I think of myself as a queer. Non-separatist, but anti-assimilationist. Saying that “I’m just like you” doesn’t really get me where I want to go. In many ways, I am “just like you” but those aren’t the parts that give me trouble. And so that insistence on my ability to be fully myself and not suffer violence or oppression because of that is what’s important. You always fight your battles and draw your lines differently. When I first started transitioning, I didn’t want to go to the corner store and say
I’ve met people like that, certainly. I can’t imagine it. I didn’t want to do that at all. I just thought that felt very inauthentic. However, I understand that they do it because of other people’s feeling about transsexuality. I don’t know how many times in my own life people have met me on the street, or at a presentation, and it’s “she, she, she” until I say, “I’m a transsexual,” and suddenly it’s “he, he, he, he.” I’m like, “I’m sorry, you were having no problem with me fifteen minutes ago. What are you confused about? What changed, except your knowledge of my transsexual past?” It’s that belief about gender and the body. Is change in the body shape a change in the essence of the soul? People trip up about that. And so I understand [the desire to keep quiet]. There’s that paradox of visibility. I’m doing all of this so that people understand me the way that I understand myself. But if they know that I’ve done this, then they don’t accept me as I understand myself. They see me as something different, and then all my hard work has been for naught. However, if I don’t tell them, they will accuse me of being duplicitous. It’s a catch-22.
For me, I think of how open I am about being transgendered or how I present at different times—it’s kind of like the difference between using language for poetry and using language to communicate. If what you really want to do is communicate with someone “I need x, y or z,” and you are using the language of gender for its communicative potential, and often that’s what we want to do with gender, is communicate a sense of self with an other. But within certain contexts, within more closely held communities and other contexts, other kinds of communication for different uses are possible. Are you doing your gender like a funky bass riff, are you riffing on some gender improv? Are you using the way that you are doing your gender to test the boundaries of language? You can do gender more like an art practice or like a political practice. And at times those can be very effective things to do. They can be really fun.
THE BOMBSHELL
I looked into a sea of faces, lined up along the ropes of the “quarantine walk “ and held back by a sea of determined police, then heard a roar of voices shouting my name. I reeled under the impact. I thought for a moment that I had entered Dante’s inferno, as flashbulbs exploded from all directions and new sreel cameras whirred. A crowd of three hundred shoving reporters, news-reel and still photographers had converged, all jockeying for position and camera angles. I learned later it was the largest assemblage of press representatives in the history of the airport.
Christine Jorgensen was the first star of the dawning age of celebrity, the first American to become internationally known simply for being herself. Her fame was based not on her profession, her talents, her lineage, her looks, or her wit. None of these was particularly remarkable. Christine Jorgensen was famous simply for being Christine Jorgensen. She was a “reality” star decades before the concept was invented. A few other brave souls had undergone the same transformation before her, but Christine was the butterfly captured in the glare of klieg lights as she exited her cocoon. She was no more and no less than the man who had become a woman, and a pretty good-looking woman at that. “Ex-GI becomes Blonde Bombshell,” the headlines screamed as the young American who traveled to Denmark in 1950 to seek help for a baffling medical problem returned home. She soon found that the world press treated her recovery from surgery both as a matter of profound international importance and as a sexual scandal.
Jorgensen was born on Memorial Day, May 30, 1926, the child of two first-generation Danish Americans, George and Florence Jorgensen. She was the second child born to the couple, and her parents named her George, Jr., after her father. Her sister, Dorothy (called Dolly), was three years older. Jorgensen’s autobiography, published in 1967 and reissued in 2000, describes her childhood as a happy one. “Dolly and I were surrounded by a closely knit, affectionate family of the sort that gives a child a warm feeling of belonging. Happily we had the advantage of being in a family that enjoyed activities as a unit, and that still applies today,” she writes. In her youth, Jorgensen was called “Brud,” short for “brother.” Brud was especially close to her grandma Jorgensen, “a person of grace and dignity,” Jorgensen recalled years later. “Grandma was always my champion when others laughed at my ‘sissified’ ways.”
From an early age, Brud was aware of the differences between him and the other boys in the neighborhood. “A little boy wore trousers and had his hair cut short. He had to learn to use his fists aggressively, participate in athletics, and most important of all, little boys didn’t cry. Contrary to those accepted patterns, sometimes I did feel like crying and I must have felt that Grandma understood and didn’t disapprove when I ran away from a fistfight or refused to play rough and tumble games.” In her autobiography, Jorgensen describes George’s crushing disappointment when instead of the “pretty doll with long golden hair” that he already knew enough not to request for a Christmas present at age five, he was given a “bright red railway train.” She also describes a conversation that George had with his mother around the same time, asking why his sister, Dolly, was allowed to grow her blond hair long and wear dresses, things he envied and admired but was not permitted to have. “ ‘Mom,’ I asked, ‘why didn’t God make us alike?’” His mother explained that the world needed both men and women, and that there was no way of knowing before a baby was born whether it was a boy or a girl. “‘You see, Brud,’ she said. ‘It’s one of God’s surprises.’”
“ ‘Well,’ I replied. I don’t like the kind of surprise God made me!’”
Like many boys who fail to conform to society’s views of masculine behavior, Brud was often ridiculed for his differences by both children and adults. In mid-century America, those differences were particularly jarring. The “sexual anarchy” of the fin de siecle had long since given way to a rigid sexual binary. Male and female were once more separate and distinct categories, with no discernable overlap. Home and family, not the office and factory, were defined as women’s proper sphere, as Rosie the Riveter put on her apron and turned domestic goddess. Men were expected to be workers, husbands, and fathers. “After World War Two, there was the creation of this really rigid gender system in the West,” historian Susan Stryker said in our 2001 conversation. “Like, the world is cut in two and you are on this side or this side. There are no anomalies. That construction of gender/sex/sexuality is I think as much an artifact of the Cold War as the Berlin Wall.” Like the millions soon to be trapped behind the iron curtain of communism in the East, those who felt oppressed by the new gender regime in the West learned the virtues of silence, subterfuge, and secrecy. These were the skills they needed to survive. Not only gay and gender-
