The Monster at the End of This Post

The first rule of monsters is learning who is a monster.

I was a bookworm as a kid. Before starting kindergarten, I learned to read from a bookshelf of Little Golden Books, a book of Mother Goose, a collection of children’s Bible stories, and “Monster and Me”—a series of slim, white, hardbound books featuring a naked purple man called Monster, and his mentorship of a skinny brown boy called Boy. In my favorite story, the two are taking a walk (from the houses and trees, it looks like they live in California) when it begins to rain. Monster takes out an umbrella, turns it upside-down, and makes it grow to the size of a giant swimming pool. The umbrella-bowl fills with rain. Then the sun comes out, and dozens of kids show up to swim in this enormous, deep pool with Boy. There are no parents, and nothing bad ever happens in the “Monster” books. I would read them over and over, especially the one with the umbrella trick.

My favorite book as a child was not on my bookshelf: it was in the local public library. I checked out The Very Hungry Caterpillar so many times that the librarian suggested to my mother that she should buy me a copy. It was the first book I loved: the clever placement of holes, the delicious looking food, and how the caterpillar grows huge, then undergoes a mysterious transformation, fueled by all of that exotic fare.

When my little sister was old enough to ask me to read to her, her favorite book was The Monster at the End of This Book. It featured Grover, the Sesame Street Muppet, breaking the fourth wall and speaking directly to the reader. I would love this effect, later, when “Choose Your Own Adventure” books became popular. Like “Monster,” they were written in the second-person present tense. Grover is afraid of monsters, he explains, and spends most of the book trying to convince the reader not to turn the page. His plans to forestall the end grow more grandiose, but those powerful, wicked children we were, we just kept turning pages, delighting in Grover’s growing panic. Even my little sister had the power to make Grover beg her for mercy.

We knew something about monsters, and stories, that gave us an advantage over poor Grover. After destroying an entire brick wall that he builds to keep the monster at the end of the book at bay, Grover is crushed: not by the bricks so much as by his failure in avoiding his fate. We turn the final page, and find, muppet ex machina, that it is Grover himself who is the eponymous monster at the end of this book.

***

There are two kinds of monsters in stories. There are protective and friendly monsters, like the Monster who is Boy’s friend, and like most Muppets who call themselves monsters. And then there are real monsters: the things too scary for children’s movies, but which appear, anyway, in nightmares, or are known to exist, somewhere… A book like The Monster at the End of This Book was educational: it taught children to recognize that monsters walk among us and share the same fears and longings. Even you, gentle reader, could be a monster and not realize it. Better to let your nature be unfolded and to face it with equanimity.

After I outgrew picture books, I moved on to different genres of young adult fiction: the aforementioned “Choose Your Own Adventure” series, which prefigured RPGs. I was comforted by stories of neglected protagonists who get happy endings: Heidi, Oliver Twist, Black Beauty, My Side of the Mountain, The Outsiders. I went through a phase where all I read were books about teenage girls in dire circumstances: Go Ask Alice, Deenie, Karen, books about teen pregnancy, anorexia, poverty, incest. I wanted the extremities of experience, reports of life on the edges, to know how bad it could get. Like other teenagers, I was drawn to horror, fantasy, and science fiction. A young adult title that I read and reread was The Girl Who Could Fly, about a teenager who orders wings from the back of a comic book, drinks the accompanying magic potion, and finds herself with real, permanently affixed, rainbow-hued wings: able to fly, and at the same time, desperate to hide her new gift. At the climax, she panics at her transformation, and finds a way back to normalcy. I was disappointed by this ending, so although I loved the book enough to check it out of the library repeatedly, I would read the book, on subsequent occasions, only to a point at which she remains happy with her new life, and then lay the book aside and start another.

***

As a young adult in college, I read textbooks. An English major, I eventually only read what was assigned. I stopped reading much of anything when I started working as a technical writer, until one day when I was at home after my grandmother died. I’d been at her bedside when she passed, and we had been very close. After she died, I kept taking sick days from work and hiding in my apartment, chain smoking.

