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CHAPTER 1
BOY TO MAN
Deirdre remembers Donald's mother taking him at age five into a tea and ice cream place called Schraft's, in Harvard Square. After a hot fudge sundae and a watery Coke he had to go to the bathroom, so she took him into the ladies' room. It was nothing out of the ordinary. She wasn't going to leave her five-year-old son in a strange men's room when he needed to wee-wee, not even in the safe world of 1947. What's not ordinary was Donald's sharp memory of it, the ladies in the tiny room speaking kindly to the boy as they straightened their seams and reapplied their lipstick.
His mother took him everywhere, all over Boston to her voice lessons at the Longey School in Cambridge and to rehearsals downtown with the opera director Sarah Caldwell. Sarah took him to his first circus, and at Longey he used to slide down the banister, or imagined it. His father was a graduate student at Harvard and then an assistant professor, not doing much baby-sitting. Donald's mother took him at age six to a rehearsal of Henry V in Memorial Hall, down the street from their married students' housing in Holden Green. He was fascinated by the swords in the play. He loved swashbuckling, and in college he joined the fencing team. The team photo hangs on Deirdre's office wall at home, under the mask and sword, an arrangement of artificial flowers beside it. Unfazed by her male past, she puts her coffee cup on a little brass plaque, "1889–1989. Harvard. One hundred years of fencing." As a boy Donald organized armies for mock battles, with wooden swords and trash-can lids for shields. The armies were cozy — families — though families with a lot of dramatic keeling over dead like in the movies. No girls. She's all right.
His mother also took him along to Filene's Basement in downtown Boston for sale days, when the women in the aisles tried on dresses in their slips and less. It was annoying, her mother said in recollection, that men would stand at the edge of the crowd and watch silently while the women worked to clothe themselves at prices they could afford. There was nothing out of the ordinary about a mother with a full-time job, also studying singing, and therefore with child-care problems, taking her little boy along to Filene's. It was Donald's sharp memory of it that was out of the ordinary. He kept the memory, not yet wanting to dress as the women did, to be as the women were. He was half conscious of it: Swordplay, yes, what boys and men do. Not that other. No.
He loved the MGM musicals that he and his mother would see at matinées at the University Theater. He would come out tap dancing, wanting to be Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly or Donald O'Connor — not Ginger Rogers, as the feminist joke goes, doing the same steps backward and in heels. When his mother signed him up for ballet lessons he balked and did not like it. The others were girls. It pulled him. No.
He watched his mother pluck her eyebrows with tweezers and whisk mascara onto her lashes with a little square brush. Like the ladies' room in Schraft's and the women in their slips in Filene's Basement, the memory hung there like a moon, meaningless. Donald shrugged and returned to being a boy.
He was normal, happy, bookish, an only child until adolescence. He stuttered always, making the rounds of speech therapists into high school. There's no cure for stuttering, or none that he persisted in. Stuttering either goes away or it doesn't. His didn't. But otherwise he was studious and obedient and cheerful — no worry, said his mother later. I've never worried about you, she said. He played with toy soldiers in Sammy's basement in Holden Green and read books on astronomy until he discovered that it was applied physics and required a lot of math. He read boys' books, which were the books he was given — the Hardy Boys, not Nancy Drew. Later he learned from his sister that she was encouraged to read Little Women, which Deirdre first read at fifty-five. His father gave Donald The Three Musketeers, but he didn't like it as much as his father had when he was a boy, the dreams of courage on the page.
Not that Donald had girlish dreams of love. True, he played with string puppets as though with dolls, because it was Howdy Doody time. But it's not as simple as that, Deirdre would explain. I was not effeminate, if that's your theory. I behaved like a boy, dreamed like a boy, was a boy. There's nothing plain in such histories. Some male-to-female gender crossers were effeminate boys, but many were not. Effeminate boys most often become ordinary nongay men, less commonly gay men, but rarely gender crossers. A tiny share of noneffeminate boys like Donald wish in time to become women. You can't tell. It takes time to know oneself. There will be surprises.
And in any case, now that we're talking about how to treat people, Deirdre would say, effeminate boys, and tomboy girls, are human too. You ought to see the Belgian movie My Life in Pink, about a little boy who shames his family by wanting to be a girl. Deirdre saw it alone in a theater near Southern Methodist in Dallas. The movie was not her boyhood, but it was her desire, which sprang to life as boyhood ended.
So Donald had been a normal boy, though never a thrusting, macho one. He never fought, though teased about his stutter. His mother told how he came home crying at being teased by a cross-eyed playmate named Frankie.
"You didn't tease Frankie back for his crossed eyes, did you?"
"Oh, Mommy, no. That would be a terrible thing to do. I'll get over my stuttering someday" (Donald's optimism), "but Frankie will always be cross-eyed."
