Editor's note:
Carlisle's on another gender bender.
We know from experience it's best to just back off and
let it run its course. While you're waiting, though,
you might pick up one of these fascinating books exploring
gender, sex, and other fuzzy maths. |
Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides
"If Middlesex were simply
a novel about a hermaphrodite who is raised as a woman
and then decides to be a man, it would still be a comic
tome that’s equal parts freaky and funny. But this
sophomore offering...is much more....Finally, a book
for the literate and the lascivious alike." Bill
Gaines, Maxim
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Price: $27.00
Your Price: $21.60
(Sale - Hardcover)
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for other copies |
Trans-Sister Radio
by Chris Bohjalian
"Transsexuality goes mainstream
in this Scarlet Letter for a softer, gentler
but more complicated age....Bohjalian humanizes the
transsexual community and explains the complexities
of sex and gender in an accessible, evenhanded fashion,
making a valuable contribution to a dialogue of social
and political import." Publishers Weekly
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Price: $14.00
(New - Trade Paper)
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for other copies |
Gender Outlaw: On
Men, Women, and the Rest of Us
by Kate Bornstein
"A thoughtful challenge to gender
ideology that continually asks difficult questions about
identity, orientation, and desire. Bornstein cleverly
incorporates cultural criticism, dramatic writing, and
autobiography to make her point that gender (which she
distinguishes from sex) is a cultural rather than a
natural phenomenon." Kirkus Reviews
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Myra Breckinridge
by Gore Vidal
"Myra Breckinridge continues
to give wicked pleasure and still seems to have fixed
the limit beyond which the most advanced aesthetic neo-pornography
ever can go." Harold Bloom, The New York Review
of Books
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Crossing: A Memoir
by Diedre N. McCloskey
"Deirdre McCloskey's brave,
witty, dizzying autobiography positively drips tears,
sex, danger, and courage with each sashaying step."
Kate Bornstein
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Price: $15.00
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 e have a new employee here at Powell's. Her name is Betty,
and she's my kind of gal. She drinks. She smokes. She idolizes
Margaret Cho. She's not in the market for new friends, though.
She got married only two months ago, and she's still in
love with love. Each evening, the moment her shift is over,
she's out the door wearing one of those annoying grins reserved
for newlyweds, schizophrenics, and gaseous babies.
So you can imagine our response when she told us that Dale,
her groom, was going to pick her up for lunch and asked
if we'd like to meet him. Was she kidding? She'd already
made him out as some kind of latter day Stanley Kowalski:
virile, enterprising, and "hunkalicious." He'd just opened
his own mechanics shop called The Greasy Nut. I don't know
about anyone else, but I wanted to meet him.
When he arrived, I had a chance to give him a leisurely
once over as Betty was introducing him around the store.
It was queer. Was I imagining things, or is Dale the spitting
image of my father. Sure, he was a few inches shorter —
and in far better shape. But he had the same angular jaw,
tuberous nose, and heavy-lidded, gray eyes as my father.
He even combed the same shock of coarse hair, thick as a
mud flat, across his square forehead. He wasn't terribly
handsome to my eyes, but I could definitely see the appeal.
Betty's husband is one of those rare people who is truly
at ease in his own skin. Like the smell of home cooking,
when people like Dale enter a room, everyone feels simultaneously
relaxed and expectant.
When they finally arrived in my corner, Betty, proud as
a peahen, introduced us: "Carlisle, this is my husband Dale.
Dale, this is Carlisle." As he offered me his hand, Dale
told Betty, to my surprise, that we'd already met. Then,
with just the hint of a sly grin, he addressed me directly:
"Hello, Carlisle, how've you been keeping yourself?"
"Hello, Dale." I was a bit unnerved. After a moment's hesitation,
though, I decided to come clean. "Sorry if I'm being rude.
You look terribly familiar, but I can't for the life of
me remember where we've met."
With a deep, Boris Karloff chuckle, he said, "Well, Carlisle,
we've met through your cousin Darlene."
Now that took me by surprise. No one in my family had heard
from Darlene since the late eighties, when she abruptly
cut off all communication and disappeared without a trace.