My roommate studied gender performance. His bookshelf was full of titles like Gender Trouble and Stone Butch Blues. Although I was keenly curious about some of these, I never borrowed one or even flipped through them. This day, I went to my roommate’s bookshelf, selected Leslie Feinberg’s novel and sat down and began to read. My life started to change that day.

When I read Stone Butch Blues, I reacted like other trans men I’ve talked to about this book, and also as I did when I read The Girl Who Could Fly. In Leslie Feinberg’s novel, a fictionalized memoir, the protagonist, Jess, medically transitions in order to pass as a man, then finds ze doesn’t identify comfortably within either the category of butch woman or of trans man. When Jess realizes that hir identity as a man is not clear or strong, I felt uncomfortable: let down because, like other trans men who found their way through Stone Butch Blues, I realized by the end of the book that this is not about someone exactly like myself.

Trans person as monster is a common trope, even when used sympathetically. Hedwig and the Angry Inch, one of my favorite films, is about a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, though when she sings and dances, she decides where to insert the laughs. Hedwig, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, and The Monster at the End of This Book are all focused on the same conundrum as Mary Shelley was in the original Frankenstein: puzzling out who are the real monsters from who just looks like one, who the victims are, what is monstrous in human nature, and whether we are all, inescapably, monsters.

I want my monsters both lovable and courageous; I want them to forge on to the end, to self-awareness, able to see themselves for everything they are, inside and out. When the adventurer who orders a pair of wings and puts them on realizes she is changing, is afraid, and turns back to her prescribed and boring life, I am disappointed by her lack of character and vision.

The first Frankenstein’s monster is tragic; newer incarnations offer other possibilities. Dr. Frankenfurter’s initial inspiration spirals into madness and he goes home at the end of the film, thwarted. The hungry caterpillar is transformed—gorgeous—and young Frankenstein’s monster enjoys both a happy ending and a monster-sized member, while Hedwig’s triumph, like Jess’ and Grover’s, is a more measured one: she has an inch, no longer angry, and walks out of the last scene with nothing and no one else, free and alive and open to the possibilities.

—Photo credit:  Jim Brayton/Flickr

Death In Spring

My yard in riotous June.

“I hate this wallpaper,” Wilde was supposed to have said, just before he died. “One or the other of us will have to go.”

My therapist told me this quote from Oscar Wilde, supposedly his last words. We’ve been talking about being outcast, and queer, and of thoughts of death and suicide. Wilde had been ill after his imprisonment, and his last months were spent bedridden, in a room with ugly wallpaper. When Jason tells me this I think of “The Yellow Wallpaper” first, because of the literary connection, then of the wallpaper in my own home, the lower half of a decrepit Victorian. “I hate this wallpaper,” Wilde was supposed to have said, just before he died. “One or the other of us will have to go.”

It’s a season of death and illness, even as it’s undoubtedly spring come early. Everyone’s mental health and immune defenses are at their lowest ebb, in the pause between the last of the cellared rations of tubers and the first greens of spring. My husband claims to be nursing at least his third consecutive cold. The snows have melted, unlikely to return. The banks of the river are pits of sucking clay. In the yards and along every path, snowdrops have been supplanted with crocuses; this morning I walked the dog through the neighborhood, and saw a forsythia in bloom.

Anything growing in my own yard, besides grass and trees and some shrubs, is thanks to Abby, who had been our neighbor when we first moved here. As I go in and out the door to the porch where I garage my bicycle, I pass the particularly sprawling and accursed yew that Abby had a vendetta against. Now that the snow has melted, I can see the pile of sand and yard trash she had deposited into the middle of it, in her attempts to kill it without uprooting it outright. She hated our landlord, but would not defy him outright, only in her sidelong witchy way.

Abby, her teenage daughter, Micah, who had ferrets, Abby’s wife, Janet, their neurotic dog, Ziggy, and their cats constituted the family upstairs when we moved in. A couple years after we arrived, Micah graduated and moved into her own place in town. Then, a few years ago, Abby and Janet bought their own house in the next village. Within the year Abby, who had never been well, became seriously ill. I saw her in the hospital the day she and Janet got the news that Abby had stage IV cancer, but I didn’t realize that I would never see my friend again. There is no fifth stage. Abby died within a couple of weeks.

