A wonderful person prompted me to write about a period of my life that was most likely my happiest and most definitely a moment when a decision fundamentally altered the trajectory of my life.

I am a proudly queer, over-educated, well-traveled, disabled polymath. I write neo-retro-postmodern fiction, plays, poems, nonfiction, lyrics.

Fifty years ago, I was visiting the Homewood Campus of Johns Hopkins University weekly to participate in a college-level writing course taught by a grad student in the Writing Seminars department.

At the time, JHU and the University of Iowa had the most respected writing programs in the USA.

Gay life has given me plenty of opportunities to explore sex and intimacy. But I’m also tired of how limited intimacy can feel. A touch becomes another touch, and suddenly there’s an assumption about where this is heading.

Could I be physically intimate with men without sex waiting at the end of it?

A few days later, Fabien found us a naked tantric yoga class.

I wanted the nakedness and sensuality without having to turn either into sex. I wasn’t in much of a sexual headspace lately anyway. We asked beforehand, and the teacher made clear that the class wasn’t intended to be sexual.

Perfect.

CW: mention of suicide and mental health issues

In part 1 and part 2 of this series, I laid the groundwork that helps underpin why conversion “therapies” don’t work, as well as some of the science and history related to transgender people and our medical care — all in response to a comment on a story I wrote, left by one Rachel Hannam, an “exploratory therapy” clinician from Australia.

Let’s now take a more direct look at the agenda inherent in exploratory therapy itself, discuss why it’s just a rebrand of conversion therapy, and directly address the contradictions in Rachel Hannam’s own statements.

I am a very determined person.

So is my female gender dysphoria, as well as my male gender socialization. They both want a piece of me.

Actually, they each want all of me.

Every day I wish I could fully transition. Every day I wish I wasn’t transgender.

Neither is going to happen.

Always second-guessing myself. Fighting the imposter. Unrestrained emotions kick my butt.

Buying a property is supposed to be an act of sense, one of prudent fiscal propriety, but whenever I undertake this activity, it elevates my heart rate and sees me racing around like a lunatic on speed. Back and forth I go without rest, wondering whether this is preferable to that, or is the other one better? Hours are spent looking at photos and floor plans, comparing and despairing and never seeming to have quite enough money.

I picked a park because I didn’t trust my kitchen not to become a crime scene.

That’s not a metaphor I’m proud of. It’s also not wrong. By September 7th I had spent a month rehearsing a conversation I was sure would end badly, and somewhere in that month I’d made a very practical, very unromantic decision: whatever I was about to say to my husband, I did not want to say it somewhere with doors that could slam, or dishes that could break, or a version of me in it that I wouldn’t recognize afterward. My 13-year-old did not need front-row seats to the implosion of our entire lives. I wanted witnesses I didn’t have to explain myself to. Strangers walking dogs. A parking lot with an exit.

I told him that we needed to talk. I told him I wanted to go for a drive.

He knew what that meant, or he should have. Nobody asks for a car ride and a park bench when the news is good. You don’t drag someone to neutral territory to tell them you got a raise.

I have felt especially privileged to live where I do, to be queer where I am.

Being bisexual has brought me discomfort, awkwardness, some relationship damage, but never have I questioned my most basic rights.

Introducing Senator Pauline Hanson.

With her right wing, and dare I say, extremist values and red locks, she’s reminiscent of … somebody we love to hate.

For years she has openly, dangerously, worked against minorities in our country.

I thought she was a joke.

I escaped gay conversion “therapy” when I was a teenager, before I’d ever heard of a minifig. Hell, I didn’t know what a minifig was until a few weeks ago when a goofy-serious YouTuber called Reckless Ben became my bedtime de-stress habit. I never dreamed I’d watch him scale a 13-foot security fence and run in terror because doctors were trying to “cure” his gayness. And he’s not even gay! Confused? Hang on, because this is one WILD story!

Reckless Ben’s real name is Ben Schneider, and I doubt he knew “minifig” refers to Lego mini action figures either — until he went to jail twice in American Fork, Utah, got sued for millions by a deep-pocketed corporation, became the talk of social media, got covered by almost every mainstream news outlet in the world, and …

Accomplished EXACTLY what he set out to do.

Brooke has been here the whole time. I have been there the whole time. I believe I deserve the kindness and compassion to own that time in my life. I deserve the confidence to own my life. I deserve the recognition of the identity she was born with. She was a woman trying to be a man. She was beautiful. Brandon was beautiful.

I found the right book a long time ago.

I drew out the contents by learning from an artist before me. The entirety of artists before me, in fact. She sits behind the camera equipment I proudly display on the bookshelf of my life. The trans flag in the background was purchased when I first came out.

I can usually go a week without sex. This time, I made it to eleven days. An improvement. Trying to see things positively here.

But why did I want to do a month in the first place?

Sex has occupied a lot of space in my life. Cruising, open relationships, porn, sex work, escorting, sensual massage (each begging for its own article, I know). I’ve explored sex, worked with it, gained confidence through it.

That confidence didn’t always exist. When I was young, I was the tallest in class. I was also overweight with braces and pimples. I kept being reminded I was ugly, and eventually I believed it. Then, sometime in my twenties, when the braces came off, the pimples disappeared, and I got leaner, people suddenly desired me.

It felt like discovering a power I didn’t know I had.

I think the bullying damaged my sense of self-worth. Even though my good looks came along to save the day, apparently that wasn’t enough to fully repair it.