And while it's true that as a teenager Darlene hung out
with the type of guys who became mechanics like Dale Kowalski
here....
Well, maybe "hung out" isn't quite the right phrase. In
high school, Darlene used to park her metallic blue Camaro
in front of the Superette and match, beer for beer, any
Marlboro-smoking young tough foolish enough to take her
on. When they were good and plastered, she'd challenge them
to a bout of chicken, and then laugh in their faces after
she'd run them into the ditch. Few men can handle being
whooped by a girl, so Darlene made a lot of enemies as a
teenager. I suppose she might have also had a few friends,
though I didn't know of any.
"So, did you know Darlene in high school?" I asked.
"I sure did, though not very well yet. She kept her distance
from me as a teenager."
"Darlene kept everyone at arms length back then."
"Yeah, and moving to Eugene didn't really help much either."
This was true. Like most of us at eighteen, Darlene was
having a hard time finding a workable way to be in the world.
By the time she left for college, she had clearly realized
that rebelling without a cause was earning her nothing but
a beer gut and a lot of wear on her tires. So during her
first quarter at the University of Oregon she decided to
try rebelling with a cause. She joined the revolution.
Within two weeks after moving into the dorm, Darlene had
stopped trying to out Alpha every man she met, and had accepted,
lock, stock, and (Kalashnikov) barrel, the fevered tenets
of the Great Proletariat Revolution.
Throughout Darlene's communist phase — or, as my father
dubbed it, her Red Period — the family had absolutely
no idea what to make of her. One image in particular is
burned in my memory: Darlene sitting at Thanksgiving dinner
in her red beret and Mao jacket lecturing her mother on
the basics of Marxist theory — "When discussing the
socialist revolution to come, it's important to avoid language
that serves, however subtly, the very machination of bourgeois
hegemony we're working to subvert. Instead, we must cultivate
a level of discourse free of the variegated oppressions
of class distinction" — while my aunt, a forkful of
turkey hovering in limbo halfway to her mouth, tries, unsuccessfully,
to tear her eyes away from Darlene's breasts, which, without
the benefit of any support whatsoever, are sagging clear
to her navel.
"So you knew Darlene in Eugene, too?" I asked.
"Barely. We were pretty out of touch during the eighties.
The Marxism was bad enough. But when she started in on all
that 'We Moon' crap, I just couldn't take it."
Few could. In her junior year, Darlene had discovered young
love in the form of a tiny wood nymph named Sarah. They
changed their names to Hag (Darlene) and Spider (Sarah),
got matching body art (the phases of the moon in six tiny
tattoos arrayed across the back of the neck), and joined
a radical lesbian commune call The No Harm Farm.
Now, I've never actually been to No Harm. I tried to visit
once but turned back when confronted with the following
sign nailed to the front gate: "You are entering No Harm
Farm. Racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, intolerance —
and MEN — are not welcome here." But, I knew a lot
about the place, nonetheless. I was going through my own
"phase" at the time and was volunteering twice a week at
a vegan food collective. Naturally, the Earnest Eggplant
was popular with the radical lesbian crowd, so I overheard
enough talk about the farm to get the general idea.
Most of the women who lived there had come out of one or
another of the various Radical Left groups popular in the
seventies. But they had each come to the realization that
Karl Marx — who was, after all, a man — had misdiagnosed
the problem. Capitalism is just a symptom. The real problem
is the authoritarian father-god of our patriarchal society
who thrives on violence, greed, domination, and restrictive
clothing. In contrast, the wymyn at No Harm worshipped the
far more ancient Great Earth Goddess: communal, nurturing,
powerful, and buck naked.
They strove to replace the "phallocentric" society they
had grown up in with a new/old "vagicentric" one of their
own making. It was all very cutting edge and experimental.
They spent their midnights "taking back their power" in
loud declarations made to the four directions, their mornings
sleeping off peyote hangovers, and most every other waking
minute trying to communicate through a clutter of hyphens,
slashes, and randomly-placed capital letters: "Be-ing Power/ful
Womb-en means re/Source-ing our Sisterhood, it means re-Turning,
Crone-i-logically, to the source of our fuller/vulver Ecsta-tic
Journeying."