After Abby and Janet moved away, we had other neighbors, but they come and go, all college students, and we’ve liked some of them, but never had the fondness we did for our first neighbors. We were “the boys” to them, just a little bit younger than our upstairs matriarchs and an all-male household beneath their all-female one (except for cats and ferrets). They were the ones who made relationships with our neighbors in the houses on either side of us, gave us a way to piggyback into them when they left, so that we share dog talk, snow removal equipment and labor with them, watch their houses when they go on vacation.

But mostly this is Kevin who does this work of being neighborly. I’m planted in the past, still picking Abby’s raspberries every May and freezing them. I make desserts from them and bring them to Janet’s potlucks. I admire, photograph, and report upon Abby’s roses, her black irises, the daffodils and crocuses that are thinned each year by the squirrel population. No one feeds the birds, now that Abby’s gone, but they still come to raise families in our trees each year.

Even that fucking shrub is still alive, still gaping where it has spread instead of being pruned, full of grit and trash. Oh Abby, I think, as I pass. She had such a cheerful way with what was ugly, happy to bring home boxes of plants, plaster stickers over her loud and tiny sherbet-orange beater of a car. Abby made things with her disturbances of fertile grounds. Her perennials still bloom. Micah still has Janet. So does Ziggy, who is a calmer animal than she ever was, reflecting her mistress’ unflappable demeanor. Abby was the loud one, spiky-haired, covered in piercings and dressed in purple, though there was always something calm and fixed about her gaze. She was actually shy, but went to pains to hide this. She loved the beautiful and the tender ones, hated bullies and the resistant, persistent ugly things that can’t be scrubbed out or ripped out.

How Abby hated that shrub. One or the other of them was going to have to go.

Hugo Schwyzer Is Still a Feminist

“The interests of women — and particularly of abuse survivors — take precedence here. And a former abuser who has truly changed his ways will, I believe, understand why that line is drawn. End of story.” —Jill ”On the Hugo Business” on Feministe

This is the explanation given for why Hugo Schwyzer is no longer welcome on Feministe, after revealing the worst thing he ever did. It’s a good example of why I’m so much more involved in a project that is not nominally feminist these days, a project that is focused on men’s lives, even to the dismay of my feminist friends of all genders. I’m at The Good Men Project because I am a man, because I love men and always have, and because I care about men’s experiences. Not exclusively: I have also always loved girls and women, listened to and cared about their lives, though this was expected of me, having been born female. And being part of the trans community, of people moving across and around the gender spectrum, the most important lesson I have learned is that we are all human souls and can be hurt in precisely the same ways. The differences are subtle and pervasive, and so highly fetishized that gender can take center stage, as if it were the most important difference among us, or told us so much more about a person than it does.Though Jill seems to think that our society sidelines the experiences of women who have experienced abuse and violence so as not to harm the good men in our movements, that is not what I’ve seen in my more than a fifteen years as a feminist. The ones whose experiences are regularly sidelined within feminism are men’s, particularly when they don’t fit the intersection of traditional and feminist masculinity.Hugo continues to demonstrate through his humility that he will stay in that intersection of acceptable masculinity. He won’t rise to defend himself because he doesn’t think he deserves to; Jill certainly doesn’t. A good man doesn’t defend himself against a woman, and a good feminist man accepts that the victimized, female feminists get to decide who else has a valid feminist narrative.

I don’t know what to call this feminist movement that Jill is a part of, that doesn’t think Hugo’s experience is worth contributing or examining, that believes his experience has pushed its way to front and center of a conversation that is not about him, and gotten too much spotlight compared with the experiences of abuse survivors, on which at least Feministe is explicitly focused.

I’m sick of this other double yoke, too: the one for women that says they must be both empowered and victim-identified. Jill has a voice, and as she rightly points out, silence equals complicity. After the first disappointing excommunication of Hugo from Feministe, she had a responsibility to her community to say what she believes. I’ve defended Hugo publicly before, about a different matter, but I haven’t spoken out clearly and publicly about this before.

