INTRODUCTION
Geoff Brown’s extraordinary I Want What I Want (1966), a British novel of the life of a transgender woman transitioning and living in the working-class city of Hull, is a revelation. Mostly unknown to contemporary readers, it is compelling, insightful, and—for a book that is more than half a century old—it feels remarkably modern. While the myriad, acutely observed, details of life in a small British city in the 1960s locate it in a specific time and place, the internal struggles of Wendy Ross, its protagonist, are strikingly similar to narratives and personal journeys in trans-novels today.
I Want What I Want is written in the first person. The novel reads almost more as a series of diary entries —although it is fully plotted—than the stream of consciousness journey of Wendy Ross as she transitions from being Roy Clark, a young working-class man from Hull who works in his father’s fish and chips shop, to an independent woman living on her own. Needless to say, life is not easy for a transwoman living in a small British city that has barely emerged from the devastation of World War II.
Before emerging publicly as Wendy, Roy’s life is a series of humiliating and painful experiences: caught stealing his older sister’s clothing, being beaten by his father when he is discovered dressing in female attire, forced for a time into a mental hospital where he is mistaken for being a homosexual by a kindly older gay man. After turning twenty-one and coming into a small inheritance from her deceased mother Wendy moves out of her father’s house and begins her new life, which is far better than before, opening doors that were previously only fantasy. But her life is still crammed with unfulfilled dreams and heartache.
I Want What I Want feels singular and groundbreaking. It is, in many ways, unique in the history of transgender literature. The concept of transgender—or what was called transsexuality then—was not completely new at the time. Roberta Elizabeth Cowell had published Roberta Cowell’s Story in 1954 detailing her life before and after her sex reassignment surgery. Christine Jorgensen had made front page news in the United States—‘Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Bombshell’—in 1952, although her autobiography Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Biography was published a year after I Want What I Want. (Danish artist Lili Elbe, who underwent sex reassignment surgery without hormone treatment in 1930, and was made famous by David Ebershoff’s 2000 novel The Danish Girl, was relatively unknown until recently.)
But I Want What I Want is a work of the imagination, and radically different from the external matter-of-factness of the Cowell and Jorgensen texts. There are potentially some British fictional antecedents to Brown’s novel. Charlotte Charke’s 1755 A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke, Youngest Daughter of Colley Cibber, esq. Written by Herself; Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 doom-laden, inversion-driven The Well of Loneliness, and Virginia Woolf’s 1928 cheerful gender-shifting romp Orlando: A Biography are all read now as transgender narratives. But even these fictions—the Charke memoirs are essentially fictionalized—do not match the intense interiority of Brown’s novel. Nor do they have the broader, contemporary medical context that permeates I Want What I Want. In the post-Jorgensen world both Wendy and the reader are well aware of the possibility of sex reassignment surgery and hormone treatments.
For the contemporary reader, familiar with transgender memoirs and novels such as Jennifer Boylan’s 2003 She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders, or Brian Katcher’s 2009 young adult novel Almost Perfect, I Want What I Want may feel pre-modern, even old-fashioned. Wendy’s evolution, while self-determined, is made in an uncomprehending world that is filled with danger and little possibility of full acceptance. It prefigures Leslie Feinberg’s 1993 Stone Butch Blues, although it is far less unrelentingly harsh and brutal in its depiction of anti-transgender prejudice.
It is tempting to read I Want What I Want as a curious sociological text. Brown was clearly moderately familiar with medical and psychological discourses about transgender identity and sexuality since the novel is quite careful to distinguish Roy from being homosexual or engaging in cross-dressing. This is surprising because at the time of publication there were few available writings about the medical aspects of transitioning. Halfway through the novel Wendy reads in the Daily Telegraph:
A Baltimore Criminal Court judge authorized an operation to change the sex of George Lloyd, 17, who is awaiting sentence on the charge of stealing 15 women’s wigs valued at £400. Two doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital described Lloyd as a psychic hermaphrodite and said the operation would be in his best interest.
This, as far as we know, fictional story sends her to a physician with whom she has a discussion about transitioning surgery. (Although fictional, this news story is accurate in that in 1965 gender theorist John Money was spearheading transsexual medical options at the newly formed Gender Identity clinic at Johns Hopkins; a fact of which Brown was clearly aware.) The doctor, in the novel, denies Wendy’s request, but it is clear from the discussion in that scene that Brown knew far more than most people about transgenderism, including the prevailing medical advances and prejudices of the time.
Very little information is publicly available about Geoff Brown. Contemporary Authors notes:
Family: Born March 5, 1932, in Yorkshire, England; son of Frank and Lily (Spencer) Brown; married Estella Baggley, June 3, 1969. Education: Attended Hull College of Art, 1953-57. Politics: “Chauvinist.” Religion: Church of England. Military/Wartime Service: Royal Air Force, 1950-52.
He published I Want What I Want in 1966, and a second novel, My Struggle, about a mentally disturbed man who believes, in part, that he is Adolf Hitler, in 1977. He died on August 20, 2008 at the age of 76.