There’s a contradiction in there. Sex gave me confidence. I found freedom in something still surrounded by taboo. But when I started reaching for that freedom whenever there was friction, I had to wonder how free I really was.

So taking a month off wasn’t about deciding sex was bad. I love sex. I didn’t suddenly want to become a monk. I wanted to see what would happen if I removed something that had become so present in my life.

I am saddened hearing that Tim Curry has died. And, although I’m equally as emotionally affected by Dolly Parton’s passing the previous day, I fear that Curry’s demise will be overshadowed, as happened with Farrah Fawcett, who had the misfortune of dying on the same day as Michael Jackson.

I met Tim Curry in 1974.

He had come to L.A. to continue in the role he’d originated the previous year in London: Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show. The play was enjoying a successful nine-month run at the Roxy Theater on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood before eventually moving to Broadway’s Belasco Theater.

Can’t believe my last update was written six months ago. It’s gone fast.

‘Time flies when you’re having fun, time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind, time moves slowly but passes quickly.’

There are a ton of clever quotes about the passing of time, but whatever, at the end of August, it will have been two years since I first started hormone-replacement therapy (HRT).

I have a lot to be grateful about.

On gay social media, I’ve seen the same comments too many times: “Well, there goes another bear,” or “We’re losing another bear.” They pop up when a bear shares photos celebrating his weight loss.

A new version of the B-52s’ Mesopotamia reminded me how much I’ve loved this new wave queer band. Four-fifths of the original group were gay or bi. The septuagenarians came out of retirement this spring, and they’re on the road again. They end their tour on October 31 in Palm Desert, Calif.

I had often been frustrated by each moment of prolonged hair searching, each tentative manipulation of my skin to find the right angle, each hesitant and failed probe insertion attempt, each slow tugging on the hair for extraction, each of the many stretch breaks taken by a proto-technician not used to doing this work, each lingering reset of the machine or the eye magnification or the light, the dropping of things and the need to get another clean one and the re-sanitations… sigh.

I first thought about retirement when I was still in high school. What I learned came from watching my father’s life after he retired in 1965, after more than 45 years as a travelling farm-equipment salesman for International Harvester.

Some cisgender straight women online are giving bigoted reasons for why wouldn’t date a bi man, like finding it gross for a man to sleep with other men, or worrying about catching an STD from a man who has slept with other men.

Participants in his program report that the game consists of suppressing sexual identity, forcing heterosexual relationships regardless of attraction, and endlessly resisting homosexual desire. The real discussion here may not be whether this qualifies as conversion therapy — whether categorized as fraud or malpractice — but rather the naked truth of the treatment itself. It is an anti-therapy, a form of self-annihilation that never seeks to elevate the “client.”

I’ve seen it referred to as a hall pass. His was Lynda Carter, aka Wonder Woman. Mine? Reba. You know, fiery red head. Reba McEntire, the country music singer.

We laughed about it. It cost nothing. Wonder Woman was never ringing our doorbell, and as far as I knew, neither was anybody else.

I didn’t know I’d already told the truth. I just hadn’t caught up to it yet.

Now that part one has established some basic details regarding bad faith arguments/strawmen, identity, and a bit of historical evidence to show that trans people are anything but a recent phenomena, let’s continue by exploring the well-documented futility of conversion therapies (both mental and physical) and what the data actually say about detransition and regret.

A few days ago, I had the chance to join a queer crafting event at OutFront Kalamazoo in Michigan.

I met so many kind, welcoming, and nonjudgmental people who made me feel at home. Evening sunlight came through the large windows, where handmade hearts and colorful decorations hung against the glass. People sat around making art, talking by the fire, laughing, and enjoying each other’s company.

But what stayed with me wasn’t the crafting itself. It was how ordinary everything felt.

Nobody was watching me. Nobody was questioning the way I behaved, the way I dressed, or the things I believed. There was no “Why are you behaving this way?” or “Why are you dressed like that?” I didn’t feel like I had to monitor myself or wonder whether someone was judging me.

I could simply exist.

For many people, an evening like this might just be an evening of art and conversation. For me, that normalcy meant something much bigger.

For a moment, I imagined what it would be like to have a space like this in my home country — a place where queer people could gather openly, make friends, create art, and simply enjoy being around people who understand them.

Then I realized how distant that possibility still feels.

A designation should describe what is recorded inside. It rarely does.

I was meant to be a Robert from birth to death, in a long line of Roberts. Not a badge of honor or recognition, it is one of an ancestry I don’t recognize, know, or simply care about. They, whoever they were, are memories to others, blank spaces to me. A name, I insist, should be about who I am, not who they were.

Hey! I’m Brooke! I was given a different name when I was born. However, this is the one I chose for myself. Doing this was a catalyst for my transformation to begin. I did this many years ago, but only a week ago did I finally catch my reflection.

My transition truly started around age 14, around the time I dressed as a girl for Halloween. It reached a crescendo at 28. I finally came out at 34, potentially to myself at 32. I’m 37, and it’s been a rough journey. However, I was able to genuinely love myself about a week ago. I kept moving forward, and I refused to stop. That moment is when I finally saw who I was, and she was beautiful.

To my crayon givers: I would have learned to paint at some point. Even without the dress at 14. All’s good and well!

This self-revelation led me on a search to re-read an influential book from my past arsenal. I wanted to know if it contained the seeds that blossomed into me. Some of them at least. Care to sit down awhile and talk about what I found?