I'm thankful Donna was able to be her true self for some time, but she deserved more. And it's 100% bullshit that MCA organized the funding for her surgery only to die of cancer himself at age 47. The universe fucked up in multiple ways here.
Part of it, of course, is that Donna didn’t have a language to describe her experience, and in fact, she says that it wasn’t until January of 2002 that she first heard the word “transgender.” As soon as she read about it, Donna saw herself—perhaps for the first time—and began transitioning almost immediately. (“I saw the light at the end of a very dark tunnel and I ran straight for it,” she wrote.) Tragically, not long afterwards, Donna was diagnosed with colon cancer. She had an operation to remove the cancer that year, followed by six months of chemotherapy, but the cancer came back.
“My understanding was that she was pretty much dying, and that she wanted to live out the rest of the little time she had left in the body of her choosing,” recalls Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz in Beastie Boys Book. “So [Adam] Yauch took care of it. He organized it so we gave her the money for the [gender-affirming] operation, but it was under the guise of reimbursement and unpaid back royalties for the Polly Wog Stew record from 1982. Donna got the operation, and then within a year passed away.”
As someone who quit my own band in 1997 rather than come out as a gay musician and make an attempt at becoming whole, I watched Laura’s experience play out almost fifteen years later with both envy (for the strength to do it) and concern (for the way becoming a public trans figure almost overnight could affect her). I was elated by the success of Transgender Dysphoria Blues, which incredibly turns ten this year, but I was also curious about how the pressure and attention was affecting her own ability to process coming out, and more importantly, grow into the person she was becoming. One of the greatest misconceptions that people have about coming out is that simply doing so is an end of some sort when, in reality, it’s a humble beginning. As I say to Laura in our conversation, which will be published in full on Thursday, “it’s more like once you do it, you’re staring at a fucking group of broken pieces all around you, trying to put yourself back together, and trying to figure out what was real and what was not real.” For her part, Laura looks back on that moment knowing that she had just reached a place where—for better or for worse—there was simply no other choice.
“Ultimately, I don’t think it’s healthy to come out in the public eye like that. You should not do that, really!” she laughs. “But in a way, it’s almost like sobering up—where you can sober up and you may not be ‘fucked up’ anymore, but you’re still fucked up. And then there’s all this work that needs to be done. One of my therapists told me, very early on, ‘You need to understand that the person you think you’re becoming is not who you’re going to be.’ I think, subconsciously, I realized that before they said it, but that was what’s so ultimately terrifying. I realized that I had no idea what was about to happen, really.”
