TELL

TELL S2E2 - Glamour - Episode Transcript

Drae Campbell: From the corporate infrastructure [strum] [laughter] [TELL THEME SONG]

[MUSIC BED] DC: Hi, I’m Drae Campbell and this is TELL -- a podcast where queer people tell queer stories. For the past 8 years I’ve been hosting and curating a night of live storytelling at BGSQD -- a queer bookstore in Manhattan. And now I’m sharing those stories with the world… again! Season 2.

DC: Just so you know these stories were recorded at all different times and places and throughout the quarantine, pre-vax, post-vax, and everything in between.

DC: So, if you need a dose of queer community, or just wanna hear great stories told by the people who lived them, you’ve come to the right place. So strap on your head phones and lay down your tarot, ‘cause TELL is queering the narrative and telling our stories, on our terms.

[FADE OUT MUSIC]

[MUSIC BED] DC: Each episode of TELL features three stories that center around a theme and the theme of this episode is… [echo] Glamour. Glamour is intrinsic to the queer identity or to many of them. Inward, outward, dancing, loving, living, organizing, protesting, we keep it in our heart and soul many of us, not all of us, but it is a big part of who we are… [echo] Glamour.

DC: First we have Zo Tipp. Zo Tipp is a Jewish Japanese American non-binary actor who goes by he and they. This story brings to mind the great debate: What is the herpes of theater? Sequins or glitter? Maybe we’ll know after hearing Zo Tipp unpack the packers and deconstruct shiny things. This fabulous story was recorded in October 2020…

[END MUSIC]

[ZO TIPP]
Zo Tipp: Thank you! Thank you, Drae, thank you, Greg. Thank you so much for having me, and it's really nice to see some faces. All right. When I think of shiny things, I think about sequins, iridescent stick on earrings, craft store gems you hot glue to a T-shirt, ornate chandeliers. I get hungry thinking about them. I get hungry for certain sensory experiences, and I like their directness. Abstract desires can be confusing: career aspirations, relationship ideals, metrics. But sensory hungers are simple and honest. When I'm attracted to someone I want to smell their perfume or pheromones like it's a special source of oxygen. I need it to fill the bony cavities in my face. I need it in my lungs. Sometimes I get a hankering for a song and I listen to it on a loop for a week straight. And I get visually hungry for shiny things. Since I was a kid, I've loved to ride in a car in the rain. I love how the street lights get caught in the raindrops on the windshield and refract, and the scene blurs into dancing light like a quiet disco, with the wipers giving a soft beat. I love it more at night as the lights look more intense. I love it most when I don't know where we're going, but the driver does -- transport without orientation. When I'm driving now, I try to be safe while letting myself stare at the strobes and light bars on emergency vehicles just a little. Even though I know they're out for bad news, but I didn't know that as a kid when I came to love them and to yearn for them, even. I've always had this capacity to yearn without an object of desire. Sometimes, in fact, yearning for something to yearn for, which is pretty gay.

ZT: When I think of shiny things, I think about this round wooden Japanese trinket box I had as a kid, which is probably my grandmother's by chance. It was painted with glossy port wine-colored lacquer and gold foil flowers on the outside. Black matte lacquer on the inside, it was about the size of a grapefruit, squished a little so it could sit on a table. And when I was eight or so, I had filled it with a collection of sequins and little plastic gems. I do not know how I amassed so many, but when you're assigned female at birth, they hook you up with sequins. That's part of the welcome package perhaps. This little urn was like my supply of fairy dust. I loved to open it and just stare at the colorful collection sparkling inside the dark wood. One day, my best friend and I decided to turn my bathroom into a magical portal. We took all the sequins out and covered every surface in the little room with sparkle. This was the same bathroom where I stood on the counter more than once and put my hands to the mirror, hoping I'd pass through it into another world after seeing a TV show about Alice through the Looking Glass. And that best friend, I didn't know it at the time but looking back, I have realized that in my later elementary school years, I had a few girlfriends. We never would have called ourselves that, but we used to play make believe. We'd make up romantic, speculative fiction about straight couples from shows and movies we liked, and we would role-play as these couples. One would be the boy and one would be the girl, and since I was shorter than everyone and boys apparently must be taller, I was always the girl. For instance, that best friend and I pretended to be Ace and Melissa from Ace Ventura 1. I will not get started [laughter] about my complicated relationship with the movie. We would concoct these vulnerable and dramatic scenarios that would lead us to fully making out, like eight years old. I made no connection between this and how I perceived my sexuality. I had crushes on boys in school, so I was straight.

