From Leslie Feinberg's photostream on Flickr.

I had few role models growing up.

My sports hero was Art Shamsky of the New York Mets. Amazingly, I got to see him a few times--amazingly, because he wasn't exactly in the starting line-up. He usually came in late in the game when a left-handed pinch-hitter was needed. He was the closest thing to myself in baseball--a slow-running Jewish lefty power-hitter with a self-deprecating sense of humor.

Shamsky came to Monticello Raceway one summer with a few teammates to sign autographs and answer questions. My question ("who makes your glove?") and his funny answer ("U.S. Steel") were reported in the sports section of the Times Herald-Record. They reported that the question had been asked by "a young lady in the crowd." My premature debut as a femme.

Then it was Harpo Marx, after I read his autobiography, Harpo Speaks. He presented himself as an innocent, which is how I saw myself--and I totally identified with his submissive relationship to his brother Chico. 

Then there were the people I couldn't recognize as role models, because they represented roles that were not available to me. But I idolized them. They were free-spirited women who lived unconventional lives.

The first I can recall was Juliet Mills as Pamela Piggott in Billy Wilder's Avanti! Miss Piggott goes to Italy and has an affair with the married son of the married man with whom her free-spirited mother had had a "same time next year" affair for decades. It's the man Mills has the affair with, Jack Lemmon, who is the film's main character. She is the catalyst for positive change in his life. But I never identified with his desires or concerns. It is my enduring ambition in life to be a free spirit and a catalyst for positive change. As a married man with a job, I was unable to be either.

The other free spirit I recall spending a lot of time thinking about was Shirley MacLaine as Jennifer Rogers in Hitchcock's black comedy The Trouble with Harry. Where Juliet Mills was blond and dressed in frills and ribbons like a girl's doll, Shirley MacLaine was redheaded (like me) and tomboyish and…sexy! And in touch with her sexual nature in a way that awed me. It comes through in this 6:30 clip--stay 'til the end of the clip to hear the line that is etched in my brain: "Lightly, Sam. I have a very short fuse."

I spent a lot of time looking for women that reminded me of these archetypes, but when I found them I never wanted to be a man to them like Jack Lemmon or John Forsythe, MacLaine's love interest in TTWH. Now I know: I wanted to be one of them--a free-spirited woman living an unconventional life.

Brian Eno – Burning Airlines Give You So Much More #favoritesongs

Prog rock, Italian style PFM (Premiata Forneria Marconi) performing "Celebration."

Chet Atkins & Les Paul

I need a good photo editor to put my face over Madison Young's in this pic. I think it would go a long way toward explaining my gender, sexuality and orientation to people.

Remember the movie Dark City, where the people wake up every day to a city that has been physically reconfigured? It's okay, because they wake up already programmed to the new map (and all the new facts of their new lives). My gender is like the map of the dark city, but I am its Rufus Sewell, plagued by a sense that everything is wrong, and getting wronger every day.

Sewell's character is caused to develop his latent talents, and can then alter the city himself to create a consistent and continuous reality. I no longer even aspire to consistency, but I am slowly developing my ability to give expression to my daily gender--my queer if not trans if not femme if not dyke gender. But not until I can inhabit it. Sometimes the only way to find it is by taking endless self-portraits and making cartoons out of them.

My day typically begins with an urgent reminder of my maleness. From there it is a quest to find the correct expression of my femininity. I have struck the first counter-blow by keeping polish on my nails at all times. (My toes are still polished from the mani-pedi I received on film in Lemonade in late June.) I also keep my genitals tucked tightly away in a pair of women's spandex panties all day (and and all of the night). It's my equivalent of breast binding. When I'm lucky, I notice my nails or panties before the need to pee makes me aware of my penis (maybe I should start calling it my "pee-ness"). If not, it can take hours to "girl up."

Yesterday, I woke up feeling chilly and made a tactical error: I put a "shirt-jacket" out of my old wardrobe. I sat down to drink my coffee and get on Twitter and Facebook, but I didn't feel right. So I went to the bathroom and shaved my face (except for the small moustache and soul patch I have been letting grow out this week), and I put my hair in pigtails. I took a picture, using the webcam on my MacBook.

The collar tabs kept flopping over and hitting my chin. That was an annoyance. But in the image, it looked as if I was wearing a men's flannel or corduroy shirt. That was enough to make me take the shirt off. And redo my pigtails. And put on lipstick (Belladonna Mauve--nearly the same shade as my lips. And take more pictures.


I manipulated the images to enhance the stubble above and below my lips, but it's the pigtails that really stand out.

I had to see my shrink in the afternoon, so I put on a top. I prefer a tank with spaghetti straps, but because of the chill, I put on a white blouse, one of my first purchases from Target. I also wore my brand new terry velour pedal pushers, also from Target. I also curled my lashes and applied mascara (black ruby, formulated for green eyes). And eyebrow pencil. More pics. More cartoons. And I had found my gender for another day.

"Well no one's asked, me but I still answer...I like girls, I like girls!" #favoritesongs

This Ain't the Summer of Love

Here's the original of the close-up:



Wearing Cover Girl Exact Eyelights in Black Ruby (formulated to for green eyes)
and Cover Girl Almost Nude lipstick.

…and no one but me to stroke it.

