While this might be a little lengthy I assure you, it’s the truncated version of the story. I’m always open to speaking further about my life and experiences for anyone interested and especially if it may help someone else.
Let’s do a little travel back in time. Before Ellen’s famous coming out “Puppy” episodes in 1997. Before AOL went unlimited and allowed the first wave of people to surf the web and access information in a whole new way. Let’s go back to the 1980s where a young girl so desperately wanted to hang with the boys. A young girl who played with He-Man instead of Barbie. A young girl who felt like her skin was crawling every time she was forced to wear a dress. It was a “dark ages” because there was no information about anything LGBT+ anywhere around. Fast forward a little and the only time a gay or “trans” person was seen on the screen was a prostitute, druggie, or some other evil or mentally deranged type of character. But I kept finding myself drawn to girls and even those a little older than me but I didn’t know what this “draw” was because I had no vocabulary for it.
I wasn’t overly religious but I was asked to be a godmother to my cousin who was born in 1991 so I had to get confirmed and that meant I had to do confession as part of the final “classes.” I told the priest I was confused and didn’t know what was going on but that I was finding I was attracted to other girls. The priest turned to me and asked how I thought I’d look black and blue and unless I wanted to find out I should leave the confessional. I was surprised but as I wasn’t overly religious to begin with I didn’t feel “betrayed by my faith” as many others might have felt.
I was constantly tormented and teased in school as the “weirdo” and the black sheep in general. There was a small, dark phone booth in my middle school that I would often hide in to avoid the tormentors. In the tiny room were a little bench built into the wall and a little rack where a little newspaper-type booklet was placed in the slats. I would flip through it often just to have something to read and noticed a section for gay and lesbian. What are these words? What do they mean? I wasn’t entirely sure but, at the same time, I felt like these were incredibly important words. There was a listing for a local support group for youth. When squirreled the booklet away but was too nervous to call.
I was distracted by constantly being beaten up at school, beaten up at home by my father, and feeling like I had nowhere to go and no one to turn to. I fell in love with the Phantom of the Opera in middle school because I felt a kinship with Erik (Phantom). I felt like my attraction to the same gender was like his deformity. I felt grotesque and shunned by the world and so I started to turn away from the world in kind. I retreated to my mind and turned to writing. I’d write all kinds of stories but the recurring theme was a female “hero” always rescuing some female “damsel” – really likely the same old stories everyone else told except same-sex based. When I discovered that my parents were breaking into my writings I felt everything and anything I did was violated – I had nothing! No one to speak to, no one to trust, and I couldn’t even “speak to myself” through my writing. I retreated even further into my mind – opting now to just keep my thoughts to myself and never write anything anymore because even that was being violated. The more I retreated into myself the more I became “odder” to others and the more I was tortured and beaten up by my classmates and at home.
I spent the summer before I entered High School as a freshman just riding my bike. I’d get out of the house first thing in the morning and would ride anywhere and everywhere all day so I wouldn’t have to be home and deal with my father. High school started and I went to classes and joined the drama club because I always had a passion for theater thanks to my grandmother (who passed back in 1992) and the love I had for Phantom of the Opera was still strong because it was “my story” too. He was deformed on the outside and I was deformed on the inside because I liked girls. There was a boy in drama that was gay and said I should check out a support group. I remembered that booklet and eventually called and spoke to a lovely young woman (who I believe was about 18 or so) who told me all about the group and “coming out” and told me when the next meeting was going to be. I felt that maybe I wasn’t crazy or disgusting and maybe it was okay to like girls. I told a senior girl I was crushing on at the time that I liked her…
…Apparently, I was wrong…
She told the school principal and before I knew it I was being kicked out of school and being mandated into a mental hospital for “observation” for a month. It was true! Something was very wrong with me. I was a filthy disgusting creature just like I always knew I was! In the hospital was a girl and a boy, both around my age (maybe a year or two older) and they were lesbian and gay – the girl was discharged within the first few days of my being there but the boy was very friendly and told me about this local support group that I should check out when I got released. It turns out that it was the same group I called about and planned to attend a meeting before I got tossed in the loony bin. We got out around the same time and he agreed to meet me at the next meeting so I wouldn’t have to go alone.
When I got there it was a small, dark room with just a couple of chairs. There were a couple of older kids (18 or so) who ran the group and then a couple of others around my age and so. I was instantly attracted to one of the girls there and so I reached out and we went on a date. We wound up dating (in secret – I didn’t come out to anyone yet) for a little while when her mother kicked her out so my parents said she could stay with us. My sister and I were hanging out on her bed while she was in the shower and I fell asleep so my sister left to go to her room and my girlfriend just crawled into bed next to me. The next morning my mother walked in and saw us sharing the bed, both sound asleep, and started screaming. She grabbed me and pulled me out of the bed and started beating on me and screaming for my girlfriend to get the F— out of the house. My mother then proceeded to out me to my entire family and, thankfully, most of them said they weren’t too surprised and didn’t have much issue with it overall.