As a postwar British novel about gender and sexuality I Want What I Want bears little relationship to the homosexual-themed work of Francis King, James Courage, Robin Maugham, and C.H.B. Kitchin. While Brown’s narrative here is centered on the intense inner life of Wendy Ross the larger context—indeed, the setting—is post-war urban Britain, specifically Hull. As a coastal city with industry and ports, Hull—four hours north of London—was hit hard during the Blitz. Much of the commercial heart of the city was destroyed, and ninety-five percent of homes were damaged, many badly. At least twelve hundred residents died, and three thousand were injured.
The Hull of I Want What I Want totters on post-war recovery. Parts of the city are thriving and even Wendy’s father’s fish and chips shop is doing well. But there is a greyness over the city and these lives. The rooming house to which Wendy moves after she leaves home, and the ‘nice’ house owned by academics in which she later takes a room, are, like Wendy, are in a process of transformation, struggling toward something new. In many ways, I Want What I Want resembles the postwar novels of John Braine, David Storey, and Alan Sillitoe of a national culture that is scarred by ever-evolving class ambiguities and conflicts. Brown’s favorite novelist was Evelyn Waugh, and while both of his books reflect that author’s concern of class distinctions, Waugh’s flippancy is replaced by a moral seriousness that reflects a nation struggling with ruptures in national and economic identity.
I Want What I Want is also a novel of consumption. Wendy’s journey to being publicly viewed as the woman she is, is most often is described in the clothing she wants and buys:
I ordered a black skirt, a pair of black slacks, two blouses and two pair of shoes—one pair had flat heels, for wearing with the slacks and the other pair were high-heeled court shoes—two brassieres, a suspender belt, two slip and pantie sets, two pairs of briefs for wearing under the slacks, two nightdresses—one black and one red—and four pair of nylons.
It is not just Wendy’s gender identity that is being expressed here, but her conscious desire to move from her father’s fish and chip shop to becoming a middle-class lady. She relishes clerks in women’s shops calling her ‘madam,’ and enjoys being seen as well-to-do and proper. This emphasis on post-war consumption comes directly from Brown’s own experience of poverty. Not particularly well-off growing up, Brown and his sister fell into deep poverty after their father—who worked first as a cooper and then, after metal barrels replaced wood, a joiner—died and his second wife’s family took control of any property and money.
Did Brown consider himself transgender—or transsexual in the language of the time? Certainly My Struggle—which, like I Want What I Want, is a stream of consciousness first-person narrative—a denser, more deeply internalized book than his first, gives us no hint as to who Brown was. It is impossible to draw any conclusions about the author. To add to the ambiguity Brown noted in an interview that ‘I Want What I Want is about transvestitism, My Struggle is about paranoid-schizophrenia. It would seem that I write about abnormal psychology. What is it that causes me to concern myself with such murky things when, really, I am so very like Julie Andrews?’
More telling is his wife Estella’s Brown statement to the publisher of this edition that ‘extreme poverty forced [Geoff] to live in imagination, there was never any possibility of real action because there was no money. I imagine Roberta Cowell could finance her efforts to change sex but Geoff couldn’t. I think that more important than sex or gender change was a desire to be “other” than who he was. It was lousy being Geoff Brown.’
What is absent, for the contemporary reader, from I Want What I Want are the politics of gender or, in a larger sense, sexual politics. This is unsurprising since the term ‘sexual politics’ was first used by Kate Millett in her 1969 groundbreaking study Sexual Politics. Australian feminist Germaine Greer continued this public discussion in The Female Eunuch a year later. If Brown’s I Want What I Want feels dated it is because it seems untouched by the feminist analysis of sex and gender roles that was only a few years away.
The 1972 film version of I Want What I Want—written by Gillian Freeman, whose 1961 gay-themed The Leather Boys (written under the name of Eliot George and filmed in 1964)—is far more attuned to contemporary ideas about sex and gender. Here Wendy is much more assertive and forthright about her sexual desires for men, whereas in the book her flirtations with a man she meets verge on abuse. The film also has a far better sense of the potential for sexual violence against women and how Wendy is impacted by that. Freeman even has Wendy—in two separate scenes—reading Simone de Beauvoir’s groundbreaking feminist analysis The Second Sex. Freeman also gives the film a more upbeat ending—possibly the ending that Brown could not imagine in 1966 because of poverty as well as the lack of a feminist movement.
Read today, I Want What I Want is more than a historical curiosity: it is a fully realized portrait of a person—a transwoman—becoming herself in a specific time and place which both defines her and which she transcends.
Michael Bronski
January 2018
Michael Bronski is Professor of the Practice in Activism and Media in the Studies of Women, Gender, Sexuality at Harvard University. His Queer History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2011) won the 2011 Lambda Literary Award for Best Nonfiction as well as the 2011 American Library Association Stonewall Israel Fishman Award for Best Nonfiction. Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps (St. Martin’s Press) won the 2003 Lammy Award for Best Anthology. His last two books have been “‘You Can Tell Just By Looking’ and 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People” (Beacon Press, 2013) (coauthored with Ann Pellegrini and Michael Amico) and Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics (Beacon Press, 2015) coauthored with Kay Whitlock. He is now at work on a YA edition of A Queer History of the United States which will be published next year. He has been involved in gay liberation as a political organizer, writer, editor, publisher, and theorist since 1969.