Wednesday, July 03, 2002

Dress Codes

Kewl interview with the author at Salon.

The book is about the author's father's transition to being a woman while the author was a teenager.

Select bit:

Your mother's father was also in the vanguard of the sexual revolution. So, unlike many women of her time, your mother was very familiar with many kinds of alternate sexuality, at least on an intellectual level. Do you think that made her more open to starting a relationship with a man she knew to be a transvestite?

Ironically, what led her into this marriage and this situation that eventually became so untenable was the fact that she was so open-minded. She was not the kind of person who wouldn't confront things. She just thought that men had weird sexual peccadilloes, that's what they do. I think, weirdly enough, she thought of my father's cross-dressing as his most male attribute. To her, the thing that really made him a man was the fact that he wanted to wear women's clothes, because only men do weird shit like that.

The fact that she saw my grandfather experimenting with things, while my grandmother sat idly by made it all normal for her. Maybe if she had been brought up in a much more conservative household, where these things were not discussed openly, she probably would have heard that my father liked to wear angora sweaters and immediately ran for the hills. She probably could have protected herself more if she had been less liberal. But she was just liberal enough to handle this, but not so liberal that she wanted to change her sexual orientation and stay with someone who was transgendered. But she did throw him his coming out party.

I was so nervous going into that coming-out party. We didn't know if people were going to show up with blow torches. And then people were just calmly eating canapés.

Also of interest is a review of "The Last American Man."

The tag line of which -- Endangered species, Why are there no more rugged, self-reliant he-men like the subject of Elizabeth Gilbert's "The Last American Man"? Because no women will put up with them -- sucked me right in.

In this second review, the author weaves in references to "Dress Codes," finding similarities between the lives of the transgendered father and the so called last American man.

posted by Bohica at 3:54 PM