This was one of Wendy's last television appearances for a very long time. She came out publicly nine years later in an interview with Playboy magazine and talked about how miserable she was at this point in her life. She'd released Switched-On Bach as Walter Carlos in October of 1968, less than a year after she'd begun HRT, when the physical changes were becoming more noticeable.Ā Wendy had been living as a woman in her private and social life, but the public appearances and interviews she had to do in the wake of its commercial success and critical acclaim were a source of profound anxiety and dysphoria.Ā Wendy used to cry in her hotel room as she applied the press-on sideburns, put on a wig to hide her long hair, and used an eyeliner to fake a five-o' clock shadow before going on television shows (and before her meeting with Stanley Kubrick to compose the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange); few people bothered to hide their speculation and open disgust.
Over the next decade, she continued with the treatments and was able to afford gender affirming surgeries but released two more albums as āWalterāāfears for her safety and pressure from her record label made it unthinkable to do otherwise. Thatās ten years of both public and creative isolation in a field she pioneered:
The fact that I couldnāt perform publicly stifled me. I lost a decade as an artist.I was unable to communicate with other musicians. There was no feedback. I would have loved to have gone onstage playing electronic-music concerts, as well as writing for more conventional media, such as the orchestra.
This is Wendy Carlos almost twenty years later.Ā She was always beautiful, but right here? Sheās fucking luminous.
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