Ben, 64, Northampton, MA, 2014
I identify as an FTM, non-hormone, non-op, transsexual heterosexual man. That’s the whole string of it. I was in the lesbian community when I was younger, but I never really fit. That was the 1970s and there really wasn’t the language then about transmen or FTMs or any of that. I didn’t have that accessible to me as an identity. I thought, “I’m the only one on the planet like me,” but then in 1985, Lou Sullivan sent his little booklet through the mail to the archives I was working on. It was “Information for the Female-to-male Crossdresser and Transsexual,” a little booklet that he self-published with a little handwritten note that said, “Maybe some people in your archive would want to read this.” Even though he didn’t know me, he didn’t know who he was sending this to, I read it. I read it and within two hours I called him and I said, “I gotta meet you, because now there’s two of us, you know, on the planet.” And I flew to San Francisco to meet him.
When I got there, I dressed up super masculine. I even wore temporary facial hair, because I wanted to demonstrate to him that I was a man. So, he opens the door and he is this little frail ninety-eight pound gay guy with a t-shirt on and I thought, “Well, he’s a man and he’s kinda like me, but he’s kinda not like me.” We ended up talking for five hours straight in his kitchen. In the middle of it, he told me he had to get up and take his AZT. I hadn’t known that he had HIV/AIDS, but I realized then that I was making the closest friend of my entire life, the most pivotal individual for me, and that I was losing him at the same time. We corresponded until he died and when he died, I started the East Coast FTM Group because I had nobody and he had asked me to head up his group in San Francisco, which I couldn’t do.
I always felt some resistance to the fact that I didn’t transition medically, but over time I started to find transsexuals who had not transitioned medically, or who had transitioned partially and then stopped, like my friend Leslie Feinberg. Eventually I found more people with the idea that, “I’m already me, I don’t need any medical intervention to become me.” It took a ten-year journey with a gender counselor to give myself permission around this, because it is not popular, even in our community.
I’ve done a lot of organizing, much of it pre-internet. I did it the way Lou did it at first, all by mail. I remember the first big conference I went to, a True Spirit Conference, and I think there were 300 guys, FTMs, from all over the country and Canada, and I remember thinking, “It’s starting. The movement for FTMs is really starting, big time.” Now I have a vision for making the Sexual Minorities Archives a national comprehensive LGBTQ educational resource center with a museum and an art gallery with many rooms to show the collections, to have a youth room, to have a meeting room, to have a community room, and to be the preeminent LGBTQ archive on the East Coast. That’s what I’m most looking forward to as I age and that’s what I want to accomplish before I die.
From: To Survive on This Shore
