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.
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.
Labels: phone booths, remembered, trans
posted by little light | 4:30 PM
17 Comments:
*echoing what vyxyn said*
I keep wanting to say some brilliant thing that will get across exactly how wonderfully you write and how much I appreciate you telling your story.
But I'm always just sitting here going "Damn."
i studied acting all through my teens, took drama classes in high school, and appeared in many plays in summer camp and my local "y". my interest in acting prompted my mom to send me to the neighborhood playhouse, an upscale acting school in new york city, for a year. i was pretty serious about acting as a career, until i attended an open house event at nyu for their undergraduate acting program. it seemed to me that every other guy there was gay, and at the time, that scared me to death. it was at that moment, that i decided to never have anything to do with acting.
It's funny, looking back over things--I think I may have failed to convey how automatic and involuntary it became. After all that study, the habits stuck. I would find myself unable to avoid taking on the accents and gesture-patterns of people I talked to without effort. There are still scraps of it that jump in that I'm always watching for, reactions I built up--like using the old voice when a creditor or my mother calls--and failed to dismantle in a timely fashion. The whole thing took on a life of its own, and I got good and lost in it.
I was in trying to discern and pare away what was the artifice and what wasn't that I found both that the core I was really building on wasn't what I'd convinced myself it was, and that the line between a real experience of artifice and a false experience of a true thing was very, very blurry.
I don't miss him, much, but he still manages to show up in bits of old programming, and that's okay. I'm not afraid of having come from somewhere.
"I don't miss him, much, but he still manages to show up in bits of old programming, and that's okay. I'm not afraid of having come from somewhere."
i'm always facinated how we each process the changes we experience through transition. so many of us, myself included, sometimes refer to ourselves before transition in the third person. when i think about it, it sometimes gives me the creeps. i attempt, on purpose, to see myself as the same, before, during, and after transition. i am not always successful.
That makes sense, Nexy.
As far as I'm concerned, I'm the same person--the "him" was that persona, the image that other people were projecting onto, if that makes sense. There was a real person there, and that was the same me--I'm not one for disconnecting myself from my context. But overlaid on that person was a role I studied for same as any stage role I had, except more reified--there were so many people putting energy and ideas into that person, and he took on a life of his own.
It happened to be my life, unfortunately. There are things that I miss about living that role, certainly--the privilege comes sharply to mind--but it was, in the end, a thing I wrote and built, and there was a suffocating "I" who had done the writing and building.
Very much the same dynamic here, though not through theatre. I guess I've always been an "outsider artist", self-taught, and always a bit of a give-away because I never did it right, just on the edge of competency which wasn't enough.
Which made me appear, oddly enough, some kind of amazingly out-of-this-world male person who other people saw as living outside of what the traditional male persona is and I got a lot of feminist pats on the back for it.
And a lot of anger directed at me when I told them I was just pretending. They *needed* me to be who they thought I was, that construct. It was the beginning of something new. (These were WHITE_PROGRESSIVES, so, it's not like I was actually doing anything great, just enough to be seen by the feminist W_Ps as something they wanted to model all males after.) Or something.
It's interesting, what Nexy brings up, that I could not relate to trans women who I was introduced to when I started transitioning, because they referred to themselves in the third person. Not their "old" selves, but the people they were working at becoming. That I could just not wrap my head around.
I don't know if it was an age thing or what. Do we still do that? I'm hearing you say that you're struggling against it and sometimes finding something there to struggle against. L L talking about the opposite. The one trans woman I know now doesn't really communicate that way at all, but her life is more complicated than I really could deal with myself and not really something I should be talking about.
This is all what made me upset when people were talking about us as "performing gender". I had felt I was finally relieved of performing a gender and starting to just be myself. I know now that "performing gender" is one of those theory things that doesn't really describe what I think it does, but the words meant something real and not at all in the way they were being used. And it made me want to scream at queer theorists how little they understood and would they quit writing about us because they're not understanding a thing and making fools out of themselves.
I guess I still feel that way.
I want more and I want it faster and I want it spread out across the world and I want people to be made to sit down and understand it before they go to lunch.
But thanks for this. I realize I want too much.
i have issues with the concept of "performing gender" as well. i think my interest in acting, along with my musical performances at that time were an attempt to *not* be who i am, or was. a mechanism to perform in a role that didn't reflect who i was, perhaps. but i'm not so sure that really describes it either - i believe it's a lot more complex than that.
i suppose one could argue that we all, all people regardless of gender, identity, orientation, etc, perform to some degree in our daily lives. i can't count the number of people who, after i thought i got to know them, showed a side of themselves that from my perspective, came out of left field, so to speak. do we all show faces to the world that don't necessarily represent who we really are, at some point in our lives? isn't ones work persona, for example, different than ones home life persona, which is different from the persona that lives in ones head?
Oh yes....yes exactly.
I'm just sitting here at work, transfixed... I should have started moving a while ago. But that's right, that's true. No, that's Truth.