ZT: When I think about shiny things, I think about the stained glass panel next to my front door in the next home I lived in, a condo after the house with the Magic Portal bathroom. When we had to move, my mom asked for my input and I campaigned hard for this condo so I could be neighbors with my best friend, my Ace-and-Melissa friend, who lived a few units down. The stained glass in the door had red roses in it, and I guess it might have seemed cheesy-looking to some people. It was a little iridescent, a very 90s suburban aesthetic. But it reminded me of the opening sequence to Beauty and the Beast -- fairy tale, romance, enchantment. And when my friend came to the door, I could see her through the shiny glass and my heart leapt. In fifth grade, my best friend and I got a new friend, and they became closer, and then they decided to become popular, which turned out to necessitate bullying me. One day at recess, I found them whispering and giggling. I asked them why. My best friend said she had told our new friend that she had kissed my boob during our last play date. For some reason it was clear to all of us that this was something for me alone to be embarrassed of, something my friend had tricked me into. And somehow it seems like telling our secret and laughing at me for it was my friend's way of saying “no homo” and pointing out me is a weird queer. I didn't have any consciously gay feelings or come out until almost 20 years later.

ZT: When I think of shiny things, I think of the chandelier in the Phantom of the Opera, a show which I memorized in high school and sang all the parts to wearing out my original Broadway cast. I related to The Phantom four reasons I could not articulate then, that weirdo with his forbidden love who railed against society and lived by candlelight reflected in the subterranean sewage tunnel rivers of Paris. I related to him, but, already an actor well, well-informed about type, I dreamt of playing Christine. I had a high voice and people saw me as a pretty girl, and I thought that I was what they saw.

ZT: When I think of shiny things, I think of the Sputnik chandelier at the Metropolitan Opera House. I got obsessed with opera for over 10 years, a wild detour from acting. With my light, high voice and my pretty girl look at the time in the eyes of that industry, I was perfect for cute and sassy little chambermaid roles. A character named Olympia, who is literally a life sized doll who sings like a bird, that sort of thing. I was always asking my teachers if I could work on songs written from the male perspective or operatic trouser roles. Not on purpose, I just kept being drawn to them. Trouser roles are played by women with light mezzo voices, a little lower than mine. These characters are plucky, boxy, androgynous young men who often fall in love with older women. I always wanted to sing their arias, [siren] but my teachers told me time and again that I would never sing those roles, so I tried hard to be the pretty girl that sang like a bird. I later realized this was a big part of the reason I had incapacitating performance anxiety. I majored in classical singing in college and I had no social life. I practiced hours a day, I overloaded on credits, taking electives, graduate opera courses, and on the weekends I would often drive from my upstate college back home to Westchester just to go to the Metropolitan Opera by myself. I usually got a ticket in the family circle standing room, which is all the way up and at the back of the house. This is like looking from a seven-story apartment window at people walking down the street a block away. The visuals are impressionistic, but the acoustics up there are fantastic. If I wanted to see a Friday night show, I would just drive directly to the city. My mother complained I never wanted to see her, I just wanted a place to sleep for my opera trips. So when I went to the Met, I projected myself into all the characters, all the genders, all the giant voices. In my studies, I was good with the classic opera languages Italian, French, German, but I loved most of all to forget what the text meant and just feel the sounds and the shapes and the tastes of words. In retrospect, the more stereotypically feminine a character was, the more I wanted to forget the meaning of their lyrics. I think I may have been so attracted to opera for those many years because of the way I could get lost in the sound. My identity seemed so fixed then, and even though typecasting in opera is just as if not more restrictive than in acting, my prospects as an actor, were even more particularly tied to the performance of my supposed identity. Without that equalizing force of pure sound. I just wanted to become a beautiful noise. The Metropolitan Opera has these famous chandeliers that look like starbursts. They have them in the grand lobby and they have them in the theater hung halfway down the great height of the hall. When the show is about to start and the orchestra begins tuning, the chandeliers slowly, silently rise up to the gold leaf ceiling, their twinkling lights fading into the dark. Every time I go to that house and that moment comes, my breath stops and I tear up. For years, I wondered why. Now, I think that those moments of entering into a theatrical piece are like a liminal space when you cross into a fantasy world. I could be in a school auditorium or a dirty movie theater, and I will always feel this way with the lights go down. I get misty-eyed when I watch a TV show I like, and the opening credits play. This is when you release the person you think you are, your assumptions about your fellow audience members. Everyone agrees to enter the reality of the spectacle that is about to begin. Everyone agrees to believe together.

