It’s all been wonderful.
JUDY GARLAND, 1945
There is no law prohibiting a person from being a sex deviate, or queer. Perverts may roam at large providing they do not practice certain prohibited acts.
JOHN P. KENNEY, PH.D., and JOHN B. WILLIAMS, LL.M., M.S. in P.A., 1968
1
C onsider by contrast the transwoman’s namesake. Born Frances Ethel Gumm, in place of the hoped-for son who would have been called Frank, she first opened her eyes in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, but transferred that event to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the latter birthplace being more glamorous. Presently she also changed what they called her: It occurred to Frances that Judy was an interesting name, and she promptly adopted it. You see, Frances was not yet interesting. How could this anxious child star get ahead? She needed attention. Hence she thrust herself forward, learning how to look pretty and when to fawn. What matters “truth” once the makeup goes on? When she was almost eighteen they called her sixteen. By then she might have believed it. And so she dressed herself in sincerity. “I meant every word of that song I sang to Clark Gable in my first picture,” Judy seriously confided to me as she slipped off a little blue wool dress with the white lace petticoat trim showing two inches below the hem.
Unlike her, Neva (a more interesting name than Karen) owned nothing but obligations. Power is a burden, no matter how it might be spent. But I cannot say that power is not sweet. And I would not deny that she felt some kind of rapture, to be so honored and raised up into what she now was.*
2
No longer shielded from the lusts of women and the brutalities of men, she began to fulfill her purpose. Well, what of the role itself? How authentic was it? Just as the Hollywood actress, whose true tasks are to take direction in embodying the commercialized fantasies of others, and to be the submissively unattainable object of public yearnings, falsely appears to be her story’s subject—spoiled, enriched, ravishable, envied and petted—so anyone whose doom is to be seen must keep drudging away to sustain her “look”—anyone, that is, except for the lesbian, whose beauty went bone-deep. Again she confounds me. From where they came, those allurements and involvements of hers, or even from what substance or energy they had been extruded, I can tell you no better than I can make sense of those pleated woman-robes flowering outward from the black center on the underside of a Greek drinking cup.
E-beth had been made apparently irrelevant, like a former church-window’s roundness now filled in with stones so that its ovoid sill of paler pebbles remains inexplicably. It seemed that her mother could no longer hurt her, and of course she would never or always be lonely. Her new life already fitted her with almost ominous ease, as if she lacked anything to renounce. To be sure, she, resisting, still occasionally believed herself to be unloveable; but she had been well taught to take the wills of others for her own—and there were so many wills! As Reba had explained, if she only did good to herself and others, there was nothing else she would need to do; and if she removed herself from consideration the work would be even simpler.
On the ferry from the island she stood on deck, breathing in rain and gripping the railing, until a middle-aged lady in a suede jacket came to stand beside her. The lesbian found herself instantly understanding what this person was longing for her to say, so she said it, the lady opening her brown eyes and commencing the languid swaying of a wounded Amazon; presently the landing-horn moaned; they crossed the gangplank into the city and went to bed.
Next came a stronger woman who also needed to get something out of the girl.—
What would any of us have aimed for, if we could have been her? I who hope for nothing but to maintain the altars of my seven addictions cannot imagine. For Judy Garland, success was like candy. She reads all the fan magazines. She is a Ping-Pong champion . . . She makes fudge . . . She is a husky, hearty little girl with a huge appetite . . . And at the end she was shouting into the tape recorder: I’m not something you wind up and put on the stage; I wanted to believe and I tried my damndest to believe in the rainbow that I tried to get over and I couldn’t. So what?
As for Neva, before her beginning she had already reached the end. What the old woman had done to her restored her to indifference . . .—or one might say that she took on a stately and almost vegetal placidity, much as when Apollo’s prey turned herself into a bay-tree so that the god could rape her only by plucking her many leaves.—How could a bodhisattva be troubled by anything? Smiling and ready, she loved us.
3
Certain dooms arise from their victims’ own deeds, and many result from accident, but some are simply magical, as when a pretty young soul named Luz Hernandez-Chavez, persuaded by the public defender, pled guilty to third degree felony battery, which then, because it was a hate crime as Judge Hempel explained, enhanced itself most miraculously into a second degree felony even as the public defender was patting the defendant’s shoulder and latching shut his briefcase, so that she had to swallow a decade in state prison. To be sure, Luz tried to spit it out like a rapist’s cock; although the tired public defender was already on vacation, she wept and cursed until his colleague agreed to move for a withdrawal of the original guilty plea on the grounds that she did not know she was pleading to a hate crime, at which point the case rose brightly (appealed against her by the district attorney) all the way up to the Second District Court of Appeal.—Well now, sighed Judge Luther, wasn’t this crime motivated by some kind of hate? And he walked into the courtroom, so that everyone had to rise.
The district attorney explained: Christina Rojas is a declared lesbian and therefore falls within the statutory protected class.—The public defender’s colleague began searching for something on the old trial transcript, but it ducked into hiding, so that the district attorney could not be checkmated and therefore continued joyfully: Luz Hernandez-Chavez, in combination with Ramon Lopez and Maribel Kingslee, drove together from Vallejo to Stockton for the sole and admitted purpose of beating up the victim, who was in a rival gang.—Judge Luther looked at the defendant over his glasses. His niece had been raped by gangsters, so he wished he could send Luz to the gas chamber. The district attorney was now saying: The gang to which the assailants belonged stigmatized homosexual activity, and because the victim was a lesbian, this woman and her friends assaulted her.—At last the public defender’s colleague found the page for which he had been longing. He smiled delightedly, but the district attorney was already poisoning our minds: Specifically, Your Honor, the arrest warrant stated that Luz Hernandez-Chavez continuously beat the victim until ordered to stop and that the victim was thereafter transported to the hospital due to her injuries . . .
Objection, ventured the public defender’s colleague, not for the first time, but she got overruled, and so Judge Luther said: We affirm the conviction of Luz Hernandez-Chavez, and the denial of her motion to withdraw the plea.—Both other judges concurred; poor Luz therefore served every moment of her stipulated ten years, passing the time by dreaming of smashing in the face of the first stinking bull dyke she would meet outside.
At last they dismissed her. Strutting gaunt and angry down the street, she met the opener of all our locks, the one who existed without us, the lesbian. Right away Luz was sobbing sweetly in her arms.
In the morning Luz said: I want to be honest and I want to be loving. With you.
Thank you, said the lesbian, running her hand through the other woman’s hair. Soon she went away.
4
Once upon a time Judy Garland confided to the press: I have a private instructor in my dressing room. It’s loads of fun . . . I’m taking a postgrad course on my favorite subjects, music appreciation, art appreciation and French. I’m learning oil painting, too. I’ve been at it five days. Sometimes the lesbian must also pretend to have fun. That is how celebrities gratify us little people.
For both of them, as for any of the world’s other sweethearts, it would all be wonderful. Both their mothers schooled them to lie; Neva was even better than Judy at keeping secrets . . .