Being Transgender Is Perfectly Natural | Medium

Being Transgender Is Perfectly Natural | Medium

Friday Night in Dumbo: Novel-T Team 2 Opening Day Party with David Goodwillie & Sandy the Seagull at powerHouse Arena

Yesterday morning, when our dead-trees issue of Time Out New York arrived in our non-virtual mailbox, we turned to the "Your Perfect Weekend" section and saw as the first item for Friday, May 4:

We’re big fans of Novel-T

because we like books more than sports, and wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a Tell-Tale Heart is the best way to show that literary spirit. Like-minded folks should stop by powerHouse Arena (37 Main St at Water St, Dumbo, Brooklyn;

novel-t.com; 7–9pm, free) for the launch party of the nerdy tee company’s “Team 2” series,

which salutes writers such as Kurt Vonnegut, Emily Dickinson

and the line’s first living author, Jonathan Ames (his emblem is the Brooklyn Bridge, natch). Once you’ve donned your Darcy tee ($25), stick around for a reading from Richard Grayson, or show off your baseball skills (sort of) in a Wii

home-run derby.

What that left out was the more exciting news that David Goodwillie, whose new novel American Subversive

has gotten spectacular reviews everywhere, was reading at the event and that there would be an appearance by Sandy the Seagull of the Brooklyn Cyclones.

powerHouse Arena is a great venue for just about anything, one of the coolest spaces in Brooklyn.

We arrived early and explored the intriguing green-themed art exhibit upstairs

and the selection of books and other stuff for sale downstairs.

The event tonight was co-sponsored by BrooklynTheBorough, which had their new print little magazine on display.

David Bukszpan and Michael Kravetsky, who are both the brains and brawn behind Novel-T,

introduced the evening's events, which began with an underwhelming reading of an allegedly comic Brooklyn baseball story written by the world's worst photographer. If you want to see non-sucky pics of this event, check out the professional photos at Facebook, taken by the talented Emile Dubuisson, who can even make meeskites look semi-okay.

Anyway, things picked up momentum considerably once David Goodwillie, a former minor league baseball player, read a funny and honest section of his rollicking memoir, Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, dealing with his failed post-college tryout with the Cincinnati Reds.

Free Novel-T Team 2 shirts and Cracker Jacks were catapulted into the bleachers.


A video of Jonathan Ames, in the T-shirt honoring him, introduced the new lineup of stylish Novel-T wear.

There was free beer (not much use to us teetotalers, but nice for normal people) and then the Wii tournament got underway with Sandy as the first contestant.

He is a better mascot than a player.

It was really a great evening, and we're grateful for being invited.

Also we're grateful that our old friends Ken, Paul (we know both of them from our freshman year at Brooklyn College forty years ago) and Janet and our students Tunisia, Clinton and Nadia were nice enough to show up. As for Sandy the Seagull (shown here with Paul), he's a great sport and the best big bird in all of Brooklyn baseball.

Again, if you want an idea what the Novel-T celebration of the release of its second team, The National Puncs, looked like without the fuzziness and blurring, see Emile Dubuisson's photos at Novel-T's Facebook page, like this one:

Wednesday Evening in Cobble Hill: BookCourt's Launch Party for "The Alcoholic" by Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel

When the greatest economist of the twentieth century married the most famous Russian ballerina of her day, Londoners marveled

Was there ever such a union of beauty and brains
As when Lydia Lopkovka married John Maynard Keynes?

This evening at the fabulous BookCourt in Cobble Hall, we got to see a similarly spectacular coming together of two great American talents, Brooklynites Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel, who've produced a graphic novel, The Alcoholic, of which Kirkus Reviews has said, "Rarely does a collaboration produce a graphic novel of such literary and artistic merit" and which The Los Angeles Times has called "a scabby and subversive masterpiece."

We are big fans of both these guys - in our 2006 review of Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs in The American Book Review, we called Ames "perhaps the wittiest writer of his generation." We also loved Haspiel's artwork in collaboration with our old acquaintance Harvey Pekar on American Splendor and The Quitter and his other comics, not least of which his 1980s drawing of Richard Grayson.


So we got to Cobble Hill early and were in BookCourt's back room at least 15 minutes before the scheduled 7 p.m. reading/discussion with the author and artist. But we were out of luck: all the chairs were already taken or saved. But we figured Ames and Haspiel were worth standing for.

