At 12:01 a.m. Wednesday morning, a new law legalizing civil unions
took effect in Colorado. Denver and Boulder immediately started to issue
licenses, and on Wednesday morning Fran and Anna Simon, the first gay
couple granted a civil union in the state, said their vows at a ceremony
held at a downtown Denver municipal building.
After a crowd of hundreds of people counted down the moments until
midnight, the Simons were given their license at 12:02 a.m. A few
minutes later Denver Mayor Michael Hancock officiated their civil union
ceremony.
The Simons were joined at the ceremony by their 5-year-old son
Jeremy, and the couple wore the same white wedding dresses they wore
seven years ago at their commitment ceremony.
“Our commitment doesn’t change, but we will have a burden lifted off
our shoulders,” Anna Simon said. “Loving and committed couples need
legal protections.”
The state’s new law grants gay and heterosexual unmarried couples the
ability to form civil unions and exercise rights similar to those
granted to married couples, including the right to make medical
decisions, qualify for health insurance and survivor benefits, transfer
property and adopt children.
The Denver clerk’s office stayed open until 3 a.m. Wednesday morning
issuing civil union licenses, and U.S. Hancock, Rep. Diana DeGette and
local judges spent hours officiating civil union ceremonies in the
atrium of the Wellington E. Webb Municipal Office Building.
“I’ve been a part of the effort to legalize civil unions in Colorado
now for several years,” Hancock told the Associated Press. “I feel a
tremendous amount of pride for the people of Denver to work with their
legislators to finally pass this piece of legislation to allow people to
love and live as they so choose.”
DeGette, who has been a longtime supporter of gay rights, told the
Associated Press that she’d specifically earned her clergy status online
so she could participate in Wednesday morning’s ceremonies.
“Members of the GLBT community are the same as everyone else — they want loving, permanent relationships,” she said.
In Boulder the first license was granted to Bonnie Lloyd and Pattea
Carpenter, who’d already made history when they became the first lesbian
couple in the U.S. to have both of their names on their child’s birth
certificate.
By the 3 a.m. cutoff time, 130 couples in Denver and 48 couples in
Boulder were reportedly granted civil unions. The state resumed granting
licenses at 8 a.m. Wednesday morning.
In 1992 voters in Colorado approved a ban on discrimination
protection for gay people, and they made gay marriage illegal under the
state constitution in 2006. The civil union bill was signed this March
by Gov. John Hickenlooper, a development indicative of the major gains
that gay rights advocates have made in recent years.
But as happy as the Simons were to celebrate their civil union, Anna
Simon told the Associated Press that the law only represents another
step in the struggle for LGBT marriage rights.
“Like most people growing up, you have a dream of falling in love and getting married, not getting a civil union,” Simon said.
(Original post here.)
Showing posts with label Journalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Journalism. Show all posts
CHICAGOPHOENIX.COM: Gender Identity Disorder removed from the American Psychiatric Association manual
LOS ANGELES — The American Psychiatric Association has eliminated
“gender identity disorder” from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders.
For decades, the manual has classified all transgender people as
having a mental disorder. The new DSM, which will be called the DSM-5,
has been revised to refer to “gender dysphoria,” specifically focusing
on people who feel “a persistent discomfort with gender role or
identity” and not including people who are content with being
transgender.
The APA board of trustees finalized the revision last month, but the change went largely unnoticed while most headlines focused on the APA’s controversial revisions to its policies regarding autism.
The elimination of the GID diagnosis will have far-reaching ramifications for many transgender people.
In addition to being the guide that mental health professionals use to diagnose their patients, the DSM has been employed by insurance companies and other organizations to set their policies regarding transgender people.
Dr. Tanya Jacob, a Los Angeles psychologist with a specialty in LGBT patients, is one of many mental health professionals praising the change.
“I think that it’s a great sign that society is beginning to accept the fact that a person’s gender does not always correlate naturally with their biological sex,” Dr. Jacob told Phoenix Nation. “Much of the so-called ‘dysphoria’ of a transgendered person is based off of society, not necessarily themselves. Gender itself is a societal construct, it’s an expression, and one that most people, transgendered or not, don’t fall completely on either side of.”
The elimination of the GID diagnosis has not met with universal approval from transgender rights advocates. The diagnosis of GID is used to justify insurance coverage for gender reassignment surgery, hormone treatments and other medical procedures related to gender transition. Some transgender rights advocates fear that without the GID diagnosis, insurance companies will class these procedures as cosmetic or elective and deny coverage.
Other transgender rights advocates feel that the DSM revision doesn’t go far enough. Kelley Winters, founder of the Gender Identity Disorder Reform Advocates group, objects to the DSM-5 retaining the Transvestic Disorder diagnosis in the sexual disorders chapter. Transvestic Disorder covers people who experience psychological distress related to cross-dressing.
“This punitive and scientifically capricious category maligns many gender variant people,” Winters wrote on the group’s blog, “including transsexual women and men, as mentally ill and sexually deviant, purely on the basis of nonconforming gender expression.”
The APA did not declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder until 1973, and the change did much to increase the acceptance of gay people worldwide.
Transgender advocates have been pushing for the elimination of GID from the DSM for years. They finally saw some progress last summer, when the APA released new health guidelines for transgender patients and a new position statement supporting transgender care and civil rights, citing the importance of protecting transgender people from “significant discrimination, prejudice, and the potential for victimization from violent hate crimes, as well as denial of many basic civil rights, protections, and access to health care, to the severe detriment of their mental health.”
The DSM-5 is due to go into effect this May.
(Original article posted here.)
The APA board of trustees finalized the revision last month, but the change went largely unnoticed while most headlines focused on the APA’s controversial revisions to its policies regarding autism.
The elimination of the GID diagnosis will have far-reaching ramifications for many transgender people.
In addition to being the guide that mental health professionals use to diagnose their patients, the DSM has been employed by insurance companies and other organizations to set their policies regarding transgender people.
Dr. Tanya Jacob, a Los Angeles psychologist with a specialty in LGBT patients, is one of many mental health professionals praising the change.
“I think that it’s a great sign that society is beginning to accept the fact that a person’s gender does not always correlate naturally with their biological sex,” Dr. Jacob told Phoenix Nation. “Much of the so-called ‘dysphoria’ of a transgendered person is based off of society, not necessarily themselves. Gender itself is a societal construct, it’s an expression, and one that most people, transgendered or not, don’t fall completely on either side of.”
The elimination of the GID diagnosis has not met with universal approval from transgender rights advocates. The diagnosis of GID is used to justify insurance coverage for gender reassignment surgery, hormone treatments and other medical procedures related to gender transition. Some transgender rights advocates fear that without the GID diagnosis, insurance companies will class these procedures as cosmetic or elective and deny coverage.
Other transgender rights advocates feel that the DSM revision doesn’t go far enough. Kelley Winters, founder of the Gender Identity Disorder Reform Advocates group, objects to the DSM-5 retaining the Transvestic Disorder diagnosis in the sexual disorders chapter. Transvestic Disorder covers people who experience psychological distress related to cross-dressing.
“This punitive and scientifically capricious category maligns many gender variant people,” Winters wrote on the group’s blog, “including transsexual women and men, as mentally ill and sexually deviant, purely on the basis of nonconforming gender expression.”
The APA did not declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder until 1973, and the change did much to increase the acceptance of gay people worldwide.
Transgender advocates have been pushing for the elimination of GID from the DSM for years. They finally saw some progress last summer, when the APA released new health guidelines for transgender patients and a new position statement supporting transgender care and civil rights, citing the importance of protecting transgender people from “significant discrimination, prejudice, and the potential for victimization from violent hate crimes, as well as denial of many basic civil rights, protections, and access to health care, to the severe detriment of their mental health.”
The DSM-5 is due to go into effect this May.
(Original article posted here.)
Jose Canseco Sued for Twin Boxing Stunt
Originally posted April 19th, 2011 on the news website OnlineJournal.com.
Jose Canseco is being sued for breach of contract, after the former ballplayer allegedly sent his twin to take his place at a celebrity boxing match.
Canseco was scheduled to fight at the the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida on March 26th, but according to the lawsuit he sent his twin brother Ozzie to take his place.
"We made him a transfer of $5,000 when we agreed on the fight," an unidentified Celebrity Boxing representative told El Nuevo Herald. "Hours before the fight Saturday, we issued a check for the remaining $5,000 in the name of Jose Canseco, and we delivered it to whom we thought was Jose Canseco. He declined it and asked that the check be made out to cash, which we did.
"When we discovered that the person to whom we had given the rest of the money was not José but Ozzie, we asked him to return the check, but he refused to do it. We will go to the bank on Monday and put a stop-payment on it."
The switch was apparently discovered after the boxing match organizers realized that Ozzie Canseco didn't have the tattoos that his famous brother sports on his biceps. A photo of Jose Canseco without his shirt had appeared in advertising for the match.
When they discovered the ruse, representatives of Celebrity Boxing called the police, and Ozzie Canseco left the Passion nightclub escorted by police officers.
On Sunday, Jose Canseco posted messages on Twitter criticizing Damon Feldman, the promoter of the celebrity boxing program.
"Damon Feldman did not comply with his part of the agreement," read one tweet. "Be careful with Damon Feldman, the Celebrity Boxing leader, who will not pay you if you fight for him," read another.
In previous celebrity boxing fights, Canseco drew with former "Patridge Family" star Danny Bonaduce and was knocked out in the first round by ex-Eagles return man Vai Sikahema.
Jose Canseco is being sued for breach of contract, after the former ballplayer allegedly sent his twin to take his place at a celebrity boxing match.
Canseco was scheduled to fight at the the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida on March 26th, but according to the lawsuit he sent his twin brother Ozzie to take his place.
"We made him a transfer of $5,000 when we agreed on the fight," an unidentified Celebrity Boxing representative told El Nuevo Herald. "Hours before the fight Saturday, we issued a check for the remaining $5,000 in the name of Jose Canseco, and we delivered it to whom we thought was Jose Canseco. He declined it and asked that the check be made out to cash, which we did.
"When we discovered that the person to whom we had given the rest of the money was not José but Ozzie, we asked him to return the check, but he refused to do it. We will go to the bank on Monday and put a stop-payment on it."
The switch was apparently discovered after the boxing match organizers realized that Ozzie Canseco didn't have the tattoos that his famous brother sports on his biceps. A photo of Jose Canseco without his shirt had appeared in advertising for the match.
When they discovered the ruse, representatives of Celebrity Boxing called the police, and Ozzie Canseco left the Passion nightclub escorted by police officers.
On Sunday, Jose Canseco posted messages on Twitter criticizing Damon Feldman, the promoter of the celebrity boxing program.
"Damon Feldman did not comply with his part of the agreement," read one tweet. "Be careful with Damon Feldman, the Celebrity Boxing leader, who will not pay you if you fight for him," read another.
In previous celebrity boxing fights, Canseco drew with former "Patridge Family" star Danny Bonaduce and was knocked out in the first round by ex-Eagles return man Vai Sikahema.
"Alien Corpse" in Viral Video Was Made of Bread and Chicken
Originally posted April 20th, 2011 on the news website OnlineJournal.com.
An "alien corpse" that recently appeared in a widely-circulated video clip has been revealed as a hoax.
The video, shot in the Siberian town of Kamensk, showed the alleged frozen remains of an alien from a crashed UFO. But when the police visited the home of the video's maker, he confessed that the creature was actually a prop made out of chicken and bread and given a coat of paint.
The video quickly went viral after the UFO news site, All News Web, posted an English translation on YouTube on April 17th. The site claimed that the video was evidence of the government covering up of a UFO crash.
Soon the story was circulating all over the web that a lifeless alien body had been found in southern Siberia following reports of a "pink and blue glowing object" that crashed from the sky. It was reported that Russia's Emergencies Ministry staff were investigating the incident and that search and rescue teams found no sign of a crashed aircraft.
Within three days, the video had more than three million views. For a while it was the most-watched clip on YouTube and thousands of commenters were furiously arguing about its legitimacy.
But now, mere days after the clip first appeared online, it has already been debunked.
The alien story began to fall apart when the chief editor of the Kamensk-Info newspaper saw the clip. He feared that the strange-looking creature could actually be the corpse of a child, so he immediately called the police. The police soon found the filmmaker, who went by the YouTube name of SashafromBaikal. Under questioning, he admitted the hoax.
The news website Russia Today reports that the man won't face any legal punishment. Unsurprisingly, some die-hard conspiracy buffs are already claiming that the chicken sandwich extraterrestrial is just another cover story.
An "alien corpse" that recently appeared in a widely-circulated video clip has been revealed as a hoax.