* * *
He was eleven years old. They had moved from Cambridge out to the wooded Boston suburb of Wakefield the year before. Eisenhower had won the election, and Donald had to explain to the Republican girls next door why his mother and father had voted for Stevenson. Stevenson's the best, that's all. He played occasionally with the girls, but at football, tussling in the scrum with girls at that age larger than the boys.
On a day in December 1953 he was home sick from school. His mother was downstairs in the kitchen with his new baby sister. He was having the first wet dreams of maleness. Oddly, his dreams were of femaleness, of having it, of being. Upstairs in the bathroom he took a pair of his mother panties from the laundry basket, put them on, and found a rush of sexual pleasure — not joyous or satisfying, merely There. It was a mild ache, pleasant and alluring, mixing memory and desire: the women half-dressed in Filene's, the little ballerinas, his mother. There was nothing of male lust in it except the outcome. It was not curiosity about what lay underneath women's clothing. It was curiosity about being.
He kept the panties on and put on his pajamas over them, and his robe too, for security, and went downstairs.
"Hello, honey," his mother said, "How are you feeling? Better?"
"Uh, yeah. Yy-yes. B-b-better."
"You look very handsome in your robe!" A Christmas gift last year. He didn't wear it much.
* * *
As Donald aged thirteen or fourteen waited for sleep in his bed in Wakefield he would fantasize about two things. Please, God, please. As a little boy Donald had been holy for a while, listening every week to a radio show about Jesus, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and thrilling at rehearsals to his mother singing The Messiah. By adolescence he was not religious — something of a village atheist, actually, and starting to read Emma Goldman in the Carnegie library downtown. But the God-draped scenery of his culture remained for times of longing. Whoever: Please. Tomorrow when I wake up:
I won't stutter. I'll just talk like people do. It'll be easy for me, like flying in the stories. Sam Small the flying Yorkshireman.
And I'll be a girl. A girl. It's easy. Samantha Small the flying Yorkshire WOMAN.
Deirdre later used the memory to introduce talks, to put people at ease about both her stuttering and her crossing in one story. She would joke, "I f-f-finally got one of m-m-my two wishes!" and the audience would laugh.
Donald crossdressed when he could. Whenever he was sure he was alone in his own house he would dress in his mother's clothes or in clothes he had gotten out of the trash. He outgrew his mother's shoes at age fifteen or so. He once tried on the shoes of his friend Louise next door, when the family was away, but with her he mainly played chess.
Donald's mother never suspected, she said later, not at all. At first this astonished Deirdre, though it shouldn't have, thinking back on the experience of a parent. Donald as a father did not suspect what was going on in his son's room or his daughter's head. When he was working for the highway department during summers in college his mother found a girdle he had appropriated from the trash, but she thought it had been left by some girl he'd been entertaining. The thought was natural because he was for the usual reasons heterosexually attracted to girls. His father once nearly caught him crossdressing, at age fifteen, with his mother's clothes strewn around. Donald had been frantically removing them as his father's quick steps approached the room. If he grasped what his son was doing he never mentioned it. Probably he thought it some usual heterosexual fantasy. Or nothing. His father was not watchful in such matters — a private man, willing to grant others their privacy.
The 1950s were the age of crinolines for teenage girls, and he was jealous. Oddly, now I have a crinoline, for square dancing, Deirdre thought. As a teenager Donald broke into neighboring houses to wear the crinolines, and shoes that fit, and garter belts and all the equipment of a 1950s girl. He didn't do it much, escaping out back doors as families came in the front, leaving everything undisturbed. He didn't steal things. Maybe a cookie now and then.
He was never caught. Despite heart-thumping expeditions in housebreaking and almost-caughts in his own home, no one suspected, and the crossdressing never became an issue. Thank goodness, thought Deirdre. In the 1950s they gave electroshock treatment for homosexuality, to say nothing of gender crossing. In later decades the psychiatrists persisted, and "gender identity disorder," as homosexuality was in the dark ages before 1973, is an item in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition, the DSM-IV. The "disorder" did not appear in the DSM until seven years after the psychiatrists had guiltily removed homosexuality.
Daphne Scholinski, who wanted to be a boy, or at any rate not a regular girl, tells in The Last Time I Wore a Dress how the psychiatrists tried to force her. In 1981 they locked her up with delusional patients, the only female on a male ward. She was raped twice. The womanly experience of being raped did not change Scholinski's mind about not being a girl.
Thank God I wasn't caught.
* * *
He decided not to wish to be a girl, though he kept on crossdressing when he could. He began to keep an emotional distance from his beloved mother, as boys do, nothing strange. He grew taller than his father — six feet, a little above average for Donald's generation of men, big boned — and became a regular guy in his private boys' school in Cambridge. He was elected co-captain of the football team, which meant he could not possibly be a girl. (Unhappily, God does not arrange for every crossgendered person to be small-boned and pretty. Later Deirdre learned of two massive professional football players from two opposing Super Bowl teams who wanted to come to a crossdressing convention in Dallas but refrained in mutual fear of each other and of exposure. And she heard of two gender crossers who had been opposing quarterbacks on their high-school football teams, not knowing about each other until they were postoperative.)
