I transitioned when I was 19 years old. I knew if I went to college, if I was trapped in one more, tiny space that I’d end up dead. I knew that to be true. So, I went off to live my life and try my best to figure out why everyone hated me so much and wanted me dead, and who exactly all these voices were that screeched at me in the middle of the night. I was on a quest, and it was 1980 and there was nowhere for me to go. And then, out of the blue, completely by accident, I met my sisters. I was auditioning for a “Talent Night” at a club in Chicago called “Club Victoria”. I assumed Talent Night meant, “show us your talent”, so I got together with my pal Barb and decided I’d dance and take off a couple of my clothes and wow the audience with my sexiness. After that fell flat, I realized, as I was downstairs, that the 6 foot tall showgirls I was dressing with had a very distinct reason for the low, bass-like tonality of their voices: They were all transgendered. And that was that. I had found them. They had found me. We found each other, and we never let go.
They raised me, fed me, clothed me, taught me, fought with me, scolded me, birthed me, and berated me. And then, as the plague came, they died, one by one, person by person. Everyone I knew and loved and ate with, and slept with, and cried with, and held, and protected. All died. Every. Last. One of them.
And then it came near me and it infected me and I almost died, except I didn’t. And then I kept on living and I still couldn’t figure out what it was I was supposed to be doing exactly. I couldn’t figure out how to speak loud and firm enough so people would hear me, so I would get what I really wanted, so I wouldn’t feel insignificant, or like I was bothering someone. My parents were still miles away, my lovers bored me to tears and I was sick and tired of lip synching to other people’s music. I wanted my own voice to come out of me, not Streisand’s.
I don’t happen to think that my life is any less or any more strange or beautiful or maddening than yours. I believe that all of us have a story to tell, and it’s just as big as we allow it to be. As I sat on the corner of the bar in the mid nineties, sipping on a manhattan (a drink I loathed, but always made me feel like Greer Garson), a tall, lanky man in a business suit waddled up to me and sat down. He smiled and lifted his glass to mine. We toasted and he stared at me for the longest time.
“Stop staring. I hate it when people stare at me.”
He took a chug of his beer, wiped his lip and said very straight forwardly to me:
“You’re an actress who hates when people stare at you? You need to figure that shit out.”
That night, after he left my apartment, I walked out onto my balcony and looked up at the Chicago skyline. And I heard the tall, lanky man’s voice again…I needed to figure that shit out. That was the shit that I needed to make sense of. And it wasn’t as simple as me not wanting attention, or needing approval, or begging for compromise. It wasn’t any of that. It was about who and what I was and how I was going to make that clear. So, for the next decade, I searched. I tried it all. I kept going and I kept living and I got sick and almost died, and got married, and went to less and less funerals and slowly, in my life, I became a student. I went from pretending to be a know-it-all, to becoming a student of my own life. And once I did that, once I realized I was never going to figure it all out or come up with all the answers or satisfy everyone’s curiosity, or appease all the skeptics, I finally, ultimately took my first, huge breath. I finally opened up wide enough and deep enough to let other people in and allow myself to learn and receive the gifts they had to offer and I tried not to act like I knew everything. I finally looked up and said that I could be many things and not just one and that no one has the right to judge me, live through me, or run over me. I asked questions and I stayed in that place. I found a voice that shook my own soul and seemed to fly through the atmosphere at an enormous speed. I was over taken by the people who gave me the strength to find that, and I learned how to Proclaim. And once that happened, the people and the family and the lovers and the audiences and the students huddled around me and accepted me no matter what. We fought the bullies together and we cheered the triumphs with grace. And they helped me see that what I spent years searching for had always been with me, I’d just never believed it. I never thought I had that much power. Not me. Not ever.
I now know who I am.
But that’s all I know. I don’t know anything else. I’m a dummy about a lot of stuff, and I couldn’t care less. And who I am is a laundry list of people, places, things and random experiences I’ve collected in the last fifty years I’ve been on the planet. I am undefinable. I am unattainable. I have found my voice and I’m never again going to search for what I never really lost in the first place.