The video, shot in the Siberian town of Kamensk, showed the alleged frozen remains of an alien from a crashed UFO. But when the police visited the home of the video's maker, he confessed that the creature was actually a prop made out of chicken and bread and given a coat of paint.
The video quickly went viral after the UFO news site, All News Web, posted an English translation on YouTube on April 17th. The site claimed that the video was evidence of the government covering up of a UFO crash.
Soon the story was circulating all over the web that a lifeless alien body had been found in southern Siberia following reports of a "pink and blue glowing object" that crashed from the sky. It was reported that Russia's Emergencies Ministry staff were investigating the incident and that search and rescue teams found no sign of a crashed aircraft.
Within three days, the video had more than three million views. For a while it was the most-watched clip on YouTube and thousands of commenters were furiously arguing about its legitimacy.
But now, mere days after the clip first appeared online, it has already been debunked.
The alien story began to fall apart when the chief editor of the Kamensk-Info newspaper saw the clip. He feared that the strange-looking creature could actually be the corpse of a child, so he immediately called the police. The police soon found the filmmaker, who went by the YouTube name of SashafromBaikal. Under questioning, he admitted the hoax.
The news website Russia Today reports that the man won't face any legal punishment. Unsurprisingly, some die-hard conspiracy buffs are already claiming that the chicken sandwich extraterrestrial is just another cover story.
Omega-3 Fatty Acids Associated With Prostate Cancer Risk
Originally posted April 26th, 2011 on the news website OnlineJournal.com.
Omega-3 fatty acids may have a link to aggressive prostate cancers, while the long-maligned trans fats may actually protect against prostate tumors.
In a new study, researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle examined levels of omega fatty acids and trans-fatty acids in the blood from a group of 3,461 men over age 55. The men were part of the Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial, which ran from 1994 to 2003. About half of these men had prostate cancer.
The researchers expected that omega-3s would reduce the risks of prostate tumors while trans fatty acids would up the risk, but they were surprised to learn that the opposite appeared to be true. High levels of omega-3 fatty acids (specifically DHA) were associated with a 2.5-times increased risk of high-grade tumors. These are the cancers that grow faster and have a greater likelihood of spreading than lower-grade tumors.
Men in the study who had the highest levels of two kinds of trans fatty acids - which has been widely regarded as the "bad" fat - had about half the risk of prostate cancer of those with lower levels.
The researchers published their findings this month in The American Journal of Epidemiology.
"We were stunned to see these results and we spent a lot of time making sure the analyses were correct," lead researcher Theodore Brasky said in a news release.
But the researchers caution that the apparent association could possibly be the result of other diet or lifestyle factors, and nobody should avoid omega-3 fatty acids and increase their consumption of trans fats based on the results of this study.
"Overall, the beneficial effects of eating fish to prevent heart disease outweigh any harm related to prostate cancer risk," Brasky said.
While prostate cancer is a concern for many men, heart disease is the leading cause of death in males.
Omega-3 fatty acids may have a link to aggressive prostate cancers, while the long-maligned trans fats may actually protect against prostate tumors.
In a new study, researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle examined levels of omega fatty acids and trans-fatty acids in the blood from a group of 3,461 men over age 55. The men were part of the Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial, which ran from 1994 to 2003. About half of these men had prostate cancer.
The researchers expected that omega-3s would reduce the risks of prostate tumors while trans fatty acids would up the risk, but they were surprised to learn that the opposite appeared to be true. High levels of omega-3 fatty acids (specifically DHA) were associated with a 2.5-times increased risk of high-grade tumors. These are the cancers that grow faster and have a greater likelihood of spreading than lower-grade tumors.
Men in the study who had the highest levels of two kinds of trans fatty acids - which has been widely regarded as the "bad" fat - had about half the risk of prostate cancer of those with lower levels.
The researchers published their findings this month in The American Journal of Epidemiology.
"We were stunned to see these results and we spent a lot of time making sure the analyses were correct," lead researcher Theodore Brasky said in a news release.
But the researchers caution that the apparent association could possibly be the result of other diet or lifestyle factors, and nobody should avoid omega-3 fatty acids and increase their consumption of trans fats based on the results of this study.
"Overall, the beneficial effects of eating fish to prevent heart disease outweigh any harm related to prostate cancer risk," Brasky said.
While prostate cancer is a concern for many men, heart disease is the leading cause of death in males.
Muammar Al-gaddafi Contacts NY Times About an Exhibit of His Clothes
Originally posted on the news website OnlineJournal.com.
Muammar Al-gaddafi has reportedly approached The New York Times about the possibility of the Metropolitan Museum of Art doing a fashion exhibit about him.
Horacio Silva of The New York Times was recently sent a letter by a member of Libya's Culture and Ethnic Affairs office, asking if Silva would like to journey to Libya in order to inspect the clothes collection of the Libyan dictator.
"We would like to offer you the opportunity, Mr. Horacio," the letter reads, "when it is convenient to do so to be our guest for an all expenses paid trip to Tripoli and peruse our President's collection with a view to curating a stylish retrospective of his fashion highlights at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum in New York."
The letter is signed by Zainab Bint Abu Talib, an aide to Mr. Moussa Khalid Wahabb, the new Minister for Cultural Affairs in Libya. The letter is six pages long, with four of those pages being "reference shots" of Gaddafi in various costumes.
The letter, if legitimate, comes at a bizarre time, as NATO forces are fighting alongside Libyan rebels against Gaddafi's forces. Yesterday it was reported that two NATO airstrikes had struck Gaddafi's compound, taking out his library and administrative offices.
Gadaffi is famously eccentric, and his garish fashions have long been celebrated and mocked online. Still, this would be a strange move even for him.
The letter does include some references to the current conflict, ending with, "Obviously there is urgency in your response. We have been suffering many outages at the Ministry with peak body ramifications. Yet with backup generators at the new consolidated headquarters now running more reliably, all contact appliances are in full working order."
Silva did not reveal if he had actually written back, but in a Times column headlined "Off Pitch," he expressed regret about not being able to go.
"Would that I could play in Muammar el-Qaddafi's closet," Silva wrote. "Sadly, The Times's editorial policy prohibits me from taking this trip."
Muammar Al-gaddafi has reportedly approached The New York Times about the possibility of the Metropolitan Museum of Art doing a fashion exhibit about him.
Horacio Silva of The New York Times was recently sent a letter by a member of Libya's Culture and Ethnic Affairs office, asking if Silva would like to journey to Libya in order to inspect the clothes collection of the Libyan dictator.
"We would like to offer you the opportunity, Mr. Horacio," the letter reads, "when it is convenient to do so to be our guest for an all expenses paid trip to Tripoli and peruse our President's collection with a view to curating a stylish retrospective of his fashion highlights at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum in New York."
The letter is signed by Zainab Bint Abu Talib, an aide to Mr. Moussa Khalid Wahabb, the new Minister for Cultural Affairs in Libya. The letter is six pages long, with four of those pages being "reference shots" of Gaddafi in various costumes.
The letter, if legitimate, comes at a bizarre time, as NATO forces are fighting alongside Libyan rebels against Gaddafi's forces. Yesterday it was reported that two NATO airstrikes had struck Gaddafi's compound, taking out his library and administrative offices.
Gadaffi is famously eccentric, and his garish fashions have long been celebrated and mocked online. Still, this would be a strange move even for him.
The letter does include some references to the current conflict, ending with, "Obviously there is urgency in your response. We have been suffering many outages at the Ministry with peak body ramifications. Yet with backup generators at the new consolidated headquarters now running more reliably, all contact appliances are in full working order."
Silva did not reveal if he had actually written back, but in a Times column headlined "Off Pitch," he expressed regret about not being able to go.
"Would that I could play in Muammar el-Qaddafi's closet," Silva wrote. "Sadly, The Times's editorial policy prohibits me from taking this trip."
Plastic Surgery Booming in China
Originally posted on the news website OnlineJournal.com.
Plastic surgery is booming in China, and it's become the most popular way to spend discretionary income after houses, cars and travel.
Ma Xiaowei, China's vice health minister, says that the demand for plastic surgery has exploded in the last decade, as the number of upwardly mobile Chinese people has surged. At a conference organized by the Health Ministry late last year, Ma said that the number of cosmetic procedures is doubling every year.
"We must recognize that plastic and cosmetic surgery has now become a common service, aimed at the masses," he said.
While no official numbers are available, in 2009 the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery estimated that there are more than two million plastic surgery procedures per year in China, ranking the nation third behind the United States and Brazil.
Face-lifts and wrinkle-removal treatments are popular, just as they they are in the West, but the most frequent procedure in China is one that has nothing to do with turning back the clock.
Zhao Zhenmin, secretary general of the government-run Chinese Association of Plastics and Aesthetics, told The New York Times that China's most popular cosmetic surgery is designed to make the patient's eyes appear larger by adding a crease in the eyelid, forming a Western-style "double eyelid." He said that the second most popular procedure is done to make the bridge of the nose more prominent - exactly the opposite of most nose jobs in the West - and the third most popular procedure involves reshaping the jaw to make it longer and narrower.
Many of these procedures are performed on younger patients who are trying to improve their employment prospects, teenagers who were given cosmetic surgeries for high school graduation presents and even kids in middle school.
But as plastic surgery booms in China, the country's regulatory system is lagging behind. When 11 clinics and hospitals offering cosmetic or plastic surgery were inspected, Ma said at the conference last year, fewer than half met national standards.
Plastic surgery is booming in China, and it's become the most popular way to spend discretionary income after houses, cars and travel.
Ma Xiaowei, China's vice health minister, says that the demand for plastic surgery has exploded in the last decade, as the number of upwardly mobile Chinese people has surged. At a conference organized by the Health Ministry late last year, Ma said that the number of cosmetic procedures is doubling every year.
"We must recognize that plastic and cosmetic surgery has now become a common service, aimed at the masses," he said.
While no official numbers are available, in 2009 the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery estimated that there are more than two million plastic surgery procedures per year in China, ranking the nation third behind the United States and Brazil.
Face-lifts and wrinkle-removal treatments are popular, just as they they are in the West, but the most frequent procedure in China is one that has nothing to do with turning back the clock.
Zhao Zhenmin, secretary general of the government-run Chinese Association of Plastics and Aesthetics, told The New York Times that China's most popular cosmetic surgery is designed to make the patient's eyes appear larger by adding a crease in the eyelid, forming a Western-style "double eyelid." He said that the second most popular procedure is done to make the bridge of the nose more prominent - exactly the opposite of most nose jobs in the West - and the third most popular procedure involves reshaping the jaw to make it longer and narrower.
Many of these procedures are performed on younger patients who are trying to improve their employment prospects, teenagers who were given cosmetic surgeries for high school graduation presents and even kids in middle school.
But as plastic surgery booms in China, the country's regulatory system is lagging behind. When 11 clinics and hospitals offering cosmetic or plastic surgery were inspected, Ma said at the conference last year, fewer than half met national standards.
Kate Middleton's Domain Name Grabbed by Canadian Couple
Originally posted on the news website OnlineJournal.com.
A Canadian couple has purchased Kate Middleton's name as a URL for just under $2,500.
Last week Greg Kureluk, 33, his wife Carole Lemire, 31, and a group of local business partners purchased the rights to the domain name, www.katemiddleton.com. They're turning the URL into a website for Kate Middleton fans, featuring wedding news and gossip, fashion tips, photos and videos, and of course all of the latest Middleton merchandise.
Greg Kureluk tells The Province that he just happened to spot the domain name up for sale on the site sedo.com and he couldn't resist the opportunity to grab it. But Kureluk insists this site isn't set up to exploit Middleton's name for financial gain.
"Some guys like to go out and play pool," he says, "and some guys like to play on the Internet. We don't need the money. We're just doing it for a lark. The intent is not to exploit. At the end of the day, it's going to be done in a very tasteful way, in a very respectful manner."
Kureluck says that he was never a particular fan of England's monarchy before, but recently got hooked when he went to London with his wife on their honeymoon.
"I'm not obsessed," Kureluk says. "But I think Kate will revitalize the monarchy, by bringing it back to reality. Not only is she beautiful; that goes without saying. But Kate and William just have this air about them. They are royal, but people feel they can relate to them."
Lemire, a salon owner who already runs her own style blog, will be covering hair and fashion for katemiddleton.com. Like her husband, she says that she's not obsessed with Middleton
"It's not like I live and breathe this girl," she says. "But I love anything British. And I am excited to see what she can do for fashion. Right now, she dresses very conservatively. It's going to be very, very neat to see what she does with her clothes and her hair."
A Canadian couple has purchased Kate Middleton's name as a URL for just under $2,500.
