and people kept getting creeped out by the precise mimicry of his nostril-flares and eyebrow quirks--which had taken a whole lot of following him around to achieve. I developed a set of movements for a non-human character that were only slightly off, as though the joints worked not quite right, just enough to be unsettling in a way that was hard to place. I would recite a litany of the loves and hates of who I was playing in free moments, until I was nearly in tears. I had to shed my skin and become that person. I had to be unable to tell us apart until the show was over, to lose even my own thought patterns and footfalls.

I couldn't see the desperation of it, at the time. The naked, bleeding-gums need in it--for truth, under the lying. To fabricate and construct my way to real experiences, not just for the audiences, but for myself. To be enough other people that maybe, next time I broke character, I'd end up being someone I recognized. To study people hard enough, to mimic enough ways of being, that I'd find one that fit--that was natural, that would, if nothing else, allow me to build someone who looked organic.

At that same time, I was learning to apply those skills in daylight. I had never fit in; the foreignness stank on me, I think. I learned to tuck in my full lips when they drew shouts and derision and nicknames on the bus. I learned to cut off my thick, curly hair and comb it like the people around me. I learned how to approximate, from what I had, a silhouette that was familiar, by re-angling my pelvis and shoulders, planting my feet differently, sitting with my knees so instead of so. When more people began talking to me, when some of the violence trickled to a stop, when I found that being a chameleon worked, I took it further.
I stopped jutting my hips; I stopped smiling the way I had as a child, and studied pictures of attractive men smiling, and mimicked in the mirror. (You can still find family photos with me, over on the left, doing Prince William's smile, with eerie precision. I still don't know how I managed to make my mouth do that, and make it look natural and spontaneous. You know the one--slightly triangular, head tilted down and to the left, a little bit shy? Keep an eye out. I did. When I stopped doing it, people wondered where "my" smile had gone.) I had joined the cross-country and track teams, and I swallowed my terror of the boys' locker room and played Jane Goodall instead of hiding out and doing my best to only be present for the actual running.
I took notes. What was that gesture he just did? How did they respond to it? I mimicked the response, and faded into background, normal, not a target. I mimicked the gesture, and showed up--a wasp painted like a honeybee, a sheep in wolf's clothing. A brightly-colored lizard hoping nobody would notice it's not really poisonous.
I worked out harder, trying desperately to build muscle, to anchor the illusion. I pretended not to feel awkward with my shirt off. I cracked my knuckles. I deepened my speaking voice and started cursing more and pruning my vocabulary. I would only spend ten minutes at a time in a given social group at lunch or on break, and my acquaintances and friends from each never met--which was good, because in each place I stood differently, walked differently, laughed differently, used different slang, before skimming over to the next.

Once it anchored well, I allowed myself a little leeway: once "boy" was established I could do "artistic boy" or "smart boy" or whatever. I worked on a sort of sensitive-James-Dean masculinity that said "coffee-house poetry and boxing" to ground the offshoots in. Still, I was rarely under actual daylight any more. I was just slipping role to role, altering the relative positions of my fingers, the placement of my cheekbones, the shape of my palate for a given vowel to give the audience a real, authentic-looking experience. Whenever the stilted, studied nature of it was called out, I learned and adapted.

I learned, for one, that perfect portrayal doesn't read right. Like a rug-weaver, you have to leave in flaws. You hit the Uncanny Valley if you don't put cracks in it--scuffs on your shoes, stains on your wallpaper, hairs out of place. Perfectly-put-together looks artificial; muss your collar a little here, wrinkle your jeans a little there, and "studied" gives way to "organic." Real people have scars and stumbles printed on them, and it you want to look real, you either have to come by them honestly or fake them. I did both.

I did all this because it worked. It kept me safe in public; it preserved me from violence in the corners. I could date a couple of the girls I swooned over. My grades improved. I lettered in a couple of things.
I was making it. It's just that I wasn't getting at the truth, and it itched, and I thought I was losing my mind, because just when my life was coming together--life as a reasonably attractive, well-read, successful young man winning community service awards and being put on TV spots as an ideal teenager, who was finally not disappointing his parents so much, who finally had a prom date and a life--I was hating it. I was wanting something nobody I knew wanted, something that I had only heard whispers of on late-night TV, seeing as I wasn't savvy with the Internet and was edgy about staying up late. (I know. I'm a wholesome little thing.) In the end, I did the thing I always did onstage--I lost track of the difference between me and the character, lost myself in the role--it's just that the curtain wouldn't go down so I could scrub off the greasepaint and go home. It was my best acting ever: so seamless that, yes, my own mother couldn't recognize me, so much that when I finally hung up the costume everyone thought that was when I started acting. So well-prepared and brought forward that even I forgot I had put it together on purpose, and started to see it for what it counterfeited: authenticity. Naturalness.

