On the surface Alex Millete is a very happy and independent individual. When I first met him, I got the sense he was the kind of person who is always in a good mood and tries to make the best of every situation. He comes across as a very positive kind of guy. His laugh is contagious and five minutes into our first interview, I felt like I was talking to an old friend.
Before I had even met Alex he offered to make me cookies. He used at least one smiley in almost every text he sent me, the kind with the noses that look like this, :-] and a lot of these, XD. He even invited me over to his apartment for dinner suggesting, “We could pop a pizza in the oven.”
The more I talked with him, the more I realized that he is unlike anyone I had ever encountered before in my life. The stories he told me made me feel like I was listening to the plot of a dramatic made-for-TV movie on the Hallmark channel, full of scandal, heartbreak, and surprise. The kind of movie my mom loves to watch but I can’t stand because they just end up being really depressing.
I got the sense that Alex really enjoys telling stories. I can tell he likes to entertain people because whenever I would laugh or gasp or wince, his facial expression would reveal a hint of satisfaction.
Alex talked about himself with ease but is unwilling to let me speak with his friends and family about his life.
After conversing through email, phone, text, and in person for about two weeks, Alex stopped responding.
The door to apartment 1161B had to be pulled open with a lot of force. The carpeted floor prevented it from working properly. The apartment itself was small and dark. The hallway that led into the living room had clothes and boxes cluttering the already narrow path. All the lights were off except the one that lit up a tiny kitchen to the left of the long narrow hallway, clearly in mid-use. A bowl of what looked like cookie dough sat on the table along with open notebooks and binders. Dirty pots and pans covered the counter. The sink was filled with unwashed bowls and spoons. There were multiple cabinets open filled with mismatched tableware put away with no obvious sense of organization. A sweet and somewhat comforting smell filled the air. The living room was anything but livable. Multiple cardboard moving boxes had been stacked up against the wall, some bent and broken, others open with the arms of unfolded sweaters hanging out the sides. On top of a small coffee table there were three plastic storage containers filled with holiday decorations.
Alex flipped a switch and the standing lamp that tilted ever so slightly to the left turned on giving the sad looking room a little more life.
“We’ve been here about 3 months now.” He chuckled as he noticed my puzzled facial expressions. “My roommate is pretty messy.”
Alex stands 6 feet tall. He has dark brown hair that falls just above his shoulders but is typically tied back into a ponytail. He says he used to buzz his hair, and he assured me that he is only growing it out for his best friend’s wedding so she can, “make something pretty out of it.” Alex has strikingly bright blue eyes and freckles scattered across his friendly face. The first time I met him he wore loose fitting jeans and a plain faded blue t-shirt with bare feet. His appearance did not seem to be a priority, there were stains on his jeans and the t-shirt he wore was worn out with some holes on the sleeves.
Alex rarely looked me directly in the eye when we talked. Instead he fidgeted with his hands or looked down at his feet. On the rare occasion that he made eye contact with me, he gave a nervous grin and quickly looked back down. I could tell he felt uncomfortable with me staring at him as he spoke, he would sometimes change the subject if he caught me looking.
Alex was born and spent most of his life in Culver City, California making the slight twang in his voice very strange. When I asked where he got the, “ya’ll” from, he told me his family spent two years in Alabama when he was younger. His parents are divorced but he didn’t really seem to have anything to say about why. He is the oldest of six children from two separate families. His mother re-married and had two more kids after Alex. His father got remarried and had three. When I asked about his siblings Alex’s face lit up and he clenched his fists, squeezed his eyes shut and said with a smile, “my brother’s going to be gay! I love it….I’m not the only queer one in the family and it makes me so happy!” Alex figures this because for his brother’s birthday this past year he got his ears pierced. He is only ten years old.
His mother, a self proclaimed, “cubicle hippie” sells insurance and his father does something, “unexplainable with charts and marketing.”
He lived with his mom growing up and had anything but a normal childhood. She brought him up in almost every religion you could think of from Christianity, Judaism, to Hare Krishna. “My mom, when I was growing up… we went through pretty much every single religion. We actually lived with the Hare Krishna’s for about a month…you know the people who stand on the corner who have everything but the little ponytail on the top of their head and they go, ‘Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna’...we lived at their compound….yeah…” My shocked face must have amused Alex because he smiled and nodded his head letting the information sink in a little.
“She finally found this church up on top of one of the hills called Lakeshrine which is a temple that is Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism mixed…and she stuck with that since I was about nine or ten.”
