ja
P
a
Francisco J. González
67/1
Writing gender With Sexuality:
reflectionS on the diarieS of
lou Sullivan
In contemporary psychoanalytic writing, gender tends to be disarticu-lated from sexuality. While this has been a theoretically useful approach, especially as regards the critical appraisal of early traditional literature (which often assumed a facile coherence between sex, sexuality, and gender), this position too often leaves gender stripped of one of the most compelling forces in psychoanalytic theorizing, namely, its relation to the sexual. Here the diaries of Lou Sullivan (1951–1991)—a transsexual man who began writing long before considering sexual transitioning—are used to present an extended example of the intimate linkage between gender and sexuality. The diaries stand as a unique historical archive: a fairly comprehensive, prospective, first-person account of transsexuality, begun before the subject self-identified as transsexual, which documents a complex and candid subjective evolution. Situated historically during a time of enormous upheaval in both psychoanalysis and the culture at large on questions of gender and sexuality, the diaries offer an additional opportunity to consider the nexus of individual psyche and social forms. Keywords: transgender, sexuality, gender, Lou Sullivan
T
hese reflections were born from a moment of recognition, and like all such moments, this instance of recognition was animated by thePersonal and Supervising Analyst and faculty, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (San Francisco); Staff Psychiatrist, Instituto Familiar de la Raza; editorial board member, Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality.
An earlier version of this paper was presented in 2011 at Masculinity, Complex, a conference sponsored jointly by Studies in Gender and Sexuality; the Gender Studies Program, John Jay College of Justice; Center for the Study of Women and Society, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; and Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, New York University. Submitted for publication April 16, 2017.
keenness of a correspondence that was sufficient to bridge a palpable difference. Sean Dorsey, the transgender choreographer and dancer, was moving on stage, his body in motion shimmering between masculine and feminine, a figure reconfiguring, and I, watching in the audience, felt my mind moving in some way along with him. The reverberations of mascu-line and feminine had themselves a dual cast: signaling both a complex movement or transition across biological sex (female-to-male), as well as the “bent” masculinity of homosexuality. Uncannily, it was in those moments when the gestures and movements might have been most tradi-tionally described as “effeminate”—and this word alone already conveys the complex stratification we call gender1—it was in those “fey”
moments, then, in the pageantry of swishes and bent wrists, that I found myself reading Dorsey’s body most transparently as “male.” The ricochet of gender here was rather pleasantly vertiginous to me: in this instance it was the imprimatur of femininity that made the man in my eyes. Because the medium was modern dance, the performance of gender was tightly imbricated with the erotics of bodies in motion, intertwining: the bent wrist was answered with an arm encircling a waist, with the press and glide of physical contact. The scene led me to think about the ways that gender is always laced with sexuality: gestures conventionally read as effeminate, and heightened for artistic effect by the choreography, sig-naled here a particular kind of male body, namely a male body sexually drawn to other such male bodies.
I had returned to see Dorsey because I had been mesmerized by an earlier performance of his a couple of years earlier, based on the diaries of Lou Sullivan, a transgender activist and writer. Lou had been born Sheila in Milwaukee in 1951, and as a girl of twelve had started keeping a record of her days in leather-bound, latch-book journals that opened with a little key. Diary writing was in fact a practice Lou continued with dedication and passion until two days before his death from AIDS as a gay man in San Francisco in 1991.
It is necessary here to take up the important question of pronouns, which (in English) become obviously gendered in the third person, in speaking about someone and not to him. I have chosen to follow Lou’s
1We might do well to remember that it was Freud who in several works ascribed the
mas-culinity complex to women, alerting us to the complex articulation between anatomical bodies and gender. As Butler (1990) taught us, gender becomes readily visible only when denaturalized and disarticulated from or rearticulated to bodies; sheared off from a particular materialized body, a gesture can migrate across anatomies.
gender identification in the diaries by using the pronouns Lou used when writing. For example: in the earlier writings, when Lou uses his given name, Sheila, and clearly refers to himself as a “girl,” I use the pronoun “she.” This convention introduces a problematic touching on important subjects beyond the scope of this paper, most obviously the clear right of self-determination by individuals to signify their gender retrospectively. To be clear: this is a position I strongly support. Many trans people have an uncontested and lived experience of having always been a gender that differs from the natal body. For such a person, the shift in pronouns I am using here would constitute misgendering.2 But I hope to make a case
here for the legitimacy of other narratives, ones in which the coherence of gender is not monolithic, in which gender stability is not constructed in opposition to gender fluidity.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, my use of a change in pronouns over a lifetime also introduces the complex multitemporal revisions of psyche designated by the concept of Nachträglichkeit or après-coup.3
These seminal psychoanalytic ideas complicate a linear account of devel-opment and implicitly suggest the possibility of multiple “origins” in any given accounting of a life (González 2013). In conventional developmental psychoanalysis, core gender identity is thought to be established early in life and remains a coherent and consistent anchor of the subject as a kind of truth of the soul and indelible inscription in the social order. If early psycho-analytic theory tied gender firmly to the bedrock of anatomy, contemporary theory loosens this determining bond, but holds to the notion of a perdura-ble gender identity that the trans subject affirms or recovers later in life (along the lines of: I was thought of by others as a girl, but I was actually always a boy from the start). In psychoanalysis we have largely come to accept such claims as legitimate (though this took some time), and the ana-lytic establishment has become more comfortable with the idea of trans as a viable subject position. “Gender aggregates polyvalently,” writes Avgi Saketopoulou (2014a, p. 775; 2014b), whose papers detail the complex relation of (trans)gender and its embodiment. In the spirit of polyvalency, then, this paper aims in part to advocate conferring legitimacy to less
2For an elegant and clinically usefully investigation of misgendering to relationship to the
natal body, see Saketopoulou (2014a,b).
3Space precludes an investigation of this important and complex idea here, especially as
it relates to (trans)gender identities and sexualities—for a general orientation to this idea, see Faimberg (2007); Laplanche and Pontalis (1967, pp. 111–114); Perelberg (2006); Thomä and Cheshire (1991).
obviously “coherent” trans narratives, and by so doing trouble the impera-tive of coherent narraimpera-tives of gender for all subjects.
