Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out (25 page)
I wanted to perform it in the end-of-year Proud Theater program, but it was near showtime and I didn’t push it. A couple of weeks ago, Brian (Brian Wild, the adult artistic director of the company) remembered it and asked me to do it for the benefit. I took it out and said to myself,
You know what? This sucks. I need to rewrite this.
So I did. I don’t think I had it completely written down anywhere. It’s all been memorized. Basically I wrote everything down as I remembered it and filled in the parts that I couldn’t remember with stuff that I made up.
I’m not good about talking about poetry. I don’t know how to do it. Poetry is like thoughts, it gets at things more accurately.
When I was eleven or maybe twelve, I went to a performance at Proud Theater with some of my mom’s friends.
Oh, yeah, it’s so good,
I thought. When I turned thirteen, my mother’s friend’s son and I decided to check it out.
It was in a church, the sub-sub-basement of a church. We went down a flight of stairs, then another flight of stairs, then another flight of stairs, until we’re basically in a fallout shelter.
Luke and his friend Samuel found themselves in a big room filled with a bunch of high-school seniors. It was a bit intimidating.
We were sitting by ourselves in a little corner ’cause everybody’s, like, twice as tall as us, twice as old as us — well, not exactly. One guy, Seb, came up to us. He was wearing a skirt, and his hair was long. He said, “Hey, it’s so great you came! You’re like little children, and you’re here and that’s awesome. Like, high five!”
I was cool with that. “Yay, you accept me. At least you’re being nice to me.”
A twenty-year-old transgender playwright-mentor, who joined us for one of our interviews, was at the rehearsal too. He actually helped the two young actors through a warm-up session that begins every rehearsal. The playwright explained that Luke did not talk to him at first.
Yep. For the first six months, I didn’t talk to him.
“I used to be intimidating,” the playwright says with a laugh.
And I used to be shy as hell. I would go to Proud Theater and talk to my friend Samuel. I would follow him around because he was less shy than I was. I’m shy even around people my age, and these people were three or four years older than me.
After maybe four or five months of silence, Emma, an adult mentor, got me out of my shell. Emma became my first friend in Proud Theater other than Samuel. I thought,
You can actually talk to these people.
During my first year with the group, the playwright wrote a skit called “Do It Yourself.” I got cast as the trans man. Even though I was still identifying as female, I remember trying out for the part and really wanting it. But I didn’t actually know why.
“Do It Yourself” is like a foggy mirror, artfully hinting at the playwright’s mind-set before he came out trans to his parents. He told me that he chose to give the lead to Luke because he saw a lot of his own earlier behavior in the young actor. “I thought it would be interesting to give him the role and see what he would do with it. I figured by playing it, maybe it could get the gender identity ball rolling. If nothing else, it would be a great role for him.”
Probably the first major bully was in third grade. He made the usual generic insults for bullying trans people: “Are you a boy or a girl?” he would ask me. He asked a lot. “Are you a boy or a girl? Are you a boy or a girl? Do you want to be a boy?” I think he may have had a Napoleon complex because he was a small kid. He was athletic and good in sports, though.
I was good in sports too, but I didn’t participate much. When we played, we were always separated by gender, and I felt really uncomfortable playing with the girls. When I did play with the boys, if I did something wrong, I’d be so mortified that I’d be too embarrassed to go back and play again. Oh, my gosh, I was, like, deathly, deathly shy.
When I got to middle school, it got a lot worse — especially in sixth grade. There was this guy who . . . oh, my God . . . who was very, very — he was one of those people who was the typical popular jock type. Big. Tall. Athletic. Handsome. Stuff like that. Yeah. He was definitely one of the main harassers. He had a couple of guys who would accompany him. It was mostly verbal. When you are questioning whether you
are
a boy or a girl, and someone comes right out and asks you, “Are you a boy or a girl?” it’s like rubbing alcohol on a cut.
It only got physical a couple of times. I reported it once. The whole experience was so humiliating and useless that it kind of made me feel that I couldn’t trust the school system. One guy was coming on with the usual are-you-a-guy-or-a-girl-do-you-want-to-be-a-boy stuff. It was one of the first weeks in middle school, so I thought,
You know, it’s middle school. I should not take this anymore. I need to do something.
And I went to the teacher and said that I’d like to file a harassment report. As far as I know, the report wasn’t filed. They had me go into a room with him and asked me to tell him why I was upset. And he had to say “sorry.” It was very juvenile. It was very ineffective. A lot of it was mortifying because I didn’t like talking about harassment. When I did, it tended to bring more attention to what I was harassed about, which was gender expression.
I came out as trans to my mom. We were in the kitchen, sitting at the table. I think it was after school, but I don’t remember exactly. I was feeling emotionally shaky, and I don’t remember how it came out, but it did.
She quickly denied it, saying, “I don’t think you are.”
My older sister was there. She told my mom that if I said I was, I probably was. She actually said that to my mom, which I really appreciated. But my mom still said, “No, I don’t think you are.” That cut pretty deep, deep enough that I dropped it.
I had a couple of journal entries around that time:
I guess I’m a boy . . . I’m a boy . . . I’m a boy.
After my mom denied it, I stopped writing about it. I stopped thinking about it. When I stopped talking about it, my sister stopped too.
In seventh grade, there were attempts by the girls to fem me up. A couple of times, they held me down and put makeup on my face. To them it was very, very funny. Part of me didn’t want to say anything because, in a twisted sort of way, I was making people laugh. It was a chance to please people, so I didn’t tell anyone. Besides, I called these girls my friends. You always want to be able to have somebody as your friend. No one wants to say I don’t have any friends. And out of everybody in the school, they were the ones who paid me the most attention, so that translated into, oh, they’re friends.
I didn’t think I could tell my parents about them. I was afraid that Mom might have said what my friends did was for my own good. I mean, I don’t think she’d really say that, but there was always the fear that she might. Part of that was because when I dressed more female-like, because all my male clothes were dirty or something, my mom would say, “Oh, you look so nice today.” I didn’t look especially nice. I just looked more female.
I really, really enjoy acting. It’s the one thing that I’ve had positive feedback about all my life. I acted in school plays, little things on campus, basically wherever I could. It’s definitely a passion of mine. And it’s one of the few things I like doing that I’ve been told I do well. That gave me the confidence to try out for the play.
I kept a folder with all my Proud Theater scripts in it. I printed out information about testosterone and stuff like that, telling myself I was doing all this research for the skit, that I wanted to know about being trans for the skit. It was a total lie.
Portraying a trans person came really, really easily. “Hmmm, this feels right. Maybe I am trans.” I mean, in an oversimplified version of things, because I was acting the role of a trans man, I could explore being trans deeper than I could by just thinking about it. It was, like, “I’m not reading this stuff because I’m trans; I’m reading it because the character’s trans.” In reality it was a huge personal exploration.
Acting is so strange. You become someone else. Their troubles are your troubles. So it gets blurry, especially in this case. Who is who? Who is what?