This local story is told by local filmmakers. Denver company Loco Lane Filmworks, helmed by Director Alan Dominguez, created this 1-hour documentary by speaking to Angie’s family and friends as well as showing photographs of Angie. Scored by Mackenzie Gault (of Flobots fame) and featuring a song by L.A.-based band Ozomatli, the film focuses on Andrade’s life as remembered by her family as well as the trial of her killer.

It’s called Photos of Angie.

Emma Goldman

“At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause. I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.”

Which doesn’t fit on a t-shirt as readily as “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” (If anyone can make a t-shirt out of what she actually said, I want one!)

It’s from her memoir Living My Life, Pt. 1, page 56. Definitely a book worth reading, and you can read it online, for free, at the Anarchist Archives.

She was, as many know, a pro-choice, family planning advocate (for which she was arrested several times) but what a lot of people don’t know is that she disagreed with the majority of leftist contemporaries in her outspoken support for LGBT people way back when.  (She was also a free love advocate, which we might call poly these days.)

21st LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD WINNERS for BOOKS PUBLISHED IN 2008

TRANSGENDER
Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word), Thea Hillman, Manic D Press

BISEXUAL
Open, Jenny Block, Seal Press

LGBT ANTHOLOGIES
Our Caribbean, edited by Thomas Glave, Duke University Press

LGBT CHILDRENS/YOUNG ADULT
Out of the Pocket, Bill Konigsberg, Dutton

LGBT DRAMA
The Second Coming of Joan of Arc, Carolyn Gage, Outskirts Press

LGBT NONFICTION
Loving The Difficult, Jane Rule, Hedgerow Press

LGBT SCI-FI/FANTASY/HORROR
Turnskin, Nicole Kimberling, Blind Eye Books

LGBT STUDIES
Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality, Regina Kunzel, U. of Chicago Press

LESBIAN DEBUT FICTION
The Bruise, Magdalena Zurawski, Fiction Collective Two/University of Alabama Press

LESBIAN EROTICA
In Deep Waters 2: Cruising the Strip, Radclyffe and Karen Kallmaker, Bold Strokes Books

LESBIAN FICTION (a tie!)
The Sealed Letter, Emma Donoghue, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
All the Pretty Girls, Chandra Mayor, Conundrum Press

LESBIAN MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY
Sex Talks to Girls, Maureen Seaton, University of Arkansas Press

LESBIAN MYSTERY
Whacked, Josie Gordon, Bella Books

LESBIAN POETRY
love belongs to those who do the feeling, Judy Grahn, Red Hen Press

LESBIAN ROMANCE
The Kiss That Counted, Karin Kallmaker, Bella Books

GAY DEBUT FICTION
Finlater, Shawn Ruff, Quote Editions

GAY EROTICA
Best Gay Erotica 2009, Richard Labonte & James Lear, Cleis Press

GAY FICTION
We Disappear, Scott Heim, HarperCollins

GAY MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY
Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love, Sheila Rowbotham, Verso Books

GAY MYSTERY
First You Fall, Scott Sherman, Alyson Books

GAY POETRY (a tie!)
Fire to Fire, Mark Doty, HarperCollins
Now You’re the Enemy, James Allen Hall, University of Arkansas Press

GAY ROMANCE
Got ’til it’s Gone, Larry Duplechan, Arsenal Pulp Press

• 10,000 Dresses, Marcus Ewert & Rex Ray, Seven Stories Press
• Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word), Thea Hillman, Manic D Press
• Two Truths and a Lie, Scott Schofield, Homofactus Press
• Boy with Flowers, Ely Shipley, Barrow Street Press
• Transgender History, Susan Stryker, Seal Press

I highly recommend the last of these, which I’ll admit is the only one I’ve read this year, but I’m hoping to read Scott Schofield’s soonly.

In LGBT Studies, that Tomboys book is up for an award, & I hope it wins. It is the book I am most looking forward to reading now that I’m not teaching an excessive amount.

Even cooler is to see Diane and Jake Anderson-Minshall’s joint effort Blind Curves in the Lesbian Mystery category, and good luck to them!

(But I still think they need way more categories for transgender – maybe trans studies & trans memoir/other non-fiction to start, for instance. Surely there’s enough out there these days, & for years when there isn’t, they can just ignore the category.)

I am fascinated by nuns like this, who practice what they preach in terms of living with the poor and having compassion for all. Truly remarkable, as was Dorothy Day before her (though Day was never a nun).

I’m looking forward to reading her autobiography but can’t find it – not even on www.amazon.fr. If anyone else does, or find the English translation, let me know. (Though I’m thinking it would probably be a good book for me to brush up my French!)

My sister is frustrated, she tells me, because she feels as though she’s the only one struggling with somebody else’s transness. When she goes to her oracles of emotional support (Oprah and Dr Phil), their trans families are in some polished, effortless space where they can say polished, effortless things about their support for their trans relative or friend.

Imagine that: inarticulate struggle doesn’t play well on television. Not a lot of room for “hmm” and squirm and “I don’t really know”.