ZT: I have three parents and the fragmentation in my life around them has been brutal in some respects, but all three of them subscribe to that magic and had a hand in cultivating my love and belief in it. My mother gave me the idea that an operatic voice was the most beautiful sound in the world. We used to sing arias together full out, not knowing the meaning of a single word. My stepmother taught me about the MET chandeliers and the mystique of the house and the opera experience like a legend before I ever went there. And my father always gets teary when a theatrical performance is about to start. My parents didn't understand my queerness for a while or not explicitly, at least. I didn't even know I should try to tell them until fairly recently. But when they would come to my performances -- community theater plays, voice recitals -- we all agreed to enter those spaces together, other realities where I was a girl or boy, or a cartoon dog or a vulture, or where I was trying to just become a sound. They are not effusive praise givers, but they would, and still now, get a shiny look in their eyes while applauding.

ZT: When I think of shiny things, I think of a sequin covered packer sequins like the ones I had in that red lacquer bowl as a child. I will explain. I was in a play at the beginning of this year -- you know, during the time we were all super-spreading Covid and didn't know it. The show got canceled in the middle of the run, which was when everything went on lockdown. The show was about six cisgender gay men in conversion therapy camp, but all the characters were played by AFABs, that is people assigned female at birth. There was some simulated nudity where we were dressed in these wild bodysuits with packers, fake penises. The show was farcical, if you hadn't figured that out yet, so the packers were all made of pretty, flamboyant fabric, the likes of which you could find on children's Halloween fairy costumes. My penis, my packer, was covered in this bright violet sequined fabric. My character was described as effeminate. I had come out as non-binary only a couple of years prior to this. I was afraid if I went to femme in the character, people would just read me as a girl. But the character made me stronger in my fluidity, and this sparkly packer woke up some sense of gender play, some security in being a kind of pretty boy. The show was, of course, incredibly intimate. Our characters were fucking falling in love, grabbing each other's fake junk, abusing each other, playing dream sequences about the most traumatic and tender moments of our lives, and collectively liberating ourselves from an oppressive captor. And it all culminated in a scene in the desert after we'd escaped. We all stripped down to our jumpsuits, packer's swinging, and defiantly, victoriously shouted "faggot" at each other as it began to rain for the first time after a long drought. I was the only actual queer among the other actors, interestingly. But in this moment, every night I felt so together in queerness and liberation, from gender and binaries of all kind with these straight cis women. Since the show ended early and abruptly and was immediately followed by the rest of 2020, trying to find closure was a little more difficult than usual. And I will tell you, it's usually difficult. Sequins, sequins, go everywhere and stick to everything. The herpes of theater people say. Or maybe that's glitter. But somehow one of my packers' sequins made it home to my apartment. I found it on the floor about a week after the show had closed while I was vacuuming. I carefully vacuumed around it. I found it a few more times over the following couple of months, and I carefully went around it each time until, well, I haven't seen it for a while now, but when I'm lying on the floor vacuuming, sometimes I expect to see it glint at me from an unexpected corner.