Last week Greg Kureluk, 33, his wife Carole Lemire, 31, and a group of local business partners purchased the rights to the domain name, www.katemiddleton.com. They're turning the URL into a website for Kate Middleton fans, featuring wedding news and gossip, fashion tips, photos and videos, and of course all of the latest Middleton merchandise.
Greg Kureluk tells The Province that he just happened to spot the domain name up for sale on the site sedo.com and he couldn't resist the opportunity to grab it. But Kureluk insists this site isn't set up to exploit Middleton's name for financial gain.
"Some guys like to go out and play pool," he says, "and some guys like to play on the Internet. We don't need the money. We're just doing it for a lark. The intent is not to exploit. At the end of the day, it's going to be done in a very tasteful way, in a very respectful manner."
Kureluck says that he was never a particular fan of England's monarchy before, but recently got hooked when he went to London with his wife on their honeymoon.
"I'm not obsessed," Kureluk says. "But I think Kate will revitalize the monarchy, by bringing it back to reality. Not only is she beautiful; that goes without saying. But Kate and William just have this air about them. They are royal, but people feel they can relate to them."
Lemire, a salon owner who already runs her own style blog, will be covering hair and fashion for katemiddleton.com. Like her husband, she says that she's not obsessed with Middleton
"It's not like I live and breathe this girl," she says. "But I love anything British. And I am excited to see what she can do for fashion. Right now, she dresses very conservatively. It's going to be very, very neat to see what she does with her clothes and her hair."
On Chernobyl's 25th Anniversary, Debate on Long-Term Health Effects
Originally published April 26th, 2011, on the news website OnlineJournal.com.
Chernobyl's 25th anniversary is today, but as we mark this grim occasion debate continues about the disaster's long-term health effects.
On April 26th, 1986, the No. 4 reactor at the Chernobyl plant exploded because of an accident during a safety test experiment. 31 people, most of them firefighters who had rushed to the scene trying to control the raging blaze, immediately died of radiation poisoning. The disaster sent a cloud of radiation sweeping across Europe. In 2008, a United Nations report stated that 6,000 thyroid cancers in young people were linked to the accident.
But even now, decades on, experts disagree about the long-term health effects of the Chernobyl disaster. There are many complicating factors that make it difficult to appraise the lasting damage. Adequate research funding is hard to come by, and researchers lack access to good health records. Locals who survived the disaster speak many different languages and have now scattered across different areas, and many of them no longer recall their precise whereabouts at the time of the disaster.
But we may be able to learn a lot more about radiation poisoning in the next few years. Kirsten Moysich, Philip McCarthy and Per Hall, co-authors of a United Nations study on the effects of the Chernobyl disaster, write that the recent disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan "sadly...offer[s] another opportunity to study the cancer consequences of accidents at nuclear power plants."
Unlike the former Soviet Union, for many years Japan has studied the epidemiology of radiation, giving it a chance to put together new, scientifically sound and relatively speedy investigations.
Unfortunately Chernobyl remains potentially dangerous, even today. Years ago a makeshift containment shell was hastily put over the leaking reactor, but recently that shell has been failing and radiation has been escaping again. Earlier this month, the world community pledged $780 million to help build a new containment shell at Chernobyl.
Chernobyl's 25th anniversary is today, but as we mark this grim occasion debate continues about the disaster's long-term health effects.
On April 26th, 1986, the No. 4 reactor at the Chernobyl plant exploded because of an accident during a safety test experiment. 31 people, most of them firefighters who had rushed to the scene trying to control the raging blaze, immediately died of radiation poisoning. The disaster sent a cloud of radiation sweeping across Europe. In 2008, a United Nations report stated that 6,000 thyroid cancers in young people were linked to the accident.
But even now, decades on, experts disagree about the long-term health effects of the Chernobyl disaster. There are many complicating factors that make it difficult to appraise the lasting damage. Adequate research funding is hard to come by, and researchers lack access to good health records. Locals who survived the disaster speak many different languages and have now scattered across different areas, and many of them no longer recall their precise whereabouts at the time of the disaster.
But we may be able to learn a lot more about radiation poisoning in the next few years. Kirsten Moysich, Philip McCarthy and Per Hall, co-authors of a United Nations study on the effects of the Chernobyl disaster, write that the recent disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan "sadly...offer[s] another opportunity to study the cancer consequences of accidents at nuclear power plants."
Unlike the former Soviet Union, for many years Japan has studied the epidemiology of radiation, giving it a chance to put together new, scientifically sound and relatively speedy investigations.
Unfortunately Chernobyl remains potentially dangerous, even today. Years ago a makeshift containment shell was hastily put over the leaking reactor, but recently that shell has been failing and radiation has been escaping again. Earlier this month, the world community pledged $780 million to help build a new containment shell at Chernobyl.
Interview With the Hermaphrodite: The many faces of Lynn Harris
Cover story, originally printed in OC Weekly.
As you talk to Lynn Edward Harris, he changes. When you first meet, Harris is a soft-spoken gentleman in his late ’40s. He is elfin and elegant, with the frail, pale handsomeness of some tennis-playing dandy out of a Fitzgerald novel. Then, as Harris is speaking, his metamorphosis begins. He’ll be discussing a painful subject—and there are so many painful subjects—and as he does so, he will raise a delicate hand to his chin and look at you with the tragic eyes of a spinster aunt. At such moments, he is not simply an effeminate man; it is as if he has somehow actually transformed into a dear, middle-aged lady before your eyes.
As your conversation progresses, Harris becomes many people. One moment, he looks like a shy 14-year-old boy dressed in Daddy’s clothes, but then he’ll remember somebody who wronged him 15 years ago, and boom, he has become an uncomfortably intense, wiry tough guy who could probably kick your ass. Later, when he’s finally calmed-down, he’ll tell you about his wild and decadent days in the Los Angeles of the ’70s, and his petite features will crinkle into a weary Keith Richards leer.
The most amazing moments come when Harris tells you about the ’60s, back when he was a mixed-up teen with big hair, a padded bra, and a face pleasant enough to look upon that it won him the crown of Costa Mesa Junior Miss in 1968. As he talks about his youth, the years melt away, and for an instant, he somehow becomes that lost girl again.
Harris has been many people in his lifetime, but none of them seems to have been very happy.
Harris is a man. Sort of. He is also a woman. Sort of. He is both, although it could be argued that he is neither, or that he is a third sex. Harris is a hermaphrodite, or intersex, possessing both a vagina and a penis that is, he says, about 2 inches long when erect. He has female chromosomes with male genetic patterning, male hair patterns and skeletal structure, and no breasts. He urinates from beneath the base of his penis. He has some mixed ovarian and testicular tissue. His voice is an eerie, androgynous purr. If you met him on the street and he told you he was a man, you’d believe it without question. If he told you he was a woman, you’d probably believe that, too.
A QUESTION OF THINGIES
For centuries, the western world had no “girls,” as such. From Plato’s day to the Renaissance, anatomists believed that there was just one gender—male—and “females” were simply males with inverted penises. Nowadays, we believe in the concepts of “girl” and “boy,” but what makes a boy a boy and a girl a girl? It’s a complicated question, but modern science has a simple answer.
You see, it’s all a question of thingies. When a baby is born, its thingie must be longer than an inch to be considered a penis and shorter than 3/8 inch to be considered a clitoris. A boy must have two healthy testicles and a urethral opening at the tip of his thingie, while a girl must have a pair of ovaries in her tummy and a urethral opening at the base of her thingie.
But what happens if a child is born with an unusual thingie—a thingie, for instance, that’s longer than 3/8 inch but shorter than a full inch, or a thingie with one opening on the tip and another at the base? What then? Well, that kid is in trouble. In almost all cases, pediatric urologists will assign the child a gender, and then they’ll get busy with their scalpels. If the thingie is boy-sized but the urethral opening is located down at the base, doctors will re-route the opening so that it reaches the thingie’s tip. If an ambiguous thingie is on the short side, doctors will usually assign the child a female gender, snip away any excess tissue, and prescribe estrogen at puberty. Sometimes, they’ll even construct a vagina for the child using a piece of its bowel tissue—a vagina the child will unfortunately never have feeling in.
Physicians will usually consult with a child’s parents about all of this, but it’s not unheard of for doctors to proceed without informing the parents about their child’s condition or to actually go ahead with these procedures over the parents’ objections. Apparently, anything is better than letting a child face the horrors of growing up with an ambiguous thingie.
Sadly, the evidence strongly suggests that all the tinkering these doctors do with the privates of newborn hermaphrodites does far more harm than good. Although doctors do everything they can to keep young intersexes from finding out the truth about their bodies, as they grow up, these children can’t help but realize there’s something unusual going on. Many “girls” will find themselves growing into enormously tall lesbians with linebacker shoulders and voices deeper than their dads’, while “boys” will wonder why they’re so short and their butts and boobs are so big. These hapless children will often be subjected to mysterious injections and surgical treatments, treatments that will render them sterile and incapable of ever having an orgasm. For many hermaphrodites who’ve been surgically “corrected,” sex is actually painful.
The doctors who perform these procedures are following a theory—dreamed up in the ’50s by John Hopkins University sexologist John Money—that babies are born psychosexually neutral and that if a doctor sculpts a child’s ambiguous genitalia within a few months of birth, normal psychosexual development should follow. Money’s theory soon became medical gospel, and little hermaphrodites have been paying for it ever since.
But while Money was scribbling in his notebooks, John Hopkins urologist Hugh H. Young was also doing some interesting work just across the quad. Between 1930 and 1960, Young conducted extensive case studies of unaltered hermaphrodites who grew up to be far happier and healthier than those unlucky children who fell into the latex-gloved mitts of the medical establishment. “Emma,” for instance, was an unaltered and very naughty intersex who had both a functioning vagina and a “penis-sized” thingie and was fully capable of having heterosexual sex with both men and women. She lived as a traditional homemaker with a husband, a well-vacuumed carpet, and an oven full of warm TV dinners, although Emma apparently didn’t fancy marital relations with her husband much (she referred to her vagina as her “meal ticket”) and often had extramarital frolics with girlfriends. Whatever you might say about Emma’s unorthodox lifestyle, she certainly sounds like she had a lot more fun than her surgically altered sister/brothers.
So, in the face of Young’s studies, why did Money’s theory catch on? Some critics suggest that it was a result of the era in which Money worked; the ’50s were a conservative, repressive time when gender roles were at their most rigid, a time that was notoriously tough on those who wouldn’t—or couldn’t—fit in. It was also an era when antibiotics still worked, when doctors were constantly devising new vaccines and surgeries, and it probably looked like illness itself might be eradicated by the year 2000. Hermaphroditism was an “illness,” and a brave new generation of doctors set out to “cure” it. Sadly, the cures they devised were actually a step back from the prescriptions doled out by the doctors of medieval Europe, who sent their hermaphrodite patients off to have sex with virgin corpses. Like modern cures for the intersexed, the necrophilia method was both ineffective and unutterably foul, but at least in ye olden days, patients got away without having their genitals mutilated.
Historically speaking, hermaphrodites have had it rough. While there have been hermaphroditic gods in the religions of India, Egypt, Mexico and other cultures (even some translations of Genesis describe God as being “of both sexes”), people have been far more comfortable with mythical hermaphrodites than they’ve been with flesh-and-blood ones. In Greek and Roman times, a hermaphrodite birth was considered a bad omen, and they were usually drowned. In the Talmud, they got the worst of both worlds. Like the fellows, they weren’t allowed to shave or be alone with women; like the girls, they couldn’t serve as priests or inherit their father’s estates, and they had to stay isolated from men while they were menstruating. In medieval Europe, hermaphrodites were required to decide on a gender and stick with it, with dire consequences if they strayed outside their chosen role; in the 17th century, one Scottish hermaphrodite who lived as a woman was buried alive after impregnating a local lass.
In the early decades of this century, hermaphrodites (or “half-and-halfs,” as they were commonly known) were displayed in freak shows across America, forced to strip in dark, stinky rooms and display their genitals for gawking hillbillies. Mondu, a “half-and-half” who toured Europe and the United States in the 1920s, used to pass around a pamphlet that declared him to be “brother and sister in one body, the ninth wonder of the world. . . . There is real drama and a touch of genuine comedy in this mysterious process of evolution which forces a girl to shoulder the responsibilities of a man without having been prepared by a masculine training and a boy’s background.”
THE MODERN MONDU?
If anybody could sympathize with Mondu’s dilemma, it would be Lynn Harris.
As hermaphrodites go, Harris has been fortunate. He still has the genitals he was born with, reached adulthood without being drowned or buried alive, and was never forced to have sex with a virgin corpse. But Harris has been fortunate only when you compare him to other hermaphrodites; compared to you or me, his life has been full of Dickensian drama and comedy of the blackest sort.