Jay Prosser has made the case that trans subjectivity is deeply bound up with narration and autobiography. In the seminal Second Skin, Prosser (1998) traces the intricacies of this delicate authorship: moving between telling the correct story to medical authorities in order to obtain access to body-altering technologies that affirm gender identities, on the one hand, and giving unique and authentic coherence to one’s own life lived and personally signified in ways that may not resonate with the clear story demanded by the medical establishment, on the other. Prosser notes that most published trans autobiographies are written retrospectively, from the vantage of someone looking back post-transition, and that among the few examples of transition journals, the individual has at least already made the decision to transition, and often has not completed the process.
The large archive that comprises the Louis Graydon Sullivan papers (now housed at the San Francisco Public Library Historical Collection) offers us something unique: the chronicle of a transgender life that begins well before the author has any idea of transitioning or even of the concept of transsexuality, and that reaches for something more comprehensive than a narrative of transition: the diaries extend from before menarche, through high school crushes and experiments in cross-dressing, on to the tumult of 1960s cultural sit-ins, love-ins, and be-ins, through accounts of gender-bending play with bisexual male lovers, cruising leather bars, and serious loves gained and lost, to a detailed history of gender transitioning via hor-mone therapy, psychotherapy, top surgery, and genitoplasty, through chronicles of groundbreaking trans activism, to the documentation of an AIDS diagnosis and treatment and then the slow painful decline of health until shortly before Lou’s death. In short, the diaries contain the messiness of a life actually lived, with its manifest contradiction and buoyant aspira-tion. As Sheila writes in the closing entry of 1965 as a fourteen-year-old:
And once more, diary, I’ve filled you with all the honest-to-God truths. This is me. This is my mind and my life in my own words. This is me becoming a human being [12/31/65].4
4Because the entire cache of diaries is organized chronologically and there is no
pagina-tion, I simply use the date of the entry to document the source. I quote the entries verbatim and have forgone using sic to indicate actual misspellings and grammatical inconsistencies, as this would be extremely cumbersome given the frequency of slang, abbreviations, and highly idio-syncratic usage typical of much diary writing.
Through this fascinating first-person chronicle of a transgender life, I attempt to elaborate a contemporary articulation of gender with sexuality and corporeal experience, one that aims to provide an extended and vivid example of a psychoanalytic accounting of gender deeply imbricated with erotism. A guiding principle of this view is that, at least for some, gender builds, shifts, and develops over time; it runs counter to the conventional approach that confers legitimacy only on trans narratives that document a perdurable and abiding gender identity clearly originating in childhood. We might extend this observation to all Western subjects, and say that only coherent narratives of gender, which begin in childhood and have historical stability, are viewed as sound and sanctioned.
g e n d e r W i t h S e x ua l i t y
Beginning largely in the 1980s and flourishing in the 1990s, psychoanaly-sis and related academic disciplines developed an extensive literature on the vicissitudes of gender (see, e.g., Benjamin 1988; Butler 1990, 2004; Chodorow 2005; Corbett 1996, 2008; Dimen and Goldner 2005; Elise 1997, 1998; Fausto-Sterling 2000; Grosz 1994; Halberstam 1998; Harris 2009; Layton 1998; Silverman 1992). This literature reacted critically to the essentialist reductionism of gender in the shadow of an unrecon-structed theory of sexuality. In conventional analytic theory before the feminist wave, the organizing sexuality was always implicitly masculinist and heterosexual; thus, even in the “negative” oedipus complex, the boy identified with his mother and loved his father with the same desire that she did: his apparent homosexuality was “truly” only an inverted hetero-sexuality. Freud (1937) famously delimited psyche at the “bedrock” of anatomy, or rather at the feeling of abjection supposedly stirred in both sexes by the feminine as castration. “The repudiation of femininity,” he writes, “can be nothing else than a biological fact, a part of the great riddle of sex” (p. 252). Gender is here enigmatically but foundationally tied to a misogynist (hetero)sexuality.
Early feminist theory in psychoanalysis—revisions to the masculinist oedipal story and the critique of genital monadism, for example—still unfolded against a backdrop of presumed heterosexuality and retained much of its architecture. If Karen Horney (1924, 1926) and Ernest Jones (1927) raised a feminine protest to counter Freud’s phallocentric view of
sexuality (see also Fliegel 1973), they did so on the basis of a primary femininity founded on innate heterosexuality.
One of the principal moves of queer-inflected gender theory was to radically disarticulate the presumptions of essentialist theorizing that nat-uralized the relationships between anatomical sex, gender identity, sexual identity, sexual behavior, and gender performance. The work on distin-guishing sex, sexuality, and gender had begun in earnest in mid-century, and emanated largely from studies of “hermaphroditism” (what we would now call intersex) and transsexuality. The sexologist John Money (1973; Money, Hampson, and Hampson 1955) pioneered the concepts of gender role and gender identity, and psychoanalysts, especially Robert Stoller (1964, 1965, 1968; but see also Ovesey and Person 1973; Person and Ovesey 1978), elaborated these distinctions in an attempt to sort out the confounding relationship between gender and sexuality. In these early disarticulations of gender and sexuality, psychoanalysis tended to view nonnormative sexuality as the pathological attempt to repair damaged gender (often homosexuality as a symptom of “failed” masculinity—see, e.g., Greenson 1964; Socarides 1968, 1970). The historian Dagmar Herzog (2015) argues convincingly that psychoanalysis—especially in the United States—reacted to mid-twentieth-century sexology (from the likes of Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, and Gagnon and Simon), and to the sexual revolution of which it formed a part, in a defensive and moralizing manner, “offering a secular ‘moral sensibility’ that reinforced conserva-tive family values under the sign of ‘health,’ one that was expressly con-temptuous of homosexuality and of any expression of female sexuality outside of marriage” (p. 25). Ironically, this reactivity coupled with other critical factors, such as the theoretical turn toward preoedipal structures and relationality—may have helped to deemphasize the sexual in psycho-analysis, the very discipline that had made it the cornerstone of its theorizing.