ZT: I don't need names for these things, these feelings, these portals, the pre overture moment when the chandeliers rise and the lights start glowing, when you put the sequined penis on, when that rain in the windshield reflects the street lights and send you into reverie, when we go through the looking glass. These experiences were real to me before I could articulate them or try to explain them. I didn't have a name for why I wanted to sing the foxy page boys. I didn't have a name for the falling chandelier, and Phantom of the Opera meant I didn't have a name for the rising of the Sputniks at the Met. More restrictive were the no Homo moments -- the getting identified as a character type or a vocal type is gender being assigned names. You can only use names for things you already have a set of expectations for. The more interesting feelings of the ones you don't have names for yet, and they come through the senses first, not words. The more you get to know someone, the more contradictions they have, the less they fit into names, categories, archetypes. Everybody has a fuller spectrum than at first glance. So I think it's no coincidence Queers stereotypically appreciates sparkly or shiny things and rainbows. It's light refraction, its expansion, its transport without orientation. So, when I see someone talk about a [siren] weird thing they love, or get into a flow state at their job, or get emotional about a song, or laugh at something surprising, or have a look in their eyes that I somehow deeply recognize, it seems simple and honest and my senses get hungry. It's like a shiny thing. It's like sequins in a dark bowl, streetlights through raindrop prisms at night. It's like a chandelier in a dark theater. And I always want more and more of these moments. I'm very hungry for them now. As an actor, I get that feeling at work in a way that cannot be replicated for my colleagues and pouring out of the audience, their investment and faith in the experience. Our collective belief and sense of possibility. When I see shiny things, it brings up all that longing, all that history, that feeling when I was a kid and wanted things I didn't know I wanted. Thank you.

[FADE UP MUSIC BED]

DC: Yayyyyyyy! [applause]

Audience: Woooooo.

Audience Member #1: Beautiful!

DC: Gorgeous. Zo, that was amazing. So many things. Sensory hungers! Sensory huggers is so real right now. Oh my goodness. Ace Ventura role-playing? Anyone? Hah! I love it. [laughing]

DC: You can find Zo at zotipp.com, that’s Z-O-T-I-P-P.

DC: Our second story comes from Fernando Vieira. Fernando Vieira is an Ecuadorian-born New York-based writer, director, and performer. Hearing Fernando talk about their glamorous hair at age six and feeling seen in the show GLOW in Ecuador just reminds me that queer people are miracles. This story was recorded in December 2020…

[FADE OUT MUSIC BED]

[FERNANDO VIEIRA]
Fernando Vieira: All right. Well, first of all, I'm really, really excited to be here and I appreciate the invitation. Secondly, so I was born in Ecuador in the early 80s, and I was always very femme, I was all about the feminine things. So being a little child, I was all about watching television, American television. My favorite show, I don't know if anybody saw it, not many people saw it, except perhaps queer people or queer children, it was called Glow: Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. It was a big deal in Ecuador. I don't know if it was in the USA, but it was a huge deal. And in Ecuador, every Saturday they would show it at 2:00 p.m. and I was doing an activity related to the church and I would finish at 1:30 and I needed to run because I never wanted to miss the intro. That was like a big deal for me. That was life for me. And there was no internet. This is the late 80s. You couldn't watch it on YouTube. There was nothing of that, no VCR, nothing. If I missed it, I missed it.

FV: So I was all about growing my hair. But guess what? I wasn't allowed to have long hair because in Ecuador, especially at the time, if you go to school there, they they would not allow a child, a male child, to have long hair. I would have to get my hair cut very, very short. So I would always, always have short hair. And I was already experiencing homophobia because, of course, I was a very queer boy, very effeminate and, you know, the deal. However, that wouldn't stop me from trying to be who I was. So, I would tell the hairstylist, "If you're going to cut it, I want a hair on top". Because here I had discovered hair gel and hairspray. It was all the rage in 87, 88. I don't know if it existed before, but I found out about it through my older cousins and I would watch them do their hair and I wanted to do the same thing. And of course, hiding so my father wouldn't see me.