It's pretty easy to make fun of desperate idealism. But
I felt I understood, more or less, what attracted Darlene
to radical lesbianism. Growing up, Darlene had always been
treated as a misfit. When she first left home, she'd joined
the revolution hoping to finally fit in, or to at least
distract herself with Purpose. But revolutionaries, rhetoric
notwithstanding, are intolerant as hell, which my cousin
soon realized. So when she found a group that claimed her
as one of their own, she signed up. I suppose the regular
sex didn't hurt either. Whatever. For a while, at least,
Darlene seemed to have found her niche. She became less
confrontational and far more pleasant to be around. She
even laughed once in a while.
It was during the No Harm period that Darlene and I became
friends. I think this took us both by surprise. Fellow misfits
or not, growing up we'd had little time for one another.
To be totally honest, I was afraid of Darlene. Not only
did I have an instinctual distrust of anyone who dipped
chaw or wore football jerseys, but I avoided, like polyester
pants, anyone who gave monkey bumps: "OOOooowwww, Darlene.
That huuuuuurts! I'm telling."
"For Christ's sake, Carl" — Darlene was the only person
who ever called me that — "Isn't it about time you
rooted around in those Capri pants of yours and found your
balls?"
But now that Darlene had foresworn both violence and football
jerseys we found we actually liked one another. When I wasn't
volunteering at the Earnest Eggplant I worked at a small
bookstore near campus. Darlene would drop in once or twice
a week to browse the auto repair manuals and to say hello.
We would generally sit down to a cup of oat straw tea. She'd
explain something of current feminist theory, and I'd tell
her about our efforts at the Bette Davis society to organize
an annual film festival (I never did make a very good hippie).
But as we got closer, Darlene began to open up to me more
and more. And I soon came to realize that she wasn't as
happy at No Harm as I'd thought. I remember one conversation
in particular, because it was so odd, and maybe because
it was one of our last. She'd been complaining that the
women at No Harm didn't seem able to keep their mouths shut.
"From morning to night all they want to do is talk
about their relationships or gossip about someone else's.
Who bloody cares? It's driving me crazy. I've been spending
more and more time rebuilding the engine on that VW bus
just to get away from them"
I suggested she try a change of scenery, maybe move to
California, or New York: "There are lots of lesbians in
New York."
She turned to me, and with the strangest expression, said,
"You know, Carl. I think that's part of the problem. I don't
think I am a lesbian." Not a lesbian? So incongruous
was the idea of Darlene with a man, it took me a moment
to reply: "I thought you had a good thing with Spider."
"Yeah, she's great. It's not that. It's something else.
It just doesn't quite fit."
Two weeks later, Spider showed up at the bookstore unkempt,
and with enormous bags under her eyes. She was looking for
'Hag.' "Have you seen her?"
Apparently the day before, Darlene/Hag had shown up at
the farm driving an old beat up Ford Truck with a gun rack.
She was wearing Levis and a football jersey. And had cut
her mullet. She told Spider that she loved her, but that
she was never going to be truly happy as a lesbian, and
that it was high time she took the bull by the horns. What
she meant by that was anyone's guess. Then she drove away
and no one has heard from her since.
"So, Dale, have you seen Darlene since she left Eugene?"
"Oh, she makes an appearance now and then. But as you know,
she made her choice to check out, and — so far so good
— she seems pretty happy about it."
Dale was in contact with Darlene? I was excited. I was
mad — why him and not me? I had a million questions
to ask. But before I could open my mouth, Betty grabbed
Dale by the arm: "Let's go, honey. We're not going to have
time for lunch."
"Hey, Carl, it was nice to meet you. We should get together
for a beer sometime and have a good man to man. I think
we might have a lot to talk about."
Since when, I wondered, are mechanics interested in being
friends with me? But as he turned to walk away, I noticed
a tattoo on the back of his neck that looked like a series
of tiny moons, and I suddenly knew the answer.
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