I know and have loved people who have done terrible things. I have done terrible things. Without forgiveness of one another and ourselves, there’s no way forward out of any of the evil in the world, no way for us to dismantle the patriarchy and build a better world for our children. We need to understand the pain that leads to tragedy, and have sympathy even for the Devil.

Satan was once of the Creator’s most beloved. And there is still horror, decadence, and torture in the world. We cannot hope to eradicate them by only understanding those who are righteous victims that uphold our most treasured beliefs about how utterly wrong crimes like rape and genocide are. In Rwanda, survivors of the genocide all live together. This is the model of justice and mercy I would prefer to follow, that understands there are other forces at work: that people don’t just roll out of bed and decide to murder their neighbors and girlfriends.

It isn’t a simple matter, but being good isn’t always simple. In this interview on Feministe, when asked about a time when he slept with his students, he says, “the key word is simply ‘unethical.’” Then, he doesn’t leave it at that. Being a feminist man and a professor of gender studies, he also says, “It’s made me mistrustful of the possibility of consent in those instances where one person has so much more experience and authority than the other.”

I have called myself a feminist for a long time, like Hugo has, and I say that no one can kick either one of us out of feminism, or any other ideology. If either of us wants to walk away, we may. But if I believe in feminism, even if my definition doesn’t match Hugo’s or Jill’s, and I believe that a man can be a feminist, then I will call myself one, and no one can take that identity from me. Hugo has said that he is going to move away from explicitly feminist spaces, and I wish he didn’t feel he had to go into exile. I understand, but the hate and anger that has come from feminists against Hugo, and saying that his voice is not welcome, not even safe to listen to, is misdirected. Telling his story opened him up to becoming a whipping boy, and he did; the example will not encourage others to share their stories, so we can only expect to find out about them when they’re cracked open as sex scandals. No humility, change, accountability, or learning, there.

There’s nothing in Hugo’s story that can hurt any of us. Being triggered by reading about it is not his fault: it’s the result of being a traumatized reader, and once the flashback has passed and you are grounded in the present again, you will know the difference between actually being helpless in the grasp of a dangerous person you trusted, and having the power to walk away from the page.

Drink and drive: satire as social rumble strip

Reviews of “The Sarah Silverman Program” and Louis C.K.’s show, “Louie.”I don’t watch TV: I watch Netflix. When TV was more of a shared experience, I could talk to people about what’s on TV. When I was a kid, I watched “All in the Family” on TV with my family. We’d all gather in the living room and laugh at Archie Bunker, the patriarch of the family, who was ignorant, sexist, racist, and abusive to the people who loved him. We compared the family members to our own household: the garrulous, naive mother; the irascible yet lovable father. These were people we knew and loved and poked fun at by proxy. We could laugh at the injustice of our situations.

In order to say something important and provocative about social issues, comedy writers will sometimes create satirical characters like Archie Bunker and his family. They’re a comedic device, and one with a danger of backfiring. In order to learn what the writers want to say about us, they have to make us understand that these are caricatures of us. We have to identify with it, but not all the way, leaving room to figure out to what degree we unconsciously embrace the views being criticized.

The the danger in airing “All in the Family” back then was of overidentification with the satire: of not recognizing that it was a criticism, and not merely a window on our shared reality. When this happens, there is a danger of satire failing.

It’s easier to make a distinction between a character like Pee-Wee Herman and the actor Paul Reubens, because they have different names. Sometimes the public persona is the real person, as much as that can be said to be true: Mr. Rogers was in character wholly consistent with Fred Rogers’ values. Paul Reubens has very different values and desires in his private life than the permanent man-child he plays as Pee-Wee Herman. Archie Bunker and the characters that Sarah Silverman and Stephen Colbert perform are all characters, distinct from the people who play them. Even more closely associated than O’Connor is with Bunker are the comedians who play characters with their own names.

We are increasingly called upon to distinguish ever more subtle divisions between our satires and our real values. It is a measure of the cultural competency required of the artist who can produce satirical art that tricks the viewer into seeing the artwork as evocative of an important aspect of real life, however momentarily. As Warhol did with his soup cans, and television comedy productions do, pop art reframes the ordinary so that we will consider it anew.

