It’s odd. There is an image inside your head, one you’ve carted around for years. It’s a changeling, meaning that it has the ability to mutate, to take on different shapes and forms. Sometimes it’s a stranger, walking down the street, bumpin’ to his iPod. He looks nothing like you; he’s five inches taller, or shorter, his skin two shades darker or lighter, his hair kinkier, straighter. But he’s wearing this shirt, see, this pink, gray, white and brown, floppy collar, button-down, vertical striped shirt—a couple of sizes too small. And you think: Soon, I’ll be able to wear shirts like that. Sometimes it’s a head of soft black curls rising up and down to the rhythm of the heart beating within the smooth toffee brown chest on which it lay, an arm draped loosely across the ribcage below. And you shudder and hold yourself—a bare brown chest just hanging out in the open like that. How crazy, how free. Free. Free. Free. Sometimes it’s ensanguined and fibrous and bloated and heavy, and the weight of it makes your neck ache and your shoulders hunch until you begin to shuffle through life like the prematurely aged—weighted down by a burden you have not earned, whispering soon, soon. Sometimes it’s the shoulders themselves—smooth, void of discoloration, indentation, chafe marks. Sometimes it can even be a feeling, the hint of one, a lightness, or barely noticeable touch, like the bite of a mosquito before the itch starts. But mostly it’s a dream, a dream of inhaling and exhaling, breathing, still.

And then it happens. After all those years of wishing, hoping, fantasizing, hiding, dreaming, resigning, imagining, seeing, denying, accepting, bargaining, compartmentalizing, deciding, planning, saving, stressing, it finally happens. And it is nothing and everything that you expected and more.

First, there is fear, crippling, debilitating, abject fear! Even after a full battery of blood work, urine and stool samples proved you were healthy, as you are wheeled into the operating room, you waved goodbye to your friends convinced you will never see them again. (I’m told this is a common phenomenon.) Someone asks you a couple of questions: What’s your name? how old are you? And the next thing you know, you are cold, and there are people talking, discussing on deck procedures, and your eyes are open, and there is a curtain drawn closed around you, and before you can open your mouth, a nurse comes in and covers you with a blanket, tells you you’re in recovery, offers you something to eat: graham crackers, chamomile tea. Along with the snack, she drops two pills in your hand, which—you already know from your friends—you can exchange, if you want, for a shot of morphine, but you have to ask. You choose the pills, and are unable to shit for the next three days.

To be continued...

Fifteen years ago during my first Christmas holiday in France, I stumbled upon a book in an English bookstore, entitled A Rap on Race. For those unfamiliar, it is the unedited transcript of a recorded conversation between James Baldwin and Margaret Mead, the feminist anthropologist who made a fortune writing and speaking about her experiences living with the indigenous peoples of Samoa, Africa and New Guinea. At the time it was published (1971), the book received mixed reviews. Some going so far as to call it “baloney,” citing that the only reason it garnered any attention at all was because the participants were famous. That in the end with such memorable quotes as Baldwin’s “The point of a man is being a man,” and Mead’s “When the Irish get angry, they’re in love,” not only did the conversation—much less the ensuing book—fail to say anything poignant about race or any other subject, but because the parties involved were so busy making sure they came off sounding like the famous people they were, it never even reached the height of mutual masturbation. Even Baldwin himself called it a “rather terrifying show.”

Perhaps it was the magic of living in Paris, or the fact that in 1991, James Baldwin could do no wrong in my eyes; but as I sat on a bench overlooking the Seine, slurping up the pages of Rap as if each were a hot sip of cider after a hike through the woods on a winter afternoon, I grew increasingly excited by the reality that such a conversation actually took place. The idea that two polar opposites like Mead and Baldwin could ever wind up dead in the same room was a revelation, never mind engage in a conversation on race over dinner at a mutual friend’s that was being recorded. Even the knowledge that they shared a mutual friend lit a fire inside me. Who cared what ultimately came out of their mouths? The important thing was that they had come to the table and had remained there for nearly two full days.