What we didn't know, and would find out only when we tried to leave, that there were over 100 people standing outside the inner room and even some on the street in front of the store. So we were lucky to have a great view and to be able to clearly hear Jonathan's trademark "hairy call" opening and closing.

We've experienced the three "hairy calls" before, most recently at last spring's PEN Awards ceremony at Lincoln Center, where our seatmates, the poet Kate Gale and writer Mark E. Cull of Red Hen Press, publishers of many great books and also our Silicon Valley Diet, were kind of surprised by Ames's thrilling trilling. To be honest, we thought until just looking it up that they were actually "Harry calls" because we don't associate Jonathan Ames with hair.

To us, Ames's copies of his male pattern baldness, which he passed out to the crowd to remind us that he knows he's losing (um, lost) his hair, were also old news. And he really needs to update it because, like the Arctic ice cap, his follicles have continued to disappear.

The event began a bit late because of the overflow crowd, but it was a terrific evening. Both Ames and Haspiel are big supporters of BookCourt, which has been a great resource for Brooklyn booklovers since 1981 (see The Written Nerd's excellent report on the store), and so the celebration of The Alcoholic had a neighborhood feel - as well as lots of cups of red wine passed around so the audience could better identify with the novel's hero, Jonathan A.

The novel's author, who may or may not be the model for the book's protagonist, read his hilarious essay "I Shit My Pants in the South of France," which The Signal described quite well:

It was a piece Ames penned when he was a columnist for the New York Press during the mid-'90s, which he included in his collection of essays What's Not To Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer. It chronicles his visit to a strange doctor in SoHo for his first colonic - a water enema incurred for the purpose of cleansing the beleaguered colon - and the aftermath, noting that it was "completely autobiographical, however embarrassing that is."

As he had a lubricated tube inserted into him, which Ames said conjured images of Laurence Olivier in "Spartacus," he recounted an adventure from 1983 when he spent the summer taking classes in the South of France.

After drunkenly buying a rank tuna sandwich from a dirty gentleman outside a café, Ames was overtaken by wrenching stomach cramps that ended with an "(explosion of) diarrhea like a ruptured sewer main."

Following this exercise in scatological participatory journalism - we are of the half of humanity who loves scatological humor and can't get enough of that shit - Jonathan and Dean took questions.

The first two asked them about their favorite comedians and boxers (Muhammad Ali, Richard Pryor, Patton Oswalt) and then someone asked about the collaborative process in creating a graphic novel. The author and artist said that no drawing was done until things were written. Jonathan showed Dean old photos of himself, since the book is "semi-autobiographical," so that Dean could know, for instance, what Jonathan looked like in kindergrarten.

Dean said that he always focuses on one aspect of a character, and Jonathan's obviously was his prominent nose. Jonathan explained that DC had sent him material about how writers work on graphic novels: with each page, he wrote out the number of panels and then described the captions and dialogue to go within each.

Sometimes Dean would change a word or discuss his ideas for the story but they rarely disagreed - except at one point Jonathan felt his character was leering where he should have looked sweeter. Mostly, every two weeks, ten pages would go back and forth. Dean would pencil them and then ink them.

The creators of The Alcoholic said the work involved "lots of kismet," as they'd "traveled lateral roads" of drinking and drugs in their lives, albeit in very different ways. In response to a question about how they met, Dean said that as an admirer of Jonathan's classic essays in The New York Press, he saw him one day at the Fall Cafe on Smith Street in Carroll Gardens (our aside: we love the place too and have gone to great poetry readings there) and introduced himself.

What Jonathan said was particularly amazing was that Dean would often draw scenes from his life, like a childhood basketball court, exactly how it looked in real life. And he admired Dean's devotion to realism: to get drawings of Asbury Park right, Dean downloaded and studied dozens of photos from the Internet.

We were going to ask Dean how collaborating with Jonathan was different than working with Harvey Pekar but someone beat us to it. Dean said that "Jonathan is a writer; Harvey is a savant," that Jonathan "thinks about narrative structure" whereas Harvey "doesn't care what you draw" and might be happy if it were just his own head talking in every panel. Jonathan said he tried to make things interesting for his friend Dean so was conscious of putting in fight scenes and pretty girls into the narrative.