And yet I kept waking up in a cold sweat and panicking, hands frantically searching my body: how in God's name had I woken up looking like a seventeen-year-old boy? How had this happened? I would dream, and there were nights I was who I had been before I put on the smoke and mirrors, and I would forget, and I would make it all the way into the shower before I woke up, under the hot water, and gaped in horror: someone had clearly switched me up somewhere, some peculiar Twilight-Zone thing, some massive practical joke everyone was in on. Where the hell were my breasts? And--oh. my. God. And then I'd wake up a little more, and remember that every day began this way, and get dressed for school, smiling like a prince, doing pushups, getting on with it.

What you want is impossible, I insisted to myself. It cannot be. So you need to suck it up, and get tough, and just learn more tricks, drown yourself in more details, do the same thing over again and learn what's a man, now that you've got everyone going that you're a boy.
I was having panic attacks nearly every day, constantly doing divinations to try and figure out what was wrong. The I Ching handed me the doubled glyph of the Middle Son: there is danger on all sides, it said. This will hurt. Watch for the pitfalls. The runes said the same thing, mostly. So did the cards. I kept looking for something brighter, something that didn't say that what I was doing could only end in disaster. I was digging for the truth, and it kept refusing to look like what I wanted it to:

The good son. The ideal big brother. The embarrassing, but ultimately redeemed younger brother. The boyfriend to bring home to Mom. The loving father. The winner of races, the adopter of the family mantle, the responsible one who kept to the law and made everyone proud. The cipher.

At two in the morning, at six in the morning, it was still wrong, no matter how much I bruised myself trying to exorcise it.

And the falsehoods crumbled, eventually, and I took a bow, for no applause, really, to no audience. And I walked offstage, looking for something like natural light.

As it turns out, it's hard to untangle what's you, and what you've made yourself to appeal to others. It's hard to tell a gorgeously crafted illusion from the reality you don't want to see underneath. It's hard to unlearn little things like gestures and cadences and subtle posturings. Especially--especially--when everyone near you thinks that you're not uncovering, you're affecting. I overcompensated, some; I have to admit I did the femininity theater for a little while, same as I had with masculinity. And then I said, screw it--I can't do this any more, either way, anyhow. I filed down the nails. I got a few pairs of jeans. There was just no more time for masks, even if they looked more like what I wanted. I couldn't trust anything like that.

And yet, even after having reached a kind of equilibrium, even after settling into a self I can finally feel is real, it's hard to trust myself, because I was, for so long, a liar. And a liar who can con you for a matter of years, who you'd have been willing to die for before you found out the lie, is not someone you want to take advice from, any more. What do you do when the liar was you, too? When the truth isn't as convincing as the con-job? How do you know you're not just walking off the set and onto a soundstage?

Especially when--well, there's still theater in it, you see. I won't tell an untruth; I swore some years back not to lie any more, ever, which is what got me into this coming-out mess in the first place. But I have to live a life with privacy in it. If nothing else, my physical safety and that of my loved ones depends, at times, on my ability to make the stage look naturally-lit, to make the papier-mache look natural. I have a skillset and a toolkit and I won't pretend they're not useful.
This life has to look like it grew organically. You can't just give yourself a nickname, for instance, but you can set yourself up with a name you could have honestly come by, a family name, one that lends itself to nicknames for other people to come up with. You can't have gotten all your possessions, and all your clothing, at the same time. The house has to look lived-in. The shoes need scuffs. There has to be a hair out of place or it immediately triggers that something-is-wrong-here response. How to make your history plausible, without making any of it up? How do you talk about your childhood? How do you explain being a woman if it's obvious you never much got to be a girl? They're good questions; they're hard questions. But in the end, you have to let some of the bits not match. Perfect isn't plausible. Flawless doesn't look authentic.