You see like most people of color born in this country (I imagine), I was weaned on raps on race. Mine was a consistent diet of warnings whipped up by my parents, grandparents, older brothers, sister, aunts, uncles, 1st cousins, 2nd cousins, 3rd, play cousins, neighbors; day after day, litanies of lived-to-tell truths were spoon-fed to me for breakfast, lunch and dinner. “Make no mistake,” my father proffered bluntly and often. “They will attempt to hold you back because of the color of your skin.” “You know they don’t like our kind,” my grandmother would whisper as if she might be arrested for speaking the word, they, too loud. Red, black and green Black is Beautiful posters and photos of Angela Davis, fist raised in the air, afro taking up most of the frame, hung on our walls. The names Huey, Malcolm and Martin were tossed around as if they were relatives, as were Rosa, Coretta, and Betty. On any given Sunday, I could walk into the family room after a day of playing soccer, kickball or basketball, and find my father seated at the card table with a few of his closest friends engaged in a discussion that inevitably turned to race. Sometimes the exchanges were heated, sometimes funny, but always, peppered throughout was the word they. They did this. They will do that. They don’t know any better. They can’t be trusted. They can’t help themselves. Rise above it, you’re better than they are. They, they, they, they were white people, and, except for the occasional girlfriend of one of my father’s friends, the ingredient most often missing from our table.

How can you dine on a true rap on race, I wondered over time, if one of the key components is continually left out? How is anything supposed to change? How are we ever supposed to understand the nuances of one another if we insist on talking about each other rather than to each other? How can we see our humanity reflected if, as Malcolm said to the white woman who asked what she could do to help, we tell those who have not shared our experience to go home? So, naturally, when I stumbled upon Rap in Paris, although I agreed with much of the criticism (that a whole lot of words were spoken, but nothing actually said), I was filled with hope. And even though the book was twenty years old when I first read it, I thought maybe there’s a chance. Maybe we can all sit down together. Maybe in time, we can even have an honest conversation.

Now, fifteen years later, after leaping at every opportunity presented and nearly always falling away disappointed, not only have I begun to question whether an honest conversation is possible, but I’ve also started to wonder if understanding each other is really the point.

A few days before New Year’s, I received a phone call from a friend inviting me to come over and participate in what promised to be the honest conversation for which we had both been searching. There were four of us: my friend, her girlfriend (who is white), another woman (also white who, my friend assured, had done a lot of work in the realm of understanding and speaking honestly about race), and me. It wasn’t exactly Baldwin and Mead (none of us were famous for one); I brought over and cooked my own dinner (lemon-peppered broiled chicken w/ a side of broccoli); and we had been talking for nearly an hour before all but one of us realized we were being recorded (which is illegal, by the way, though I am glad the transcript exists).

The person responsible for the recording was the woman who had done a lot of work. She was also the one, I was told, who unintentionally initiated this conversation. At some point before I was invited over she had been singing a popular rap song whose lyrics—like so many in Hip Hop—repeatedly uttered the term, niggah. As I understand it, the song was not on the radio, nor was my friend bumpin’ the dirty version on her stereo; it was just something that had stuck in the woman’s head, and she was singing it, the song, because she liked it. I can relate to that, I love Hip Hop. The discussion ensued when my friend asked the woman to stop (singing the word, niggah, that is, not the song), citing that she found the woman’s use of the term offensive. The woman stopped, as asked, but not without asking, why?

She understood that she was wrong, she said, that she had fucked up! Promised to never do it again. But what she wanted to know was why, when the power associated with the word had been neutralized by its prevalence of use in the Hip Hop community (which is everywhere now), was it still considered offensive when it came out of her mouth? Why was she being taken to task, when her kids—turned out she was an educator, a teacher of underprivileged, mixed race youth in Humbolt County—bandied the word about the classroom as if it were a stick of gum or penny piece of candy? She was only singing a song, for god’s sake, a song that somebody black had written and recorded. It’s not like the word was part of her daily lexicon, or that she meant anything by it—certainly not anything racist. After all, hadn’t she written a letter to the school board protesting the teaching of Mark Twain?

In retrospect, I should have stopped right there; should have never countered with a) the word hasn’t and shouldn’t be neutralized, and b) if it’s reclamation you are talking about the word was never yours to reclaim; should have recognized that this woman was in no shape to have an honest and open conversation about anything, much less the reasons why her use of the word, niggah, might be considered offensive. She was too concerned about coming across as racist, as are most people in this country when it comes to race.