By the end of the century, gender studies had exploded, especially after the appearance of queer theory, which radically questioned the pre-sumption of heterosexuality. In this liberating move, however, gender is often seen as driven primarily by something other than the sexual: studies tend to focus on performative instantiations of how gender manifests, how it is signaled, and how it operates in the psychosocial field, and on the effects (often anxious) of the discourses of power and the symbolic structures that organize and regulate its production, possibility, and
transfigurations. Even formally psychoanalytic studies of gender have tended to be more concerned with questions of social construction and power than with erotics, desire, and bodily pleasure.
Psychoanalysis today posits an exceedingly complex relationship between gender, sexuality, the body, and the social, a view that tends toward agnosticism on its resolution and highlights the enigmatic. Contrasting Freud’s relatively simpler schemas, Corbett (2008) captures the fluidity of our contemporary quandary:
Distinct from Freud’s position, no one aspect of this relational matrix is privi-leged. There is no originary moment; there is no ordinary pair or triangle, there are instead multiple relations and registrations; there are no dispositional genita-lia; gender and genitals, instead, are built through over-determined nonlinear moments. There is no originary desire; desires and gendered states also accumu-late through chaotic complexity. The desires that found gender, the desires gender lives to solicit are manifold. The material body is built, not given and determining. Gender and genital experience are interimplicated; the direction of causality is neither from genital experience to gender nor from gender to genital experience. The direction of causality is neither from the raw materials of physiology to the constructed mind nor from mind to physiology. The network of desires created through the relational excess of human life is too complex for such simplistic causality [p. 845].
If, as Lingiardi (2015) writes, “every desire ‘hallucinates’ a desirable body, shaping its gender stereotype” (p. 110), then we might now begin to trace new linkages between gender and sexualities. Perhaps this is what psychoanalysis is best suited to do: to help in the construction of indi-vidual narratives about these networks of desires, ones that forge believ-able and useful connections between libidinal bodies, socially shaped genders, and lived sexualities—and useful not just to individual analy-sands, but to our collective theorizing. Greater recognition of these actual lives lived can help us see the vitalizing questions that emerge at the edges and fissures of our established theoretical narratives.
n a r r at i v e i d e n t i t i e S
The life of Lou Sullivan is cast squarely against the complex history in which gender and sexuality were being refashioned at mid-century. Aptly enough, Sheila was born three years after publication of Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and two years before the companion
volume, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. In 1963, the year Sheila began recording her life in handwritten diaries, Betty Friedan published
The Feminine Mystique, Kennedy was assassinated, and Sam Cooke recorded the protest song “A Change Is Gonna Come” after being barred from a “whites only” motel.
Reading the diaries, particularly those from the period I’ll highlight here, beginning before Sheila’s transition in late adolescence and moving through early adulthood, is a fascinating exercise in postmodern narrative hopscotch. The entries are sometimes made out of sequence with respect to the printed calendared pages, and there are cellophane-taped extensions on smaller leaves of paper, long quotations from letters written or received, and insertions of topical newspaper stories, photographs, or concert tickets. It’s as if the diaries themselves materialize the flux and tumult of this turbulent time, as well as the subjective temporalities of a mind. Later, Lou would tape to these pages the first long hairs trimmed from his chin after starting testos-terone—tangible evidence of his becoming a man, now become something like the totemic relics of transgendered sainthood. And toward the end, one finds the press announcement of Lou’s newly published biography of Jack Bee Garland (Sullivan 1990). Garland had seen combat as a male Red Cross aide in the Philippines in the Spanish-American War and lived some twenty years as a beneficent newspaperman in San Francisco, only to be discovered on autopsy to be anatomically female.
Sullivan’s writing—both the historical book on Garland, which (re)-constructs a trans life from newspaper accounts and, more substantially, the lifelong documentation of his own life in the diaries—instantiate “body narratives” (Prosser 1998). Prosser’s term centers on a question of great interest to psychoanalysis: namely, how the material flesh of the body comes to be subjectified, how a body comes to be my body, a libidi-nal body. The metaphor of writing is apt. Both Freud (1925) and Laplanche (1999) use writing to represent the ways the world deeply touches us, the internal registration of what is initially external to psyche (perceptions in the case of Freud, inscriptions of the enigmatic other in the case of Laplanche). In Prosser’s use of the term, the transsexual is an “authorial” or “constructing” subject, who literally becomes through narration, in a complex dialogue with medico-legal establishments and the social. This is similar to the Lacanian analyst Patricia Gherovici’s conception of the transsexual body as a written body (2010). The diaries thus offer a vivid iteration of this materializing process.
But all narrative is necessarily constructed. A narrative inherently implies production by editing and curation: some elements are brought into the story, others discarded or never recorded in the first place. While diaries are presumably written for an audience of one, psychoanalysis would be quick to remind us that especially the stories we tell ourselves about who we are can hardly be taken as transparent and historically veridical. Our narratives may hold us together, but our lives are full of contradiction; we inevitably conceal as we reveal.
The diaries are psychoanalytically interesting in another way: they give a social accounting of identity development. Reflecting little on pos-sible childhood origins, they follow what we might call an Eriksonian line that postulates a lifelong process of development, with consolidation of sexual identity in adolescence. Identity is a subject to which psychoanaly-sis gives scant attention. The term is certainly wed to the political move-ments of precisely this period: the identity politics of class, the women’s movement, and gay liberation. This bald association to politics has rightly complicated the psychoanalytic rigor of the term, which can also carry with it the taint of rigidity. But Erikson, who has tended to be marginal-ized in our theoretical developments, had a much more dynamic concept in mind. Referring to use of the term “inner identity” to describe Freud’s link to Judaism, Erikson (1956) finds here an idea “which was not based on race or religion, but on a common readiness to live in opposition, and on a common freedom from prejudices which narrow the use of the intel-lect” (pp. 56–57). He goes on:
It is this identity of something in the individual’s core with an essential aspect of a group’s inner coherence which is under consideration here: for the young individual must learn to be most himself where he means most to others—those others, to be sure, who have come to mean most to him. The term identity expresses such a mutual relation in that it connotes both a persistent sameness within oneself (self-sameness) and a persistent sharing of some kind of essential character with others [p. 57].
