Of Souls & Roles, of Sex & Gender
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OF SOULS & ROLES, OF SEX & GENDER A Treasury of Transsexual, Transgenderist & Transvestic Verse From 1967 to 1991 Edited by Rupert Raj with a Foreword by Trish Salah, PhD & an Afterword by Kim Elizabeth Stuart © January 1, 2017; revised July 1, 2018, by Rupert Raj Raj, Rupert, 1952-, editor Of Souls & Roles, Of Sex & Gender: A Treasury of Transsexual, Transgenderist & Transvestic Verse from 1967 to 1991 / Rupert Raj. The editor is donating this unpublished (newly-revised) international trans poetry anthology to the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia, in care of Prof. Aaron Devor, founding director, and Chair in Transgender Studies. *** 1 DEDICATION To all of my fellow transsexual, transgender(ist), transvestite (crossdressing), gender non- binary, genderqueer, transqueer, Hijra, intersex and Two-Spirit community members, and our partners, families, friends, allies and supporters. ~~~ And to all the contributors to this trans poetry anthology, with a special dedication to the following contributors, at least five of whom have since departed: Linda T. O’Connell (19??-????), a Canadian transsexual activist and poet, whose fighting spirit expressed through her two trans poetry anthologies of 1978 and 1982, inspired me to compile the present collection. It’s uncertain if she’s still alive as she was wheelchair-bound with Multiple Sclerosis in 1988. (See “The Poets” for more information, and my poetic tribute, “For Linda T., With Love” [BOOK ONE, PART ONE: M-F TSISM].) David Aaron Liebman (1966-1984), an American, autistic member of my Metamorphosis Medical Research Foundation (MMRF), who took his life at 18 due to intense depression. (See the entry for his sister, Maura Liebman, in “The Poets” for more information, and my poetic tribute, “For David - And Both Our Sisters” [BOOK ONE, PART TWO: F-M TSISM].) Louis Graydon Sullivan (1951-1991), an American, gay trans activist, newsletter editor and biographer, who died of HIV/AIDS at 39. (See “The Poets” for more information, and my poetic tribute, “For Lou, My Fellow Transqueer Gender Transgressor” [BOOK ONE, PART TWO: F-M TSISM].) Stephen (Steve) E. Parent (19??–199?), an American trans activist and gender therapist, who died of kidney failure in his mid or late 40s. (See “The Poets” for more information, and my poetic tribute, “For Steve, My Fine American Friend” [BOOK ONE, PART TWO: F-M TSISM].) Johnny A. (aka Johnny Armstrong, Johnny Science, etc.) (1955-2007), an American former drag king, gay trans activist, musician, videomaker and newsletter editor, who died at 62. I don’t know the details surrounding his death. (See “The Poets” for more information, and my poetic tribute, “For Johnny A., My Fellow Trans Cultural Activist“ [BOOK ONE, PART TWO: F-M TSISM].) Merissa Sherrill Lynn (1942-2017), an American transgender activist and magazine editor, who died in a hospice at 75, following a much earlier massive stroke. (See “The Poets” for more information, and my poetic tribute, “For Merissa, The ‘Tiffany Rose’“ [BOOK ONE, PART ONE: M-F TSISM].) ~~~ 2 CONTENTS FOREWORD, Trish Salah, PhD 4 INTRODUCTION 7 BOOK ONE: TRANSSEXUALISM: PART ONE: Male-to-Female Transsexualism 10 PART TWO: Female-to-Male Transsexualism 135 BOOK TWO: TRANSGENDERISM (Androgyny): PART ONE: Male-to-Female Transgenderism 197 PART TWO: Female-to-Male Transgenderism 289 BOOK THREE: TRANSVESTISM (Crossdressing) Male-to-Female Transvestism 322 THE POETS 396 AFTERWORD, Kim Elizabeth Stuart 418 ABOUT THE EDITOR 420 3 FOREWORD1 More than halfway through the second decade of the 21st century we are, at least according to Time Magazine, now past “The Transgender Tipping Point.” What might that mean? Certainly the level of transgender, transsexual and genderqueer visibility we have today exceeds anything we’ve seen before, and for some time now a solid minority of that visibility involves some significant degree of self-representation. And yet a good deal of that media visibility accrues to recently-transitioning celebrities (e.g., Caitlyn Jenner) and is infused with voyeuristic spectacle, which seems to alternate between transphobic repudiation and condescendingly, saccharine affirmation of otherwise privileged individuals’ journeys of self- actualization. Even so, media-savvy trans women of colour such as Laverne Cox and Janet Mock have managed to parlay their celebrity to give voice to more complicated and politicizing narratives that highlight the normatively damaging effects of poverty, social erasure and exclusion, lack of adequate health care and job security and the criminalization of sex-work on most trans peoples’ lives. Highlighting the pervasive and systemic nature of such violence does