I wanted to know if all these different religious traditions had any effect on him and if so, how? He told me after pondering my question over, “…I was too young to understand it and it was never really a thing that I was into. I guess the mass amounts of religions I’ve gone through and seen and learned about just have completely numbed me to most religion… which is why I just enjoy Wicca because its just like, oh hug a tree.”
Alex is a practicing Wiccan who will occasionally conjure up a spell in his small kitchen with the help of a large spell book that he keeps under his bed. That is, whenever he can get his hands on some of the hard to find ingredients necessary to perform such spells.
“It’s basically just nature based religion. I guess you could compare it to hippies, a lot of tree huggin,” he told me.
When I asked him to tell me a little about what Wiccans believe in, he was at a loss for words so he went and rummaged through his room to find the “Book of Shadows.” As we talked more, he scanned the pages looking for an answer to my question.
“I spend a lot of time meditating in my room.”
About what, I was never told.
I asked him how he came to be a “practicing witch.”
He paused for a moment, looking down at his fidgeting hands and then answered, “8th grade, my teacher for English, we had to do something called an isearch, which is… you pick something to research…it’s this huge thing you gotta do. So I was gonna do it on cats, which is just the broadest subject I could possibly pick. And then randomly, I think I was walking to the bookstore and I saw this book, and I was like alright, this is cool... it’s magic! I like magic!”
Alex blames his mom for the way his life has played out. When I asked him if I could speak with her, he responded: “Um that would be a really bad idea considering I don’t talk to her anymore because she is rather abusive.”
“I went to kind of like an alternative high school it was ridiculous. My mom is completely insane. Just absolutely psycho, so when I hit puberty and wouldn’t do what she told me anymore she put me in a group home that had a high school attached. So I went there for 3 years.”
The group home he talked about is called, Vista del Mar. He didn’t see much of his family while he was there because the meds they put him on made him sleep 16 hours a day making it impossible for him to follow the program they require students follow if you want to have visitors.
“I was for being a teenager while the rest of them were there for being drug dealers, prostitutes and gang bangers.”
After graduating from Vista, Alex was on his own. The next adventure in the ever so twisted story of my dear friend Alex is the time he tried to enlist in the United States Army.
Alex was intent on enlisting in the army at age 19 so he travelled from Los Angeles to Fort Jackson in South Carolina. He said, “I went into the army to escape a really bad living situation I was in. That was the main reason for joining. I wanted to get out of LA and start a new life for myself. The army really sucked, I don’t even know…Their goal is to mentally break you down and forge you into a new person worthy of following orders and never questioning anything. And for a liberal democrat with strong feminist leaning that was a really difficult thing for me so you know, it really sucked. When I got to the final physical fitness test, I couldn’t pass pushups. They were going to send me to fat boot camp, and I said no.”
After his failed attempt at joining the army, Alex worked a couple jobs and tried going to college locally in LA. He finally made the decision to follow two of his old high school teachers from Vista who were married, all the way out to South Bend Indiana after their teaching licenses had expired and were not renewed.
He was a student at IUSB for a couple semesters studying graphic design but had to withdraw from school due to lack of funds.
Alex works three jobs now and recently moved in with the same high school history teacher he moved out to South Bend with, after she got divorced and needed someone to help with the rent.
0.3 percent of the U.S. population openly identifies as transgender.
That’s about 951,789 people.
Alex Millete is one of those people.
According to a recent survey, 30% of Americans can’t define what it means to be transgender. It’s a confusing concept, even to Alex.
As we talked Alex described a life that constantly involves crossing the blurred lines of gender.
He told me, “Maybe I’m just gender queer, I’m not male, I’m not female I’m just an Alex.”
It’s not easy being Alex, but he still finds time to be a regular twenty-four year old.
Like any other college student, Alex dates. He’s had girlfriends and boyfriends.
He told me, “I don’t care what’s under a person’s clothes. I’m attracted to a person’s intelligence more than anything. I mean if you’re smart, you don’t use your and you’re wrong in a sentence, I’m okay.”
When Alex first meets someone he just presents as female to keep it simple. This means he waits to tell people that he sees himself as male.
When he feels that he can trust a person he simply says, “this is the real me and if ya can’t deal with that then, ‘bye!’”
He’s dated mostly straight men, but the women he has been involved with have been bi-sexual.