FV: So I grew older, slightly older, and I really, really wanted to have blond hair. But it was not something that men would do because that was really, really bad. So guess what? There was a lady who will come to my house to do the women's hair, and she would dye their hair. They would only cut the men's, but I was like, "Oh my God, I want to find out how she does it." So I asked. I was like, "Hey, what do you use? What's the name of the with product?" Just passing conversation, and I would take notes. So one time I went to the pharmacy and I bought the ingredients as she told me. And I was like, "I don't know, maybe I shouldn't. I'm going to get beat up for this, but I really, really, really want to have blond hair." So I bought it. Behind the house, there was a little tree with like construction stuff. I hid myself and I mixed it and I dye my hair. Now, I didn't really know much except reading that directions, but I'm sure it wasn't the correct thing. But guess what? It worked. My hair was somehow blondish. It was just very, very light. So I was talking to somebody and she was like, "Oh my God, but you just dye your hair." I'm sure that the way I'm doing it is not even convincing, because at the time, it really was like if I kill somebody. My mom found out and she was like, "You need to go back to the store. You need to purchase black hair dye because your father's showing up any moment and he's going to kill you if you do it." So, I ran back and she dye my hair black. My blond experience was probably about thirty-five minutes, OK? And as she was dyeing my hair, I said to myself, "You'll watch woman one day. Just give me a couple of years, perhaps four or five years. I'll be 18. And I want to do whatever the hell I want." I hated my mother that day. I really did. And I think I became sort of like this anxious queer person to really have independence. That's what I really wanted. And when I turned 17, I was already in college in the USA. I finally dyed my hair and I went back for a winter break and I said, "I'm not changing it." And I didn't. So I was very happy about it. This is 1999, by the way.

FV: So that same year, I met my first boyfriend. And I was excited, I had never had a boyfriend, except for some occasional lovers that had boyfriends. So I was just a second fiddle. Hey, that's all I had. So this time I had my own boyfriend and I was happy, and all of that. I had another hair color. I was eager to find life. At 19, this is 1999, at 19, I really had a expectations about life. And this is when it becomes a sad hair story. So this man, one day he calls me at 3:00 in the morning. He was drunk and he says to me, "Fernando, I want to tell you something". And he was really, really drunk. He was mean, but I didn't know better. But then again, I didn't have anything else to compare it to, so that's all I had. And he was like cursing at me. And then he said, "And you're stupid. You are so dumb. You have no idea what you've done." I'm like, "What are you talking about?" "I am HIV positive and you're fucked." And I was like... how can you take that news? So this is late 99, October, I was in college, I didn't know where to do a test. So I waited until winter recess, so it was two months later. You can imagine the suffering I went through thinking that I had something. So I finally went home two months later and I took a test. But again, at the time, there was no rapid test. It was really, really hard to find out the results. So I waited, got it. I was OK. But then, I didn't believe it. I went through a denial period where I was like, "I don't think this is real. It's only been three months.” At the time it was like six months, to be sure. So all that suffering, I accumulated a lot of stress, a lot.

FV: So I went on with my life. I was waiting for the six months. And then one day speaking to a friend, I had blond hair and I didn't know this, and she says, "What the hell is happening to you in the back of your hair?" I'm like, "What are you saying?" "You have an entire black hole!" Because everything was blond, except there was a huge area here in the back. And like, "What do you mean?" She showed me a mirror, and I freak out. I say, "Oh my god, I have no hair." I had not noticed it. Of course, that first thing you do go to the internet. It wasn't even Google. I don't know what...Netscape? I don't know what it was at the time. And there it was. That was an HIV symptom, and I was sure that I had it. I was sure that at 19 I was about to die or something. It was terrible. And so I lost my hair. I was so proud of my hair, but I lost it. And months went by. I took the test. It came out negative again. But, because the hair would not grow back, I really, really thought that I had it. And it went on for like a year where I was in denial. And I was so young and I thought my life was over. But luckily, I kept testing. Finally, about four years later, I believed that I was negative because it kept coming back negative. And the hair slowly started growing when I stop being depressed. And when I tell you depressed, I mean, like, really, really, I was not, I could not be a happy person. Every single day was in my mind. It was a psychological thing. And the hair somehow reacted to that.