You have to make the show realer than real, when everyone's watching. Nobody's satisfied by an experience of watching actors walk around on a raised bit of floor: they want to see truth, conveyed carefully in a beautiful filigree of misdirection and rehearsal, but truth nonetheless. The real, to look real, can benefit a lot from illusion's toolkit. Paying attention to all those details, something I learned to prop up bottomless lies, has served me well.

It's hard to explain how it can still be authentic, not just look the part, when I have to study up and do a bit of performing, now and then, to get that truth across. I did grow here. It was just more complicated, for a while.
Now I know what sunlight looks like. Now I know what my own smile looks like. See?

It's a hell of a lot brighter than a spotlight.
I don't act any more because I can't imagine going back.

de profundis

Four years ago, the political got very personal.

I was a good little radical then; that night, if anything, is what galvanized me. I had wandered down into the streets ready to spend a few hours protesting the oncoming war and then go home and on a date and to my homework. I can't really claim much in the way of nobility: I cared, I cared until my little heart was worn out, but I wasn't a grownup about these things, not yet. I still wanted Bad Guys to line up against. I still wanted to Win and Go Home, because I still thought there was a chance things worked that way.

So I wandered into the eye of the storm, and into a protest that shut down Portland highway by highway and bridge by bridge. The notion was to get everyone to stop and think: this is an inconvenience, but bombs are about to start dropping, tonight, on a nation of real people. Stop. Stop and look around. Feel this moment. Know that it matters. We knew everything would change, we knew it would be a disaster, no matter how much we could never have predicted about the four years to come.

I have written about this before: the peaceful protest I sat in, the places elsewhere in town where it got ugly, where demonstrators fought with riot police, where a police chief shipped in from LAPD and a mayor who wanted to make political examples got brutal and militaristic, where anarchists and would-be revolutionaries got stupid, or naive, or nasty. The squad car driven at me and my friends, engine gunning. The flashbang grenades thrown in our faces. The scared preteen who wanted to make a stand, choking on vinegar-soaked cloth in case of tear gas, that I helped smuggle out of the worst of it. The firehose, the rain, the choppers, the friends with black bruises a foot square that lasted weeks, the people dragged off of sidewalks and then arrested for jaywalking, the children called terrorists. The cops who told me, as they cuffed and searched me, that they'd like to torture me for opposing this President, that they wished they could treat me as Saddam would. The bones that stayed intact because of news cameras. The sadistic prison guards who forced me to watch footage, over and over again, of the first bombs dropping, complete with mocking commentary on how I hadn't been able to stop the deaths of my "little I-racky friends." I've written about the violences that gave me shaking, terrified flashbacks for months after, and I've exorcised those, mostly. I've told the funny bits, gestures wide, trying to make light of a night that changed who I was and my trust in the world forever, trying to make a good story out of the scared kid I was. I've tried the heroic angle, the confessional angle, the big-picture, the find-the-themes tale. I keep wanting this to be the opener for a piece about my discovery of street medicine and a new politics of triage, or part of a larger account of demonstrations, or about the conversation I had shortly afterward with a South African dissident that midwifed my perspective on matters of justice.

This should not be those, because I haven't exorcised the most selfish part of how I changed that night. Many, many people died that night, four years ago, far away from where I was. Many have, as a consequence, died since. Perspective tells me these things are the most important, that these things are, if I am decent and an activist and true to my faith, what I ought to write about, on this brutal, tragic anniversary of a war that never should have been.
My politics are concerned with those and daily, but four years ago, the political got personal. That's what I need to exorcise.

Feel this moment. Stop and look around. Somewhere, there's a bridge blockaded in my head. Somewhere, I'm still cuffed and working on an escape plan, but the daily routine gets hit, diverted, stymied, bottlenecked. Feel this moment.
I keep wanting to put it in continuity, in context, because that's what I do: stories. I keep wanting to move on down the road.
Feel this moment. Stop.