The first time I visited Harris at his smallish, artfully furnished West Hollywood apartment, our interview turned into one of the longest, most fascinating conversations I’ve ever had. We started talking sometime in mid-afternoon, and the next thing I knew, it was pushing midnight. He let me flip through his scrapbook, which is full of pictures of Harris as a little girl, as a zaftig teenage beauty queen, as an anxious-looking young man with a wispy beard. One particularly memorable set of photos had a twentysomething Harris as a glamorous, Bowie-esque androgyne, fully made-up and shaving his face. He showed me his female birth certificate, along with the male birth certificate he was issued in adulthood, and a stack of articles about his case from publications ranging from the most scholarly medical texts to such tabloids as The Globe. We never even stopped to eat, and by the end, we could hardly hear each other over our growling stomachs.
As he was showing me out, Harris handed me a copy of an enormous yellowing bundle of paper; it was his autobiography, I, the Hermaphrodite (or More Lives Than One). He told me he had been shopping it around to publishers for years, but so far, he’d had no serious offers. Given the fantastic tales he’d been spinning all night, I couldn’t imagine how any publisher would pass on Harris’ story. Christ, his life should have been a best-seller, a miniseries, a major motion picture. But once I began to read the book, it didn’t take long to figure out why no mainstream press had picked it up. Written in a style equal parts William Burroughs, Jackie Collins and Ed Wood (“There was little to say to the young man who inadvertently had managed to provide me with a few minutes of carnal delight but which fell short of any consummate gratification”), I, the Hermaphrodite is a book of wonderful, transcendent strangeness. It is also so exhaustingly lurid that reading a single page can leave you feeling like you’ve just attended a noisy, all-night orgy. In the course of the book, Harris has dalliances with an award-winning playwright, a married minister (and the minister’s church organist), a top studio set designer, a “Marine-on-leave porno star,” a variety of television and film personalities, a Lebanese smuggler, and many, many more. While I can’t help but wonder if more than a bit of artistic license was involved in the book’s creation, I’ve learned that where Harris is concerned, the more impossible something sounds, the more likely it is to be true.
What follows is the most accurate portrait I can offer of a unique individual who wears many faces and never stands still.
A LIFE IN PINK (AND BLUE)
When Lynn Harris was born in an Orange hospital in 1950, he was pronounced female by a doctor who he now says must have been “half-blind.” As he grew, Harris was neither an extreme tomboy nor a girly girl; he and his younger sisters played with dolls, with Harris invariably taking on the daddy role. He climbed trees and loved to play games, although he disliked the “rough sports.” He took an interest in woodcarving, as well as ballet. The only thing about him that was obviously unusual was his intelligence; by age 3, he could recite Shakespeare.
But early on, Harris knew there was something strange about his body. One day, when he was about 5 years old, he lifted up his dress and tried to ask his mother about the strange thing that was growing between his legs.
“Put your dress down,” she hissed, “and don’t look at it!”
In many ways, that moment set the tone for Harris’ future relationship with his mother. Today he describes her as a “very moralistic Roman Catholic,” and when he speaks of her, you can hear a lifetime of hurt and frustration in his voice. Harris grew up dreading his mother’s harsh words and worshiping his glamorous, remote, character-actor father. Harris’ parents separated when he was still a child, and Harris stayed in Costa Mesa while his father worked in Hollywood, coming down for all-too-infrequent visits. The arrangement left Harris in the hands of his mother, who steadfastly refused to accept his claims that there was anything strange about his body. In a strange way, this was a fortunate turn of events for Harris; had his mother taken him seriously, he probably would have ended up being surgically “corrected.” As it happened, Harris pleaded for years until his mother finally took him to an endocrinologist when he was about 11. The doctor performed a brief exam on a fully clothed Harris. Without seeing Harris’ budding penis, the doctor agreed with Harris’ mother: further diagnostic tests were unnecessary, and treatment was not indicated; the child was clearly a girl. It was another lucky break, although it sure didn’t seem that way to Harris at the time.
“You see,” Harris’ mother gloated. “I told you it was all in your head! Now stop all these wild imaginings!”
But as his teens progressed, it became increasingly difficult for Harris to believe that his problems were simply wild imaginings. He began to grow facial hair, and his voice dropped until it was lower than that of the boys in his class at Newport Harbor High School. His breasts and hips stubbornly refused to blossom, and he had no real periods; every few years, he found a bit of blood in his panties, but that was it. Perhaps most troubling of all was the question of Harris’ vagina; he couldn’t find one, not even when he looked with a mirror.
Desperately seeking an identity, the young Harris threw himself into acting, where he could hide behind costumes, makeup and characters. He performed in a batch of school plays, usually playing parts—a butch female Army colonel, for instance—with a prophetically androgynous twist. In just a few years, he won 14 acting trophies. He worked hard at being a great actress, almost as hard as he worked at being the proper, pretty young lady his mother wanted him to be. Harris subjected himself to a drag-queen-like daily regimen of two hours of makeup, shaving and padding; he waxed himself so often and bathed in so many toxic depilatories that he now says it’s a wonder he has any skin left. To keep his body hidden in gym class, he changed clothes in bathroom stalls and always took care to shower alone.
Harris began to enter local beauty pageants, despite his mother’s warnings that the judges would never pick a padded girl. Much to his mother’s amazement, he took home several trophies. Harris was the first Costa Mesa Junior Miss in 1968. He still has a picture of himself in a gown and tiara—looking a bit like a young Shelley Winters—standing alongside A.L. Pinkley, then-mayor of Costa Mesa. Along with the crown, Harris was awarded a college scholarship, something he’s still proud of.
“I’m proud of all the things I did as girl,” he says. “I earned that crown!”
Harris approached femininity with a jock’s determination, and he now attributes his aggressive, competitive edge to the male hormones that were coursing through him. “I was determined to be the best female of any female I knew, and I went over the top,” he says.
But no matter how much he fought it, Harris couldn’t deny what was happening to his body. Every day, when he looked in the mirror, the face that looked back at him looked less and less female. On the street, people sometimes stopped him to ask if he was a man in drag.
Harris’ sex was ambiguous, but he had drives as strong as any girl—or boy—his age. He yearned for romance but was frightened by the prospect of sharing his unorthodox anatomy with a lover. Nonetheless, at 18, Harris lost his virginity in the time-honored tradition of teenage girls across America:with his knees up in the front seat of his date’s car. The venue, however, was the only thing traditional about the evening; Harris’ date was a divorced older man who blindly struggled to penetrate him for two hours, at one point grunting, “Do you even have a vagina?”
Finally, he found one; a tiny thing, with a hymen so tough that Harris now feels it should have been slit surgically. The deflowering hurt like hell, but at least Harris knew he actually had a vagina. In more ways than one, he had at last, he says, “become a woman.”
With the ’60s swinging all around him, Harris left home at 19 and moved back to Hollywood to seek his fortune as an actress. The outline for Harris’ book describes these days as [ahem] “a cyclone of discotheques, movie premieres, and swingers’ parties offering recreational sex with men AND women.”
He began appearing in LA theater productions, supporting himself with beauty retail and other work. Finally free to see his own doctors and learn what was really going on with his body, he began taking estrogen in an attempt to regulate his menstrual cycle and increase his bustline. In 1972, still in his early ’20s, he began experiencing hot flashes, fluctuations in blood-sugar levels, rapid weight gain and other symptoms of menopause, symptoms that weren’t alleviated until one of his doctors suggested “reverse therapy”: a course of male hormones. Desperate for answers, in 1973, Harris checked himself into La Mirada Community Hospital for three days of tests and exploratory surgery. The doctors there eventually diagnosed him with what they called “a hermaphroditic situation”:Stein-Leventhal Syndrome, a congenital condition that affects one in every 10,000 births. They warned him that his body would continue to “masculinize” over time, adding that there was little he could do to stop it.
Harris reacted to the news by running out and buying higher heels and putting bigger pads in his bras. He’d always lived as a woman, and he didn’t want to be anything else. Seeking images of “masculine” women, he would look up pictures of the brilliant but famously non-photogenic Gertrude Stein in the encyclopedia, anxiously wondering if eventually, he would look as nasty as she did. Many women fear the loss of their looks with age; poor Harris also had to fear the loss of his very gender.
When he tried to talk about his situation with his family, his parents predictably went into full, furious denial.
“Nothing’s wrong with you,” Harris’ father roared. “If you let on to your boyfriends that you’re some kind of freak, you’ll queer your marriage chances forever!”
Touchingly, one of Harris’ sisters worried that she might “catch” his condition and grow a penis, too.
THE CURTAIN FALLS
By Harris’ account, as the ’70s wore on, he appeared in a string of Z-grade movies (mainly horror films with such titles as Meat Eater and Mother’s Day, all of which have proved remarkably difficult or impossible to track down), became an international call girl, and ended up in hot water with the Vegas mob, among many other spicy if incredible-sounding misadventures. He also continued working in live theater, but his increasingly masculine-looking body made leading-lady roles hard to come by, and by his late ’20s, he was already playing middle-aged mothers. He was growing disenchanted with acting, realizing for the first time, what a crutch it had always been. He had been pretending to be a woman for years, and it wasn’t working anymore. Despondent and lost, he turned to a “spiritual counselor” for advice.
“You’ve always been so unhappy as a woman,” the counselor said. “How much worse off could you be living as a man?”
Feeling he had nothing left to lose, Harris took the advice, and almost overnight—”cold turkey,” he says—he gave up the womanhood he’d been fighting so long and hard to hold onto. He let his beard grow in, bought a male wardrobe, and changed his middle name from Elizabeth to Edward. (He didn’t change his first name, feeling that since the feminine form of Lynn usually ends with an “e,” his name was already masculine enough.) He embraced his new role so thoroughly that he even decided to have his name and gender changed on his birth certificate. The Los Angeles Superior Court agreed with his request, but the bureaucrats in Sacramento balked because Harris’ petition was not accompanied by the customary affidavit from a doctor stating that Harris had undergone sex-reassignment surgery. Harris complained and was issued a new birth certificate that stated his middle name as Edward but still gave his gender as female, a development that Harris says drove him to “suicidal feelings.” He persevered and eventually received a new Certificate of Live Birth for Lynn Edward Harris, male. Harris believes that his case set a precedent for the first legal sex change without surgery.
That was 20 years ago. Since then, Harris has worked a variety of jobs (until recently, he was working as a film-production bookkeeper, although as I was writing this story, he was laid off) while devoting most of his energy to representing the hermaphrodite community. He has appeared frequently on television and radio, as well as in magazines, newspapers and books, and he has become a prominent speaker and essayist on intersex issues. He says he does it partly to educate people about intersexes and partly as a response to all the years of denial and repression he endured.
Although he has reached something of an understanding with his father, Harris and his mother didn’t speak for 10 years; it’s only now that they are making the first steps toward understanding.
BOTH SIDES NOW
One of the wackier Greek myths involves a Theban named Teiresias. During his youth, Teiresias came upon two snakes coupling, and, perhaps repulsed by the sight of all that wiggly snake love, decided to separate them. Separating a pair of snakes mid-screw sounds like a dumb move under any circumstances, but Teiresias was especially foolhardy, as the ancient Greeks believed that snakes were creatures with strange, magical powers. As soon as he brought his staff down upon the female of the pair, Teiresias found himself transformed into a woman.
He spent a few years that way, until one day when he was out for a stroll, and he came upon the same snakes again. This time, he struck out at the male (apparently he still hadn’t gotten over his issues with snakes having sex) and promptly found himself changed back into a man.
Not long after, Zeus and his wife, Hera, were debating whether men or women enjoy sex more. Zeus felt sex was better for women, while Hera believed men got more out of it. They called on Teiresias, since he was the only person who could answer the question from firsthand knowledge. Teiresias responded that women experienced 10 times more pleasure than men, a reply that so infuriated Hera that she blinded him on the spot.
Like Teiresias, Harris has looked at gender from both sides. And like Teiresias, he has come away from the experience with attitudes that are bound to cause controversy.
“Women today are getting greedy,” Harris says. “They bitch and moan about maternity leave, and then they bitch and moan if somebody doesn’t open the doors for them.”
Harris is quick to admit that some of his anger with women is based on envy. “Look, I never asked to be a man, and I do miss the accouterments of womanhood. . . . But these girls today, sometimes I feel like telling them to just shut up and realize how good they’ve got it.”
In his book, Harris describes himself as bisexual, but today, he seems to have little sexual interest in women. “Women are decorative, like pretty statues. I like to look at them, but psychologically, mentally, there’s nothing there I’m attracted to.”