When we correctly identify the frame around the art—the authorial voice, the laugh track, the linguistic clues that this is satire—we feel savvy. This is part of the joy of beholding art: realizing that it is art. Being photorealistic is not what makes art a true mirror to life; it’s how true it is. Truth can be conveyed with stick figures. The crudest cartoons can speak most vividly to real and complex desires.

A Triaminic haze sequence in the first episode of “The Sarah Silverman Program” that looked like it was drawn with MS Paint tricked me thoroughly. I’m a big fan of Silverman’s standup, so I was surprised to find, when she brought her same character into sitcom format, that her first episode still managed to push a reality button for me. The dangerous self-involvement Silverman’s character embodies didn’t bother me when she played an ambivalent rape victim in her standup routine, but when she reminded me of the danger of people who drive while fucked up, I reacted in fear.

I’ve been in just a few car accidents, none of which I’d call serious: I sustained no injury worse than a concussion, a sprained wrist, or flashbacks. I have friends who will be on pain meds forever, who might never walk unassisted, whose lives are far more altered than mine by car accidents, so I don’t seriously consider how car culture has traumatized me, when it has claimed victims with greater violence and finality. I think we’re far too blasé about driving, because everybody does it. In addition to my blogs on home cooking and industrial food, I write about bicycle commuting, so it’s not as though I weren’t already in touch with the hazards of car culture, but I was used to considering them in terms of physical health and the environment. Silverman made me examine how I feel about driving under the influence that no number of billboards has made me consider.

When I realized that I’d fallen under the spell that Silverman casts, I had a new respect for the subtlety of difference between the authorial voice and the voice of the character.

I had forgotten, momentarily, and found myself angry at Silverman, the author, because I had been lulled into taking her character seriously. I realized, like one blogger who has compared me to Stephen Colbert, that it is possible to be lulled into identification with the satirical perspective, and that it is this precise danger which makes comedy so dangerous. The feeling of alarm that I get when I fall into these cunning traps, as I did when I began to identify too strongly with the fussy diners in “Portlandia,” gives me a jolt of adrenaline. Sometimes it reminds me of the rumble strips on the edges of highways, which warn the driver who has drifted too far from the safety of the right-hand lane.

***

Silverman the author remains one of my favorite comedians, but she’s not for relaxation. If you want to settle in and have your mind expanded in a less painful way, there is the positive role model that Louis C.K. offers in his comedy. Louis C.K. is as willing as Silverman to tackle difficult subject matter in his comedy, but different because for much of his comedy, and particularly what he does in “Louie,” he cannot work through a character. “Louie” is Louis.In my favorite of his routines, Louis C.K. contrasts the hedonism of cake with the self-abnegation (and tremendously ripped abs) of Jesus Christ. He is the master of the awkward balance of self-consciousness and desire and for this, instead of being brave enough to pretend to be the Devil, he has to be himself: base, striving, and of human scale. In the second episode of his show, “Poker/Divorce,” this straight man stages a serious conversation about the word faggot that manages to inform and delight.

I trust this straight man to be true, and it allows me to securely identify with him; this is especially so when Louie chooses one hilariously seductive path after another to satisfy both his role and his desires. When Silverman’s character does basically the same thing, I have to watch her with the same critical eye with which I watch “The Colbert Report.” I expect the punch line that jars me from any potential prolonged identification with their outrageous satires. Their reminders that I am at all like one of these objects of ridicule vary in severity of tone, from the rumblings that accompany straying from the lane, to a moral klaxon blaring. Reminders that I am like Louie don’t hurt.

The Good Men Project: Recent posts on Penn State, “The Kids Are All Right”

My recent posts on The Good Men Project have been on the evil that men do when good men do nothing.

Before learning the identity of the grad assistant who saw Sandusky in the shower that night, I only wanted to know, why didn’t he call 911 when he saw a violent crime in progress? Mike McQueary has stopped a knife fight. He could have put a stop to this known child molester.  Only he could ever explain why he didn’t.

Cognitive Dissonance and the Sandusky Situation

Sperm donor Paul could have been a flaky, yet lovable spuncle to Nic and Jules’ kids, teenagers Laser and Joni. Instead, he fucked it all up. Then he walked away. My principal problem with him is the part where he walks away.

