In the time just before the period I'm going to write about in this post, the early to mid-70s, when I was 10-14 years old was when firstly, I began to read more adult books such as Jaws and All Creatures Great and Small, and then to turn toward science fiction, as so many in that generation did, and fantasy. So I read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I started reading Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein along with some slightly more contemporary authors. Asimov's Foundation Trilogy gave me the image of a society in which a hidden power could predict the future based on social facts. Clarke of course wrote 2001, A Space Odyssey and other books in which mysticism about the future of the human race combined with the technical achievements of space travel. Heinlein wrote the great Stranger in a Strange Land, which introduced me to alternative conceptions of religion and also of transsexuality, giving to me one of my first and most intense feelings of longing for change in my life and in my body. I was transported to another reality which was ecstatic and was my own.
I also began, through school to read Dickens and those scary books for me, Lord of the Flies and Planet of the Apes, tales of human endeavors gone awry from within and without, with apocalyptic consequences. I also began to read histories of the Vietnam War (just concluded), biographies of military leaders, as well as Westerns by Zane Grey, The books of Laura Ingalls Wilder, of Jules Verne and of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan).
I was saved at age 14, and tried to take literally the word of God, but for some reason it always put me to sleep.
My father, to his credit, would weekly bring me to one of the post libraries and wait as I picked out my next set of reading material.
What interests me in the above list is that it is an expression of idealism and apocalypse from the mid - 19th to the mid-20th centuries, with the anxieties of all of that being transmitted into the brain of a relatively young person. Also, there was a basic conservatism to much of the literature, certainly missing the incredible experimentations that were going on in the time in literature in breaking down writing, narrative and character to their elements and perhaps putting them to gether again, probably not. I was not reading Donald Barthelme. I was not reading Susan Sontag. NOr was I even reading Beatniks such as Jack Kerouac or Alan Ginsberg, much less anything political about the civil rights movement and struggles over the War in Vietnam that for adults was still the major subtext of American politics.
Sexuality, however, was beginning to slip in on the sly. I read, for instance, Shere Hite when I was around 14. I would avidly scan books for mentions of sexual intercourse, for tales of transsexuality and transvestism, etc. These inclinations would only intensify as I grew older.
Now at the period which I am concluding in middle age, but which began in mid-adolescence, I began to notice the great differences in development between me and my peers. I was socially turned inward, was competent at and interested in strictly academics, had virtually no rebellion to speak of. Between the age of 12 and 17 I went to exactly one party. But at the same time I had burgeoning emotional tides and cross currents that were ripping me apart inside. I began to dress in my mother's clothes (usually masturbating when I did, but that's another story, isn't it.) I made semi-public excursions into the night which usually ended with me being scared and exhilarated, and once in danger of being molested. I had exactly two friends that I informed of my "difference," and for both of them, one my counselor-suggested "girlfriend," and the other my buddy from playing war in the desert and getting high on pot and wanting to seduce him, it was an occasion for laughter.
My parents were, despite my academic success, unrelenting in telling me whta to do, where I coiuld go, who I coiuld see. At age sixteen my come-home time after church on Sundays was ten o'clock! I was becoming more and more angry, particularly with my father, who declared that our house was not a democracy adn that what he said went. But I didn't express any of it, except through slowness and confusion and an internal temperature that was reaching a boiling point. It was when I reached a place where I couild imagine ants crawling inside my head, torturing my brain that I finally turned to the only mode of expression with which I was comfortable, writing. I lay there on the living room floor as he watched TV, feeling the ants, and started to write angry angry words down, shaking the while, so that of course I drew his attention. I think he may have read what I wrote. But I had finally foiund a way to escape inner destruction by bringing out the feelings I had.
That same year in one of my English classes, I learned automatic writing for the first time. While others barely wrote anything, especially not anything interesting, I poured out thoiughts on sex, on feelings, on my life that shocked others in the class, since they knew at the age of 16 I had not even had my first kiss. Fortunately the English teacher had enough presence of mind to keep the other students from harassing me very much.
In the transition between late-adolescence to "early adulthood," if that's what to call the college years, I became ever more outwardly conservative while most nights praying to wake up as a woman. I read more and more about transsexuality when I was a high school intern at the University of Arizona. I became more and more hardened to my individual needs except when expressed at the feet of the girl I was obsessed with. I was competent enough academically to go to Stanford where the next shocks of emotion and writing, combined, sent me into near catatonia and the beginnings of self-destructiveness that only at this point am I learning to live with.
Enough for now. Continued in next post.
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