Because when we think of racism, we can’t help but bring up images of slavery, of chains and bondage, of open and institutionalized discrimination. When we think of racism in this country we see Rosa Parks on a bus in Montgomery, white only signs placed in the windows of restaurants and motels, the KKK, Mark Furhman and Rodney King, the fires and broken glass of Watts and Crown Heights. We do not think of ourselves. It is 2006 after all, the twenty-first century. That was before our time. We live in an era where people are just people. The fact that Bush and Fema showed up four days late to the party in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina had nothing to do with the fact that the majority of the residents there were black; it was simply because they thought the worst was over, that they had dodged a bullet. They hadn’t anticipated that the levies would fail, even though over the last five years thirty million dollars had been cut from the budget that was meant to fix them. But, of course, that had nothing to do with race either.

Another good friend of mine tells a very funny story about a time when she stumbled drunk into Safeway at two o’clock in the morning (broke and hungry), and how she walked out with a rack of ribs stuffed down the back of her pants, bar-b-cue sauce saturating her ass like blood, and not one person in the whole store bothered to notice. She never thought twice about the fact that she was steeling because she believed she was entitled to those ribs, that the poor should be taken care of when they are hungry and cannot afford to buy food. Fro the record, I completely agree. And every time she tells it, I laugh along with everyone present at the hilarity of it. What I have not shared with her, or with anybody else, is that under the exact same circumstances, if it were me, the outcome would have been different. I never would have been given the opportunity to stuff the rack down my pants, let alone walk out the door. Because at two o’clock in the morning, I would have been shadowed by security the moment I entered in the store. Hell, I get followed when I walk into Safeway at two o’clock in the afternoon. And, no, it is not because the security guard is trying to hit on me as someone once suggested.

An old house mate of mine confessed one day that she was afraid to walk down the block of Haight Street between Fillmore and Webster (which is populated by black folk—some crack addicts, some dealers, some just regular people with nothing else to do—hanging out as if the entire sidewalk were the front stoop). That often, when she had been out drinking at Mad Dog in the Fog, she took the long way home, which was six blocks, instead of the direct route, which was three. She felt just awful about the implication of her revelation. Did that make her a racist? She asked, visibly concerned. No, I said. That makes you scared. I’m afraid too when I walk through that section of Haight Street.

We were racist, I offered as an afterthought (intentionally using the word, we), long before. For I believe you cannot be born in this country without being racist. It is embedded in our make up. Legislated racism is the foundation upon which this country was constructed. Like mold, its spores have taken root everywhere; we cannot be rid of it without demolishing the current structure, and building anew. But no one appears ready just yet for that kind of revolution. Until then, we must accept racism as a part of us; treat it like the chronic disease that it is and as individuals do what we can manage it, keep it in check.

And therein lies the rub. I know very few people who are willing to swallow this pill. So anytime the subject comes up, conversations inevitably become heated, people defensive, and before you know it epithets and accusations are flying all over the place. In the end, even Baldwin and Mead succumbed to the pressure: she calling him anti-Semitic, he labeling her another of his persecutors and oppressors. Which led to the usual suspects of excuses: Mead claiming she couldn’t be racist because of all her work with the pygmies, Baldwin countering that he could not be an anti-Semite because one of his best friends was Jewish.

Likewise, the conversation at my friend’s house on the precipice of the new year nearly came to blows, ending abruptly when the woman who had done a lot of work lashed out in the idiom (complete with head-snap and requisite body language), “Don’t know what made you decide to come runnin’ ovah here wit yo chicken, but…”

A very wise person recently said to me: “Can understanding really be the goal? I mean even in the most intimate relationships true understanding takes years and years, in most cases a life time. Is it really something we can expect to happen en masse? Now, if we’re talking about making choices and decisions that do no harm, isn’t that more about understanding ourselves?”

Yesterday, my newly assigned nurse paractitioner at Kaiser asked if I were transitioning from a woman into a man, or from a man into a woman.

"Umm... actually," I answered, "I'm not transitioning."


25 days and counting!

37 days and counting…

January 1, 2006

The city was quiet this morning. The hoots and hollers and sirens of last night’s revelry had finally fallen asleep, nodded off as it were, looking forward to a day spent nursing hangovers, navigating the awkward moments of waking in strange beds next to unfamiliar bodies, walking, busing, or cabbing it home in the thrift store suits and dresses that were so much sexier in the dim light of the bar, reciting lists upon lists of resolutions and mantra’s entitled “Never Again.” It was a good day for it. Cold, wet, windy and gray.