Someone asked Jonathan about his current projects, and he mentioned the HBO pilot of Bored to Death in which Jason Schwartzman will be playing his alter ego (rather than play himself as he did on Showtime's What's Not to Love?). Next summer Jonathan's new book, a collection of fiction and non-fiction The Double Life is Twice as Good, will be published.

We asked Dean about his projects, and he mentioned Fear, My Dear, the second installment of his Billy Dogma trilogy

and another book just coming out this month, but "for four-year-olds," entitled Mo and Jo: Fighting Together Forever.

After some more interesting questions about the constraints of writing graphic novels (Jonathan said he was forced to be concise, though he felt he usually was anyway) and how their friendship was affected by the collaboration (Dean said that from their first meeting, the two men hit it off, though Jonathan kept refusing his invitations to hang out and do stuff with Dean and his friends; Jonathan said that at the time he'd been in a relationship with a woman who didn't allow him to go out), the creators of The Alcoholic wrapped things up around 8 p.m. and many in the huge crowd went to get their copies of the book signed.

We stayed up too late reading The Alcoholic but we aren't sorry. As the L.A. Times said, the humor and a truly wicked honesty kept the pages turning.

"Bending Gender": Richard Grayson reviews Jonathan Ames’s "Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs" in American Book Review

Richard Grayson reviews Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs, edited by Jonathan Ames, in the January/February 2006 issue of American Book Review:

Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs
Edited and with an introduction by Jonathan Ames
Vintage Books, paper, $13.95, 314 pages

By Richard Grayson

Most Americans are intrigued by transsexuals but don’t know what to make of them. I can recall the dopey reaction of one teenager to the sentimental 1970 film The Christine Jorgensen Story: “She was such a cute guy! Why did she become a girl?”

Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs, doesn’t answer my adolescent question. Jonathan Ames, the book’s editor, is after something more profound than that. In his introduction, Ames calls the etiology of gender dysphoria “probably unanswerable…a mystery of the human condition.” (xv) The testimony of the fifteen transsexuals compiled here serves as a celebration of that mystery and of the infinity capacity of human beings to reinvent themselves.

At first blush, Ames – a talented novelist, performance artist, and newspaper columnist and perhaps the wittiest writer of his generation – might seem an odd guiding force behind this kind of anthology. But Ames’s comic novels – I Pass Like the Night, The Extra Man, and Wake Up, Sir! – are, at their heart, stories of quirky characters choosing to profoundly transform their lives.

While changing one’s sex may seem like a drastic step, the overarching theme of the entries in Sexual Metamorphosis is restoring the natural order of things. The first excerpt, Case 129 from Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, sets the tone for the volume. A nineteenth-century Hungarian physician describes how, despite marriage and children, he has felt “like a woman in a man’s form” his entire life.

Although the second memoirist, the Danish painter Lili Elbe, born Einar Wegener, died in the 1930s following surgical implantation of ovaries, later medical advances made true sex change possible and fairly safe. At this point, Ames notes, transsexuals’ memoirs take on the same basic narrative structure: First, a child feels terribly uncomfortable in his or her gender role; next, an adolescent or adult, after much torment, undergoes a transformation into his or her “true” sex; finally, after more suffering – now physical as well as psychological – the individual finds peace, if not total happiness, in the aftermath of the sex change.

The excerpts from Jan Morris’s Conundrum – the book that made transsexuals respectable if still a bit outré – exhibit all the stylistic gifts of her best travel writing. Morris’s earliest memory, exquisitely rendered, is of three-year-old James, sitting beneath his mother’s piano as she plays Sibelius, suddenly realizing that he “had been born in the wrong body, and should really be a girl.”

Despite that, Morris relates a happy, nearly idyllic childhood, and seems so well-adjusted that it makes James’s transformation from husband and father into plucky, Mrs. Miniver-like Jan almost anticlimactic.

Some of these selections deal with public reaction to the writer’s metamorphosis. Jorgensen, the former Army private from the Bronx whose Danish sex change operation in 1952 caused a national sensation, is represented here with an account that goes a long way to explain how her unpretentious charm and ladylike demeanor made her something of a beloved figure, the first celebrity transsexual.