The identification that Erikson here describes is a keystone of the social link in the individual psyche. Consistent with his larger work— including the psychobiographies of Luther (Erikson 1958) and Ghandi (Erikson 1969)—this formulation of identity extends psychic develop-ment well beyond infancy, demonstrating that the psychic configurations laid down in childhood are more like malleable templates than fixed
bedrock, templates that can interact with sociohistory in dynamically complex and unpredictable ways.
Erikson’s words could hardly be a more apt description of Lou’s strug-gles, which serve as an extended example of the dynamic interplay between subjectivity and the social. Indeed, what I hope to offer is a counterpoint to the established notion of gender identity as an essentialist and early fixed determinant of psychic life, implying that emergent social categories (such as trans) can radically change how we come to think of such fundamental concepts as “core gender identity.” I eschew questions of etiology and cau-sation to describe something like a trans phenomenology. My emphasis is specifically not on the conventional psychoanalytic narrative of origins in the family; rather, it is on the elaboration of identity as something contin-gent, often incoherent and conflictual, and necessarily in a constitutive relationship with the collective. Consider here Ian Hacking’s well-known “looping effect” (2007) between discourses and subjects as they co-create and modify each other. If we take seriously Harris’s claim (2009) that gen-der is softly assembled, the “strange attractors” that may come to consoli-date it may lie in our futures as much as in our pasts.
lo u n é e S h e i l a
In the complex story that Lou tells of a life, conviction about becoming a man is something that coalesces gradually and then masses up over time, developing into a center of gravity that cannot be denied. In a 1964 entry, Sheila recalls “playing boys” with her sisters when she was seven, taking names like Billy Cordail and Chris Roman; less than a year later, she is intrigued and perhaps a bit surprised that, though she is infatuated with a boy who ultimately breaks her heart, it is homosexuality, indeed male homosexuality, that so compels her. “I seem very obsessed [by homo-sexuality],” she writes in December 1966:
so today I started my first story. About a mute 17-year-old whose father is afraid of him sexually becuz the boy has homo tendencies & strong ones. So the father takes to abusing the boy which gives him [the father] sexual pleasure. He makes the boy strip and the father beats him with a leather strap. —When I think of stuff like this, I get all kind of wet stuff in my underpants. I dunno what it is but I once read in a magazine that the stuff emitted in masturbation wasn’t harmful [12/4/66].
We might see here the gathering coherence of an identity as a trans-gender boy within Sheila, though unconscious (and hence mute) in rela-tion to the introject of a harsh paternalistic law that condemns this emergent form. This relation is not simply adversarial but also highly eroticized, providing evidence that what is at stake here is a question not merely of gender but of sexuality. The sadomasochistic element is per-haps not unusual in sexual identity formations that are culturally pro-scribed or reviled, and we should consider the enlivening aspects of such “sexualization” as a way such subjects psychically counter hegemonic constraint.
This first story is followed by many others, a steady stream of narra-tives and fantasies: sadomasochistic scenes of fathers or cops or social workers sexually using their lost charges, or hapless Cinderella boys res-cued by a prince only to be kept as sexual slaves. It’s always homosexual sex, and always between men. Concurrently, Sheila, a devoted Catholic who struggles honestly with Christian ethics and openly declares a love for Jesus, takes to dressing in cowboy drag and assuming the persona of her displaced characters:
Went downtown in my beige shirt, Levis and chain with dad’s good conduct medal. I just bombed up and down the deserted crummy streets . . . and you shoulda seen the people look. My act was that I pretended I’d just been let outa jail after servin a month for distributing Communist propaganda when it really was only my philosophies. I lov actin and sure wish I could be a boy so I could be an actor. I can act like a boy better than I can a girl [8/31/66].
The layering of gender play and political drama here is intricate: sto-ries of class disparity and social injustice give a shape, literally figuring Sheila’s own sense of personal alienation, as much as cross-dressing man-ifests her productive gender trouble (Butler 1990). The social upheavals of the late 1960s fuel her passions about the plight of the poor and other outcasts, passions she explicitly reads as vehicles for her sexual masoch-ism. The street theater of playing the hungry boy or dispossessed political dissident stages a complex fantasy that braids together social position, personal gender performance, and sexual desire. No one thread from this braid can be isolated without disrupting the others. In Erikson’s model of identity development (1956), a number of these moves would certainly
come under the rubric of “negative identity,”5 while he highlights the
enormous difficulties encountered by the adolescent in a time of massive historical change and social pathology (Erikson 1946).
The diaries are constantly showing us this kind of tight raveling: identification with the other is always profoundly tied up with questions of desire. Nor are these identifications parsed primarily in the language of the family romance. Rather, they take as their starting point the entry into the social order outside the boundaries of strict kinship. No doubt there were early organizations of gender and sexuality for Lou, but we might see these as “familial anlagen” that experience will hew and shape into novel kinds of erotic and corporeal identifications. This ongoing experi-ence is largely psychosexual. Indeed, the diaries trace a trajectory of love and desire, beginning with unrequited religious passions for Paul McCartney and Jesus, unreachable and idealized figures, through its first incarnations in passionate high school crushes with boys named Larrie and Ralph (the latter of whom she even considers marrying). Away at col-lege, Ralph becomes more fantasy than real partner, and perhaps a poorly satisfied desire for him serves mostly to consolidate a growing internal sense of boy-ness. “I thought of the days I really thought I was a cowboy,” Sheila writes:
I dressed my part & I really was one. I don’t have to dress up anymore & I’m glad. The cowboy’s in my soul, where he counts. He doesn’t have a name cuz he’s 1,000 different men. Always men, tho. I really shouldabeen a boy. I’da been so much happier as a boy. I’ll probably make a good marriage cuz my husband’ll be me in all I wanted for myself. I’ll treat him as tho he were me. Strange & I wish Ralph were here [3/10/68].