Harris lives as a man and has relationships with men, but he takes pains to point out that he doesn’t consider himself gay.
“I do not understand the gay lifestyle,” Harris says. “Most of it seems so warped and distasteful. Those terrible parades and the bathhouses and things like that . . . These gays are beset by vice addictions and social disease, and that all has nothing to do with me. I’m much more mainstream. Besides, I’m still involved with the same gender I’ve always been involved with, so how could I be gay?”
After years alone, Harris is now seeking someone to share his life with. In recent months, he has placed some personal ads, but so far, the response has been disappointing. “These men see an ad for a hermaphrodite, and they expect some beautiful woman with a penis. They see me, and I’m like a little boy with the wrong equipment. I spoil their fantasy.”
Harris’ androgynous build sometimes causes him problems in public, too. Although he had hoped that the days of being approached by strangers and asked if he was in drag would have ended when he began living as a man, this has not been the case.
“I still get that stuff sometimes, and people can be really rude about it. A few weeks ago, I was at an antiques show, and a black man came up and asked if I was a man or a woman. I was furious. I mean, can you imagine the nerve?”
I ask Harris what he told the man.
“I called him a coon, and I turned and walked away.”
THE FACES BEHIND THE FACES
As all of this may indicate, Harris is a moody and sometimes difficult personality. I learned how difficult when I took a few days to respond to one of his e-mails and Harris furiously called the Weekly’s editor, insisting that I was a charlatan who’d run off with the manuscript of I, The Hermaphrodite, that I was going to take it to a publisher and use it to make my fortune. Needless to say, I returned the book in a hurry.
Despite his flaws, I can’t help but admire Lynn Harris. He has lived too many hard lifetimes in his 49 years, and yet, of the countless faces he has worn, the two that come through most clearly today are the lost, approval-seeking teenager and the gentle, middle-aged dandy. Through all the anger and the hurt, both of these faces keep peeking through, and when they do, they are beautiful.
As you talk to Lynn Edward Harris, he changes. When you first meet, Harris is a soft-spoken gentleman in his late ’40s. He is elfin and elegant, with the frail, pale handsomeness of some tennis-playing dandy out of a Fitzgerald novel. Then, as Harris is speaking, his metamorphosis begins. He’ll be discussing a painful subject—and there are so many painful subjects—and as he does so, he will raise a delicate hand to his chin and look at you with the tragic eyes of a spinster aunt. At such moments, he is not simply an effeminate man; it is as if he has somehow actually transformed into a dear, middle-aged lady before your eyes.
As your conversation progresses, Harris becomes many people. One moment, he looks like a shy 14-year-old boy dressed in Daddy’s clothes, but then he’ll remember somebody who wronged him 15 years ago, and boom, he has become an uncomfortably intense, wiry tough guy who could probably kick your ass. Later, when he’s finally calmed-down, he’ll tell you about his wild and decadent days in the Los Angeles of the ’70s, and his petite features will crinkle into a weary Keith Richards leer.
The most amazing moments come when Harris tells you about the ’60s, back when he was a mixed-up teen with big hair, a padded bra, and a face pleasant enough to look upon that it won him the crown of Costa Mesa Junior Miss in 1968. As he talks about his youth, the years melt away, and for an instant, he somehow becomes that lost girl again.
Harris has been many people in his lifetime, but none of them seems to have been very happy.
Harris is a man. Sort of. He is also a woman. Sort of. He is both, although it could be argued that he is neither, or that he is a third sex. Harris is a hermaphrodite, or intersex, possessing both a vagina and a penis that is, he says, about 2 inches long when erect. He has female chromosomes with male genetic patterning, male hair patterns and skeletal structure, and no breasts. He urinates from beneath the base of his penis. He has some mixed ovarian and testicular tissue. His voice is an eerie, androgynous purr. If you met him on the street and he told you he was a man, you’d believe it without question. If he told you he was a woman, you’d probably believe that, too.
A QUESTION OF THINGIES
For centuries, the western world had no “girls,” as such. From Plato’s day to the Renaissance, anatomists believed that there was just one gender—male—and “females” were simply males with inverted penises. Nowadays, we believe in the concepts of “girl” and “boy,” but what makes a boy a boy and a girl a girl? It’s a complicated question, but modern science has a simple answer.
You see, it’s all a question of thingies. When a baby is born, its thingie must be longer than an inch to be considered a penis and shorter than 3/8 inch to be considered a clitoris. A boy must have two healthy testicles and a urethral opening at the tip of his thingie, while a girl must have a pair of ovaries in her tummy and a urethral opening at the base of her thingie.
But what happens if a child is born with an unusual thingie—a thingie, for instance, that’s longer than 3/8 inch but shorter than a full inch, or a thingie with one opening on the tip and another at the base? What then? Well, that kid is in trouble. In almost all cases, pediatric urologists will assign the child a gender, and then they’ll get busy with their scalpels. If the thingie is boy-sized but the urethral opening is located down at the base, doctors will re-route the opening so that it reaches the thingie’s tip. If an ambiguous thingie is on the short side, doctors will usually assign the child a female gender, snip away any excess tissue, and prescribe estrogen at puberty. Sometimes, they’ll even construct a vagina for the child using a piece of its bowel tissue—a vagina the child will unfortunately never have feeling in.
Physicians will usually consult with a child’s parents about all of this, but it’s not unheard of for doctors to proceed without informing the parents about their child’s condition or to actually go ahead with these procedures over the parents’ objections. Apparently, anything is better than letting a child face the horrors of growing up with an ambiguous thingie.
Sadly, the evidence strongly suggests that all the tinkering these doctors do with the privates of newborn hermaphrodites does far more harm than good. Although doctors do everything they can to keep young intersexes from finding out the truth about their bodies, as they grow up, these children can’t help but realize there’s something unusual going on. Many “girls” will find themselves growing into enormously tall lesbians with linebacker shoulders and voices deeper than their dads’, while “boys” will wonder why they’re so short and their butts and boobs are so big. These hapless children will often be subjected to mysterious injections and surgical treatments, treatments that will render them sterile and incapable of ever having an orgasm. For many hermaphrodites who’ve been surgically “corrected,” sex is actually painful.
The doctors who perform these procedures are following a theory—dreamed up in the ’50s by John Hopkins University sexologist John Money—that babies are born psychosexually neutral and that if a doctor sculpts a child’s ambiguous genitalia within a few months of birth, normal psychosexual development should follow. Money’s theory soon became medical gospel, and little hermaphrodites have been paying for it ever since.
But while Money was scribbling in his notebooks, John Hopkins urologist Hugh H. Young was also doing some interesting work just across the quad. Between 1930 and 1960, Young conducted extensive case studies of unaltered hermaphrodites who grew up to be far happier and healthier than those unlucky children who fell into the latex-gloved mitts of the medical establishment. “Emma,” for instance, was an unaltered and very naughty intersex who had both a functioning vagina and a “penis-sized” thingie and was fully capable of having heterosexual sex with both men and women. She lived as a traditional homemaker with a husband, a well-vacuumed carpet, and an oven full of warm TV dinners, although Emma apparently didn’t fancy marital relations with her husband much (she referred to her vagina as her “meal ticket”) and often had extramarital frolics with girlfriends. Whatever you might say about Emma’s unorthodox lifestyle, she certainly sounds like she had a lot more fun than her surgically altered sister/brothers.
So, in the face of Young’s studies, why did Money’s theory catch on? Some critics suggest that it was a result of the era in which Money worked; the ’50s were a conservative, repressive time when gender roles were at their most rigid, a time that was notoriously tough on those who wouldn’t—or couldn’t—fit in. It was also an era when antibiotics still worked, when doctors were constantly devising new vaccines and surgeries, and it probably looked like illness itself might be eradicated by the year 2000. Hermaphroditism was an “illness,” and a brave new generation of doctors set out to “cure” it. Sadly, the cures they devised were actually a step back from the prescriptions doled out by the doctors of medieval Europe, who sent their hermaphrodite patients off to have sex with virgin corpses. Like modern cures for the intersexed, the necrophilia method was both ineffective and unutterably foul, but at least in ye olden days, patients got away without having their genitals mutilated.
Historically speaking, hermaphrodites have had it rough. While there have been hermaphroditic gods in the religions of India, Egypt, Mexico and other cultures (even some translations of Genesis describe God as being “of both sexes”), people have been far more comfortable with mythical hermaphrodites than they’ve been with flesh-and-blood ones. In Greek and Roman times, a hermaphrodite birth was considered a bad omen, and they were usually drowned. In the Talmud, they got the worst of both worlds. Like the fellows, they weren’t allowed to shave or be alone with women; like the girls, they couldn’t serve as priests or inherit their father’s estates, and they had to stay isolated from men while they were menstruating. In medieval Europe, hermaphrodites were required to decide on a gender and stick with it, with dire consequences if they strayed outside their chosen role; in the 17th century, one Scottish hermaphrodite who lived as a woman was buried alive after impregnating a local lass.
In the early decades of this century, hermaphrodites (or “half-and-halfs,” as they were commonly known) were displayed in freak shows across America, forced to strip in dark, stinky rooms and display their genitals for gawking hillbillies. Mondu, a “half-and-half” who toured Europe and the United States in the 1920s, used to pass around a pamphlet that declared him to be “brother and sister in one body, the ninth wonder of the world. . . . There is real drama and a touch of genuine comedy in this mysterious process of evolution which forces a girl to shoulder the responsibilities of a man without having been prepared by a masculine training and a boy’s background.”
THE MODERN MONDU?
If anybody could sympathize with Mondu’s dilemma, it would be Lynn Harris.
As hermaphrodites go, Harris has been fortunate. He still has the genitals he was born with, reached adulthood without being drowned or buried alive, and was never forced to have sex with a virgin corpse. But Harris has been fortunate only when you compare him to other hermaphrodites; compared to you or me, his life has been full of Dickensian drama and comedy of the blackest sort.
The first time I visited Harris at his smallish, artfully furnished West Hollywood apartment, our interview turned into one of the longest, most fascinating conversations I’ve ever had. We started talking sometime in mid-afternoon, and the next thing I knew, it was pushing midnight. He let me flip through his scrapbook, which is full of pictures of Harris as a little girl, as a zaftig teenage beauty queen, as an anxious-looking young man with a wispy beard. One particularly memorable set of photos had a twentysomething Harris as a glamorous, Bowie-esque androgyne, fully made-up and shaving his face. He showed me his female birth certificate, along with the male birth certificate he was issued in adulthood, and a stack of articles about his case from publications ranging from the most scholarly medical texts to such tabloids as The Globe. We never even stopped to eat, and by the end, we could hardly hear each other over our growling stomachs.
As he was showing me out, Harris handed me a copy of an enormous yellowing bundle of paper; it was his autobiography, I, the Hermaphrodite (or More Lives Than One). He told me he had been shopping it around to publishers for years, but so far, he’d had no serious offers. Given the fantastic tales he’d been spinning all night, I couldn’t imagine how any publisher would pass on Harris’ story. Christ, his life should have been a best-seller, a miniseries, a major motion picture. But once I began to read the book, it didn’t take long to figure out why no mainstream press had picked it up. Written in a style equal parts William Burroughs, Jackie Collins and Ed Wood (“There was little to say to the young man who inadvertently had managed to provide me with a few minutes of carnal delight but which fell short of any consummate gratification”), I, the Hermaphrodite is a book of wonderful, transcendent strangeness. It is also so exhaustingly lurid that reading a single page can leave you feeling like you’ve just attended a noisy, all-night orgy. In the course of the book, Harris has dalliances with an award-winning playwright, a married minister (and the minister’s church organist), a top studio set designer, a “Marine-on-leave porno star,” a variety of television and film personalities, a Lebanese smuggler, and many, many more. While I can’t help but wonder if more than a bit of artistic license was involved in the book’s creation, I’ve learned that where Harris is concerned, the more impossible something sounds, the more likely it is to be true.
What follows is the most accurate portrait I can offer of a unique individual who wears many faces and never stands still.
A LIFE IN PINK (AND BLUE)
When Lynn Harris was born in an Orange hospital in 1950, he was pronounced female by a doctor who he now says must have been “half-blind.” As he grew, Harris was neither an extreme tomboy nor a girly girl; he and his younger sisters played with dolls, with Harris invariably taking on the daddy role. He climbed trees and loved to play games, although he disliked the “rough sports.” He took an interest in woodcarving, as well as ballet. The only thing about him that was obviously unusual was his intelligence; by age 3, he could recite Shakespeare.
But early on, Harris knew there was something strange about his body. One day, when he was about 5 years old, he lifted up his dress and tried to ask his mother about the strange thing that was growing between his legs.