It wasn't gender, for me, but identity plain and simple. Can I be the Good Girl for them? Can I be sweet and kind and perfect, but not too intimidating? Can I follow my family and be punctual and smart and never let anything get in the way? Can I be what each person wants?
It used to scare me... I felt like the Dodecahedron from the Phantom Tollbooth. Put on your two happiest faces for this place, add just the rightshade of sad for this one; the smart aleck who never does homework for this crowd, the perfectionist Making It Work for this one, the Kind Mother for these... just make sure to keep slipping from one to another and back again. I wondered... if this is what I'm doing, if I'm so good at going from mask to mask to mask, then which one is really me? Is there a true me?
I went with utility over truth, ultimately. Goffman over Haraway. What I am, what I present, is me. Always me. Even when they're diametrically opposed from moment to moment. I am the properly submissive secretary, the wild progical girl, the hermit, the butterfly, the gamer, the femme. They are all me, and they are all true; they are just not all true at the same time.
It's no fair! You're too far away. I miss you. Funny, how that is...we didn't speak much after Freshman year, but I miss you all the same. If you're down here to visit, ever, we should go do things, or sit and have tea.
And bloody hell, you make me miss thinking. It's like stretching atrophied muscles to read you. All the applications of that fancy degree I got... in real life instead of games. Granted, the games are what I studied for, and I'm not doing that either. There's precious little analysis one can give to routing slips and invoices. Ah well.
*hugs* This was good. This was very good.
Heh. Of course, as I publish this, I actually read your last comment, Nexy. That's Goffman, you've got right there. We all perform, every day. It's not falsehood, exactly... it's just a tool. It's what we do. We're the work person in one context and the home person in another, and that's the way life goes.
He's good, and usually relatively readable, despite being verbose and, well, old. If you're ever poking through a library and you see him, you might find him interesting.
that's beautiful. somethin' else. real heart in this. i'll have to get my coffee and read it again, slowly.
Perhaps somewhere in the world there are actual honest-to-god normal people. However, I think most of my presented normality has come from observing other people and seeing what they do. Obviously from reading the comments so far, a lot of people do this, for many different reasons.
Performance of identity is a fascinating issue. I think nexy's probably right to say that everyone performs an identity in some aspect of their life. Whether it be good employee, good child, etc.
Besides, how do we define normality besides through the observation of others? If we want to blend in, observation leads to imitation pretty easily.
To riff off the whole Goffman thread a little, I guess what I take is that we perform because the "whole" of who we are is just too big to convey. There's a sense in which we are everything we convey, and whilst X is presented in this context, the rest of the alphabet is still there, and there are letters that run together and words, but we're too multiple to express all at once, so we perform in the sense that we find what fits in the moment, in the context, and sometimes we find new things, and sometimes we rediscover things, and so on.
This, too, is strangely familiar.
I have never really been an actor of conventional sort. I did, however, spend a year portraying Girl for a living. By the time I did that, I had become aware that I was not -- of where the fourth wall was -- and it made a marked difference from my previous jobs, where I'd been half doing the job and half portraying Girl, and since it wasn't what I'd been hired for (and yet was) and wasn't what they were paying me for (and yet was) I wound up getting uncomfortably blurry.
This also connects to a blog post I'm about to make, I think.
You know, I wouldn't have bothered to write this if I thought it was only about transgender issues--I try not to write anything like that.
What I was doing, as lovelesscynic and magniloquence especially have pointed out, is a very normal thing for people to do--just magnified, amplified, obsessively distorted. I took that adolescent period of establishment-of-identity, that habit of moving from role to role and mask to mask, and then I took it further down the rabbit-hole.
I hoped that in showing this scene in exaggerated lighting, folks in the audience might recognize some familiar patterns.
Leave the flaws in. Reproduce people and places not here and now. You know?
We're all a whole lot of people, in a way--even now, I wouldn't dare suggest that my new lenses on the world don't divide and prism into the daughter and sister, the employee, the writer, the girlfriend, the good soldier, the medic--and from there, further and further and further.
Speaking of mirrors, I reread this, and it's interesting how much it reads, on its own, like a transition narrative in the other direction.
I keep wanting to say some brilliant thing that will get across exactly how wonderfully you write and how much I appreciate you telling your story.
But I'm always just sitting here going "Damn."
yup.
theatre seems to be to some degree a queer kids' thing (or however you want to define it). I was attracted to it for the eroticism, and the...magic.
this post reminds me that i have my own stuff about theatre and how it isn't doing it for me now, and what that's all about...
-broods-
"theatre seems to be to some degree a queer kids' thing (or however you want to define it). I was attracted to it for the eroticism, and the...magic.
this is spot on. i found the same magic in music, which is where i ended up for most of my 20's. may i join you in your brood?
>>>this is spot on. i found the same magic in music, which is where i ended up for most of my 20's. may i join you in your brood?
Ooh, me too. I make electronic music, so it's multiple personas all the way.. my boy name (which I don't show to anyone I know really), Bisexual Cyborg and Emily In Love...
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