Are the Kids All Right?

My big, gay marriage

Justin Cascio and Kevin Collins on their wedding day (Photo credit: Janet Grunwald)

It took more than a change in state law for Kevin and I to be united in legally wedded bliss last summer.

Neither of us began life destined for manhood. Our birth certificates register the births of female babies, and we were raised as girls. By the time I was an adult, I was aware of those not born to womanhood claiming it for themselves, but it still hadn’t occurred to me that I could do the same in my own life: that the man I saw in the mirror could be made visible to others. I learned it was possible to become a transsexual man when I finally saw others change their female-looking and sounding bodies and voices and names to match their male souls and minds. By the time Kevin and I met through a mutual girlfriend–we were all polyamorous queers–I was several years beyond the awkward phase. No one who met me could tell that I hadn’t been born male.

Kevin wasn’t yet Kevin, but he was nearly on his way. When he decided to transition, he began to act on his emancipation from the gender roles that had confined him. Realizing that he was a man meant that he felt entitled to masculinize his body, as I had, and take a new, male name. This was just part of what his freedom afforded him. It also enabled him to act on his other desires, the ones he had suppressed in order to be a “good” butch lesbian. As my own feminine appearance had belied my masculine identity, Kevin’s looks were interpreted as evidence of another, preconceived set of behaviors and desires: he was typecast as the butch. Despite what he looked like, he loved men, and he was attracted to me. The attraction was mutual, and we fell in love.

I know this isn’t unique to transgender, gay/lesbian/bisexual, polyamorous, or kinky people, but Kevin and I felt lucky to have found one another. It’s difficult to find someone compatible when your gender and body don’t closely match, when your sexual orientation is in the minority, and your attitudes about sexual monogamy are even less well understood by most people.

Kevin and I first talked about marrying when we moved to Northampton, MA. Before living together in Brooklyn, NY, we’d both grown up in conservative places: the Rust Belt for Kevin, and the Bible Belt for me. For years, we’d seen lesbian and gay couples in the news, countless pairs of them being married on courthouse steps and raising their ringed hands and signed licenses triumphantly in the streets of California, then in Massachusetts. Gay marriage had arrived in Massachusetts before we did, so the decision to marry was open to us. Would we be legally wed?

I have been married once before, as a woman to a man, and have a child from that marriage. Since transition, I’d once toyed with the idea of marrying a woman I was involved with, but we backed out at the last minute, unready to make the commitment to one another. Kevin and I had both already made tremendous changes in our expectations for our lives. As well, the world had changed around us, altering our real and perceived options of what we could do or be, and how we might live. We both felt incredibly lucky to have discovered the joy and peace of being in a comfortable gender, being seen by others as we saw ourselves, loving who we wanted, and not hiding any of these things. Taking on marriage, with the multiple challenges that we present to the traditional model, required an additional adjustment to our sense of entitlement. Upon arrival in Massachusetts, we were just old enough people, and new enough as men, to not yet feel worthy of the right to marry as gay men.

Getting married is a supremely traditional act. It’s a vote of confidence in the conservative, stabilizing forces of civilization that act as counterweight to the dramatic societal changes that civil rights movements bring. When I was ready to embrace marriage with Kevin, it was because I had no doubt that we could make the institution our own. We had an unusual relationship from the start, and we made it work because we believed in our values and because we valued what made us different from other people we knew. Even though much of our lives felt experimental, ad hoc, and constantly evolving, we made our marriage a priority. Making good on our commitment to stick together, we had proven not only able, but had grown as people in the process. Not only was marriage good for us, but we were good for our marriage.

The last barrier was not a legal one, but a trans matter: one of gender identity. Although my documentation was already corrected, Kevin’s was not, and it was important to him to make our relationship public as a man, not as a woman. Some people are more than glad to use the loopholes of documentation to create legal, heterosexual marriages between two people of the same gender. Gaining the legal rights of marriage in a state that denied us a marriage as men would not have served our goals. We weren’t marrying to gain some tangible benefit, like health insurance. We would be discriminated against, experiencing the many injustices that come with a state-recognized, but federally ignored marriage, and fight the injustice like other gay married couples.

