Last year, my partner C and I tied the knot at the local city hall before a select group of people comprising of close friends and one family member on each side — the fathers of the brides. That our fathers made it to the ceremony warmed our hearts, impressed some friends and surprised a few others. This was followed by my first American Christmas — also my first family Yuletide — in a warm southern state, which was a welcome relief from the New England chill. Now, a business-related event is taking me back to India, my place of origin, and compelling me to face my extended family, some of whom have gaped in horror, felt anger, sadness, and general confusion at the turn of events in my personal life.
Willie Colón’s voice was my grandma dressed in her widow’s black counting novenas. It was End of Days empty, calling out for redemption. He sang like that time I asked my Grandma if my Dad loved me, like that time I got spanked for asking such an obvious question.
My answer for him, the answer I’ve created for us, was and still is, I’m not really sure how to love you, yet.
For me, one of the most beautiful and empowering parts about choosing to live as an out trans woman is knowing that I’m helping to dismantle the deeply fucked up power structures that have plagued us since we first gained access to transition in the middle of the 20th century.
The more of the show I watched, the more I understood my own childhood wasn’t just a series of unfortunate events related to my awkwardness, or my girlhood, but something much larger. I’d constantly faced racism as a mixed-race girl in school, and I’d chosen the easiest way through. Where Eddie struggles not for assimilation but for respect, I’d done the opposite. I’d been complicit in my own assimilation to whiteness because I was afraid of being disliked. Where Eddie fights against the bullies in his school and revels in his successful power plays episode after episode, I’d done the opposite. I didn’t bother eating the dried pork sandwiches my mother had made me the way Eddie eats his stinky tofu outside of school: I just starved, or saved up for my own Lunchables. There were no other Taiwanese kids in school with whom I could carpool, like Eddie, but I was so afraid of being seen with my mother that I’d ask my white father to be the one to pick me up from school.
I made my mother disappear from my story.
When you’re dating one person, does every other person instantly become unattractive to you? Do you transition from being straight, gay or lesbian to being a Sandra-sexual, Matt-sexual, or Alanna-sexual? I didn’t think so. In my current relationship, I am having the best sex of my life, and I am still attracted to women. There are still women on the street who catch my eye. That doesn’t mean I’m in hiding from my true inner lesbian; it means I’m a living, breathing, queer human.
I say that these women saved my life because without them, the Me that I know and love would not be here right now. There’s just something about feeling inauthentic, impossible and insignificant that really makes life a burden, and that’s where I was for years. I was sick of living and wavered between a fear of and desire for death.
In the February of 1996, I sent David Carr two poorly conceived college-newspaper articles and a chapbook of black-nationalist poetry—and David Carr hired me. I can’t even tell you what he saw. I know that I immediately felt unworthy—a feeling that never quite faded—because I was a knucklehead and a fuck-up. But what I didn’t then know about David Carr was that he’d written and edited the knucklehead chronicles, and published annual editions wholly devoted to the craft of fucking-up. I think that David—recovering crack addict, recovering alcoholic, ex-cocaine dealer, lymphoma survivor, beautiful writer, gorgeous human—knew something about how a life of fucking up burrows itself into the bones of knuckleheads, and it changes there, transmutes into an abiding shame, a gnawing fear which likely dogs the reformed knucklehead right into the grave. Perhaps that fear could be turned into something beautiful. Perhaps a young journalist could pull power from that fear, could write from it, the way Bob Hayes ran with it, because the fear was not of anything earthly but of demons born from profound shame and fantastic imagination.
Having a high IQ doesn’t mean you are going to be successful. It just means your brain works faster. It recognizes patterns. It can reach conclusions quickly. I’m laughing at jokes as soon as the punch line comes out; I multitask and boredom is my nemesis. I’m always doing five things at once. My mom hates it when we go out for dinner. I have two phones, one for work and a personal one, and I am always on both. I’m still keeping up with the conversation and I don’t understand why she’s so upset.
I now have a history of adding and deleting my OkCupid account because whenever I’m on there it always matches me with some with lesbian who is hanging off the side of a mountain in her profile picture. I have no idea what I put on my profile that makes OKC think these are the women I’m interested in dating. And honestly I tried throwing caution to the wind and saying “Hey, if the computer says we’re compatible then it must know what’s best, right?” Because honestly, while I’m open to diversity in the women that I date, I have found that usually out of 50 quick matches on OKC I might get 3 black lesbians. I met up with a hang gliding white lesbian once to see if there could actually be some sort of connection. Maybe she secretly has an affinity for ’60s soul on Stax Records or we could connect over L Word re-treads. It just didn’t work at all. The only thing we connected with was a love for Thai food and cognac which can work in certain situations. But there was no spark. And that is ok.
Hell, at least I tried.
Many of my straight friends, even the most liberal, see this logic as warped. It’s one thing for them to admit that they would prefer their kids to be straight, something they’ll only begrudgingly confess. But wanting my daughter to be a lesbian? I might as well say I want her to grow up to be lactose intolerant.
I realized last night that wedding vows and ceremony wordings are necessarily things that have been passed down and repeated (almost) verbatim, because that’s kinda the deal: we’re putting our names on the unfathomably long list of people who once made the same promise. It’s the ritual of the thing that grounds it and gives it weight, and I talk/write/think enough already. Maybe on this day I should say some words other people have said, because I feel the weight in them and they feel true without me having to fuck with them.
This is just some unfiltered honesty here. A feeling I’m still powering through la la la.
Since getting back, I have moved out of a bad living arrangement, found a new job, and come out to my mother. I’ve also started to question every assumption I’ve ever made — about myself, about others, and about what is possible. I’ve started to view people in a new way. I see privilege and disparity everywhere, and I feel a burning need to change it. More importantly, I believe that I can. I am more open and relaxed and at home in my body than I have ever been. I am frighteningly earnest. I am excited and grateful, and I am deeply, profoundly happy.
After vacillating between happiness and panic, Jess found herself at A-Camp 5 and totally loved it. That wouldn’t have been possible without her campership. Donate or apply for a Campership to A-Camp 6 today to spread the love.
‘You removed the part of me that makes me feel good while having sex?’ I asked. Our Bodies Ourselves, and some of the Internet articles I’d read, gave me the confidence to say this last part. At sixteen, I thought I knew exactly what had been taken away from me, even if I wouldn’t have any idea what this really meant for another five years.
'I didn’t have a choice,’ said my mother. 'It happened to me too.’
I realize I don’t want any record of my days. I have the kind of brain that erases everything that passes, almost immediately, like that dustpan-and-brush dog in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland sweeping up the path as he progresses along it. I never know what I was doing on what date, or how old I was when this or that happened—and I like it that way. I feel when I am very old and my brain ‘goes’ it won’t feel so very different from the life I live now, in this miasma of non-memory, which, though it infuriates my nearest and dearest, must suit me somehow, as I can’t seem, even by acts of will, to change it.