“Put your dress down,” she hissed, “and don’t look at it!”
In many ways, that moment set the tone for Harris’ future relationship with his mother. Today he describes her as a “very moralistic Roman Catholic,” and when he speaks of her, you can hear a lifetime of hurt and frustration in his voice. Harris grew up dreading his mother’s harsh words and worshiping his glamorous, remote, character-actor father. Harris’ parents separated when he was still a child, and Harris stayed in Costa Mesa while his father worked in Hollywood, coming down for all-too-infrequent visits. The arrangement left Harris in the hands of his mother, who steadfastly refused to accept his claims that there was anything strange about his body. In a strange way, this was a fortunate turn of events for Harris; had his mother taken him seriously, he probably would have ended up being surgically “corrected.” As it happened, Harris pleaded for years until his mother finally took him to an endocrinologist when he was about 11. The doctor performed a brief exam on a fully clothed Harris. Without seeing Harris’ budding penis, the doctor agreed with Harris’ mother: further diagnostic tests were unnecessary, and treatment was not indicated; the child was clearly a girl. It was another lucky break, although it sure didn’t seem that way to Harris at the time.
“You see,” Harris’ mother gloated. “I told you it was all in your head! Now stop all these wild imaginings!”
But as his teens progressed, it became increasingly difficult for Harris to believe that his problems were simply wild imaginings. He began to grow facial hair, and his voice dropped until it was lower than that of the boys in his class at Newport Harbor High School. His breasts and hips stubbornly refused to blossom, and he had no real periods; every few years, he found a bit of blood in his panties, but that was it. Perhaps most troubling of all was the question of Harris’ vagina; he couldn’t find one, not even when he looked with a mirror.
Desperately seeking an identity, the young Harris threw himself into acting, where he could hide behind costumes, makeup and characters. He performed in a batch of school plays, usually playing parts—a butch female Army colonel, for instance—with a prophetically androgynous twist. In just a few years, he won 14 acting trophies. He worked hard at being a great actress, almost as hard as he worked at being the proper, pretty young lady his mother wanted him to be. Harris subjected himself to a drag-queen-like daily regimen of two hours of makeup, shaving and padding; he waxed himself so often and bathed in so many toxic depilatories that he now says it’s a wonder he has any skin left. To keep his body hidden in gym class, he changed clothes in bathroom stalls and always took care to shower alone.
Harris began to enter local beauty pageants, despite his mother’s warnings that the judges would never pick a padded girl. Much to his mother’s amazement, he took home several trophies. Harris was the first Costa Mesa Junior Miss in 1968. He still has a picture of himself in a gown and tiara—looking a bit like a young Shelley Winters—standing alongside A.L. Pinkley, then-mayor of Costa Mesa. Along with the crown, Harris was awarded a college scholarship, something he’s still proud of.
“I’m proud of all the things I did as girl,” he says. “I earned that crown!”
Harris approached femininity with a jock’s determination, and he now attributes his aggressive, competitive edge to the male hormones that were coursing through him. “I was determined to be the best female of any female I knew, and I went over the top,” he says.
But no matter how much he fought it, Harris couldn’t deny what was happening to his body. Every day, when he looked in the mirror, the face that looked back at him looked less and less female. On the street, people sometimes stopped him to ask if he was a man in drag.
Harris’ sex was ambiguous, but he had drives as strong as any girl—or boy—his age. He yearned for romance but was frightened by the prospect of sharing his unorthodox anatomy with a lover. Nonetheless, at 18, Harris lost his virginity in the time-honored tradition of teenage girls across America:with his knees up in the front seat of his date’s car. The venue, however, was the only thing traditional about the evening; Harris’ date was a divorced older man who blindly struggled to penetrate him for two hours, at one point grunting, “Do you even have a vagina?”
Finally, he found one; a tiny thing, with a hymen so tough that Harris now feels it should have been slit surgically. The deflowering hurt like hell, but at least Harris knew he actually had a vagina. In more ways than one, he had at last, he says, “become a woman.”
With the ’60s swinging all around him, Harris left home at 19 and moved back to Hollywood to seek his fortune as an actress. The outline for Harris’ book describes these days as [ahem] “a cyclone of discotheques, movie premieres, and swingers’ parties offering recreational sex with men AND women.”
He began appearing in LA theater productions, supporting himself with beauty retail and other work. Finally free to see his own doctors and learn what was really going on with his body, he began taking estrogen in an attempt to regulate his menstrual cycle and increase his bustline. In 1972, still in his early ’20s, he began experiencing hot flashes, fluctuations in blood-sugar levels, rapid weight gain and other symptoms of menopause, symptoms that weren’t alleviated until one of his doctors suggested “reverse therapy”: a course of male hormones. Desperate for answers, in 1973, Harris checked himself into La Mirada Community Hospital for three days of tests and exploratory surgery. The doctors there eventually diagnosed him with what they called “a hermaphroditic situation”:Stein-Leventhal Syndrome, a congenital condition that affects one in every 10,000 births. They warned him that his body would continue to “masculinize” over time, adding that there was little he could do to stop it.
Harris reacted to the news by running out and buying higher heels and putting bigger pads in his bras. He’d always lived as a woman, and he didn’t want to be anything else. Seeking images of “masculine” women, he would look up pictures of the brilliant but famously non-photogenic Gertrude Stein in the encyclopedia, anxiously wondering if eventually, he would look as nasty as she did. Many women fear the loss of their looks with age; poor Harris also had to fear the loss of his very gender.
When he tried to talk about his situation with his family, his parents predictably went into full, furious denial.
“Nothing’s wrong with you,” Harris’ father roared. “If you let on to your boyfriends that you’re some kind of freak, you’ll queer your marriage chances forever!”
Touchingly, one of Harris’ sisters worried that she might “catch” his condition and grow a penis, too.
THE CURTAIN FALLS
By Harris’ account, as the ’70s wore on, he appeared in a string of Z-grade movies (mainly horror films with such titles as Meat Eater and Mother’s Day, all of which have proved remarkably difficult or impossible to track down), became an international call girl, and ended up in hot water with the Vegas mob, among many other spicy if incredible-sounding misadventures. He also continued working in live theater, but his increasingly masculine-looking body made leading-lady roles hard to come by, and by his late ’20s, he was already playing middle-aged mothers. He was growing disenchanted with acting, realizing for the first time, what a crutch it had always been. He had been pretending to be a woman for years, and it wasn’t working anymore. Despondent and lost, he turned to a “spiritual counselor” for advice.
“You’ve always been so unhappy as a woman,” the counselor said. “How much worse off could you be living as a man?”
Feeling he had nothing left to lose, Harris took the advice, and almost overnight—”cold turkey,” he says—he gave up the womanhood he’d been fighting so long and hard to hold onto. He let his beard grow in, bought a male wardrobe, and changed his middle name from Elizabeth to Edward. (He didn’t change his first name, feeling that since the feminine form of Lynn usually ends with an “e,” his name was already masculine enough.) He embraced his new role so thoroughly that he even decided to have his name and gender changed on his birth certificate. The Los Angeles Superior Court agreed with his request, but the bureaucrats in Sacramento balked because Harris’ petition was not accompanied by the customary affidavit from a doctor stating that Harris had undergone sex-reassignment surgery. Harris complained and was issued a new birth certificate that stated his middle name as Edward but still gave his gender as female, a development that Harris says drove him to “suicidal feelings.” He persevered and eventually received a new Certificate of Live Birth for Lynn Edward Harris, male. Harris believes that his case set a precedent for the first legal sex change without surgery.
That was 20 years ago. Since then, Harris has worked a variety of jobs (until recently, he was working as a film-production bookkeeper, although as I was writing this story, he was laid off) while devoting most of his energy to representing the hermaphrodite community. He has appeared frequently on television and radio, as well as in magazines, newspapers and books, and he has become a prominent speaker and essayist on intersex issues. He says he does it partly to educate people about intersexes and partly as a response to all the years of denial and repression he endured.
Although he has reached something of an understanding with his father, Harris and his mother didn’t speak for 10 years; it’s only now that they are making the first steps toward understanding.
BOTH SIDES NOW
One of the wackier Greek myths involves a Theban named Teiresias. During his youth, Teiresias came upon two snakes coupling, and, perhaps repulsed by the sight of all that wiggly snake love, decided to separate them. Separating a pair of snakes mid-screw sounds like a dumb move under any circumstances, but Teiresias was especially foolhardy, as the ancient Greeks believed that snakes were creatures with strange, magical powers. As soon as he brought his staff down upon the female of the pair, Teiresias found himself transformed into a woman.
He spent a few years that way, until one day when he was out for a stroll, and he came upon the same snakes again. This time, he struck out at the male (apparently he still hadn’t gotten over his issues with snakes having sex) and promptly found himself changed back into a man.
Not long after, Zeus and his wife, Hera, were debating whether men or women enjoy sex more. Zeus felt sex was better for women, while Hera believed men got more out of it. They called on Teiresias, since he was the only person who could answer the question from firsthand knowledge. Teiresias responded that women experienced 10 times more pleasure than men, a reply that so infuriated Hera that she blinded him on the spot.
Like Teiresias, Harris has looked at gender from both sides. And like Teiresias, he has come away from the experience with attitudes that are bound to cause controversy.
“Women today are getting greedy,” Harris says. “They bitch and moan about maternity leave, and then they bitch and moan if somebody doesn’t open the doors for them.”
Harris is quick to admit that some of his anger with women is based on envy. “Look, I never asked to be a man, and I do miss the accouterments of womanhood. . . . But these girls today, sometimes I feel like telling them to just shut up and realize how good they’ve got it.”
In his book, Harris describes himself as bisexual, but today, he seems to have little sexual interest in women. “Women are decorative, like pretty statues. I like to look at them, but psychologically, mentally, there’s nothing there I’m attracted to.”
Harris lives as a man and has relationships with men, but he takes pains to point out that he doesn’t consider himself gay.
“I do not understand the gay lifestyle,” Harris says. “Most of it seems so warped and distasteful. Those terrible parades and the bathhouses and things like that . . . These gays are beset by vice addictions and social disease, and that all has nothing to do with me. I’m much more mainstream. Besides, I’m still involved with the same gender I’ve always been involved with, so how could I be gay?”
After years alone, Harris is now seeking someone to share his life with. In recent months, he has placed some personal ads, but so far, the response has been disappointing. “These men see an ad for a hermaphrodite, and they expect some beautiful woman with a penis. They see me, and I’m like a little boy with the wrong equipment. I spoil their fantasy.”
Harris’ androgynous build sometimes causes him problems in public, too. Although he had hoped that the days of being approached by strangers and asked if he was in drag would have ended when he began living as a man, this has not been the case.
“I still get that stuff sometimes, and people can be really rude about it. A few weeks ago, I was at an antiques show, and a black man came up and asked if I was a man or a woman. I was furious. I mean, can you imagine the nerve?”
I ask Harris what he told the man.
“I called him a coon, and I turned and walked away.”
THE FACES BEHIND THE FACES
As all of this may indicate, Harris is a moody and sometimes difficult personality. I learned how difficult when I took a few days to respond to one of his e-mails and Harris furiously called the Weekly’s editor, insisting that I was a charlatan who’d run off with the manuscript of I, The Hermaphrodite, that I was going to take it to a publisher and use it to make my fortune. Needless to say, I returned the book in a hurry.
Despite his flaws, I can’t help but admire Lynn Harris. He has lived too many hard lifetimes in his 49 years, and yet, of the countless faces he has worn, the two that come through most clearly today are the lost, approval-seeking teenager and the gentle, middle-aged dandy. Through all the anger and the hurt, both of these faces keep peeking through, and when they do, they are beautiful.
"Terra Cotta Warriors: Guardians of China's First Emperor" at the Bowers Museum
Originally printed in OC Weekly, 2008.
When you're first confronted by Qin Shi Huang's famed, life-sized, terra-cotta soldiers, your Hollywood-damaged brain is tempted to see them as re-creations, as fiberglass props. They're like something from one of the Indiana Jones movies, sculptures guarding the ancient treasure, seemingly inanimate until our hero steps on the wrong floor panel, and then all of the figures suddenly creak to life, centuries of dust and dead bugs falling away as they reach for their stone swords.
They can't possibly be real, these warriors built to defend the glory of a man who has not breathed since before the time of Christ. And yet they are real, and they are here, next door to the Kidseum. Legendary fighting men who have been locked away for dozens of lifetimes while the world waged endless wars around them, they smell of dust, of history, of grandma's attic.