We made our own wedding. Kevin sews and bakes and gathers people, I cook and write and collect music. We pooled our domestic powers, as we had for seven years of commitment, interdependence, love, sex, and living together. We took out some loans. We invited our dear friends, co-workers, and relatives. My sister came from California and I met my niece, who got two new “tíos”: “uncles” she met at their wedding, and who love her. Thanks to my sister, my niece has never known a world where two such tíos as my husband and I are second-rate family.

In Paula Ettelbrick’s obituary, her legal opinion on gay and lesbian marriage from 1989 was quoted: “Justice for gay men and lesbians will be achieved only when we are accepted and supported in this society despite our differences from the dominant culture and the choices we make regarding our relationships.”

The real “danger” to society in recognizing our right to marry is that we will inevitably queer marriage. Broadening the definition in one way presents ever more ways in which we may negotiate formal, legally recognized relationships that match the way we live. We are sure to see social and legal changes at an increasing rate, as our private lives accommodate new ranges of possibilities, and even more rights are clamored for and eventually won. Someday we’ll win the rights to create our own marriage contracts, decide for ourselves their conditions and constraints, and even the number of participants in a marriage, or how many marriage contracts one person may enter at any given time. The conservative forces might hope that the radicals will be appeased with an offering of equal marriage, but only the first wave of conscious gay citizens can possibly receive its birthright as if it were a gift.

Why transition from female to male, to become a gay married couple? It’s a question that both Kevin and I took years to learn to answer this succinctly: We transitioned to match our bodies to our feelings of already being men. Our sexual orientation is who we are attracted to. We married for love.

Our human polyculture

Since Kevin and I got together, more than eight years ago, we’ve pulled one another along on our journeys toward health. We’re both unusual people with special needs: sensitive, intelligent, and traumatized, as well as queer and transgender. Our trajectory toward integration and wellness hasn’t been steady or moved only forward. When Kevin moved into my Brooklyn apartment, he was an ex-smoker, but he picked up cigarettes again because I still smoked. He introduced me to a whole foods diet, and I started cooking it, but only occasionally: mostly we still ate fast food or worse, convenience store food. Eventually I got sick for what I decided would be the last time, and we both quit smoking. We got bicycles and rode them to farmers markets and the upscale groceries in Manhattan. We subscribed to a weekly delivery of organic vegetables and fruit, and worked our way up to the challenge of eating a whole farm share. When we moved to Massachusetts, we made local farm shares the staples of our diet.

Now we’ve lived here in the Pioneer Valley for more than six years. While Kevin has pursued mental health therapy, I’ve worked through trauma in my body by engaging in physical activities. Kevin has gotten more active and seen the benefits to his mood and reduction in chronic pain, but nothing he tried, not exercise, prescription drugs, or careful adherence to a whole foods diet, helped with either his sugar cravings or his road rage.

A couple weekends ago, I took him to his first Weston A. Price Foundation potluck, and he learned from some of the attendees about their Paleo or otherwise gluten-free diets, which could be seen as a subset of the traditional foods diet that the WAPF people eat. Cutting grains out of his diet was a revelation. Even with all of the progress he has made in therapy with his panic disorder, the multiple daily panic attacks continued. What finally made them stop, cold, was no longer eating wheat. His sugar craving is gone, too. He no longer comes home and tells me about the cookies he couldn’t resist at work, or the drivers he tailgated on the way home. After years of living with his panic attacks, he doesn’t go off anymore. He tells me he feels like he’s finally himself.

In the same time frame that Kevin has been figuring out the effects of certain foods in his diet, I have been learning the differences among the sensations that I’ve always classed as “hunger,” including certain kinds of boredom and anxiety, low blood sugar, withdrawal from sugar or caffeine, and hungers for protein, fat, or carbohydrates, which I had never before differentiated. I used to eat what I ate, when I ate it, because I kept a routine to tell me when and what to eat. I used dishes and the amounts I commonly served myself for portion control, because I would eat everything on my plate. Now I find that the sensation of being done eating is enough to make me stop eating. I no longer power through that “stop” and go on eating til the food is gone.