Okay:
I didn't go to jail that night at the protests for the war. Was I on the street to protest this invasion? Yes. Did I stay there because I felt that the law of morality and humanity came first, before my concern for the convenience of my neighbors, that this was a great enough wound in the world's order to merit disruption and risk-taking? Yes, of course, yes. Was I motivated by a dead grandfather whose world was turned upside-down by a US occupation that pulled out and left his homeland free of their prior oppressors, but still full of bloody, awful chaos, who I wanted to honor by trying to prevent any other children like him being forced into guerrilla war? Yes, yes, yes, peace be upon him. That was why I sat in the street. That was why I linked arms. But it was the arm-linking that made me stare down shotguns and sing at truncheons. It was the people I was with in the streets that night that made me bold enough to resist for more than eight straight hours in the cold rain, and it was eventually those same people who made me turn into another sort of activist entirely, the kind with a medical kit.
But it wasn't why I went to jail that night. I could have run away, even at the end, when we were surrounded by armored police and vehicles in phalanges two and three ranks deep. I like to think that I went behind bars for the cause, like Bonhoeffer and Berrigan and Esack and Tutu. Part of me did.

Let's get personal: I went to jail that night for a girl. Not one I particularly liked, while we're in the confessional.
One of the people at the core of the protest with me that night was a transgendered girl, a transient who was staying with some of my friends. She was deeply unbalanced, not a particularly healthy person to be around, but well-meaning. She had a lot of wild stories about a past escaping a cruel family, falling in with a cult, breaking free, moving on, finding herself on the streets, leaving behind a name she never told us. That night, over her more practical gear, under her satchel, she wore a tutu. She never did have much sense.
Let's confess: I was only a few steps out of the closet then, with anyone other than family and close friends. I had shoulder-length hair and looked fairly androgynous and didn't pass so very well even when I tried. That night, raw and haggard in a turtleneck and jeans, I looked male, and I had allowed that on purpose for protection, for privilege, to cover my ass. I still have survivor's guilt over it--but I'm getting ahead too far.

We were surrounded, two and three ranks deep, by masked men with covered names in black armor, with shotguns, with hands on canisters of pepper spray, with armored cars. I cannot tell you, if you have never looked on all borders of a space the size of a street intersection and seen this all around you, what it feels like. If you have not been there, I cannot really get across the feeling of looking at people next to you and trying to predict who will get hit first, who you might have to take a truncheon for, a bullet for, not knowing the intentions or the limits of whatever faces are behind all of that implacable, reflective plastic. I shed a lot of skin that night.

They announced, over a loudspeaker, the order to disperse. None of our guards moved; a small gap had been left on the southeast end of the box, as an escape route. The girl in the tutu got up, moved toward it, shrugged at the rest of us; it wasn't worth it to go behind bars, for her, I think. I was ready to get up and follow. She approached an officer, to ask him if that southeast gap was the way to exit, and could she disperse, as asked--I was near enough to overhear. He began to point, nod, confirm, when two more armored officers came up behind her, threw her to the ground, cut her satchel-strap and cuffed her. She was ground into the pavement as they hogtied her and carried her into a van belly-down.

I could not let her be the only one in there. Do you understand? We were the only two out trans women there, that night, in that place. She was not my friend, really, but I could not let her be the only one in there, alone. I linked arms and went nowhere; when they came for me, I stood up, I was polite, I announced the contents of my pockets and went civilly--but I went.
They split us up, as it turned out. I missed some parts that were related to me later. They put her in a cage--a cage!--first, apart from other people, poked at her, mocked her while she was under restraint. She was held out in the rain under a bridge, as I was, but for longer, and under a different bridge. Eventually, later that night, we were brought to the same precinct, where it got worse for both of us.

I keep wanting to move past the nausea and tell the bit about getting the other prisoners to sing "I Feel Pretty," the moment of queer solidarity I had in the holding cells, the way I small-town-charmed the detective who first processed me, before I was relocated. I want to tell the good bits. I want to keep my city lit up and lively.
Stop. Feel this moment.

She and I were processed one after the other. They read me as male; they read me as queer.
The sherriffs didn't stop at taking my shoelaces and my name. They cuffed me, surrounded me, and told me they would strip me down and lock me up with a rapist they had just arrested, who they described in graphic detail. They told me I would have no contact with a lawyer or the outside for at least three days, and that they could arrange this in the processing, that I would be alone in an isolated cell and they would ignore any cries for help. They told me in no uncertain terms that they would have me raped, even while I was cooperating, and they laughed. There were a lot of them, and I was alone, and they laughed. I was cold, and damp, and naive. I was very young. They did it because they could.

