Candid Cameron (book review)

"Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits", by Loren Cameron. San Francisco, CA: Cleis Press, 1996, 110 pp., US$24.95 paper.
"I Used to be Nice: Sexual Affairs", by Sue O’Sullivan. New York: Cassell, 1996, 242 pp, US$16.95 paper

Query, Julia, Candid Cameron., Vol. 14, Women’s Review of Books, 09-01-1997, pp 26-7.

LOREN CAMERON WAS AT A PARTY I once went to, but I thought he was a man, so I didn’t pay attention to him. He is a man, but he used to be a lesbian, and he is a talented photographer, so I missed out. If Body Alchemy had included only his portraits of female-to-male transsexuals without the accompanying text or the "before" pictures, I might have made the same mistake. I am not interested in the photograph of Erik, a long-haired, goateed, tattooed young man on his bicycle — until I learn that Erik was raised as a girl.

Erik stares back at the camera with an easy dignity, his steady gaze repelling my voyeurism, my instantly nagging preconceptions. Does he hate women? Did he leave the Lesbian Nation to hang with other boys in skull t-shirts, and does he now share their attitudes? What is between his legs? And what can it feel and do? In a comment next to the image, Erik writes, "It’s very different now. I feel the same but I’m seen differently. I’ve always dressed and acted this way …. I don’t want to be misunderstood or seen as sexist because of what I look like." His words make me realize that Erik is not a man born, fully grown, from the head of a plastic surgeon. He is not a fiction, a two-dimensional character, who can be "known" by his transsexuality.

Most of the transsexual men in the almost fifty black-and-white portraits in Body Alchemy have a direct gaze (some defiant, some open and engaging), and all of them speak. Each of the eight sections in the book is accompanied by texts: short personal statements, longer biographies and "before" pictures, self-portraits linked with short ruminations by Cameron. One of the explicit close-up images of genitalia during or after transition in the "Our Bodies" section has what appears to be a caesarean scar cohabiting with a small penis. I appreciated that these are the only photographs without faces or names; they satisfy my curiosity, are educational and avoid being salacious by not being associated with particular people. Not including genitalia would have implied a taboo and freakish quality in transsexuality. Instead, Cameron succeeds in simultaneously appeasing the viewer’s curiosity and humanizing his subjects.

The texts attached to the portraits disrupt my reading of them, making me realize how much I can’t know by looking. Many of the photographs seem stereotypical-the sensitive new-age man thumping his drum, the blue-collar worker, the body-builder, the cop—but that sensitive man had his children taken from him when he became a man, and that blue-collar worker works two jobs in order to afford the surgery. At first I don’t feel a connection to the cute surfer dude; I think of surfing as an activity of the wilfully idle. I am completely surprised, and pleased, to find out that he still identifies as the "mother" of his eighteen-year-old daughter and is "committed to progressive political ideals."

Cameron begins Body Alchemy with his own story: his childhood as the tomboy daughter of a stoic working-class father in Arkansas; coming out as a lesbian and then being forced out of town; working as a migrant laborer until two lesbian angels convinced him that San Francisco was close to heaven. Apparently, it wasn’t close enough. Nine years in a lesbian community did not make Cameron want to be (understood as) female.

Cameron doesn’t include statements about his, or the other transsexual men’s, discomfort with their biological gender. By refusing to offer their explanations for choosing the surgery (which would be to invite judgment by the presumably normal reader), he avoids pathologizing transsexuality. Instead he positions it as an identity on a par with homosexuality; he writes about coming out as TS, "Only this time, I refused to feel any shame."

Despite my reluctance to support transsexual surgery, I found myself drawn into Cameron’s story. His series of self-portraits with texts is witty, heart-breaking, sexy and steamy. Among the self-portraits is an evocative triptych titled "Distortions," showing images of Cameron looking solitary, hurt and frustrated, boxed in by statements like "WHY CAN’T YOU JUST BE A BUTCH DYKE?" "YOU ARE SO EXOTIC," "THIS IS WOMYN-ONLY SPACE," and "YOU’ RE NOT A MAN."

Cameron concludes the book with a study of his relationship with Kayt, who identifies as transgendered without having had surgery or hormones. Cameron writes, "She knows the same discomfort and pain that I have known, but we have arrived at different places to find rest—neither place better than nor really so far from the other." Hinting at his previous boundary policing of this newly established identity, he writes that Kayt helped him become "less rigid about the way others self-define." In other words, by loving and understanding Kayt, Cameron has stopped playing the "butcher than thou" game, and now believes that gender is not limited to genitalia.

BODY ALCHEMY IS FASCINATING, powerful and thought-provoking, as much a work of theory as art. In contrast, I Used to Be Nice, a collection of Sue O’Sullivan’s essays on feminist issues written over the last 25 years, is often nostalgic, more like a photo album than an intellectual challenge.