The adjustment, as the household cook, is more than just new lists of foods Kevin will and will not eat, and new proportions for the foods that remain. Both of us listening to our bodies and eating what we want is resulting in us choosing different diets. When I started cooking Paleo for Kevin, it meant changing what a meal looked like. Before, lunch or dinner always looked the same: rice or potatoes, meat or beans, and at least one vegetable, in rough thirds by volume. Now Kevin’s meals are more like half vegetables, half meat by volume. Where he used to take oatmeal for an afternoon snack, now he takes a sausage. He fixes his own beef soup for breakfast each morning and seems to enjoy doing a little slicing and simmering for his meal. He’s suddenly become a big fan of my bone stock. This diet has done for Kevin what whole foods and being able to feel my own hungers, which came from reading about the difference between sating and satiating, have done for me. He was like me, also a “Clean Plate Club” member, and now has become an extremely fussy and particular eater. He knows exactly what he wants to eat, and wants to eat that only, nothing else. When I try to eat like he does now, I find the soup off-putting as a first food of the day, and at mid-morning, I still want a grilled egg and cheese sandwich. I miss the part that’s gone, but Kevin doesn’t. I take this to mean that we’re different, and while it was good to experience what Kevin’s new diet is like, I have to trust my body’s cues, which I’ve just begun to understand.

If we trust our own bodies and the wisdom inherent in them, they can tell us what we need, whether it’s to move or eat, drink water, sleep, seek out other people, or get some sun. We knew enough to do these things before science told us they were necessary. Some people’s bodies definitely tell them that wheat is toxic. Other people’s bodies are unable to tolerate other foods that I can eat without trouble, like dairy, soy, shellfish, and nuts. I don’t know if an inability to process these foods is part of natural variation, or a sign of damage to the body, but in either case, the body’s wisdom should be allowed to prevail. It’s obvious to me, with all of the uncertainty and anxiety that exists in my culture around what we ought to eat, that we have insufficient scientific knowledge to answer these questions for everyone. What we do have in sufficient quantities are bodies that can speak to us, if we can only listen. In order to listen, we might need to know what it is we’re listening for. Although its a private conversation between you and your body, it’s informed by culture: what is worth listening to, and what we even have common language to describe, determine to a tremendous degree what we are capable of even considering, much less understanding. I doubt I would have learned on my own that I was transgender before I had conceptualized a trans man or learned that we exist. Finding out about my hunger drives was a similar kind of revelation, and I’m sure there is much more wisdom of this kind, if I can only figure out how people talk about it. While lots of people are concerned about health, diet, and exercise, far fewer are listening to their bodies for the answers, and fewer still know how to talk about those conversations. We need to learn how to do this, and by “we” I mean me and the other members of my culture who have lost this wisdom and are looking for it.

Our understanding of the human race does not end with the genome, but even here, I am beginning to think that we are more of a polyculture than we are used to thinking of ourselves. While I’d heard that there were no more traces of the Neanderthals in the modern human genome, more recently I have learned that they do live on in us: except for Africans, who apparently never encountered them, modern people from everywhere else in the world have between one and six percent Neanderthal genes. It made me happy to learn this, because I was sad at the thought that when a species dies, nothing is left of it to live on, not even its successful progeny. Someday we will divide again, and a new subset of humanity will arise from among us. How we react to them, and whether we will consider them human at all, remains to be seen.

There may be only tiny differences—less than one percent—between our genome and that of our nearest living relative, the chimpanzee, so either those tiny differences are potent, or some of the apparent junk in the genome is actually important, just undecipherable to us right now. I think we will not be able to precisely define what makes an individual a human, because it will turn out that a species is defined not by the traits each one of us carries, but by our characteristics as communities of humans. We have much in common, but trying to nail down the essentials always leaves some human out. We can’t all reproduce, or walk, we weren’t all born with ten fingers and ten toes, and we have different reactions to drugs and some foods. In agriculture, polycultures are healthier and more efficient, so it may be for the best that science hasn’t figured this out yet, because I have a feeling we’d start hurtling toward a human monoculture, first thing, instead of valuing our human diversity.