She was brought in after me, stripped down to her long underwear, and as they were throwing her to the ground and removing her piercings, she tried to bring up the local statutes preventing discrimination against the transgendered, the right to self-identification, hell, the right to remain silent. As they had told me, they told her these were "TV rights," and they knelt on her back and grabbed at her crotch and triumphantly announced that she was a he, and that he was a freak.

What did I think I was going to do, when I let myself be arrested? Did I think that I would be able to protect her? That my bearing witness would matter? There was that sharp, sick moment, where I tried to move, to intervene, to stop what was happening, as they dragged her in front of a medical examiner, harassed her, mocked her, shoved her around. There was that moment before I realized I was under lock and key, and being shouted at by armed people, and could do nothing to stop it. There was that moment where I contemplated the cowardice of not being beaten senseless and chose it.

There is a dull horror in watching and being able to do nothing. Maybe there's something I could have done, and I didn't. I don't know. I didn't. I froze and I choked on that feeling and did nothing. And I let it get selfish, because--
because--
It could have been me. Any other night, if I had worn a different shirt, if I had been further along, if I had--it could have been me, there. They threatened me; they carried out many of those threats on her, and I watched. I watched knowing that it very well could have been me, that for the rest of my life it could be, with no more option to hide things, soon enough. (I hear someone in my head, going, but there are laws. That kind of discrimination is illegal. Didn't you tell them?) I don't know what I thought I would accomplish, watching what they did to her, feeling it creep into me.

They locked her in a solitary cell and covered the window to isolate her completely. I was made to watch the foreign deaths that began that night on television, on repeat. Eight hours later, they let me out. Ten after that, they let her out.

There was supposed to be a suit against the bureau. She skipped town, moved on, scared, before her chance to testify. Records were, shockingly, lost, of who was on duty that night, of who was involved. The city moved on. The traffic was unblocked. Larger stories unfolded and the flurry of outrage was forgotten for a homeless, unbalanced young transsexual done wrong by people in uniform.

We never heard from her again. But let's be honest: this is a selfish exorcism. I don't know how she is, if she's even alive, but I know I'm stained, and that that night just won't wash out. No matter what stories, what themes, what global events were more important, no matter how many times I tell myself the context, no matter how many times I try to process it and get the traffic moving and get over the bridge we blocked together.

Stop.

It is spring, and the cherry blossoms are appearing, tree by tree.

Feel this moment.

greatly exaggerated, etc.

Comrades, I am not dead.
I have been pulling six-day weeks at work and I've had the nastier cousin of the stomach flu, so things have gotten...messy. But. I have a lot of content backed up just waiting for some finishing and maybe some polish, so you'll see me back with an escalating vengeance soon, I promise. Sorry for the vanishing act, everyone.

In the meantime, some metablogging. It looks like, in the near future, I'll be transferring to WordPress and getting my own domain. I met with Ampersand the other day, on account of we're practically neighbors, as it turns out, and he's helping me with some of the make-shinier. Those of you who dropped kind webdesign-help offers, I may call on for some consultation, but it looks like Taking Steps is getting an upgrade, folks. I'll also, I hope, be taking part in an exciting new group project. Tremble, interwebs!

And speaking of both neighbors and group projects: while nerding out over comics and coffee last week, Ampersand and I determined that there are a whole lot of blogfolk here in Portland--even just in Southeast Portland--and that it would be a grand thing to all get together for beers or noodles or something. We brainstormed some suggestions as to venue--I suggested the Lucky Labrador brewpub, which is nonsmoky, ADA-accessible, pet-friendly, large, and, let's face it, basically your ideal NPC Tavern. ("Could I have the stout and a small Caesar?" "Traveller, have you heard of the troubles to the North?" "I, uh, really just want a pint of stout." "Many villages have been ravaged by the--" "You're not even the waiter, are you?") Still open to nominations. Portlanders, drop me a line or a comment, let me know if you're interested, what sorts of times you'd be free, places you think might be nice, especially in Southeast for ease of bus access. We'll try to be accommodating as possible in the organizing.

Anyhow. You'll start to see me around again. There were no assassins. Be advised.