not in itself alleviate it, but it is an improvement over exceptionalizing narratives of individual heroism in the face of adversity. In the sphere of literature, people whom we might now call trans (or transsexual or transgender) have been telling our stories through memoirs and autobiography since the 1930s, and in the 1960s we began to see the development of educational resources, support groups, networks and newsletters. In the 1970s and early ‘80s, writers such as Jan Morris and Rachel Pollack were well-known and early literary successes from our communities. The late 1980s and ‘90s saw a proliferation of avant garde cultural production by transsexual and transgender folks, although Jayne County’s Man Enough to be a Woman reminds us that trans people were among the original punks. Nonetheless, it was not until the 21st century that we began to see a significant proliferation of trans literary production with the establishment of both web and print journals (such as Vetch and Them), the development of trans-owned presses (e.g., Topside, Biyuti, Transgress, Trans Genre Press and most recently Metonymy), the publication of anthologies of trans poetry and fiction such as The Collection and Troubling the Line, trans literary award categories in Lesbian and Gay institutions like the Lambdas, a proliferation of trans literary workshops, panels and conferences, and the recognition of trans authors as authors, rather than exemplars of an exceptional or “exotic” personal narrative. These developments have gone hand in hand with the changes to mainstream media, as well as the emergence of trans studies as an academic discipline with a home in the university and university presses…. In a wide variety of forums we are now asking questions about trans poetics, narratives, point-of-view, genre and criticism, seemingly for the first time. Except it isn’t…. As we begin to explore trans literary history, and pre-history, we discover that if this decade is perhaps the first to see the development of an apparatus to sustain trans literature (the aforementioned presses, journals and academic programs, for instance), it is -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 Parts of this Foreword were previously presented as “Writing What’s Not, Yet: Inscribing Emergence.” Department of Gender Studies Graduate Colloquium: “Writing Sexualities: Poetics, Politics, Activism.” Queen’s University, Kingston, ON. April 25, 2014. All text Copyright © the author, Trish Salah. 4 not the first to produce trans literature. As Trace Peterson points out, in the early 2000s poet kari edwards was attempting to broaden what trans literature might be in her capacity as poetry editor at Transgender Tapestry, a community magazine that had long featured poems and stories by trans authors. In her editorial capacity, edwards was attempting to make a break with an existing tradition, a poetry comprised of confessional verse, romantic lyrics, epics and folk-ballads, of ribald limericks, Christian and pantheistic devotionals, with themes inspired by Greek myths, medical literature, personal struggles, losses and longings, and celebrations of trans forms of living under the radar and in a time of censure and social erasure. In the time leading up to edwards’s tenure at Transgender Tapestry, these poems were the mainstay of trans writing, from the 1960s to the 1990s, mostly before the internet when little magazines, ‘zines and newsletters were how we spoke to one another, how we imagined our community into being. These are the poems pioneering activist Rupert Raj has gathered together in this extraordinary collection. Of course in those days the vocabulary through which we spoke our identities was different, though no less prolific than in the present moment. In English-language contexts alone, we might encounter a wide range of terms rooted in the gender clinic, classical sexology and Greek mythology, and of course multiple communities: transvestite, transsexual, epicene, drag, femmiphile, androgyne, cross-dresser, transgenderal, transgenderist…. Some of these were vestigial traces of older discourses, some were neologisms coined by linguistic and cultural innovators, many were contested, readily used in some contexts and repudiated as slurs in others. In the early ‘90s, the tail-end of the period covered in this collection, the umbrella term “transgender” was coming into its first, almost immediately contested use. And today that in turn is rapidly, if no less contestedly, being displaced by “Trans” either with or without an asterisk (Trans*). Meanwhile it is unclear how precisely older terms like “androgyne” are covered by the newer queer theoretically-inflected languages of “genderqueer,” “gender-fluid” and “non-binary” gender. To be fair though,