speramus meliora; resurget cineribus

He pretends like he’s chewing to communicate that he’s hungry! 

Hermann: Darkness without light is an abyss, light without darkness is blinding. You cannot have a coin with one side.

I’d always believed it was something to hide, a shameful, annoying thing. My husband and lover, who flanked me, didn’t even know what I was. I’d hidden it that well. And here there was someone like me, someone saying that this was a gift from the gods? I walked out shaking all over. It took me a year to get the courage to tell anyone (and only after divesting myself of both my husband and my lover), but I owe it to that one brave mythical beast, my sister/brother. S/he called hirself Siren; I never saw hir again, but someday I’m going to find hir and buy hir dinner to thank hir for my freedom.

The second person is my lover of seven years, now my wife, who was the first person in my life not only to support my gender transgressions 100% but to encourage me. She sweet-talked me into growing out my beard, encouraged my masculinity, let me wear the dick during sex, and held me through bouts of body dysphoria. She is a male-to-female transexual, and she started dating me while I was still in the denial stage. But she had me pegged long before I knew my own mind. Somehow she knew I was the man for her, even when I was wearing skirts. I’ve already thanked her, of course, and I continue to do so every day. Her I owe for knowing that no matter what I did with my flesh, someone would always desire me.

The third person isn’t a person exactly; it’s a bunch of guys from a support group for female-to-male transexuals. I went into the group sideways, defensive, certain there would be deeply grooved differences between them and myself. After all, I was an intersexual, which was its own kind of pain. I was never going to think of myself fully as a man. (Many years and many testosterone injections later, now that I’m “sirred” on the street, I still don’t. I’m a masculine androgyne, but that’s as far along the scale as I’ll go in either direction.) Instead I found we had many things in common. Those guys were my lifelines through the worst parts of my decision-making period.

I learned from them that I didn’t have to be squarely on the opposite end of the gender paradigm in order to change my body, that I didn’t have to live with the discomfort. Change was possible and reasonable and didn’t need to be justified (to the people who count, anyway) except to say, “This is right for me now.”

Thanks, Max, Henry, Julian, Mike, and Greenie.”]

In Chapter 115 of my book Foucault’s Pendulum the character called Casaubon, on the night of the twenty-third to the twenty-fourth of June 1984, after attending an occultist ceremony at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris, walks, as if possessed, along the entire length of the rue Saint-Martin, crosses the rue aux Ours, passes the Centre Beaubourg, and arrives at Saint-Merry Church. Afterward he continues along various streets, all of them named, until he gets to the place des Vosges. In order to write this chapter I walked the same route on several different nights, carrying a tape recorder, taking notes on what I could see and the impressions I had.

Indeed, since I have a computer program which can show me what the sky looks like at any time in any year, at whatever longitude or latitude, I even went so far as to find out if there had been a moon that night, and what position it occupied in the sky at various times. I did this not because I wanted to emulate Emile Zola’s realism, but because I like to have the scene I’m writing about in front of me while I narrate; it makes me more familiar with what’s happening and helps me get inside the characters.

After publishing the novel, I received a letter from a man who had evidently gone to the Bibliothéque Nationale to read all the newspapers from June 24, 1984. He had discovered that on the corner of the rue Réaumur (which I hadn’t actually named but which does cross the rue Saint-Martin at a certain point), after midnight, more or less at the time Casaubon passed by, there had been a fire—and a big fire at that, if the papers had talked about it. The reader asked me how Casaubon had managed not to see it.