Dedication

for Josh

Epigraphs

Ang hindi lumingon sa pinanggalingan, hindi makakarating sa paroroonan.

One who does not look back at their origin will never arrive at their destination.

—Tagalog proverb

There are some who, should we intrude upon them in the morning, still in bed, will present to our gaze an admirable female head, so generalised and typical of the entire sex is the expression of the face; the hair itself affirms it, so feminine is its ripple; unbrushed, it falls so naturally in long curls over the cheek that one marvels how the young woman, the girl, the Galatea barely awakened to life in the conscious mass of this male body in which she is imprisoned has contrived so ingeniously, by herself, without instruction from anyone else, to take advantage of the narrowest aperture in her prison wall to find what was necessary to her existence.

—Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

Beauty is power; longing a disease.

—Stephen Sondheim, Passion

AUTHOR’S NOTE

If you may pardon the faults of memory and the bias of personal perspective, this work is otherwise both truthful and factual, except that some names have been changed out of respect for privacy.

Prologue

BRIDGES OF LIGHT

Red brick; white tent; green grass. The outlines of prestige at an inner courtyard on a drizzly day. That was what I saw, the same as what I remembered, the specifics fuzzy from afar, my albino eyes only able to render life in scant detail unless I held it close. But I couldn’t well squat down to examine those blades of grass under my feet as I entered the cover of that tent, not at a reunion reception for queer students at Harvard, whether at that moment in 2017, or when I graduated in 1997. I couldn’t reveal myself a freak, especially not in this crowd, which would damn me for my failure of sight.

I arrived at this reception from New York, passing several bodies of water by train, but somehow the Charles still stood out to me when I took the T from South Station, the vast expanse of it, the first substantial body of water I crossed after the Pacific Ocean, when I left the pain of my childhood and hurtled to a future of great promise. This was a memory I could only vaguely make out from that distance of time, though I was used to the feeling, since my physical vision could never represent anything far except as blurs. My way of seeing had advantages though. Since I couldn’t perceive detail from far away, I could more easily associate what I saw with my past, like how those language philosophers say that when a person hears the word “chair,” they picture an idealized chair in their mind, drawn from an amalgam of memories. My vision was like that all the time, except it absorbed the few details I could actually see and integrated them with the objects I imagined.

Unable to identify any specific blade of grass on this occasion, I could imagine the blurry mass under my feet as the same uniform stalks of verdant green I’d stepped on twenty years earlier, and so became two people without much effort, the person who arrived today and the young man from the afternoon of my improbable graduation from the most prestigious university in the world. Me, a child from a Philippine province, descendant of peasant farmers, son of derelict immigrants.

Except: I was no longer a son, no longer a man. I became more aware of this as groups of gay men, mostly aging or aged, circulated around me. Their manner of casual evaluation was all too familiar from the countless gay occasions I’d been exposed to—clubs, parties, rallies, meetings—events where official interactions were always tinged with the energy of male desire. Though having such blurry vision made me pay closer attention to what I could perceive, and what I saw was the change in how those men approached and retreated, the way their bodies created invisible patterns in space, the distinction between being observed but found wanting and being dismissed offhand, the difference between being a not-so-hot guy and a woman.

“It’s kinda fun to see a bunch of boys who rejected me under the same tent,” a droll voice behind me said, whose owner I immediately identified as Kit Clark, a black alum who was several classes ahead of me but had worked at Harvard after graduation and never left. We got back in touch a few years earlier, so he was one of the few people I’d seen since I finished college.

“Haven’t snagged one yet?” I asked as I turned to face him.

“It’s a lot worse than when you were here,” he replied. “The men keep getting younger and I’m only getting uglier.”

I would protest if it were anyone else, but Kit’s tone had always made it clear that he did not invite praise whenever he said something negative about his appearance. What he invited was empathy, agreement with the injustice of how looks so determined our place in the gay pecking order and how our lack of attractiveness had so much to do with our race and femininity.