O’Sullivan, an American feminist who has lived mainly in England and now lives in Australia, is appropriately personal and political. She lets us in on her life—her frustrated sexual desires as a young woman in the late 1950s, an illegal abortion, her ambivalence about her marriage to a man sympathetic to feminism, coming out as a lesbian, her erotic writing. She introduces her stories in the context of analyses of many of the hot feminist topics of the past quarter century- -boy children in women’s space, birth control and women’s health, butch and femme, AIDS and lesbian safer sex, menopause, Camille Paglia. For readers new to feminist thinking, Sisterhood is Powerful and other feminist readers offer a better introduction and include more important critical articles, but as a story of one women’s evolution in feminism, I Used to Be Nice is engaging and sometimes spicy. But by only recycling her work and failing to provide new and deeper analyses from her current perspective, O’Sullivan misses an opportunity to enrich feminist debates.

O’ Sullivan is a likable protagonist, but I’d rather read a collection of essays by a better writer. Although she wrote for newsletters with limited space, she is oddly prone to wordy abstract summaries that left me thirsty for an example. She poses a series of stimulating questions about butch-femme relationships ("WHO is strong and protective.?" ) but doesn’t answer them. Writing of her own embracing of butch/femme, she notes that it can "also be a trap, a drain, a smokescreen, too rigid for what is really felt and experienced," but doesn’t tell us how this has been true for her or for others.

I was often frustrated with her lack of candor. Only a handful of times does she explain what she omitted while writing her early essays, For example, she points out that in an essay about raising boy children and her frustrations with the men in her family, she failed to mention that she had already started seeing women while she was writing it.

These omissions intrigue me. What has changed in feminist thinking and in O’Sullivan’s life that makes some disclosures possible now? Or makes some thoughts possible and others no longer palatable? How have her views changed? She’s so often wishy-washy that it’s hard to tell. Of her AIDS articles she writes that "there are significant changes I would make if I were writing these pieces today," but doesn’ t tell us what they are. A re-analysis of a ten-year-old article on AIDS is useful. An out-of-date article on AIDS is not.

I agreed with O’Sullivan’s politics in general, but her 1994 essay "Gender Transformations and Transsexuality" infuriated me, perhaps because I am uncomfortable with my own similar biases. O’Sullivan and I are both femme dykes who date butches. We both understand gender as socially constructed and, because both of us are disturbed by the potential maladies caused by pharmaceutical hormones, we both wish for a world where people’s self-identified gender is recognized without surgery or hormones. I understand some butches as already transgender, without hormones or surgery, but O’Sullivan seems to think that there is a great difference between transsexual men and the butches we love.

She writes of her discomfort with transsexual men (FTM) despite her acceptance of feminist transsexual women (MTF). She vacillates between an awareness that she is prejudiced and a defense of her bias, but she doesn’t peel away her assumptions and analyze her thoughts. She asserts that it is "bizarre to find transsexuals accused of destroying the implied union and stability of lesbianism when ongoing schisms and divisions have beset lesbian feminism and lesbian subcultures for years." Great! But then, solely on the basis of interviews she’ s read or heard with less than a dozen FTM people, she concludes that a significant number of transgendered men are sexist: "The recent recorded voices of lesbians who have become men are not reassuring to me with their self satisfied tales of testosterone driven blokish behavior."

Are transsexual men more likely to be sexist than other men? women? dykes? The examples of "blokish behavior" she gives are things that some dykes do without the help of hormones, like "ogling women" on the street. But doesn’t the "blokish behavior" of a dyke or a transgendered man have multiple meanings? Doesn’t it differ from blokish behavior by a man who has always been a man? I think butch desire for femme is often about loving female strength, even if the hutch doesn’t love it in herself. If a hutch becomes a man does that make her desire for women suddenly suspect?

Perhaps O’ Sullivan is scared, afraid that when butches become men they stop being our comrades, sisters and lovers and become our enemies. She writes, "I am drawn to hutch women but would be immensely saddened if a hutch I fancied decided she wanted to be a man. I want a butch to be complete." I share her feelings. But isn’t "complete" a euphemism for having female genitalia, which we fantasize being allowed to touch? Isn’t our discontent equivalent to a man’s fury when a sexy woman turns out to be a lesbian, because he doesn’t want her body removed from his fantasy realm of potential lovers? Are we afraid our (hypothetical) lovers will transform into something undesirable to us (men) and that as men they will abandon us to date straight women and work for patriarchy?

Body Alchemy helped me confront my prejudices and fears, helped me remember the obvious truth that people are too varied and complex to be "known" solely through their gender identity. Maybe O’Sullivan should give it a read.

Query, Julia, Candid Cameron., Vol. 14, Women’s Review of Books, 09-01-1997, pp 26-7.
Copyright 1997 The Women’s Review, Inc.

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