Conundrum

 Conundrum, Jan Morris, 1974.

In 1982 I was an undergrad at BU. It would not be unfair to say that I majored in drinking. Not good time, bonhomie, partying. No, more a sad, lonely, self-punishing exercise that I would pursue for decades thereafter. I was closeted. I was isolated. I was without hope of resolving what I've since come to understand as gender dysphoria.

One of the few places I found solace was at the Boston Book Annex, around the corner from my university-owned apartment. It was a cramped space, with books piled on the floor, and prices to match an undergrad's work-study wages.

It was at the BBA, atop a stack of paperbacks, that a copy of Jan Morris' Conundrum caught my eye. A man, a woman who looked a little like Michael Palin, "a traveller across the boundaries of sex." Holy shit! Someone like me! Not a caricature of femininity; not a freak. It was possible to be like me and be a normal person?

There were the similarities: She knew who she was by age four; I knew before I hit double digits. Her struggle was largely internal. "I was not generally thought effeminate." She knew alienation: "My sense of detachment was extreme." Her pursuit of her truth was "not just a sexual enigma, but a search for unity."

She knew depression. She sought out Dr. Harry Benjamin "rather than go mad, or kill myself, or worst of all perhaps infect everyone around me with my profoundest melancholy." She hinted at the same self-loathing I felt. "I found the figure I cut in the world, however innocuous it seemed to others, abhorrent to myself."

There were differences. I was not a talented (and financially secure) writer, nor was I married with children. Her career as a travel writer had provided exposure to world culture. I was parochial, agonizingly white, and intimidated by the diversity in Boston, a city not known for its diversity. Boston had only recently torn itself asunder over the school desegregation. 

But in this book, I held proof that some measure of hope existed for someone like me. The value of that knowledge cannot be underestimated.

When Morris decided to resolve her conundrum via surgery, I learned some stark truths. She had to travel to Morocco for the procedure. The facility's lack of sophistication sounded, if not medieval, at least Victorian. Even in the 21 years between Christine Jorgensen and Morris, gender affirmation surgeries were "a cross between a racket, an obscenity, and a very expensive placebo." Morris estimates perhaps 750 people worldwide had had bottom surgery. 

It all sounded so very risky. And beyond my reach.

Morris' new life sounded glorious. Looking at her body, she wrote, "I was all of a piece, as proportioned once again, though in a different kind." She felt, she wrote, "deliciously clean." Swimming in a swamp of the wrong hormones, self-pity, and pitchers of cheap beer I wanted to know that baptism.

I have just re-read Conundrum, in preparation for reading Paul Clements' biography, Jan Morris: Life From Both Sides. Now that I am out, and more at peace with myself, I can accept Morris' elegant, funny, heartfelt prose for the beacon it is. She was what I wanted to be: a real woman in the real world. Not glamorous, not flamboyant, but authentic.