My life in books

I've just finished Kate Bornstein's achingly honest autobiography: A Queer and Pleasant Danger, expansively subtitled The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy Who Joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later To Become the Lovely Lady She Is Today. Before reading this memoir, I "knew" Bornstein as a writer, playwright, performance artist, gender theorist, BDSM practitioner and trans activist, and respected her work and her stance as an out gender outlaw. Now I know more about her journey to becoming all these things, and my respect is if possible even greater than before.

Bornstein's journey contains more than a few difficult turns. She details with clarity the story of her long slow struggle to transitioning, and her realisation of the role BDSM played in her sexuality. She speaks openly about addiction and coming to see the experience of hiding her sense of her real identity as a half-lifetime of trauma that left her a survivor of PTSD. And she traces the thread of performance that runs through her life from her early years exploring acting to the multi-faceted artist and communicator she is today.

She also talks at length about the time she spent as a Scientologist and member of the organisation's inner cadre, the Sea Org, where, while still living as Albert Bornstein, she worked with L. Ron Hubbard. Some of the most moving parts of her memoir deal with the separation from her daughter that she has experienced since being expelled from the Church of Scientology - who remains in the organisation to this day, and holds to the policy that a Scientologist must avoid all contact with "suppressive persons" such as Bornstein. Indeed, the final chapter of the book is an open letter to a daughter who may never read it - and that was heart-breaking to read.

I finished reading this book on the same day that I heard of the death of another great transgender warrior - Leslie Feinberg. And so I close this with thanks to Bornstein, who is still fighting cancer - and kicking its ass - and Feinberg, who has made hir final transition in this lifetime. I learned so much about identity and personhood from both of you, without ever having met you.

Drag King Dreams, by Leslie Feinberg, is a powerful book, an important book, a book that carves the lived reality of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and ability oppression into your mind and heart with bold, precise cuts. This is a parable of how power is used to define, control, and suppress difference in a security-conscious post-9/11 world where questioning and dissent have been reframed as terrorism.

The main protagonist, Max Rabinowitz, is an aging transman and former radical activist. Lacking the “paper” that recognises him as who he is, he struggles to survive on low-paying cash jobs in Manhattan clubs that feature performances by drag kings and queens. Alienated from most members of his politically radical and Jewish family of birth, he has found for himself a family of choice composed of others like himself, people living their lives at the stresspoints of intersectionality of gender, race and class.

One arc of the novel deals with the impact on this community of marginalised people of the brutal death of their friend Vickie, murdered by an unknown and never-found assailant who was most likely motivated by hate. Another deals with Max’s re-entry into activism, shocked back to life on by the mysterious disappearance of a Muslim neighbour, and spurred on by the young activists around him. Through these arcs, the dangers of being disappeared, through marginalisation, oppression, individual and state violence, and the hope that resistance and protest can force injustices performed under the cover of silence, fear and ignorance out into the light where they can be seen, named and fought are sketched out for those of us who think we are less at risk to see.

Feinberg is hirself* a political activist with a profound personal and theoretical understanding of both intersectionality and state oppression. Ze is not afraid to have hir characters talk about politics, about political theory, about the bridges between the personal and the political and the revolutionary actions that are the only chances for a drag king’s dreams to come to some kind of fruition.

The great value of "Drag King Dreams," like "Stone Butch Blues," is that it is a tool to help oppressed and working-class people break out of isolation. To know Max Rabinowitz is to know you’re not alone in your struggle—and that’s something we all need, especially these days. (online review)

I could not put the book down, and it filled me with horror, outrage and hope that somehow, despite the forces lined up against a day of reckoning, the people of this world will continue to find the courage to resist, to march, to speak out, to demand a change.

*Feinberg’s preferred pronouns are ze (instead of he or she), hir (instead of him or her), and hirself (instead of himself or herself).