I thought I was menstruating, actually.
Yes, and I was twelve, and that’s what girls start doing. So I thought, in my confused mind, that I was menstruating. It turns out it probably was because I have a partial uterus, so it is biologically reasonable to think that at times I cramped and bloated and menstruated. Talk about bizarre—but this is intersexuality, so who knows? But a lot of this was during urination, and how many times do you urinate a day? Four or five times? You can imagine the fear. There was the anxiety and anticipation of pain that was worse than the pain.
Extremely painful. It turned out, the diagnosis was urethral meatal stenosis, which means that the opening of the tip of the urethra was scarred down, closed down. It could have been scarred because of surgery that had been performed much earlier or it could have been some sort of overgrowth of tissue in that area due to DES. This has been recorded [in the data]. And I let this go on because I was scared to death about it. I had started cross- dressing when I was about eleven or so. I first felt like a girl, or like I should have been a girl, when I was about seven, but when I was eleven I started praying that my breasts would start growing and wearing my mother’s clothes, which finally fit me. I was her height, five-six or -seven, and I was just getting to the height where I could wear her clothes. And I would do that, and then forget to put them back exactly the same way, intentionally so that someone would notice. And they finally noticed and said, “You never do that again, or we’ll have you institutionalized at Creedmore.”
Yeah. “We don’t want to deal with this.” And then I started menstruating—this painful urination and hematuria—and I tried to hide it from them because I knew what their response was to this sexual thing, and stuff that comes out of the penis is sexual, and what the-hell do I know? I’m in a fever talking about God, and fearing God. I was preparing for bar mitzvah. And I remember one day I painted my nails, and my father freaked out. I wasn’t as bad as many, okay? I wasn’t one of those hypermasculine overcompensators or anything. I just learned to blend into the woodwork, just do my work at school and manage.
So this is going on, and I started bleeding even between urinations, and I had to try to wash out my underwear, and it’s so hard to get blood out, and I’m stealing money from my mother’s pocketbook to buy more underwear so she doesn’t see it. Eventually, I couldn’t keep it up. I was only twelve. What could I do? And they caught on. And they took me to a urologist, an Austrian fellow with a very heavy German accent, and he made some sort of diagnosis. The only thing that’s come down to me is the urethral meatal stenosis. No questions about DES, so far as I know. This was ’64, and I go to this urologist and he decides to treat me with this bizarre treatment that I have never in all my years as a physician been able to elucidate any better than I’m going to tell you right now. When I describe this to urologists today, they say, “What the hell was he doing? What was that?”
He had me lying down on a table, strapped down, with what I now know to be a fifty-cc syringe with a long cannula on it, filled with some sort of viscous black material. Viscous gook that he would then insert into my penis. And then he would just stand there, this big German guy—and remember, I’m only twelve; I haven’t had my growth spurts or anything, and he’s standing there injecting this into me. This was the most painful thing imaginable. And there was no sympathy, no nurse there, no feminine energy in the room. No explanation. Nothing. I went through this for four months. My parents have since pointed out that this was an attempt to expand my urethra. But they were never in the room; they were always outside. And there was no sympathy. None whatsoever. They never talked about it. “How do you feel? Can we get you some ice cream?” Typical stuff that kids would get if they were getting their tonsils out, but never anything. And I went through that for four months. And it didn’t work.
I’ve blocked most of this stuff out. It was just awful. I don’t want to think about it. And the German accent didn’t help. I was learning about the Holocaust at the time, and even though he was Jewish, that didn’t help. And of course, there were all those sexual associations that I was making, and that I guess everybody else was making, but no one talked about it. And I’m praying to develop breasts and I’m menstruating, and here they’re doing this to my penis. And finally they decided that they had to operate. So I was taken to surgery and operated on. I don’t know what was done, but I have a scar the length of my penis, along the dorsum of my penis. I think I was basically filleted open. I developed septic shock during that procedure. Of course I didn’t know it at the time, but my mother said, “We came back to see you after the surgery and you were missing and then we tracked you down and you were in the ICU and you had a fever of 106 and we thought you weren’t going to make it.” They freaked out. Of course, I don’t remember anything because I was in shock. I was in the hospital for three weeks, on IV antibiotics and eating lousy hospital food. It was the only time in my life that I ever developed an aversion to water. Forcing fluids. “You’ve got to drink the water.” I remember hating it, becoming nauseated by water.
And again, nobody ever talked about this. My penis was bandaged up. I had a Foley [catheter] in for the longest time. It was just unspoken. It’s very reminiscent of the way women were treated if they had breast cancer. This was a big secret. In the Jewish community it’s called a “shanda,” a shame. You don’t talk about it. You go hide. You take care of it but you don’t talk about it. My grandmother died of breast cancer. She was so ashamed that she did nothing about it. It actually infiltrated her skin. I had to go to Africa to see the disease’s natural history like this! This happened in the United States of America fifty years ago. And it’s like that kind of silence … “This is sexual and so we’re not going to talk about it.” And nobody talked to me about it. I didn’t even have psychiatric consultations. Nobody. It was ignored.
Well, it was more of a religious thing. I thought this was a punishment from God for my feelings. I remember my parents bringing me my homework and I had half-Hebrew and religious studies and half-secular studies, and I’d work even harder to try to get it better. There’s a phrase in the early-morning prayers that the Orthodox still say: “Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, King of the Universe, for not making me a woman.” Somebody said once, I don’t remember who, that having to repeat that on a daily basis was like swallowing crushed glass. And here I am, top of my class, and I know all the rituals and routines, and I’m being forced to say this but I know that I’m living a lie. But I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. They would have totally freaked out. You just didn’t discuss these things.
But those three weeks in the hospital were hellacious. I felt like I was bad and that there was something very wrong with me. Luckily, my way of coping was just to work harder. I never did drugs, I never did alcohol. And I grew up in that era [the sixties]! I was a control freak; that’s how I dealt with it. I was scared to death at letting myself go because I saw what was happening with my friends, and they looked happy and carefree and so on but they would say things when they were stoned that they would regret later, and I couldn’t let anybody find out about this. I couldn’t let anybody know. So I became sort of like Newt Gingrich—very uptight, very serious. I grew a mustache and, after a couple of years at Cornell, in the early seventies, I let my hair grow. But for the most part I’ve been in deep cover, protective coloration, all of my life. I couldn’t let on. I’ve never smoked grass, can you believe it? I smoked opium once, in Thailand, and it did nothing for me. I had to do something because my wife was provoking me. I was too straight.
But get this, the surgery didn’t work. A month later, I was bleeding again. I got out of the hospital in June. I finished the year at school. I was thirteen. I had my bar mitzvah. I was actually bleeding during my bar mitzvah. I came out, and because of my illness my parents hadn’t made any plans for the summer. I had been going to day camp, which was very common in Queens in those days, and they had to hustle to get me in, and because it was late there were no slots in my age group, so I was in a group of fifteen-year-olds instead of thirteen-year-olds. Boy, you talk about somebody who just went through this profound surgical/medical experience relating to sexuality and getting thrust in with kids two years older! The girls … I lusted to be like them, but I couldn’t. I was just this little nerd, you know, who was getting picked on by the guys all the time because I wasn’t with it, and I had a small penis, and everything like this.
Oh yes, because we had to undress; we went to public swimming pools and we had to get undressed.