Ralph doesn’t last much longer, but by this point Sheila’s already met another boy, named Jim, at the Avant Garde, the local hip coffeehouse, where “freaks” and “hippies” come to listen to the likes of Big Joe Williams, The Velvet Whip, and Sleepy John Estes. For Sheila, Jim is a tremendous “sexual outlet”: “like my story boys, weak & frightened & begging not to be hurt” (12/19/68) but “so relaxed with himself & his emotions & whole
5Erikson (1956) explicitly signals out “the village homosexual” (p. 86) and “gangs of
young homosexuals” (p. 87) as examples of chosen negative identities: “The history of such a choice reveals a set of conditions in which it is easier to derive a sense of identity out of a total identification with that which one is least supposed to be than to struggle for a feeling of reality in acceptable roles which are unattainable with the patient’s inner means” (p. 87).
being & yet retaining his total masculinity & proud atmosphere” (12/23/68). On the street, Sheila and Jim are confused for two boys or two girls (11/29/68), and for the first time Sheila feels “secure and loved” (11/29/68). But the securities of love, we know, are evanescent when kindled by desire. The couple flirt with living together and even marrying, but they end up in an adventurous ten-year open relationship that dips in and out of the bur-geoning gay subcultures. There is a great deal of gender play and cross-dressing: Jim in tights or rings or girlie scarves, Sheila stuffing a sock in her jeans. For a few years Jim dabbles with homosexuality. Nothing excites Sheila more. “I want to make him the lovely boy I wish I could be. I want men to desire him & try to kiss him” (12/23/72).
Increasingly, Sheila opens to a queer life: attending meetings at the Gay People’s Union, going to hear Christine Jorgensen6 speak, cruising
gay bars for “femmy” boys, hanging out with transvestites and drag queens, and always reading and writing. John Rechy’s cult classic City of Night, about the urban adventures of a young gay hustler, becomes a kind of bible to her. She imagines Jim or herself as the drag queen Kathy, “her ghostlike beauty . . . the man who kissed her & reaching under her skirt, realized she was a man” (01/09/73). The only femininity she desires or identifies with, that makes any real sense to her, is a drag queen’s layered femininity.
It is in the context of this first, deeply sexual relationship with Jim, through and with and against him as an erotic object, that Sheila begins gender transitioning in earnest. Lou emerges in and through the sexuality of this relationship. By the time Jim leaves to study in Berkeley, their relationship is strained, mostly due to his desire to get away. Jim doesn’t have Sheila’s moral fortitude; he tends to escape rather than to engage in the rigorously honest self-grappling that is Sheila’s hallmark. As with previous breakups, Jim’s departure plunges Sheila into despair:
I realize so much how my adaptation of masculinity is to mask my vulnerable feelings toward Jim. I feel if I dress & act real femmy I’ll only think more of what a big mean thoughtless cold man Jim is & how he fucked over poor little me like he swore he wouldn’t. And I just don’t want to think of that shit. My masculinity is the only escape & shield I have from my feelings of feminine hopelessness. I don’ think it’s all so bad [09/11/73].
6Jorgensen became a celebrity when the media published her story of sex reassignment
Sheila both mourns the loss of Jim and identifies melancholically with his masculinity. In line with Freud (1917), it is perhaps now com-monplace for us to say that in relinquishing any object, both mourning and melancholia take their turns. It is loss that laminates the ego like a pearl, loss that builds it up. While gender melancholia, according to Butler (1995), is unconscious and established through a love not
mourned—as in the heterosexual constitution of masculinity—my point here is that we cannot “fully” mourn any object in its completeness, in part because all objects are necessarily incomplete.7 Even in homoerotic
love lost between two men, there will still be some element of “masculin-ity” unconsciously constituted through gender melancholia, though it may not be conventional masculinity. We might take the title of Freud’s famous paper quite literally, and suggest that whenever there is mourning there is also melancholia (after all, it is not “mourning or melancholia”). But if gender itself is a complex gathering and layered accretion of mel-ancholic identifications, as Butler writes, these identifications are dis-tilled in a crucible of desire. Part of the rewriting of the oedipus complex in feminist and queer theory is a deconstruction of the exclusive either/or logic of heterosexuality, in which identification is opposed to desire (the boy wants mother and is like father in his wanting her). Butler’s postula-tion of melancholic gender (1995) and Benjamin’s articulapostula-tion of identi-fication (1988) are both predicated on erotic attachments. In Butler, conventional masculine heterosexuality is itself the unmourned loss of the boy’s erotic tie to the father.
After a failed attempt to pick up a “blond Adonis . . . a graceful boy, soft skin, sparkling teeth, a pretty face,” Sheila writes:
And so I had to sleep with the boy I am & make love to myself, like I have every nite. I pretend I’m a boy in bed & think how it feels. I’ve done this for years—as long as I’ve had sexual feelings. I have to go to bars often if I’m to find myself a boy to sleep with. In times I can’t, I can become a boy to sleep with. But it’s so much nicer with a real one [09/16/73].
Eventually Sheila will reunite with Jim in Berkeley, and they will resume their relationship; and eventually she will lose him again, and again mourn him deeply. But by that point Sheila will have made a trans-ference of another sort: she will have become Lou.
Lou arrives gradually. Like the image developing on photographic film in a darkroom, or—in the pop iconography of the time—like the particulate incarnation by transporter beam in Star Trek, Lou takes shape, arriving seemingly from somewhere else, materializing bit by bit in his body. This manifestation is laborious, and coeval with a coming to consciousness:
MY sex life is in such transition. . . . I know I can get exactly what I want now— to fantasize is no longer good enough. Before it was beyond my dreams—it was the worst perversion I wished to have a penis, to fuck a boy, to be on top & inside! But now it’s only a matter of time [12/11/73].