I tried so hard to find a trans student at Notre Dame to write a profile on. I spoke with numerous professors and students, including the faculty advisor the newly founded PRISM club for LGBT students on at Notre Dame and many members of the club itself. I ended up having to let go of the idea and move on after weeks of unanswered inquiries. A professor of gender studies, Abby Palko, helped me get in contact with Alex through a friend of hers at IUSB. The friend, who remains nameless to me, posted a Facebook status looking for any college trans students in the South Bend area if they would be willing to help out with my project.
That is how I found Alex, or I should say, how Alex found me.
From the beginning he was very excited and willing to help me in any way possible. He told me later why he initially responded to the Facebook saying, “the fact that most people don’t know or don’t understand transgender people or what transgender truly means and I’m always happy to inform people and get that information out there and promote the understanding and well being of the transgender community.”
Alex told me a sad story about his transgender friend, Angel who was murdered as a result of this ignorance.
“My friend back in LA, a trans girl, and she had just started estrogen, she was startin to come out and wear clothes… and she was raped with a sword…she uh, did not survive that one…it was a really horrible thing for all of us and we were just like, oh my god, she just came out wearing a skirt, she was her, and then…she’s gone. So if shit like that could stop happenin’, that’d be great.” Alex let out an inappropriate chuckle.
He told me the incident occurred in West Hollywood California in November of 2009. Apparently three drunk male tourists came across, what looked to them like a female prostitute on the street. They jumped her and were not happy when they found out she was, in Alex’s words, “a dude in a dress.”
Angel was walking home from a support group for victims of HIV AIDS.
Alex doesn’t speak in complete thoughts. His sentences rarely get finished before he moves on to the next part of his story. Sometimes I found it hard to keep up.
This is just how Alex’s brain works. His thoughts flow with little organization out of his mouth. Our conversations have never had much structure, and his stories have never followed a linear pattern.
There are so many different pieces to the complex puzzle called Alex.
In his free time he writes fantasy novels. He told me he would send me a chapter to read, however I have yet to receive any of his writing. When he was younger, he was a competitive synchronized swimmer ranked 12th in the country and 20th in the world for her age group. He has his own business baking cookies for neighbors. He does this not only because he loves to bake, but also because he needs the income. He loves to knit. There are multiple large containers of colorful yarn scattered around the living room where we sat during out first interview. Alex works at Hot Topic, which he described as, “the goth store at the mall.” He also works at the Croc center in South Bend at the front desk, where he says he does, “a lot of nothing.”
Andie Leonard is a senior at Pacific Palisades High School in Los Angeles California. She has two siblings, a younger brother and an older sister. Her brother just turned ten and for his birthday he got his ears pierced. She hasn’t talked to her older sister, Kristal, in a while, she moved away to Indiana a couple of years ago and hasn’t been back in California very often. She is used to not seeing much of her sister. Kristal was never around when she was younger because their mom sent her to live in a group home for troubled teenagers after she became a danger to herself and her siblings.
The West Hollywood police department has no record of a murder of a transgender woman supposedly raped with a sword in November of 2009. There are no articles documenting this horrific tale either.
However, there is a fantastic Broadway musical turned into a movie called “Rent” with a main character that happens to be named Angel. Angel is a drag queen who suffers from, and eventually dies of AIDS.
Laura Smearer Gonyaw lives in Los Angeles California. She has three children. Her son just turned ten and for his birthday he got his ears pierced. Her middle child is a senior in high school and is applying to college. Her oldest child comes from a separate marriage and is significantly older than the other two children. Laura named her first child, Kristal Millette when she was born on January 2nd 1989. She hasn’t talked with her daughter, (who now calls herself Alex) in a while because she has some problems with Laura. Laura had to put her in a group home called Vista del Mar when she was 15 because she became a danger to herself and her siblings.
Laura never lived on a Hare Krishna compound for a month, however she does belong to Lakeshrine Church.
On Monday, March 28, 2005 Alex Millete posted to her blog called “Whatever Monkey” on blogspot:
I am back from spring break. I'm bored to hell and back again. One interesting thing that happened was that I got attacked by a mad cat while I was gone. No. Really what happened was that i got really depressed while I was on break and I cut my arm up. The mad cat story is just what I say to people who are curious. But if they really want to know what happened they should read my blog. I even hid a knife in my bed. I was going psychotic. This has happened several times over the course of the year. I have even been hospitalized three times for severe depression. But in the end, none of it has helped. I still hate myself. I hate school and I hate my life. I don't want to die though. I'm not THAT depressed. I don't want to commit suicide. That's for stupid people. I like life in general, just not my life in particular.
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