Unfortunately, that girl wound up cheating on me with someone I was on a volunteer ambulance squad with and that was the end of my first same-sex/lesbian relationship and I was thrust out of the closet. From then on I decided I would beat everyone to the punch and just introduced myself as “Hi, I’m the lesbian…” and while it startled people it also took away the power many would have over me. Most of my relationships wound up ending because I was cheated on. Around 2005/2006 I was working in an animal shelter and a woman (6 years older) saw my MySpace and we started chatting. We agreed to lunch and hit it off instantly. We were together for 4 years and my family was very accepting at this point. I started to talk to her about feeling like I was in the wrong body. For a long time I thought maybe I was just a butch lesbian but – once again – I had no vocabulary to understand what I was feeling – only that I was feeling something wasn’t right with how I saw myself in my head versus what I saw in the mirror. So, I stopped looking in the mirror. Despite her being married to a man previously and my telling her I think she’s bi versus lesbian she was adamant that she was lesbian – to the point where she told me if she wanted to be with a guy she would have stayed with her ex and that she didn’t want me to keep talking about this “wrong body” nonsense. I proposed to her, she accepted, and at one point a bunch of friends of mine planned to gather in the city (NYC) for dinner. I was excited to have everyone meet her and so we went. I introduced her to one guy and his live-in girlfriend and several other friends. Not long after I found out she went out to hang out with the two friends and they wound up kissing – before we knew it – she and I were breaking up and the guy kicked his girlfriend and her kid out of his house and now my fiancé and he were suddenly dating. I started online dating almost immediately after and hooked up with a girl from TN so I hopped on my motorcycle with everything I could manage to fit into bags strapped all over it and rode for 22 hours straight until I reached Nashville. She told me about Drag Kings and that I might be interested in that since I kept feeling like I was in the wrong body. We went to the gay clubs in Nashville where I saw Drag Kings for the first time and learned about transitioning for the first time. A month later we moved to Raleigh, NC where I started to do my own drag (dressing up as a male) and thought maybe I’m a “male-identifying lesbian.” I still didn’t have a grasp of what being transgender was or even that was what I wanted to do. I was clueless.
When I talked about “doing drag full time” as my mind understood it, my new girlfriend gave me the same old story. “If I wanted to be with a guy, I’d be straight and I’m not.” Okay, I will put the relationship ahead of my fulfillment. I wasn’t even sure what to do so why risk a long-term relationship on a “who knows what?” When I found out that she was cheating on me for some time (including one of them being with a GUY!!!!) I was done putting others ahead of my happiness. We split and I immediately went into full research mode about transitioning and March 22, 2014, I started my first shot of testosterone. But… my sister was getting married in August and I very quickly grew facial hair and my voice dropped – I needed to come out to my family quickly.
I spoke with a couple of cousins (I’m an Italian New Yorker, I have a lot of cousins) who I knew would be supportive and they said the same thing – “we’re not really surprised.” With support of some form, I told my family and they were confused but also gave me the “not really surprised” kind of response. Oh, but could you still shave and wear the dress for the wedding? I once again suppressed myself and did it so that my sister’s special day would go off without a hitch.
I’ve not dated since 2014 for a variety of reasons. I’m tired of being with people who would physically beat on me, who kept repressing me, and constantly being cheated on. I have been treated so badly by so many, including so many who claimed to love me that I didn’t believe that there were any people with genuine kindness or love in them. I got so tired of being told someone loves me “in spite of” this or that quality of mine. I have since been split from my family and have found myself to be incredibly alone and heartbroken but, at the same time, I feel like I’ve been stripped down to the barest form of myself so that I can rebuild myself better and stronger than ever. To be honest, I still wonder if there is any genuine kindness in people but having come across Dominique who seems to exude this incredible light of beautiful kindness from deep inside her soul I find it gives me a little touch of hope that there are beings out there with true love in their heart. That someone out there will be willing to be patient with me as I cleanse my scars and love me BECAUSE of who I am instead of the dreadful “in spite of.” I know that I have so much to give as a person, as a human, and surely there must be someone out there for me. It’s just very hard because I’m “too female” (ugh) for straight woman and “too male” for lesbians – or so I’ve been told multiple times. Finding someone who seeks to love me for my soul is perhaps the hardest journey of my life but I’m open to the universe guiding me and that person together. In the meantime, I continue to learn about myself and grow and learn. I may have “come out” twice – first as a lesbian and then again as a trans man – but I find that life is constantly about growing into yourself and all the many ways we come to embrace and express ourselves. So, until the person who will love my soul comes along I will keep on living and learning.