A whole platoon of these crumbling commandos, 14 men strong, has trooped into the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art for the "Terra Cotta Warriors: Guardians of China's First Emperor" exhibition, bringing with them a full-sized horse and other animals—more than 100 objects, the largest-ever stateside show of artifacts from the First Emperor's tomb. Each figure is unique, constructed from modular elements like some kind of colossal, mix-and-match Lego kit. The figures are ranked, with the generals being the largest. They stand in rows or crouch low, ready for anything you've got to offer.
Once upon a millennium, they were all painted in lifelike colors. Today, those colors are long gone, and all that remains is the fiddly detail of their original sculpting: the rivets of their armor, the little ties in their braided hair (don't call 'em bows), the rusted remnants of chain mail, the individual hairs of their mustaches. And those eerie, serene little smiles. The smiles actually make the warriors far more creepy than they would be if they were snarling or (no pun intended) stone-faced. They relish your intrusion. They lurk in the semi-darkness, lit by spotlights that cast sinister shadows across their faces, making them look like they're quietly calculating your every weakness.
Qin Shi Huang became a king at 13 and declared himself emperor at 38, uniting China and, in the process, systematically killing anybody who got on his nerves. But despite all his power, there was one foe that Qin Shi Huang could never defeat: the Grim Reaper. He decided that dying would serve as the gateway to a new world for him to conquer, and he put thousands of men to work building an entire tomb kingdom with towering palaces, offices for important post-life business and, by some accounts, whole rivers of mercury. He was buried with more than 8,000 stone figures: horses, chariot riders and his terra-cotta terrors—many of them facing east, as though to hold back any invaders from the warring states he had conquered in life. He also had his concubines and some unlucky tomb builders buried alive with him, so he wouldn't have to worry about them giving away the secrets of his treasures. Even in death, Qin Shi Huang remained an ostentatious, world-class jerk.
Qin Shi Huang wished to build an empire that would stand for all eternity. Now his city of the dead has been plundered, his warriors dispersed, his dreams of universal conquest a footnote in the history books. But stand face-to-face with one of his earthenware soldiers, look him right in his tranquil, unblinking eye, and you will feel a little shiver of the fright the First Emperor was so desperate for you to feel.
When you're first confronted by Qin Shi Huang's famed, life-sized, terra-cotta soldiers, your Hollywood-damaged brain is tempted to see them as re-creations, as fiberglass props. They're like something from one of the Indiana Jones movies, sculptures guarding the ancient treasure, seemingly inanimate until our hero steps on the wrong floor panel, and then all of the figures suddenly creak to life, centuries of dust and dead bugs falling away as they reach for their stone swords.
They can't possibly be real, these warriors built to defend the glory of a man who has not breathed since before the time of Christ. And yet they are real, and they are here, next door to the Kidseum. Legendary fighting men who have been locked away for dozens of lifetimes while the world waged endless wars around them, they smell of dust, of history, of grandma's attic.
A whole platoon of these crumbling commandos, 14 men strong, has trooped into the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art for the "Terra Cotta Warriors: Guardians of China's First Emperor" exhibition, bringing with them a full-sized horse and other animals—more than 100 objects, the largest-ever stateside show of artifacts from the First Emperor's tomb. Each figure is unique, constructed from modular elements like some kind of colossal, mix-and-match Lego kit. The figures are ranked, with the generals being the largest. They stand in rows or crouch low, ready for anything you've got to offer.
Once upon a millennium, they were all painted in lifelike colors. Today, those colors are long gone, and all that remains is the fiddly detail of their original sculpting: the rivets of their armor, the little ties in their braided hair (don't call 'em bows), the rusted remnants of chain mail, the individual hairs of their mustaches. And those eerie, serene little smiles. The smiles actually make the warriors far more creepy than they would be if they were snarling or (no pun intended) stone-faced. They relish your intrusion. They lurk in the semi-darkness, lit by spotlights that cast sinister shadows across their faces, making them look like they're quietly calculating your every weakness.
Qin Shi Huang became a king at 13 and declared himself emperor at 38, uniting China and, in the process, systematically killing anybody who got on his nerves. But despite all his power, there was one foe that Qin Shi Huang could never defeat: the Grim Reaper. He decided that dying would serve as the gateway to a new world for him to conquer, and he put thousands of men to work building an entire tomb kingdom with towering palaces, offices for important post-life business and, by some accounts, whole rivers of mercury. He was buried with more than 8,000 stone figures: horses, chariot riders and his terra-cotta terrors—many of them facing east, as though to hold back any invaders from the warring states he had conquered in life. He also had his concubines and some unlucky tomb builders buried alive with him, so he wouldn't have to worry about them giving away the secrets of his treasures. Even in death, Qin Shi Huang remained an ostentatious, world-class jerk.
Qin Shi Huang wished to build an empire that would stand for all eternity. Now his city of the dead has been plundered, his warriors dispersed, his dreams of universal conquest a footnote in the history books. But stand face-to-face with one of his earthenware soldiers, look him right in his tranquil, unblinking eye, and you will feel a little shiver of the fright the First Emperor was so desperate for you to feel.
Discovering the Jolly Nightmare: The Lost World of Charles Altamont Doyle
Originally printed in LA Weekly.
When I was a kid in the late ’70s, Linnea, a dear friend of the family, loaned me a peculiar book entitled The Doyle Diary. It reprinted the 1889 sketchbook-journal that Charles Altamont Doyle (father of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes) kept during his lengthy stay in a Scottish lunatic asylum. If Linnea ever hopes to get the book back, she’ll have to kill me first.
Individual pages of The Doyle Diary can be dazzling, but you have to spend some time with the book to realize what a masterpiece it truly is. The Doyle Diary grants you free access inside Charles Doyle’s busy brain. There are cheeky fairy women and giant polecats, humorously unflattering self-portraits, meticulous studies of the local flora and fauna, political rants and melancholy familial reminiscences, affectionate doodles of the asylum’s cleaning staff and lots of agonizing puns. Overall, one gets the impression of a gentle, highly imaginative Victorian gentleman who somehow ended up in a madhouse but was too polite to inconvenience anybody by making a big fuss about it.
While Doyle’s flights of fancy are entrancing in their own right, one of my favorite drawings in the book features a seemingly unremarkable scene the artist witnessed between two crows. One crow stands with a worm in its mouth, offering it to the other. The caption: “I have just seen this out of the window. Could unselfishness go further?”
In Doyle’s eyes, a simple transaction between two cawing, homely scavengers has been transformed into a touchingly noble act. How could anyone not love this man?
Charles Doyle was born into a family of successful artists. His father, John Doyle, was an acclaimed caricaturist of the Regency period, while his brothers all went on to fame, and his older brother, Richard “Dickie” Doyle, was one of the better-known illustrators of the Victorian age. But while Charles Altamont Doyle showed early promise as an artist, at 17 he was sent off to Edinburgh for a job as a surveyor in the Scottish Office of Works. It was mostly a routine clerk’s position, although he did some impressive architectural design, including a mighty fountain in the courtyard of Holyrood Palace, the queen’s Scottish residence.
At 22, he wed his landlady’s daughter; they had 10 kids, seven of whom lived. For years Doyle struggled to make it as an artist (he illustrated 17 published books we know of) while continuing at his day job, but the pressures of supporting a large family gradually wore him down, and he took to the bottle. Another man might have been proud to have designed Scottish monuments while illustrating books in his spare time, but Doyle knew that by the lofty standards set by his brothers, he was just an anonymous civil servant and Sunday painter with a house full of kids he could scarcely afford to feed.
In 1876, after decades of toiling without promotion for the Office of Works, Doyle was dismissed and put on a pension. Later that year he was sent to Fordoun House, a nursing home for alcoholics. His stay at Fordoun lasted years, and it was apparently during this time that he developed epilepsy, a condition poorly understood then. Perhaps addled by his illness or perhaps desperate after years of confinement, Doyle made a violent attempt to escape Fordoun in 1885. He failed, and was sent to the Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum, where he spent the next seven years and illustrated The Doyle Diary. Following a final relocation, Doyle died a lonesome death at the Crighton Royal Institution in 1893. He had spent 17 years in confinement. By any measure, Doyle lived a tragic life, but nobody who has experienced the wonders of The Doyle Diary would say it was a wasted one.
Unfortunately, Doyle’s rotten luck hasn’t improved much in the decades since his death. While his work inspired a passionate cult following and he’s been cited as a kindred spirit by such modern cartooning geniuses as Dame Darcy (Fantagraphics Books’ Meat Cake) and LA Weekly’s own Tony Millionaire, Doyle’s not nearly as well-known as he deserves to be. The Doyle Diary is long out of print (private dealers often sell used copies on Amazon for under 10 bucks) and his surviving art is scattered in collections around the world and rarely seen by the public.
Although I’ve probably read The Doyle Diary a hundred times, it wasn’t until a few months ago that I discovered a note at the book’s end stating that one of the largest American collections of Doyle’s work was at the Huntington Library in San Marino. I called the Huntington and was told that while they did indeed possess a collection of Doyle’s work, it was in fragile condition and only scholars were permitted to view it. They bent the rules and agreed to let me into their archives so I could write this article, although frankly they didn’t sound too thrilled about it. Had they denied me access, I think I would have executed a daring midnight raid, breaking into the Huntington under cover of darkness to explore the archives with a flashlight. Fellow Doyle fans would understand.
My excitement was tinged with melancholy as I sat in the Huntington’s Scott Curatorial Office’s Art Division Print and Drawing Study Room and perused a crumbling album of Charles Doyle’s drawings — an album that once belonged to Doyle’s son, Sir Arthur himself. There was easily enough material here for a whole new book, but this was literally a once-in-a-lifetime thrill; I had exactly three hours to take it all in, and then I’d probably never see this work again.
While his usual playfulness was on ample display, overall the Huntington collection showed a darker side of Doyle than I was used to. There was a sometimes unsettling battle-of-the-sexes theme on display, although you couldn’t always tell which side Doyle was on. One drawing depicting a woman riding sidesaddle on a man’s back was captioned, “To be useful as well as ornamental”; in another, the smartly dressed “Mister Present Times” offered a girl for sale: “Who wants a Bride — now is your chance — going — cheap — but nice!” Elsewhere, Cupid held a hoop through which a man and woman jumped onto the backs of running horses in the eternal circus of love. There were many hapless males trying to catch the attention of unimpressed dames, a dynamic that repeated across the human, animal and fairy kingdoms. Given how so much of Doyle’s life played out in confinement, I suppose a little sexual frustration is understandable.
One simple drawing in the Huntington archives stopped me cold: Beneath a full moon, a fat, leering drunk tipped his glass to the viewer as he tottered atop a horse with a frenzied, mirthless grin. The caption was, “Hurrah! For the jolly night mare!” It was a phrase that aptly described Doyle’s work, perhaps his entire life: the jolly nightmare.
While the public isn’t permitted to see Doyle’s work at the Huntington, representatives from both the library and Doyle’s family have told me that they’d be amenable if a publisher approached them about printing Doyle’s work, although so far there haven’t been any offers. Until that blessed day comes, I plead with you to do whatever you must to experience Doyle’s jolly nightmare for yourself, whether that means scouring Amazon for a used copy of The Doyle Diary or just stealing one from a dear friend of the family. Doyle’s work can be achingly lovely, achingly funny or achingly sad, and sometimes it is all of these things at once.
The art of Charles Altamont Doyle hurts, but it’s a hurt you’ll never get enough of.
When I was a kid in the late ’70s, Linnea, a dear friend of the family, loaned me a peculiar book entitled The Doyle Diary. It reprinted the 1889 sketchbook-journal that Charles Altamont Doyle (father of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes) kept during his lengthy stay in a Scottish lunatic asylum. If Linnea ever hopes to get the book back, she’ll have to kill me first.
Individual pages of The Doyle Diary can be dazzling, but you have to spend some time with the book to realize what a masterpiece it truly is. The Doyle Diary grants you free access inside Charles Doyle’s busy brain. There are cheeky fairy women and giant polecats, humorously unflattering self-portraits, meticulous studies of the local flora and fauna, political rants and melancholy familial reminiscences, affectionate doodles of the asylum’s cleaning staff and lots of agonizing puns. Overall, one gets the impression of a gentle, highly imaginative Victorian gentleman who somehow ended up in a madhouse but was too polite to inconvenience anybody by making a big fuss about it.
While Doyle’s flights of fancy are entrancing in their own right, one of my favorite drawings in the book features a seemingly unremarkable scene the artist witnessed between two crows. One crow stands with a worm in its mouth, offering it to the other. The caption: “I have just seen this out of the window. Could unselfishness go further?”
In Doyle’s eyes, a simple transaction between two cawing, homely scavengers has been transformed into a touchingly noble act. How could anyone not love this man?