FV: So now that it's been years and I get to grow my hair, sometimes I'm amazed of "Whoa. I have hair." So what happened was that made me extra, extra cautious because of that experience. I became almost like a saint. “Like, no, I cannot go to bed with you.” It really changed my life to the point that it was a little uncomfortable for people to be around me, really. So finally, I was OK. I'm happy that I have the hair. To me, hair represents liberty, freedom to express who I am, and even though people may judge, they say, "Oh, that's a girl, that's --" who cares. It makes me happy. And just to give you an fyi, that guy, he's still alive, and I don't think he even had it. He was just fucking with me. And that's my hair story.

[FADE UP MUSIC BED]

DC: Oh my god.

Audience: [applause]

DC: That was such a beautiful, amazing story.

FV: Thank you so much.

DC: You are so beautiful. Your hair is so beautiful. You were such a brave child. And I'm so glad you're here. And, really, fuck that guy for subjecting you to that sick gaslighting insanity. You deserve only the best.

FV: Oh, I was terrible. I'm so happy that now, life has changed for the better now. Really.

DC: Well, I'm grateful that you shared your story here, yay, and I'm pretty sure from the reactions that everybody else is pretty happy.

FV: And it's the first time I share that story with like -- unless like my best friends from that era, I haven't really touched upon…yeah.

DC: Well, I'm glad you're OK and look at your luscious hair now.

FV: Thank you. Thank you. It's sort of me saying I won over that. It's like...

Audience Member #1: Yeah, absolutely.

FV: Thank you.

DC: Yay [applause]

FV: I mean, really, really. I'm so happy that I shared this story, it makes me feel better.

Audience Member #2: Thank you for sharing that.

DC: You can find Fernando at Fernando [dash] vieira (v-i-e-i-r-a) [dot] com.

DC: For our third and final story we’re going to hear from Brian Belovitch. Brian Belovitch is an author, activist, and long-time resident of NYC. It’s always so exciting when we have a queer elder available to tell a story and drop wisdom on us, and it reminds people of all ages and identities that we’ve always been here. This story was recorded in July 2020…

[END MUSIC BED]

[BRIAN BELOVITCH]
Brian Belovitch: Thank you, Drea, and thank you, everyone for being here. I love storytelling. I've been telling stories for many years. And what really intrigued me about this storytelling event was this idea of talking about my body and um... Your body, my body, everybody work your body. And, you know, what that calls up to me is a very evocative memory of dancing and not having a care in the world in the early 70s in New York City and Providence, Rhode Island, where I grew up. And shaking my body and just not caring about a lot of the things that would soon be happening in the world. There's such a sense of joy and remembering those times.

BB: When I was a little kid, when I was five years old, it was 1961. And I knew when I was a little kid that I was different. And I knew that I was different in a way that, at the time, it felt like a really good thing to me. This would be described as possibly a child of gender non-conforming identity or may be transgender. We wouldn't know, but we didn't have that vocabulary then. And I'm so grateful that we have all of the wonderful ways to claim our bodies today and the wonderful various expressions of how we can be in our bodies. Gender, for me -- for many people, gender is it is a destination, but for me personally, it's always been a journey and it always has been this odyssey that I have been sort of on my whole life. And, I was thinking, I was taking a shower, getting ready to do this, and I was thinking in the shower, like, "When was the first time I heard the word fagot or queer?" And when I was younger, queer was a derogatory term, and we've taken it back to empower ourselves with that term. But back then, queer was a derogatory term. And I believe the first time I heard that mentioned to me was my father telling me, "Stop walking that way.” You know, “Stop shaking your ass. What's wrong with you? Are you queer?" And what does a five-year-old or seven-year-old or eight-year-old kid know what that means? Other than the tone was negative, the tone was a little pointed, and it didn't sound empowering. And that kind of stuff kind of sinks into your DNA and it kind of absorbs into your body. So that was one of the first times that I understood that my difference elicited reactions from adults that were mostly negative. And the older I got, the worse it became.