Ever wonder why we do it? What it is, exactly, about the changeover from one year to the next that conveys the need to experience the event in a state of total inebriation? Was the year on the way out really so bad that even to say goodbye, we must skew our vision before looking back on it? The year ahead so bloated with hope and promise, we must shield our eyes from the sheen of its distended belly, the blinding glare of infinite possibility? Deafen our ears to the piercing squeals of unconstrained rhythm, obstinate harmonies, and belligerent dissonance? Deaden our senses to the allure of time’s deceiving dance? Do we honestly believe year-in and year-out that this next one will be better? That in one of the twelve blank-slated months before us, we will finally complete that album, that novel, that poem, that film? That we will reconcile with our families, show up for our friends, be present with our girlfriends, kind to our children, ourselves? That this year we really are going to quit smoking, drinking, shooting dope? That we truly will exercise more? Drink less coffee? Leave all those fuck-ups in the past where they belong, those stupid sexist and racist comments that slipped out without thinking? That we will think before opening our mouths, or at least before inserting our feet? That we will actually think? That anything will be different than the year before?

On New Years Eve, my father turned seventy-six years old. In the year 2005, he split with his companion of thirty years, survived two hurricanes, and had surgery for a herniated disk acquired from moving into a neighborhood where he was not wanted. Surely, this year will be better for him. In 2005, my mother was diagnosed with diabetes, retired from her barely-above-minimum-wage part time job with no savings, then watched her own mother waste away and die from esophageal cancer. Certainly this year will prove better for her.

Or is it simply an excuse? A pretext for getting blotto, inching further and further down the road toward oblivion, where for a time at least we can conveniently forget who, where, and why we are? Another opportunity to check the fuck out? Shut down, sleep, not deal, not feel?

Or, am I making too much out of this? Perhaps it’s just a marker in time, like those mile counters along the side of the highway, an indicator of how far we’ve come and how much further we still have to go. Maybe it’s not even that. Maybe it’s just a respite, a celebratory hiccup in which we get to pat ourselves on the back for making it through another year.

Whatever it is, Happy New Year Lesbos, et al! May 2006 bring all you hope for and more.

Lately, it feels like the only words that come out of my mouth are I’m not transitioning.

“Wow, you’re having top surgery. So does that mean you’re transitioning?”
No, I’m not transitioning.

“That’s cool, so what do I call you now?”
Marci, same as always (or Marzipan, or Marz for short, but that’s another story). I’m not transitioning.

Initially, almost everyone I told about my decision to have chest surgery, including my mother, assumed that I was transitioning.

“So you’re going over to the other side, huh?”
Uh, no, I’m not transitioning.

“Not you too! Why does everybody want to become a man!”
I’m uh… I’m… not transitioning.

“You’ll change your mind; I said the same thing when I had my surgery.”
No, I won’t. I’m pretty clear on this; I’m not transitioning.
“Yeah, that’s what I said. You’ll see.”

“May I ask you something?”
Sure mom. What’s up?
“Are you planning to transition into a man?”
No, mom, I answered, both surprised and proud that she’d used the correct terminology. I don’t identify as a man, I told her.
“Good,” she said, exhaling a sigh of relief. “Because I like having a daughter.”
Yeah… but… the thing is, mom (aside from the fact that it’s not really about you), I don’t see myself as a woman either.

From as far back I can remember, I’ve been uncomfortable with the concept that there are only two genders, the construct that we are either this, or that, that the determining factor is the set of reproductive organs with which we happened to be born, and the idea that gender has anything to do with sex. Even my Trans friends, who’ve expended a considerable amount energy fighting to blow apart the binary gender code, have chosen to replace one pronoun with another.

To me, gender is a continuum, with male (for lack of better language) on one end and female on the other. Some of us kick it on the male end; some of us kick it on the female end; and some of us, like me, walk around embodying varying combinations of it all: male, female and everything in between. Though my ex’s might argue that I’m pretty much a twelve year old boy, on a good day sixteen. And while it’s true, that most of the time I do feel more comfortable on the male side of things, on any given day I can run from one end to the other, back and back again. I’ve been called he, she, he/she, it, sir, ma’am, kid, grandpa, freak, girl, mama, papa, papi, homey, li’l homey, faggot, dyke, Carlos, dog, you name it. At one time or another, I’ve inhabited them all. And I suspect I'm not alone in this.

So what’s the big deal? Why is everybody freakin’ out? There is no this side or that side. There is a plethora of sides.