But less than a month later, an entry reads:
Finally contacted another hetero female TV [transvestite]. . . . She’s 41 & lives in Clinton, Iowa. She wants to correspond & says I’m the only other one she knows too [01/27/74].
Experimentation with the name Lou in public begins in earnest a few months later, in gay bars. With a gay friend, Charles, Lou attends an open-ing party for a gay bathhouse and passes as a man. What we see in the diaries is what we see in the consulting room with any real and substantial change: a series of identifications and counteridentifications, doubts and reaffirmations, until slowly a perdurable structure emerges that with-stands life’s turbulence.
In the construction of the body his appearance requires, Lou is most concerned with sexuality and sexual love. He very much wants to be read as male, delights when called “sir” by a store clerk, or even when harassed by thugs or cops as a gay man. But becoming a man is most significantly a means for finding sexual love with another man. For a time, Jim and Lou rekindle their affair, in a kind of transitional zone between hetero- and homosexuality. In a poignant hallmark of the transition, which is one of sexuality as much as of gender, Lou experiences the unrequited love of a gay man for a straight roommate, as a gay man.
The fantasies build, turning more toward his own body. By 1974 Lou has begun thinking about surgical intervention, at times even pretending he has already had “top surgery.” After flirting with a gay boy in a bar, Lou writes: “After I told him I had a mastectomy he ran his hands over my chest, freaked. ‘She did!’ Super-ego booster. He felt nothing. I am a boy”
(05/28/74). Later, in a dream that links birth imagery with masculine auto-erotism, we see the further consolidation of his transgendered desire:
had a dream that somehow I folded out my belly-button & there I had a tied-off blob of skin (looked like a testicle tied at its base) & I wondered in the dream why I hadn’t played with it before, cuz I figured it was probably by inderctly rubbing it that I masturbated & I seemed to understand very clearly, then, how I’d been able to get off while masturbating [06/24/75].
A year later and now living in San Francisco, Lou is growing increasingly distressed about his “half & half life.” Rather than join an affirming transgen-der support group, he decides to enter individual therapy to more deeply con-sider whether it makes any sense to “switch over” surgically:
I don’t feel this surgery would make me a better man or woman, but I know it would make me a better person. I don’t believe I can successfully live as a man or as a woman. But I have to do all I can to live comfortably & this surgery would do that. I have never felt as sure of that than I do now [07/27/76].
During the few years of therapy, Lou works substantially on the inter-section of gender and sexuality and, for a time, relinquishes his desire for transitioning. Temporarily there is a return to Sheila, wearing dresses and makeup, attending a women’s support group, and cultivating heterosex-ual desire for Jim:
I’ve returned to S.F. [after a visit home to Milwaukee] feeling pretty free of my gender conflict & with an acutely raised sexual desire for Jim. I must pursue my own ideal of the perfect male/female balance & not try to oust one for the other [11/10/76].
One has the sense that there is genuine rapport between Sheila/Lou and the therapist, a woman named Claire, and that an identification based on a positive transference is an engine that helps drive the work:
And so once again I left Claire with a new outlook, the feeling of the impending crisis now clear to me. I mustn’t follow blindly what others say is female or good for me, I must choose for myself what kind of female I want to be, define my own rules to what comes naturally to me [04/05/77].
But neither is this period without difficulty. Being female requires considerable effort, and Sheila is at times deeply troubled:
Have been worried about my lack of self identity and purpose now that I’ve decided to remain female. Maybe I’m being too hard on myself & expecting to adjust to the new identity too quickly. It seems I’m more bold and positive the way I am now, yet I don’t have that “hold” on myself I did before [08/07/77]. I continue to feel more like part of the human race, yet less like a person [07/04/78].)
The end of 1978 augurs the definitive death of Sheila and the ineluc-table birth of Lou. Around this time, his older brother Pat becomes ill and dies. Does the mourning of this loss solidify something in Lou? Jim writes to say he needs to be alone because he didn’t know how to love, and their tortured relationship begins to dissolve progressively over the years. Is this final severance the melancholic catalyst for Lou’s consolidation? In the diaries, there is more mention of family ties: a closeness with two sisters, but also a strong disidentification with their maternal roles, and an easing of old tensions with parents. What these changes in Lou’s object world mean for his transition are not entirely clear: they certainly do not generate it, but they seem to provide wind to the sails of a change embarked on long ago.
Within the year Lou is clearly reestablished and begins transitioning in earnest: testosterone and a mastectomy are relatively easy to obtain, but getting “bottom surgery” proves daunting. Lou applies for sexual reassignment at the Stanford clinics, and though he makes a strong case for his transsexuality—fully cross-dressing, working and living as a man, taking testosterone, planning or even already having had top surgery—he is twice rejected. In 1979, the “gender professionals” cannot conceive of an FTM8 who wants to have sex with men. “Sudden thought,” Lou writes
sarcastically: “If the psychiatric profession has decided that being homo-sexual is no longer a sign of mental disorder, then how come wanting to be homosexual is so mental??” (10/05/79). This is fundamentally a ques-tion of desire, one that the professionals can conceive of only in terms of desexualized gender. Lou must turn to less conventional means, finding a surgeon outside the clinic system to do the job.
After the long-awaited genitoplasty—complicated by dehiscing sutures, infection, and surgical revisions—one of the most troubling
8Female-to-male, as opposed to MTF (male-to-female). These designations for
transsexu-ality are falling out of use, as they repeat and inscribe a gender binary that is increasingly called into question.
questions for Lou is whether what’s left of his vaginal opening will con-fuse a lover in anal sex. He longs to be penetrated, and as a man. What is it that is in play here if not sexuality? Counter to the conventional logic of heterosexuality, masculinity is established here precisely as the opposite of impenetrability: rather than a humiliating castration that would estab-lish a feminizing identification, being penetrated ecstatically constitutes masculinity in surrender to another man. Being penetrated, that is to say, constitutes the feminine position only in a particular regime of sexuality. But the anatomical proximity of anus and vestigial vagina complicates the libidinal geography. We could say, with Kaja Silverman (1992), that this is male subjectivity at the margins—indeed the most literal of mar-gins. A margin of flesh between two anatomical openings, both potential sites of phallic penetration, marks the difference here between male and female as much as any other piece of genital meat. These neighboring orifices are sexualized not just by the fantasy of what might fill them, or by the logic of have and have not (after all, by this point Lou has a penis), but through the desire for the particular kind of Other they invoke: a man who desires sex with a man.