Kit’s broad, open face, his strong jaw, his wide nose, would not be considered ugly, if not for the kinky hair he kept long. His olive skin would have also been attractive, except that it didn’t come with the hypermasculinity that seemed to be a prerequisite for black gay men to be thought hot. Instead, Kit refused to subject his tall, lanky frame to the rigors of a gym regimen and preferred activities like circus silks and modern dance, which he could perform with a lithe grace.

“You can always leave Cambridge,” I suggested.

“You’re not serious. My life is here. I accept that I’m undesirable.”

This struck me as a fundamental difference between us and why I’d kept my friendship with Kit at arm’s length over the years, because his self-acceptance rattled me. Kit would not allow himself to butch it up or keep his hair short just to court suitors; he wanted to be wanted, but he wouldn’t compromise himself for the sake of another’s desire. I, on the other hand, didn’t have the same solid sense of self. I’d been more than willing to clamp down on my most undesirable traits, especially two decades ago, when I had such an unclear sense of who I was beyond other people’s reflections of me.

At the same time, Kit recognized long before I did how alike we were, that we both occupied liminal places in our white-dominated Harvard gay society. He recognized me as an albino Asian when everyone else thought I was white; he could tell that my workout regimen was cover for a femininity I obscured because it was not attractive. He could also tell that someone needed to see the reality of me even when I took such pains to hide it, and Kit generously gave my inner self a witness, even when I could never settle for long under his glare.

Kit motioned to someone who approached us, and when he got close, I surprised myself when I recognized Sean Chambers, an English lit grad student while I was in college. His appearance had not changed much, just a few more pounds and a widow’s peak, his red hair duller than I remembered.

“I’m Meredith,” I said.

“I remember you,” he replied. I couldn’t tell whether he’d learned about my transition through the grapevine or if he was just good at going with the flow. Though the change between old and new me wasn’t as drastic as it used to be; I’d cut my hair in a bob and was not wearing makeup, had on a loose gray jumpsuit that could be feasibly worn by a man or a woman.

“Do you recognize anyone else?” I asked.

Sean motioned with his head toward a man passing by in tight jeans and a white shirt under his blazer. The man’s tanned skin seemed leathery to me even from a distance, his hair equal parts pepper and salt.

“Vince Parker. I had a crush on him,” Sean said. “He was so hot.”

“Everyone had a crush on him,” Kit rejoined.

As Kit and Sean gossiped about how attractive Vince had been, I reflected on the word “was.” I imagined the man would feel hurt to be spoken of like this, his beauty in the past tense.

“Anyway, we all get older and uglier,” Kit concluded.

“Except for Meredith,” Sean said as he turned to me. “You look the same.”

“Isn’t it weird,” Kit observed, “how she changed genders and looks more like she did twenty years ago than any of us?”

I chuckled then. I used to look really different when I wore heels, dresses, and a full face of makeup nearly every day. But as I put more and more of my thoughts out into the world, I also grew wary of the need to conform to that world’s expectations of me. So the heels came off, then the makeup, then the girly clothes, until I was left presenting myself in much the same way I did before transition, except hormones had given me breasts that allowed people to identify me as female. Though I hoped my belief in my own womanhood also came across, regardless of how I looked.

When I noticed a break in the drizzle, I walked away from the Lowell House courtyard where the reception was, across Massachusetts Avenue, and back to Adams House, where Harvard was housing me for the weekend. A concrete gargoyle whose mouth opened out onto a small fountain, long out of use, greeted me before I opened the heavy, carved door to my old undergrad dorm. This grandness was a remnant of a time when Adams was known as the Gold Coast apartments, housing for the richest among Harvard men. I walked down the marble-tiled hallway to the room I’d been assigned, its door also heavy as I opened it, with a ceiling at least eleven feet high and a giant fireplace whose marble mantel reached above my head. It was next door to FDR’s old room back when he himself was a Harvard man, which alumni of the house had lovingly restored with Persian rugs and period furniture.