In contrast, Christine Cossey, a fashion model and James Bond girl cruelly outed by British tabloids, wanted to keep her gender reassignment a secret, not only to the general public but also to her overbearing mother-in-law. When, to her horror, Cossey’s sex change is revealed, her career and fairy-tale marriage appear to come apart.

Most of these memoirs deal not with public coming out, but with private people struggling with their own feelings and relationships. The excerpt from Deirde McCloskey’s Crossing relates how a distinguished economics professor named Donald, who has long enjoyed dressing as a woman, finally decides to become Deirdre.

McCloskey concentrates on the struggles with Donald’s wife and adult children, who react to his crossing the gender barrier with horror and cruelty. No wonder McCloskey tells her story in the third person.

On the other hand, the excerpt from tennis player and physician Renée Richards’s Second Serve concentrates on the physical aspects of the metamorphosis, recounting in somewhat gruesome detail the bodily pain and suffering she undergoes in her surgical transformation from Richard Raskin, as well as the practical clinical details of maintaining her new sex organs.

A recurring motif is that both rejection and acceptance can come unexpectedly. Donna Rose and Deirdre McCloskey tell of wives who ridicule and demean their husbands’ desires and take extreme measures to avoid them post-surgery and post-divorce. However, the wife of Jennifer Finney Boylan, a novelist and English professor, stays in the relationship after her husband has become a woman.

Generally, transsexuals’ parents and grandparents, even those from the working class, rally around them surprisingly quickly, perhaps because they’ve known something was up since childhood. Children have more trouble getting used to their parents’ transformations, though the younger they are, the more they take the sex change in stride. The funniest moment in the book is when, on his first outing with his newly-female father, Donna Rose’s son Matt, wanting to get her attention in a crowded store, shouts out, “Hey, Dad!” – and immediately covers his mouth as if trying to recapture the words.

As Ames points out, the public is particularly ignorant of female-to-male transsexuals (F-to-M’s). However, the excerpts of the memoirs of Mario Martino, Loren Cameron, and Mark Rees – as well as the account of “Joe” from a book written by Dr. Harry Benjamin, who coined the term transsexual and whose Benjamin Standards are guiding principles that still form the basis for treatment today – show that their struggles are quite similar to their M-to-F counterparts.

One point the anthology makes crystal clear is that sex and gender, sexual orientation and sexual identity, are distinct categories. About the only thing gay and lesbian people have in common with transsexuals, Boylan tells her psychologist, is that the same people beat up both groups.

Uncharacteristically, Jonathan Ames stays in the background too much here. Beyond his thoughtful introduction to the volume, he gives us only a few sentences setting up each entry. A reader unfamiliar with the tragic story of the homophobic murder of Army Sgt. Donald Watkins may be somewhat confused reading the moving excerpts from the memoir of Calpernia Sarah Addams, Watkins’s transsexual beauty-queen girlfriend.

All of the memoirists here are white Americans or western Europeans, leaving readers to wonder how cultural differences might affect transsexuals in other parts of the world. Unfortunately, few Asian transsexuals – the best known are the Beijing Modern Dance Company's artistic director Jin Xing and the Thai boxer-turned-actress Parinya Charoenphol – have written memoirs available in English translation, and as Ames points out, no anthology can be a perfect selection.

However, given their prominence in the transsexual community, the apparent omission of African-Americans is unfortunate. Did Ames deliberately pass on the recent autobiography Hiding My Candy by The Lady Chablis of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil fame? Perhaps he felt that her decision to keep her penis – the “candy” of her book’s title – made her different from his other memoirists.

The Lady Chablis may actually be closer in spirit to today’s new trans generation, educated in gender deconstruction and not so interested in becoming a “real” man or women. Forgoing the surgery or even hormone treatments that make the transformation definitive for the writers in Sexual Metamorphosis, young genderqueers can be perfectly comfortable having both breasts and a penis. Loren Cameron, a San Francisco F-to-M photographer, notes in his memoir that younger people have less static gender identification than his generation of transsexuals. Ames, acutely attuned to the cultural scene, is aware of the changes in transsexual culture, but the production of memoirs by the coming generation will have to wait.

Although Ames’s anthology should find a place on the syllabi of college courses in human sexuality, its compelling narratives make Sexual Metamorphosis a work of literature.