The similar anatomical bodies of two “men” cannot be said to be the same libidinal bodies.9 Sexuality carves out, maps, and suffuses
star-tlingly different erogenous terrains, and the erotic body is always com-plexly shadowed by the other of its desires.
Masculinity, like all gender, is a complex set of relations—and not just between sociocultural constructs or disciplinary discourses and the individual or collective subject of interpellation, though it is also that, of course. Gender must have something to do with bodies.
Having disarticulated gender from anatomical sex and heterosexual-ity in a fruitful deconstruction of normativheterosexual-ity, perhaps we are now in a position to re-find a place for sexuality as a driving organizing principle in gender’s construction. Not through a false equivalence between sexual orientation and a way of doing gender, nor through reading gender as
sexual behavior, but by bringing back into play the body and its psychi-cally disruptive ecstasies. After all, sexuality’s exquisite relation to regu-latory structure is the taproot of the psychoanalytic project. More than
9The question of the libidinal body and its distinction from soma is exceedingly complex.
For a good review of some of this literature, including the Paris Psychosomatic School, see Bronstein (2011). For trans theorizing on this question see Salamon (2010).
anything, Lou’s life’ work was to find a form for the desire that animated his body. Gayle Salamon (2010) reads the possibilities for resignifiying the material body in transsexuality, following the work of Paul Schiller on body image and Didier Anzieu on the skin ego. Reflecting on a photo-graph depicting the layered erotics of a butch lesbian at a gay men’s leather bar, Salamon coins the term homoerratic, playing on “a libidinal economy of sameness whose participants nevertheless wander or stray from their customary or expected courses in unpredictable and surprising ways and whose energy depends on the very unfixability of those erotic identifications and exchanges” (p. 71). In late 1970s America, Lou’s ter-rain was homoerratic.
The rearticulation of sexuality with gender stems from a deconstruc-tion of the gender binary and its correlate and ground, “natural” anatomi-cal sexual difference. Core gender identity might then be taken not as an essentialist notion of “correct” primary identifications (with a “natural” natal body) seen as fixed and perdurable, but rather as more a fungible anlage subject to potential revision via complex negotiation with social structures and psychosexual positions (and a myriad of ways of making a life with them). This negotiation should not be seen as a set of consciously brokered “choices,” or omnipotent decisions on the part of the ego; they are instead something much more complex, also subject to the at least partly unconscious arbitration between libidinal bodies and the ways these can be lived in an ever transforming social order, a social order that is unconsciously transmitted intergenerationally. The fact of trans bodies has changed the libidinal economy, and not just within the given bodies of trans people, but “homoerratically,” as new possibilities emerge for psy-chosexual identification.10
“Jack Bee Garland was different,” Sullivan (1990) writes in the intro-duction to From Female to Male. “He dressed and lived as a man in order to be a man among men, calling into question our definition of sexual orientation . . .” (p. 4). It is a particular kind of intimacy among men—an intimacy that must itself have been deeply conditioned by the status of gender and sexuality in the late 1800s—that Garland seeks, and that is available, inherently, only with another man. In this and other writings on advocacy for transgender men, Lou Sullivan literally wrote out a cultural
10For a more detailed examination of what I mean here, see the suite of papers regarding
Griffin Hansbury’s “The Masculine Vaginal”: Hansbury (2017), Saketopoulou (2017), González (2017), Moss (2017).
location for “female-to-gay-male transsexuality” (as Lou himself would put it), while concurrently writing himself into a body. In so doing, he was not only subject to the cultural transmission of the sociohistorical forms of gender and sexuality he inherited, but through the pursuit of his desire also became an agent in the structural transformation of the culture in which he lived.11
The struggle to represent experience to himself in the diaries, more or less as it unfolded, helped Lou recognize a deeper writing, the writing of his unconscious, which we could express—for him at least—even more powerfully in terms of sexuality and desire than in terms of gender. Throughout the diaries, Lou’s most passionate concern is how to love, how to embody wanting, how to map out, manifest, and incarnate the erotic. I don’t think we best characterize Lou’s transition as primarily one from female to male, with homosexuality granted as a secondary effect. We might more productively consider that Lou, like all of us, uncon-sciously creates a certain kind of erotic body—a male homosexual one in this case, we can say, most clumsily. Libidinal bodies have different ways to anchor and coalesce the kaleidoscope of gender categories, different ways of being interpellated, and of recontouring the social landscape. At age fifteen, Lou-still-Sheila can begin to imagine a form beyond the cat-egories at hand:
I want to look like what I am but don’t know what someone like me looks like. I mean, when people look at me I want them to think—there’s one of those people that has their own interpretation of happiness. That’s what I am [06/06/66].
Consciously and unconsciously, we all struggle to find more or less workable solutions for the incarnation of our fantastical wanting and seek psychosocial containers that make livable the transports of our flesh. This is something we discover more than we commandeer, something we are subject to, as well as something we dream and construct. And these dif-ferent libidinal architectures refract, modify and adopt, upend, and retool the many ways of doing gender. In living these out, when we can, and perhaps even in dying by them, culture sometimes makes a move, and sometimes in this move new forms for living and loving emerge.
RefeRenceS
Benjamin, j. (1988). The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the
Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon Books.
Bronstein, C. (2011). On psychosomatics: The search for meaning.
International Journal of Psychoanalysis 92:173–195.
Butler, j. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Butler, j. (1995). Melancholy gender—refused identification. Psychoanalytic
Dialogues 5:165–180.
Butler, j. (2004). Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.
Chodorow, n.j. (2005). Gender on the modern-postmodern and
classical-relational divide: Untangling history and epistemology. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 53:1097–1118.