In the 1950s there was nothing to be done. It's amazing, Deirdre thought, how much depended on the mere practical possibility. As boy and man he desired, ached, knew, though he often kept the knowledge from himself, as people can do with unpleasant truths. If he had believed crossing was practical before the birth year of 1995 he would have gone ahead. Without question, thought Deirdre later. A woman's life. But he believed he was too big, too masculine. He thought of this often during the 1950s and '60s and '70s and '80s. He wished he was shorter, of slighter build and prettier face. Still do. Donald would recall the beautiful younger lad in his boys' school whom one of his classmates used to covet in jest, saying, "If he wore a dress I'd take him to the prom." Donald laughed, but from a false position. No, no, he said to himself, I'm glad I'm not feminine enough for that to work. My size and looks keep me from it.Yes.
In 1953 the first famous gender crosser, Christine Jorgensen, had come back from Denmark. "GI Becomes Blond Bombshell," the tabloids put it. At eleven or twelve Donald was embarrassed to stand in the magazine store in downtown Wakefield and read the flood of stories, though he did. She seemed unique. Later when he learned to drive he and his pals would go into Boston to see the drag queens, homosexual crossdressers, near Copley Square — not to hassle them or beat them up, as the bad boys did, but to see the unusual. His friend Paul was a social genius and would engage the queens in friendly talk. Still, the queens were Other — homosexual and lower class, unlike the heterosexual Harvard professor's son from a private school. He did not disdain them but could not see himself as one of them. He laughed when Paul and the others did, but he ached.
At age sixteen, when he and his family were living in Camberley near London while his father was on sabbatical, a neighbor described at a lawn party the travesti he had seen in an Italian show. They were "beautiful women," he said. Donald had no idea such a transformation was possible. Could I become a woman, he thought, with this football body? When in the late fall of that year he and his mother and little sister and brother went to live in Italy for a few months he learned of Coccinelle (which means ladybug), a French sex-changed female impersonator at the Follies, who was indeed beautiful, to a Brigitte Bardot standard. He was fascinated, though he did nothing but look at her picture in magazines.
In Rome he found a copy of Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers, an account of French drag queens in the criminal underworld that Genet inhabited. Again he was fascinated, but again the characters were homosexuals. He was not. He was not afraid of being one. He just wasn't. As a man I love women. At one level he was a happy young man, exercising his new manly body and manly duties and privileges, a coat and tie and chino pants for school and college. Only at another, buried level did he wish to be a young woman. Nothing to be done. You're a man. Report for duty.
He never went to a drag show when he was young (it's said that "drag" dates from the Shakespearean theater: DRess As Girl). Maybe a pub drag queen during his graduate-school year in England. Can't remember, Deirdre thought. The first time he saw a proper show in anything but magazines or his mind's eye was twenty years later, on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. The bar in the middle of the afternoon was uncrowded, and the man/woman danced up on the tiny stage behind the bartender, lip-synching a Patty Page song. Donald didn't stay long for fear that other conventioneers from the American Economic Association would spot him. In his last year as Donald he met a drag queen, a successful lawyer on the East Coast, who had worked her way through school dancing on Bourbon Street. Maybe that was her.
In college he once went to a psychiatrist at the Student Health Service to get advice and told him about his crossdressing. The psychiatrist was the only person apart from his wife who knew before 1995. But 1962 was the height of the talking cure, and the psychiatrist listened and suggested another appointment. Donald didn't go. He later thought in a hydraulic metaphor, the river of his life pouring and pouring into a lake behind a dam, from age eleven to age fifty-three.
For a long time he felt guilty about the crossdressing, and into his thirties he would periodically throw out his collected clothing and magazines in a purge. It's easy to stop crossdressing, Mark Twain might have said: I've done it dozens of times. (Remember the crossdressing scene in Huckleberry Finn; and persistent crossdressing by Jo in Little Women, and a short story by Alcott about a male-to-female crosser. Something about that Gilded Age.) But in homophobic times he was comforted that he was in other respects "normal" in his sexual drives. It was important to know this, even in the relatively tolerant household he was born into. "Heterosexual crossdresser" is no contradiction in terms. (Even a completed gender crossing does not imply a particular preference. The conventional statistics for male-to-female crossers formerly heterosexual is that a third go on loving women, a third come to love men, and a third are asexual.) Sexual preference and gender preference are not connected, contrary to the simplicities of 1930s psychoanalysis and 1990s homophobia. Who you love is not the same issue as who you are. You can love your dog and still not want to be one. Donald loved girls, and not because he wanted to be one. Though he did.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Crossing"
by .
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