BB: At 13 years old in August of 1969, there's something definitely going on there about my body and my presentation and my physical stance. And I was starting to gain weight and I started to get a little chubby and a little soft. And this was just a few months after the Stonewall Rebellion. So here I am, a 13-year-old gay kid in the middle of Massachusetts somewhere. And you know, all of this is going on, and I haven't a clue. But I'm still left with these feelings and these experiences of my body and how I'm going to fit in the world. So the other part of this, which I hope you find interesting, is that the messages that I received mostly from my earliest memories were of misgendering. So I was always misgendered. I was very pretty. I had very long eyelashes. I had very thick, curly, beautiful hair. I was soft and effeminate in spirit. And I was always misgendered. So I was always believing that somehow maybe there was something to this idea that I might be another gender. I had no sense of self and I had no strong core of confidence about who I was, so a few thought that it was a good idea for me to go ahead and change my body and change my name and have different surgical procedures. And I was 16 when I started to take hormones. I went to the doctor. The doctor never asked me how old I was. I got Premarin, which was the pill, the purple pills that we used to take in the 70s. Like this was like 1972, maybe? And I took them and I got small breasts and I started passing and I was young and I had passing privilege and I gained confidence from this new identity. But what I didn't realize at the time was that, if I was to be really honest with myself, the reasoning why it was doing it was not because I felt different or that I felt like I was supposed to be another gender. It was because I believed what other people were telling me to be true about myself. And that has a lot to do with my zero self-esteem and my zero sense of who I was. I was very people pleasing sort of person growing up. Shortly thereafter, we're talking about now 1980s, early 80s. I started to, you know, there are just so many different levels about my journey with my body that I started to become addicted to drugs and alcohol. The underlying feelings that I had of low self-esteem, of feeling like the misogyny that I experienced from men, from gay men, from straight men, from straight women. I mean, the misogyny that I was experiencing as this attractive sort of trans woman in the eighties was devastating to me. And it was very difficult to live that life at the time. When I was doing that in the mid 80s.

BB: I'd also gained some notoriety and I was sort of like this nightclub person. I was sort of like an Amanda Lapore of the day and running around the clubs and getting more attention and more validation of how I looked externally. And this is an important point of my story. How I looked was more important than how I felt. And someone talked earlier about how they felt anxious and that wasn't even in my radar. I had no -- I wasn't able to feel any of those things because I was masking a lot of how I really felt with drugs and alcohol. So fast forward to the third part of my transition. And in1987, I underwent therapy, I stopped using drugs and alcohol, I'd been sober like a year, and guess what? My feelings came back. My feelings about all the shame and all of the rejection and all of the trauma involved as a trans person living in a world that was constantly rejecting me came flooding back. And I was finally able to understand my body in a way that I had never been able to do before. And I never knew what feeling like a woman was because I'm not a woman and I never thought, I don't know what a woman feels like. I mean, I know what a person feels like, but I never felt like I was in the wrong body or, you know. So long story short, I re transitioned at the age of maybe 31. I had to undergo quite a bit of surgical modifications. I had my breast implants removed. I had silicone injections which had to be taken out. So I been through a lot of changes with my body. And then lastly before I close I just want to say that the other part of this body odyssey that I've been on is that I was diagnosed with HIV in 1986. And as a trans woman in 1986, being HIV positive was not a good thing. I mean, it's never a good thing to be HIV positive. But there was so much discrimination and so much unknown about the virus. And, you know, we were on the bottom of the medical chain. I'll just leave it at that. In my book, I wrote about exactly when I received my HIV diagnosis, and the doctor came in and he sat down and he said to me, "You know, you're positive. What did you expect your sex worker? You know, you're a prostitute, so you should be HIV positive." So that should give you an idea of like, how... [laughter]