CorBett, K. (1996). Homosexual boyhood: Notes on girlyboys. Gender &
Psychoanalysis 1:429–461.
CorBett, K. (2008). Gender now. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 18:838–856.
dimen, m., & Goldner, V. (2005). Gender and sexuality. In The American
Psychiatric Association Textbook of Psychoanalysis, ed. A.M. Cooper, G.O. Gabbard, & E. Person. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, pp. 93–114.
elise, d. (1997). Primary femininity, bisexuality, and the female ego ideal: A
re-examination of female developmental theory. Psychoanalytic Quarterly
66:489–517.
elise, d. (1998). Gender repertoire: Body, mind, and bisexuality. Psychoanalytic
Dialogues 8:353–371.
eriKson, e.h. (1946). Ego development and historical change—clinical
notes. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 2:359–396.
eriKson, e.h. (1956). The problem of ego identity. Journal of the American
Psychoanalytic Association 4:56–121.
eriKson, e.h. (1958). Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and
History. New York: Norton.
eriKson, e.h. (1969). Ghandi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence. New York: Norton.
FaimBerG, h. (2007). A plea for a broader concept of Nachträglichkeit.
Psychoanalytic Quarterly 76:1221–1240.
Fausto-sterlinG, a. (2000). Sexing the Body. New York: Basic Books.
FlieGel, Z.o. (1973). Feminine psychosexual development in Freudian
theory—a historical reconstruction. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 42:385– 408.
Freud, s. (1925). A note upon the “Mystic Writing-Pad.” Standard Edition 19:227–232.
Freud, s. (1937). Analysis terminable and interminable. Standard Edition
23:216–253.
GheroViCi, P. (2010). Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of
Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism. New York: Routledge.
GonZáleZ, F.j. (2013): Another Eden: Proto-gay desire and social precocity.
Studies in Gender & Sexuality 14:112–121.
GonZáleZ, F.j. (2017). The edge is a horizon: Commentary on Hansbury.
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 65:1061–1073.
Greenson, r.r. (1964). On homosexuality and gender identity. International
Journal of Psychoanalysis 45:217–219.
GrosZ, e. (1994). Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
haCKinG, i. (2007). Kinds of people: Moving targets. Proceedings of the
British Academy 151:285–318.
halBerstam, j. (1998). Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press.
hansBury, G. (2017). The masculine vaginal: Working with queer men’s
embodiment at the transgender edge. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 65:1009–1031.
harris, a. (2009). Gender as Soft Assembly. New York: Routledge.
herZoG, d. (2015). What happened to sexuality in the wake of the sexual
revolution? In Sexualities: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives,
ed. A. Lemma &P.E. Lynch. New York: Routledge, pp. 19–40.
horney, K. (1924). On the genesis of the castration complex in women.
International Journal of Psychoanalysis 5:50–65.
horney, K. (1926). The flight from womanhood: The masculinity-complex
in women, as viewed by men and by women. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 7:324–339.
jones, e. (1927). The early development of female sexuality. International
Journal of Psychoanalysis 8:459–472.
jorGensen, C., & stryKer, s. (2000). Christine Jorgensen: A Personal
Autobiography. San Francisco: Cleis Press.
laPlanChe, j. (1999). Essays on Otherness. New York: Routledge.
laPlanChe, j., & Pontalis, j.-B. (1967). The Language of Psycho-Analysis, transl. D. Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton, 1973.
layton, l. (1998). Who’s That Girl? Who’s That Boy? Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.
linGiardi, V. (2015). No maps for uncharted lands: What does gender expres-sion have to do with sexual orientation? In Sexualities: Contemporary
Psychoanalytic Perspectives, ed. A. Lemma & P.E. Lynch. New York: Routledge, pp. 101–121.
money, j. (1973). Gender role, gender identity, core gender identity: Usage
and definition of terms. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 1:397–402.
money, j., hamPson, j.G., & hamPson, j.l. (1955). An examination of some
basic sexual concepts: The evidence of human hermaphroditism. Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital 97:301–319.
moss, d. (2017). Pussy riot: Commentary on Hansbury. Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association 65:1049–1059.
oVesey, l., & Person, e. (1973). Gender identity and sexual psychopathology in men: A psychodynamic analysis of homosexuality, transsexualism, and transvestism. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis
1:53–72.
PerelBerG, r.j. (2006). The Controversial Discussions and après-coup.
International Journal of Psychoanalysis 87:1199–1220.
Person, e., & oVesey, l. (1978). Transvestism: New perspectives. Journal of
the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 6:301–323.
Prosser, j. (1998). Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia University Press.
saKetoPoulou, a. (2014a). Mourning the body as bedrock: Developmental
considerations in treating transsexual patients analytically. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 62:773–806.
saKetoPoulou, a. (2014b). When the body propositions gender: Reply to commentaries. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
62:823–833.
saKetoPoulou, a. (2017). Between Freud’s second and third essays on sexu-ality: Commentary on Hansbury. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 65:1033–1048.
salamon, G. (2010). Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of
Materiality. New York: Columbia University Press.
silVerman, K. (1992). Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge.
soCarides, C.w. (1968). A provisional theory of aetiology in male homosex-uality—a case of preoedipal origin. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 49:27–37.
soCarides, C.w. (1970). A psychoanalytic study of the desire for sexual trans-formation (‘transsexualism’): the plaster-of-paris man. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 51:341–349.
stoller, r.j. (1964). A contribution to the study of gender identity.
stoller, r.j. (1965). The sense of maleness. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 34:207–218.
stoller, r.j. (1968). The sense of femaleness. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 37:42–55.
stryKer, s. (2008). Transgender History. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press.
sulliVan, l.G. (1990). From Female to Male: The Life of Jack Bee Garland. Boston: Alyson Publications.
thomä, h., & Cheshire, n. (1991). Freud’s Nachträglichkeit and Strachey’s
‘deferred action’: Trauma, constructions and the direction of causality.
International Review of Psychoanalysis 18:407–427.
582 Market Street, Suite 305 San Francisco, CA 94104 E-mail: f.j.g@comcast.net
