Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out (24 page)
Because of my high-school grades, I only got into one college, in the CUNY system in Queens. So I went there.
I was fighting with my brother all the time. He always thought he was better than me. We were living under the same roof, but we weren’t talking to each other.
On New Year’s Day, my brother started throwing stuff at me. I told him to stop, and he wouldn’t. We physically fought. My mom tried to separate us. He was yelling that he wasn’t the one with the problem. “
She’s
the one with the problem.
She’s
the one that ruined the family because
she’s
a freak.”
Whenever the family called me
she,
I’d try to explain, “Please don’t call me that. I’m not
she.
”
“No, that’s what you are!
She!
End of story!” my brother said.
He said a lot of crap and called me hurtful things like faggot.
“That’s it. I’m moving out.”
I needed to get out of the environment that was making me feel bad about myself. I decided to live on my own. I now have my own apartment in Queens. It has a kitchen, a small bathroom; it’s a studio basically.
I talk to my mom a little bit more now, but I still keep her at arm’s length. I don’t talk with my father, and I don’t talk with my brother at all.
I’m living on my own. My parents are separated, but not divorced because we are a strict, traditional Roman Catholic family. My mom’s going to college and has a boyfriend. Dad lives with my brother; Mom lives with her mother. My mom’s not fighting with my father as much. My brother is doing his own thing. My dad is doing his own thing. Not all families are perfect.
And me? Things are sort of going my way. I have my own place, I have a job, I’m taking hormone therapy, and I’m going to a support group at my clinic called “Mindfulness.” I think it’s to help get rid of negative thinking. I only went to one meeting so far and tomorrow is the second one. It doesn’t hurt to try something new.
It’s snowing in Madison, Wisconsin. Soft, sticky flakes slow down traffic and white out the majestic state capitol. Sixteen-year-old Luke (Luke’s real name has been changed, and his image is only partially revealed, at the request of his family) is in rehearsal with an LBGTQ teen theater group called Proud Theater. Every week, teen actors and writers divide up into small groups to explore a chosen topic. They ask one another questions and share personal stories. Then they do improvisations, searching for common threads that could turn personal stories into something theatrical. At the end of the rehearsal, they all come together to present their theater pieces. The theme tonight is transgender youths.
On a bare stage with no lighting and three people in the audience, Luke rehearses a poem he wrote. Later in the evening, he will read it before the entire company.
They told me
No.
Said, ‘What are you?’ said, ‘you gotta choose’
said, ‘Pink or blue?’
and I said I’m a real nice color of
magenta
everyday extremists that made this world just black
And white solid stripes
of a penitentiary uniform, imprisoned ourselves with nothing
but the ideas of who was on top and
who was on bottom,
bathe yourself afterward,
perhaps for the sake of hygiene, they told me, but gently
make sure that soap and water doesn’t wash away your
definition
—
red and sore down there from the moment those red curtains opened,
exposing me to the cries of “It’s a —”
and
fill
in
the
blank
on these paper pages, just wanna see how crazy you,
well not everything needs a diagnosis,
and you blame it back on things past in childhood
this is still my childhood
professionally inferring that those hands down my pants
had wiped smooth like wet clay
and re-sculpted something hideous.
and they told me,
hide it.
But somewhere, there’s this scared young woman in a black dress
on a claustrophobic staircase, bleeding
’cause that safety razor wasn’t all that safe after all
backstage and illuminated by a blue ghost light, and she
finally dares to look you in the eye
And me
and her
we’re gonna go dancing on air
Filling the space between these canyon walls, our
Bodies broken at the bottom.
’Cause, yeah, you have to give up some things
to be
untouchable.
“WOO, WOO, WOO, WOW! Pow-er-ful! Powerful, man,” shouts Sol Kelley-Jones, totally wrapped up in Luke’s poetry. Sol, one of the founders of Proud Theater, is rehearsing Luke for an upcoming benefit performance that will be hosted by Chaz Bono. Luke is tall and lanky, with blue eyes and sandy-blond hair that flies here and there as he moves.
Slowly coming out of his impassioned, demanding poem, he looks to Sol, smiling. Luke is an accomplished actor, writer, and poet. He wrote the poem he just recited for a ninth-grade poetry slam at his school. At that time, he was the only out person in his school. “In middle school, nobody else was queer. It was great to be around people, theater people, that identified as queer, people whose company I enjoyed.”
“Let’s try it again,” Sol says, after giving a few stage directions — when a turn becomes a pivot, when to look directly at the audience. Taking on the role of emcee, she shouts, “And now we have Proud Theater . . . ”
“Yeah! Proud Theater!” Sol’s also the audience. Clap! Clap! Clap! “Wooooo!”
Luke jumps up and down and shakes his long, tapered fingers like a whirlybird in preparation to recite again.
Watching Luke this evening, it is hard to imagine how shy he is offstage. Extreme shydom. Offstage he giggles lots. Onstage he’s authoritative and in total control.
Luke performs the poem again.
“WHOA!” yells Sol before lowering her voice. “It’s powerful stuff. Every time I hear it, I get new richness out of it. All right! Try it again.”
Last year, when I started writing the poem, I knew I was trans but I didn’t know if I was gender neutral or FTM (female-to-male). There’s a lot you can say in poetry that you can’t say in conversation. In poetry you can get images and you can get feelings. It’s more abstract, but it’s also more concrete.
I wanted to write a piece that I could do with authority. I wanted to explain this to my school. I wanted to explain it to myself too, because I didn’t know who or what I was at that time. I got a very, very positive response, which I was proud of. The poem got a twenty-nine out of a thirty score, a pretty good rating.
At that time, I identified as female but presented in a masculine way. You’ve probably heard the expression “write what you know”? I wrote my poem when I was starting to think,
Maybe I’m trans, maybe I’m trans, maybe I’m trans,
and this is kinda given away in the first couple of lines.
Said, ‘What are you?’ said, ‘you gotta choose’
said, ‘Pink or blue?’
and I said I’m a real nice color of
magenta
Coming out trans is very exposing. It opens you up to a lot of mockery. The reason I wrote the poem as I did was to come out with a bang. I wrote it also to clear away some of the criticism that I knew would be coming. If you get up on a stage and say “I’m trans” by doing a poem — that is hopefully an all right poem — it is more impressive than just coming out. At least it was for me.