Charles Doyle was born into a family of successful artists. His father, John Doyle, was an acclaimed caricaturist of the Regency period, while his brothers all went on to fame, and his older brother, Richard “Dickie” Doyle, was one of the better-known illustrators of the Victorian age. But while Charles Altamont Doyle showed early promise as an artist, at 17 he was sent off to Edinburgh for a job as a surveyor in the Scottish Office of Works. It was mostly a routine clerk’s position, although he did some impressive architectural design, including a mighty fountain in the courtyard of Holyrood Palace, the queen’s Scottish residence.
At 22, he wed his landlady’s daughter; they had 10 kids, seven of whom lived. For years Doyle struggled to make it as an artist (he illustrated 17 published books we know of) while continuing at his day job, but the pressures of supporting a large family gradually wore him down, and he took to the bottle. Another man might have been proud to have designed Scottish monuments while illustrating books in his spare time, but Doyle knew that by the lofty standards set by his brothers, he was just an anonymous civil servant and Sunday painter with a house full of kids he could scarcely afford to feed.
In 1876, after decades of toiling without promotion for the Office of Works, Doyle was dismissed and put on a pension. Later that year he was sent to Fordoun House, a nursing home for alcoholics. His stay at Fordoun lasted years, and it was apparently during this time that he developed epilepsy, a condition poorly understood then. Perhaps addled by his illness or perhaps desperate after years of confinement, Doyle made a violent attempt to escape Fordoun in 1885. He failed, and was sent to the Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum, where he spent the next seven years and illustrated The Doyle Diary. Following a final relocation, Doyle died a lonesome death at the Crighton Royal Institution in 1893. He had spent 17 years in confinement. By any measure, Doyle lived a tragic life, but nobody who has experienced the wonders of The Doyle Diary would say it was a wasted one.
Unfortunately, Doyle’s rotten luck hasn’t improved much in the decades since his death. While his work inspired a passionate cult following and he’s been cited as a kindred spirit by such modern cartooning geniuses as Dame Darcy (Fantagraphics Books’ Meat Cake) and LA Weekly’s own Tony Millionaire, Doyle’s not nearly as well-known as he deserves to be. The Doyle Diary is long out of print (private dealers often sell used copies on Amazon for under 10 bucks) and his surviving art is scattered in collections around the world and rarely seen by the public.
Although I’ve probably read The Doyle Diary a hundred times, it wasn’t until a few months ago that I discovered a note at the book’s end stating that one of the largest American collections of Doyle’s work was at the Huntington Library in San Marino. I called the Huntington and was told that while they did indeed possess a collection of Doyle’s work, it was in fragile condition and only scholars were permitted to view it. They bent the rules and agreed to let me into their archives so I could write this article, although frankly they didn’t sound too thrilled about it. Had they denied me access, I think I would have executed a daring midnight raid, breaking into the Huntington under cover of darkness to explore the archives with a flashlight. Fellow Doyle fans would understand.
My excitement was tinged with melancholy as I sat in the Huntington’s Scott Curatorial Office’s Art Division Print and Drawing Study Room and perused a crumbling album of Charles Doyle’s drawings — an album that once belonged to Doyle’s son, Sir Arthur himself. There was easily enough material here for a whole new book, but this was literally a once-in-a-lifetime thrill; I had exactly three hours to take it all in, and then I’d probably never see this work again.
While his usual playfulness was on ample display, overall the Huntington collection showed a darker side of Doyle than I was used to. There was a sometimes unsettling battle-of-the-sexes theme on display, although you couldn’t always tell which side Doyle was on. One drawing depicting a woman riding sidesaddle on a man’s back was captioned, “To be useful as well as ornamental”; in another, the smartly dressed “Mister Present Times” offered a girl for sale: “Who wants a Bride — now is your chance — going — cheap — but nice!” Elsewhere, Cupid held a hoop through which a man and woman jumped onto the backs of running horses in the eternal circus of love. There were many hapless males trying to catch the attention of unimpressed dames, a dynamic that repeated across the human, animal and fairy kingdoms. Given how so much of Doyle’s life played out in confinement, I suppose a little sexual frustration is understandable.
One simple drawing in the Huntington archives stopped me cold: Beneath a full moon, a fat, leering drunk tipped his glass to the viewer as he tottered atop a horse with a frenzied, mirthless grin. The caption was, “Hurrah! For the jolly night mare!” It was a phrase that aptly described Doyle’s work, perhaps his entire life: the jolly nightmare.
While the public isn’t permitted to see Doyle’s work at the Huntington, representatives from both the library and Doyle’s family have told me that they’d be amenable if a publisher approached them about printing Doyle’s work, although so far there haven’t been any offers. Until that blessed day comes, I plead with you to do whatever you must to experience Doyle’s jolly nightmare for yourself, whether that means scouring Amazon for a used copy of The Doyle Diary or just stealing one from a dear friend of the family. Doyle’s work can be achingly lovely, achingly funny or achingly sad, and sometimes it is all of these things at once.
The art of Charles Altamont Doyle hurts, but it’s a hurt you’ll never get enough of.
Hooray for Hellmouths
Originally printed in LA Weekly.
In the final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, several characters, suffering from insomnia as they prepare for an apocalyptic battle, huddle around a table late one night to blow off steam with a Dungeons and Dragons–style role-playing game. Giles, the group’s 40-something father figure, can’t help but feel ambivalent: “I used to be a respected Watcher,” he grumbles, referring to his glory days as mentor to the series’ titular super-heroine. “Now I’m a wounded dwarf with the mystical strength of a doily.”
I understand how he felt. While I dabbled with D&D as a kid, I long ago put away such childish things and evolved into a grown-up with an actual life. Or so I thought until a few months back, when I discovered the Sunnydale Sock Puppet Theater (www.hellmouth.us), an online community of people who keep daily journals as characters from Buffy, Buffy’s spinoff series Angel and (to a lesser extent) the unrelated Aaron Spelling series Charmed. There are journals for every Buffy character ever, the heroes and villains, the living, dead and undead. There are even journals for inanimate objects, so you can check in with Buffy’s surprisingly talkative stuffed pig or hear how Spike’s jacket resents being stashed in a closet.
Of course, my first instinct was to run screaming. But as Buffy’s lackluster concluding TV season dragged on, I found myself increasingly drawn to the Socks, who sometimes sounded more like the Buffy characters I’d grown to love than their TV equivalents did. The Socks devised interesting storylines that took place between each week’s TV episodes, and during rerun weeks they cut loose and sent their characters on all-new adventures. When Buffy ended as a series, it stung a lot less than it could have because I knew I could go online the next morning and read what Buffy’s gang was planning for the rest of the week. (As it turned out, they celebrated their victory over the First Evil with a trip to Disneyland.) The people behind the Socks were clearly having a ball, and despite my being a grown-up with an actual life, I wanted in.
Getting in proved surprisingly difficult, as almost every Buffy character was already taken, but eventually I was allowed to take on Buffy’s rarely seen deadbeat dad, Hank Summers. It was a surreal experience, stepping into the mind of an embittered 50-year-old divorcé; it gave me disturbing insight into the reality of having pissed-off teenagers and reaffirmed my intention to never, ever breed. In Sockdom it’s not unusual for one person to play several characters (Buffy herself is handled by the same Ohio girl who writes Spike), but just fitting Hank in my head was more than enough for me.
Although a largely female, Caucasian phenomenon, the Socks range from late teens to their 40s, with Christians, Wiccans and atheists somehow all getting along just fine. There is some occasional infighting - and recently a few disruptive Socks were exiled to their own group, the Sunnydale Mittens - but overall the Socks are sweet, helpful people who don’t take their peculiar hobby too seriously. What strife there is comes mostly from without, from people who just don’t get it. It’s all too common for Socks to get hassled by lunatic fans who think Buffy’s a real person, and one of the Charmed girls was approached online by a kid seeking protection from the demons he sincerely believed were after him. There are rabid Spike fangirls who insist Spike’s diary is being written by James Marsters, who plays him on TV, no matter how much they are told otherwise. Even Hank’s had his kooks, one of whom furiously accused me of conning her when she finally figured out that Hank’s diary — about a guy with a vampire-slaying daughter named Buffy — was actually based on a TV show. If I’ve ever felt crazy for Socking, a few of my readers have put my craziness comfortably into perspective.
Some might say the Socks simply have too much time on their hands, but tell that to Tracy, a Wisconsinite who handles two Buffy characters while going to school full-time (premed) and working part-time. Socking is a waste of time, but no more so than sports or collecting stamps or anything else people do to amuse themselves on this fast march to the grave. Strong friendships form as Socks meet online to hatch storylines, gossip or offer cheer on dark days, coming together to blow off steam as we prepare for our own battles in the real world.
Addendum, 2010: Sadly, the Sunnydale Socks fell apart not long after this article was published, amidst much internal strife. It just proves something R. Crumb once said: “The next step after shared ideals is warring factions.”
In the final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, several characters, suffering from insomnia as they prepare for an apocalyptic battle, huddle around a table late one night to blow off steam with a Dungeons and Dragons–style role-playing game. Giles, the group’s 40-something father figure, can’t help but feel ambivalent: “I used to be a respected Watcher,” he grumbles, referring to his glory days as mentor to the series’ titular super-heroine. “Now I’m a wounded dwarf with the mystical strength of a doily.”
I understand how he felt. While I dabbled with D&D as a kid, I long ago put away such childish things and evolved into a grown-up with an actual life. Or so I thought until a few months back, when I discovered the Sunnydale Sock Puppet Theater (www.hellmouth.us), an online community of people who keep daily journals as characters from Buffy, Buffy’s spinoff series Angel and (to a lesser extent) the unrelated Aaron Spelling series Charmed. There are journals for every Buffy character ever, the heroes and villains, the living, dead and undead. There are even journals for inanimate objects, so you can check in with Buffy’s surprisingly talkative stuffed pig or hear how Spike’s jacket resents being stashed in a closet.
Of course, my first instinct was to run screaming. But as Buffy’s lackluster concluding TV season dragged on, I found myself increasingly drawn to the Socks, who sometimes sounded more like the Buffy characters I’d grown to love than their TV equivalents did. The Socks devised interesting storylines that took place between each week’s TV episodes, and during rerun weeks they cut loose and sent their characters on all-new adventures. When Buffy ended as a series, it stung a lot less than it could have because I knew I could go online the next morning and read what Buffy’s gang was planning for the rest of the week. (As it turned out, they celebrated their victory over the First Evil with a trip to Disneyland.) The people behind the Socks were clearly having a ball, and despite my being a grown-up with an actual life, I wanted in.
Getting in proved surprisingly difficult, as almost every Buffy character was already taken, but eventually I was allowed to take on Buffy’s rarely seen deadbeat dad, Hank Summers. It was a surreal experience, stepping into the mind of an embittered 50-year-old divorcé; it gave me disturbing insight into the reality of having pissed-off teenagers and reaffirmed my intention to never, ever breed. In Sockdom it’s not unusual for one person to play several characters (Buffy herself is handled by the same Ohio girl who writes Spike), but just fitting Hank in my head was more than enough for me.
Although a largely female, Caucasian phenomenon, the Socks range from late teens to their 40s, with Christians, Wiccans and atheists somehow all getting along just fine. There is some occasional infighting - and recently a few disruptive Socks were exiled to their own group, the Sunnydale Mittens - but overall the Socks are sweet, helpful people who don’t take their peculiar hobby too seriously. What strife there is comes mostly from without, from people who just don’t get it. It’s all too common for Socks to get hassled by lunatic fans who think Buffy’s a real person, and one of the Charmed girls was approached online by a kid seeking protection from the demons he sincerely believed were after him. There are rabid Spike fangirls who insist Spike’s diary is being written by James Marsters, who plays him on TV, no matter how much they are told otherwise. Even Hank’s had his kooks, one of whom furiously accused me of conning her when she finally figured out that Hank’s diary — about a guy with a vampire-slaying daughter named Buffy — was actually based on a TV show. If I’ve ever felt crazy for Socking, a few of my readers have put my craziness comfortably into perspective.
Some might say the Socks simply have too much time on their hands, but tell that to Tracy, a Wisconsinite who handles two Buffy characters while going to school full-time (premed) and working part-time. Socking is a waste of time, but no more so than sports or collecting stamps or anything else people do to amuse themselves on this fast march to the grave. Strong friendships form as Socks meet online to hatch storylines, gossip or offer cheer on dark days, coming together to blow off steam as we prepare for our own battles in the real world.
Addendum, 2010: Sadly, the Sunnydale Socks fell apart not long after this article was published, amidst much internal strife. It just proves something R. Crumb once said: “The next step after shared ideals is warring factions.”