BB: So moving forward from that, I did my retransition, and I used the word retransition because I don't like the word detransition. I think gender reimagining and retransitioning is always much more comfortable for me than this idea of like going back to something that didn't work for me in the first place. So I did that. And then, now I'm older, I'm a senior, I'm a senior, I'm an elder, I'm a gay elder, and I have older body now. So I'm losing muscle mass and I'm getting those little flappy things that you swing on, and I'm like gaining a little belly fat. And then when I started taking the HIV medications, I started getting lipodystrophy and losing fat in legs and my, you know, and all of this stuff. [laughs] It's… I'm grateful. I'm grateful to be here. I'm grateful to be alive. I'm grateful to have this unusual story to share with my friends and share with people so that they can make informed decisions on their own and add this kind of unusual sort of twist to the story of gender, gender identity. But I'm grateful. I'm grateful to be alive. I'm grateful to be aging in my body. I'm grateful to be undetectable. You know, there was a time when I might not have even been here, you know? So when I retransitioned back, I had to go to the gym and I had to work out, and I had to get muscles, and that was a whole other body odyssey that I was completely unprepared for. But lastly, my body is only today a vessel that holds so much more than the body can ever represent. It holds a spirit, and it holds a spirit that is loving, caring, friendly, kind, generous. And that's what's most important to me today is my spirit, and my body is changing all the time. Our bodies change as we grow older, and yours will, too. If you're still here and another 30 years, you'll really understand exactly what it is I'm trying to say here. But I'm grateful to have the opportunity to talk a little bit. Thank you all. And stay safe. Be healthy.

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DC: Thank you. Woooo.

Audience: Woooo.

DC: That was an extraordinary story, and I feel honored that you told it here. Thank you so much. I felt validated by the things that you experienced. And it was like a balm to my heart.

BB: Aww, Thank you.

DC: A lot of the things that you said, I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, and it's... having a body hun, having a body. You know, a lot of bullshit out there tries to tell us, this is some new little thing that's happening, and it's like, no, it's always been happening. And this is why we tell our stories to embolden ourselves and to, you know, you all know the deal. You know what I'm trying to say I hope. I'm speechless. Thank you. That was wonderful.

BB: Thank you, Drae, thank you for having me.

DC: You can find Brian at brian belovitch [dot] com. That’s Brian with and “I”.

DC: [sigh] Thank you so much for tuning in… and queer folks, remember – If you don't tell your story, someone else will, so get out there and…

Audience: TELL! QUEER! STORIES!

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[FADE UP TELL THEME]

DC: TELL is created, hosted and produced by me, Drae Campbell. The stories are recorded live, on zoom or on location at the Bureau of General Services Queer Division -- a pop and pop book shop and event space in the LGBTQ Center in Manhattan. Go say hi to Greg and Donny, who run BGSQD, and tell them we sent you, or follow them at B G S Q D.

DC: The TELL Podcast is produced by Emily Boghossian, recorded at BRIC House in Downtown Brooklyn by Zak Sherzad, Eric Haugesag, and Onel Mulet, and edited by Lauren Klein. Our theme songs were written and recorded by Drae Campbell and Peter Lettre. Charlie Hoxie and Kuye Youngblood are the wind beneath our wings.

DC: Remember to follow us on Spotify, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, google us on google play, and slide into our DMs @tellqueerz or @draebiz on Instagram. That’s queers and biz with a “z”, obviously. And you know what if you like me specifically, check me out on DraeCampbell.com.

TELL is part of the BRIC family. For more information on this and all BRIC Radio podcasts, visit bric arts media dot org.

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