Now, two weeks spent walking in the rain … there’s a place for a lot of hmming and squirming and “I don’t really know”. Two weeks in which the rain is too loud on the hood of your anorak to hear the other person talk. Two weeks being with somebody, but mostly thinking and reminiscing rather than talking. It’s the antithesis of television.

Becoming Drusilla is as close to the antithesis of television as any book I’ve read. It’s a piece of travel writing, really. Travel writing and a bit of biographic exposition. Because Beard is a very open, clear and entertaining writer the result is a book which is a pleasure to read.

Richard Beard, the author, references Jan Morris a lot, which in a travel book-cum-biography is appropriate. The references call to mind Jan Morris’s Fisher’s Face, a biography written by a travel writer, a book which starts from a confession that the author can’t understand somebody. (Fisher’s Face is the best-written biography I’ve ever read). Morris can’t understand the sardonic facial expression in a photo of maverick Royal Navy reformer Jacky Fisher and undertakes an exploration of the subject. Beard can’t understand the gender reassignment of his friend, a Merchant Navy stoker, and likewise undertakes an exploration.

Beard and his old friend Dru Marland, back from some corrective surgery and bruised by insensitive co-workers in the engine room of a channel ferry, walk together for a couple of weeks while Beard struggles. A very muddy, uncomfortable Beard struggles with his perceptions of his friend, with his perceptions of his own gender, and with others’ perception of them as a pair.

On Marland’s behalf, Beard agonises about passability and transphobia and the potential for violence, growing protective of his old mate as they tramp the pubs and chippies of rural Wales. If they were American they’d have to drive and this would be a road book, but they’re not so they don’t and it isn’t.

Beard gives us the road as a narrative structure because he can’t find one otherwise. Dru’s real-life transition defies standard narratives, though that doesn’t stop Beard trying to shoehorn her into one, and whenever he thinks he’s succeeded she frustrates him by agreeing … “to a point”. He tries to get her to cop to the newspaper favourite: genital surgery as the defining moment. He tries to show a metamorphosis from one name to the next leading to the apotheosis of Drusilla. He, a novelist, badly wants linearity and Dru resists. Even the comparatively straightforward structure of Offa’s Dyke National Trail, a 285km path from here to there (where “there” is the decrepit coastal resort of Prestatyn), fails as they give up on Prestatyn and motor to a coastal trail that takes them along cliff-faces on a repeat pilgrimage to St David’s.

As they walk, Beard flashes back on Dru’s transition, trying to understand the woman in the cloche hat and the 15kg rucksack on the trail in front of him or in the sleeping bag beside him. Beard remembers driving in a Morris Traveller called (by Beard) Jan Morris as they visited bits of Dru’s childhood. Dru flashes back on her childhood ambition to be an RAF pilot (foiled by the cruel accident of colour-blindness), her mother’s untimely death and her father’s remarriage.

When they stop, the ruminations of the road are driven out by Beard’s preoccupation with Dru’s appearance and gender shibboleths. In country pubs Dru insists on ordering real ale in pints rather than feminine half-pints of fizzy lager. She sits where counter staff can see her and analyse her appearance. At some point, Beard dreads, somebody is going to attack them because Dru is read as a transwoman. He becomes, he says, “transphobicphobic”.

Back when Beard and Marland were two married blokes walking the trail together and sharing a little tent they were straight. Now that Marland’s a woman, and because a man and a woman walking together must form a couple, Beard finds himself queered every time Dru’s read as a queer bloke rather than a woman. Straight man suddenly queered isn’t such a comfortable person to be, and he doesn’t take it well. Beard cringes when Dru farts on the trail or wears the day-sack (one gets the impression that Beard usually associates with a rather delicate sort of woman). So queasy is he about his own gender presentation in his borrowed pink Tilley hat that Beard … grows a beard.

Beard is really wrapped around the axle about Dru Marland’s gender, which is remarkable because he far outstrips her own sometimes twitchy concerns about whether she looks girl enough for passersby on the trail. Sometimes, though Dru occasionally shops for a more feminine top, she is a blithe polished ivory figure in waterproofs leaving Beard to struggle in his confusion as she switches in and out of her “Drusilla voice” as the whim takes her.

The book isn’t about somebody becoming Drusilla — the name on Dru’s driving licence implies far more stereotypical femininity than the real woman is prepared to concede. It’s clear that Dru doesn’t become anybody different from the Cadet Flight Sergeant A.P. Marland on the book’s cover. She just stops pretending to be male which lets her set aside so much baggage (including a load of smack).

The journey here is Beard’s, and it’s not the easy glide that the polished “loved ones” on Oprah find pleases the producers. The journey is a long, wet slog on wet trails through towns where the only portable food is a Ginster’s pasty in cellophane wrapping and where condensed milk in a plastic tube is unknown.

Back then, it was Marland who was uncomfortable, and it was Beard who was comfortable. Marland hid her discomfort (as trans people do) so everyone at least appeared to be happy. Now Marland has made herself reasonably comfortable (barring some horrid treatment at the hands of her fellow-stokers in the engine room of the Pride of Bilbao) and it’s Beard who has to cope.