"To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it."--Kurt Vonnegut

I suffer from Klutz's syndrome, which prevents me from creating things of beauty with my hands. I never took a class in art or design, and I have described myself for years as "made of words."

Four weeks ago, I followed a link to a make a cartoon avatar, and I've been back to the Web site every day since, making cartoons of images. I've also started taking pictures in PhotoBooth on my MacBook specifically to be cartoonized. It has become a new form of self-expression for me.

These were produced between June 22 and July 1.

I got married ten years ago July. This picture is a good illustration of where I was gender-wise at the time.

I couldn't bear to put on a suit and tie. My capitulation was a long-sleeved white linen guayabera shirt instead of the short-sleeved one I wanted. We had agreed neither of us would wear traditional wedding garb, then she backed out and bought a wedding gown. Eventually, she tried to back out of the marriage; she had wanted an annulment rather than the divorce we got last year.

I hid my femininity behind a full beard from the first moment I could, which was not until my late 20s, and even before that I usually had a scraggly peachfuzz (which, sadly, did not look at all Dylanesque on me). In grad. school, I actually had a student suggest in a course evaluation that I should shave more often. If they could only see what I am shaving now…

Note: this is a first-draft of a post that will appear in the coming weeks on the Good Men Project's blog.



I am more comfortable in front of an audience (whether on stage or in a classroom) than I am in almost any social situation.

But my life of denial took its toll on my ability to perform. I began to fear being looked at, and, when I was the center of attention, I would dissociate from the scene. In 1994, I won first prize in a National Writers Association contest for my story "The Late Bus," and attended the awards ceremony. I remember being there, but I have no memory of the evening after the moment they called me to the dais to accept my certificate and check.

I dropped out of académe in part because of the increased anxiety I faced just walking into a classroom. I could work well with words and ideas, but not so well with people, and I ended up with a career as a copywriter.

In 1999, I took a job as the site writer for govWorks.com. One of the things that sold me on the job was the possibility of meeting DA Pennebaker, who was producing a documentary about the company (Startup.com). I had missed a chance to be in one of his previous films (Rockaby, a documentary about the premiere production of Samuel Beckett's play of the same name), because I arrived at SUNY Buffalo to study Beckett a year too late.

You can see me in the periphery of Startup.com, but, had it not been for my fear of being seen, I might have had a bravura moment in the film. I had a private meeting with the CEO, and as I waited to go in, the directors of the film, Jehane Noujaim and Chris Hegedus, asked if they could film our meeting.

I didn't think twice before saying "no." 

I was meeting with the CEO to complain about my situation. The company was mostly made up of investment bankers and idealists, and the web production team was tossed from one division of the organization to another as it grew. I ended up working under someone I didn't respect, and I was trying to get out from under that person's responsibility. 

I was walking into a meeting where I felt I wouldn't be able to control my emotions (I was right), and I could not have done it if I were being witnessed and filmed. I was deathly afraid of being vulnerable on camera. The illusion of invulnerability was part of my male persona, though on the inside I was an open wound.

By last year, I had gotten to the point where I couldn't go out in public at all. I left home only to go to my job, to see my shrink, and to buy food. In May of 2008, I got laid off, and I was a shut-in until a few months ago, when the needlessly radical act of putting on women's clothing gave me the ability to be seen again.

These days, I am forcing myself to be vulnerable. I obligate myself to perform whether I think I can do it or not. I have sat for two portrait photographers in the past two months, and later this month I am being filmed for a documentary about people who got laid off from the advertising industry and went on to do something unique. My unique thing is changing my gender.

Samuel Beckett's only film script has an epigraph from Bishop Berkeley: "Esse est percipi" ("To be is to be pereived"). The main character (played by Buster Keaton) spends the entire film in a fruitless quest to avoid being perceived by the camera. That's what I have been doing for the past few decades, but I am no longer in hiding. Now that I have discovered my gender, I no longer doubt that I exist.

And I am ready for my closeup.

Wrote this poem today.

Trouble in Paradise

When my hair grew out,
the year after Woodstock,
I savored the possibilities.

I tried out cool hairdos I saw
in movies or magazine pictures
and waited for dad to notice.

I could do John Lennon—
I adored that angelic White Album
look with the just-off-center part.

Mom smiled when she saw me,
but dad said it made me look
like a girl. “Now brush it out

before it dries like that.”
I never saw a girl in the mirror;
I only ever saw myself,

whom I knew to be a boy.
But my hair was—like all of me—
under his jurisdiction.

If my hair made me look like a girl,
that was the end. If not, he took
no notice and I had a new 'do.

I thought I'd scored with Kim Darby
from True Grit—until someone
in homeroom called her a tomboy.

My hair grew past my shoulderblades.
Soon, every style made a girl of me
in the eyes of the law of the father

who taunted me with a crew cut
if I didn't get my hair sorted out fast.
I'd remind him about Samson and Delilah.

I brushed my still-wet hair back
so I looked like the sophisticated con-man
in a movie we had seen on TV.

I used dad's Brylcreem and combed it through
'til it my hair was flattened against my skull.
Suave, I thought. I longed for tails.

An old screwball comedy was on TV
with people crowded on a train platform.
Franklin Pangborn was gesticulating

at the brass band and acting like a big sissy.
Dad was on the couch, smothered in laughter.
I crept back to my room and locked the door.