A Hard Left Fist

I always thought I'd begin to tell my story with my mother, the Eldorado of my desire, but while I've been struggling to begin, the fathers and their masculine principle have pushed their way forward. Is it because my masculinity defines me more than my desire does? Or because masculinity is more associated with the disciplines of history and anthropology that have shaped my outlook?

I had three fathers. The first was my mother's first husband, a Hungarian Jewish refugee photographer named Laszlo Gluck, much older than she, who had died of a heart attack. On my original birth certificate he was named as my father, and I had his last name until I was eight years old. Recently, when I asked my mother why I had been named Esther-Mary, she said that these had been names of Gluck's relatives; she had wanted to think of me as his child. My second father was Saul Newton, a Communist Party organizer, also Jewish, who had married my mother after World War II and then adopted me. These were the two fathers I was told about, growing up. At nineteen I learned that there had been a third man, whose affair with my mother had caused my birth. My biological "father"--would this person now be called a "sperm provider"?--was also Jewish and left-wing, the only kind of man who turned my WASP mother on.

I have become some version of those men, the ones who turned my mother on, even though, because of my chromosomes--XX as far as I know--and a reproductive biology, which is, or rather was, capable of giving birth, my sex is female. During my lonely childhood I was stuck in the girl gender, which is linked, worldwide, to hard work, low pay, and disrespect, though this is not the only reason why, for me, neither being female nor being a woman has ever been easy or unequivocal. Later, when I found gay life, I was given a second gender: butch. This masculine gay gender makes my body recognizable, and it alone makes sexual love possible. Butch is my handle and my collective name--a tribe, the late lamented writer Paul Monette called us gay people. My life's work has been inspired by and primarily written for this tribe, these gay communities, entities that are no less powerful for being symbolic. But being butch has been problematic, too. How could it not be?

Certainly, we butches have been the target of medical interventions to correct our grievous mistakes, our unshakable belief in how we should look and move. My body commits every one of these movement mistakes--for example, hands on hips, fingers forward--which are used to diagnose gender identity disorder, a category of mental illness listed in the DSM-IV, the current diagnostic handbook of the shrinks. Luckily, when the friction of my teenage misery burst into flames, I escaped the Thorazine or shock treatments others endured through the middle-class option of therapy meant to cure what still proved to be an intractable "case" of gender dysphoria and homosexual desire.

Once when I am in my late thirties, and confident that I have finally escaped from his crushing dominance, my father Saul and I meet for dinner near where he lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Later, as we stand on the corner of Broadway and Ninety-first Street, waiting for the light to change, I realize with a creepy shock that we are dressed nearly the same--running shoes, jeans, and plaid shirts--and are both standing with hands on our hips, fingers forward, a couple of tough Jewish guys.

I'm sitting on a bus going east on Seventy-second Street in Manhattan, on my way to one of those doctor's appointments that become increasingly frequent in middle age if one is...