From: Nancy Silverrod <nsilverrod>
Date: Fri, 26 May 2006 09:51:32 -0700

I wish I could say that a book changed my life as a child. There was no book that could make things okay for me in the way that I needed.

 

The bio of Deborah Sampson, the woman who fought as a male soldier, that came out sometime in about 1972 or so was probably the closest. But nothing in it really suggested that she knew she was male, and it also seemed to suggest that she managed to live as a woman just fine after she was found out. And so I knew she wasn't really like me, and in a way that made things worse.

 

It is hard for me to think about this question actually: I read and read and read. I read all the time. And nowhere did I read about someone who was transsexual. There was barely anything about same-sex love, or about being gay.

 

It just reminds me of the terrible awful place that my world was back then. And it makes me deeply angry.

 

Illustrations Matter!

Books I loved and still love:

Herman the Loser

 

All the books by the woman who wrote

Katie and the Big Snow,

and Calico the Wonder Horse.

 

The Boy's King Arthur by Howard Pyle

with N.C. Wyeth illustrations

and Robin Hood, with Howard Pyle illustrations

 

Dr. Seuss:

Pale Green Pants with Nobody Inside Them

 

Here is a book with no illustrations that I think about all the time:

 

The Five Sons of King Pandu - which is a prose translation for kids of the Mahabharata, by Elizabeth Seeger. I love the story of the mongoose whose body is half turned to gold just from observing an act of great charity. Also that one of the sons couldn't walk into heaven because whenever he was eating he thought only of himself and not of others.

 

I also loved any mythology or fairy tales, especially the Arabian Nights. I love the stories with multiply embedded stories. How with those stories Scheherezhad's sister puts off forever the moment of reality, of truth, of daylight, of horror.

 

 

I wish a story had changed my life. I wished every night that something would change what I was. Change me from being transgender to being me: a boy.

 

A story could have changed my life by showing me that others were like me. By showing me that one could have an adulthood, a future, if you were someone like me. That there were pathways to an identity that was authentic and honest. (Notice I do not say pathways to happiness, because that was not what I longed for. I just wanted to be able to be me. Happiness is wonderful, but only possible if there is a self to feel it.)

 

I don't know what that story would read like. I don't know what the pictures would look like. I just know I never read it or heard it.

 
  I should add:
  Whenever I go on vacation, I forget all the numbers I am supposed to remember. Every pin number or access code disappears. But there is one number I don't ever seem to forget: my library card number for the Newton Public Libraries. That is where I read "The Five Sons of King Pandu" over and over. For years. At some point I looked at the little stamp sheet inside the cover: it showed I was the only person who had ever checked the book out, for years and years.
  It isn't just books that change children's lives. There are so many books I would never have seen if it wasn't for the librarian who somehow made sure I would see them.
  I first picked up "The Five Sons of King Pandu" because a librarian pointed it out to me on the "New Acquisitions" display near checkout in the Young Adult section. I never would have chosen it myself, partly because it had no illustrations, partly because I had never heard of the Mahabharata and didn't know it was classic mythology. I also didn't know the librarian, but she had somehow made it her business to know me, or at least to know what sorts of books I usually stacked on the counter in front of her. She didn't know me, but she cared about helping me find more to read, so that I would read more.
  I believe I read the Deborah Sampson bio very soon after it came out. In Junior High school (Weeks Junior High, in Newton Mass), I was tortured by other kids outside of class (and sometimes in class) so during lunch I never went to the cafeteria, I always went to the library. The librarian (was her name Mrs. Kruse?) would let me work. One of the things I loved was to put the plastic jackets on, and the paper for date stamping into, new books. One day one of the new books in the stack in front of me was that Sampson book.
  I have always believed the librarian really ordered that book on Deborah Sampson just for me to read, and that she put it out in a stack for me on purpose. Who knows whether or not she did? But finding it was such a gift really. And I never ever got to tell her that it made a difference to me. Librarians in elementary and junior high school made an enormous difference in my life, providing refuge and access to resources in quiet ways.
  Since I was a "volunteer" for the library, I got to go with the other volunteers on a special field trip each year. One year we visited the Athenaeum, a historic library in Boston, that at the time was only accessible to men, and also an antique bookstore where the owner (George Gloss?) told us about antique books. Although the historic library was incredible, that trip was difficult, because they insisted that the girls had to wear skirts or dresses into the Athenaeum. So I had to go in girl drag. Another year the trip was much better: a special private tour of the brand new building of the Boston Public Library, which had just opened. We went all over it, heard how the design was adapted to the needs of the library, saw how it connected to the old building, learned how it was called "the BPL" by intimates, et cetera. But best of all: we each applied for and received Boston Public Library Cards.
  When things got bad at school, and I felt I couldn't go and had to cut, I always took the trolley in to "the BPL" and sat in the stacks to read. In high school, I also went to "the BPL" to read Gay Community News, so no one would see me with it and know I was gay. There I also read, in one of the alternative Boston newspapers, the first story I had ever read about transsexuals: interviews with four or five real transsexuals, including an FTM like myself.
  A while back I was in the Ann Arbor Public Library during the day and two policemen came to the area I was in and talked to a kid. They said they knew he was cutting school, and after an initial denial he admitted it and they sent him back there. I couldn't help but think to myself that maybe the library might still be a better place for a kid who is deeply different, and who might be experiencing bullying and harassment from other kids the way I was. In Arizona, teachers are apparently forbidden to say anything positive about being LGBT in a classroom. Probably the library is a better school for gay and trans kids than school is.
  But now I wonder too how lesbian, gay, bi, and trans kids are supposed to manage if their libraries put those filters on the computers so they cannot access lgbt information sites. I was in a library last month that had a display of books out, including a book on Teen Suicide with those figures on how lgbt teens suicide at a much higher rate. Ironically: not only didn't the book offer a single shred of solution for this, the library also had filters on that kept me, and every gay or trans kid, from accessing websites like the HRC, NGLTF, and NCTE, which might give youth access to needed information and support.
  

Andre Wilson

Fifthwheel2004 at yahoo.com
Received on Fri 26 May 2006 11:51:32 AM CDT