Beard seeks out Mr Bellringer, the cycling surgeon who yearns to get together with the Thai doctors nearly every Briton with the cash prefers to see. Bellringer, known outside this book for his ability to squeeze vaginoplasty and labiaplasty into less than three hours, rather wistfully laments that the Thais who linger long enough to construct labia minora don’t seem eager to come to meet him at conventions. Beard is so charmed (as so many are) by Mr Bellringer that he doesn’t even suggest that Bellringer wears spandex cycling shorts on the ward for the same reason that Beard grows his beard: to show that unlike his patients he’s (as we say with respect to livestock) entire.

The main character in this very well-written story is the author, Beard. Beard struggles with his anxieties about appearing to be queer. He struggles with his anxieties about being seen with a strange-looking woman. He wants validation from the woman he’s with. He wants a trophy, and instead his old mate forces him to struggle with anxiety about being victimised as though he were trans or queer or gawdelpus a woman.

Dru’s struggle is there: she’s turned down by Richard Green, the ugly rottweiler of a gatekeeper at Charing Cross Gender Identity Centre and only later “saved … by the more mundane business of the PCT agreeing an SLA to fund the GRS at CX GIC at the end of RLE”. She’s attacked by her shipmates, she’s attacked by thugs, she’s driven away from her family by her stepmother; but she’s the supporting character here, and her struggle is largely behind her.

So I think I’ll pass this book on to my sister. This isn’t Oprah, and this isn’t Dr Phil. The makeup girl doesnt sort Dru out before the studio lights go on, and the issue isn’t resolved in 44 minutes. For some issues and some people what’s necessary is two weeks tramping the uncomfortable paths of Wales trying to remember what it meant to be dry and warm.

Here are some of my favorite lefty reads:

• Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith. – it’s this book that caused me to start referring to the Empire State Building as “The Al Smith Building.”
• Living My Life – Emma Goldman’s Autobiography. This is where that oft-misquoted “If I can’t dance” line comes from.
• Myra Page’s Daughter of the Hills - a novel about women in coal miner communities (likewise, I’d suggest The Day the Earth Caved In, which is about the coal town of Centralia.)
• U.S.A. – the trilogy by John Dos Passos, and the book Norman Mailer referred to as “the last great American novel.”
• Silences – by Tillie Olsen. One of the best books, still, about the working class.

More as this election season teeters on.

For the past years I’ve always mixed my gender / feminism / trans books, but since that Top 10 of Out‘s is so lame, and the Lammies recently neglected Whipping Girl, which they shouldn’t have, I thought instead I should post my own Top Ten Recommended Trans Reads for LGBTQ readers. There are a few everyone might not need to read – like Virginia Erhardt’s Head Over Heels, which is about the partners of MTFs – or they might want to substitute Minnie Bruce Pratt’s S/he instead – but mostly this list gives a good “big picture” view of the trans community, including a variety of identities.

I might suggest different books for family & friends who are trying to understand transition but who aren’t big readers, & I’ll have to think about that list, too.

Of course now that I’ve written it I have to say I’d add my own books, My Husband Betty and She’s Not the Man I Married, too.

& Maybe The Drag Queens of New York as well.

1. Butch is a Noun – S. Bear Bergman
   
2. Gender Outlaw – Kate Bornstein
   
3. Crossdressing, Sex & Gender – Bullough & Bullough
   
4. Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism – Patrick Califia
   
5. Head Over Heels: Wives Who Stay with Crossdressers and Transsexuals – Virginia Erhardt
   
6. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman – Leslie Feinberg
   
7. Becoming a Visible Man – Jamison Green
   
8. Mom, I Need to be a Girl – Just Evelyn
9. Whipping Girl – Julia Serano
   
10. Transition & Beyond – Reid Vanderbergh

You’ll notice none of them is a YETA (Yet Another Transsexual Autobiography), since after you read Jenny Boylan’s She’s Not There (which I assume everyone has) you don’t need to read any others, and hers is the best-written, in my opinion. You can see the list in context on my Transgender Books page, which has reviews or links to reviews and discussions of them all.

The NYT notes, in her obituary, that when Margaret Atwood reviewed it when it came out, she said:

“It begins with an account, first drafted in 1962, of her own long, circumstantially enforced silence,” Ms. Atwood wrote. “She did not write for a very simple reason: A day has 24 hours. For 20 years she had no time, no energy and none of the money that would have bought both.”

The books she helped bring back – like Life in the Iron Mills and Daughter of Earth (Agnes Smedley’s autobiography) were some of the first reflections of where my people came from I’d ever read.

How frustrating not to have known.

Boyd points out that people of variant sexuality have always appeared in literature. “There is a long line of novel characters who are gender variant, from The Well of Loneliness to Orlando to Middlesex. I like to think of my work as having inherited a great deal from writers like Gertrude Stein or [Virginia] Woolf.”

The bit that was clipped was my clarification that people have always written books about being in love with someone who is gender variant, as in Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Woolf’s Orlando.