My own room was barren except for the same oak table and dresser from twenty years ago, the same chair upholstered a pale teal, with legs that connected and curved in the back, the better to tip it upward in a precarious balance while lost in contemplation, as I often did when I lived in Adams. I spied the same single mattress from my college days when I opened the door to the bedroom, on a frame with a headboard made of black metal that vaguely reminded me of prison bars. A clear plastic bag with sheets and a towel lay on top of it, which only amplified the prison effect, ironic given how it was my younger brother who went to jail my senior year, a fact I barely registered through the haze of classes and finals. I went in and was about to put sheets on the bed when my eye caught a white glint, and I turned to face my reflection against the mirror through the open bathroom door, which I knew was the same kind of mirror from twenty years ago even when it was blurry, a shallow vertical rectangle, its corners rounded. As for the reflection itself, I could only really see the shape of my head from that distance, the yellow outline of my blond hair, the entire reflection brighter on the side closest to the window, receding to near blackness at the lower left corner.

I remembered a game I used to play with myself when I saw my reflection from afar. About twelve feet away, I couldn’t make out the details of my face, could only glean the fuzzy outlines of my eyes and lips, the holes of my nostrils, as the rest of my features blended with my skin. From that distance, I could only imagine what my face would really look like when I got closer.

The words “you look the same” lingered in my mind, and I wondered whether I could imagine myself with a man’s face, knowing that for many years now, I only saw a woman’s face when I looked in the mirror, and it had taken so much sacrifice to bring that reflection into being. I still got plenty of comments online that I looked like a man, insults I brushed off because I trusted my own perception over anyone else’s. It felt perverse, even dangerous, to bring my old face back, the man I used to be.

But I wanted to prove to myself that I could recall my old face without shaking my confidence in my womanhood. The more my skin prickled at the thought of imagining myself as a man—instead of a woman like before, or a white American instead of an albino Filipino before that—the more I wanted to play that game again. Being in that room, in that place where I had spent so much time as a man, I wondered if I could recover my old self, at least for a moment.

I faced the mirror and imagined my prominent brow, my angular jaw, my flat chin, the features that made me fear I would always be perceived as a man when I started transition. I took one step toward that mirror, and then another, when I noticed that my jaw was no longer so sharply angled, as fat had settled on that part of my face and turned what was once a line into a shallow curve. Another step and I noticed my rosy cheeks, another the natural pucker of my lips. So by the time I got close and leaned against the sink, I found myself unable to maintain the sensation that this face was a man’s, or that I by extension was a man, even when I understood what Sean meant when he said that I looked the same, my essential features more like they were twenty years ago than the other people at that reception. None of the reflections from outside could unmoor my own perception of myself, one that I’d honed and maintained over many years like a delicate, well-tended plant.

I hardened the muscles on my face, furrowed my brow, and clenched my lips into a hard line so I would look more like a man. Though the impression I got was not of a man but of a woman pretending to be a man, and not very well, as my features softened back to their original expression. This reminded me of how after I learned to speak with an American accent, and tried to get back my old Filipino one with its hard consonants and singsong intonation, it always felt like I was making fun of the accent even though it was the one I grew up with. I also couldn’t manage to use that accent in daily life because it reminded me too much of being made fun of, being thought less because I came to high school in America speaking that way. Maybe my mind also protected me from my male past, as I gave up and accepted that I could no longer perceive myself as a man or harden my features to look like one. I wondered to what degree the image in front of me conformed to what was real, but as soon as I wondered this, I also reminded myself that there is no single, objective truth, how reality is so much more malleable than people make it out to be, that the first step in making something real is believing that it could be real, that my very presence in front of this mirror, in this school, in the world, was itself proof of the power of belief in a reality that seemed entirely farfetched.

So the mirror was just a mirror now, the reflection of a reality I myself perceived, that I was a woman. But as soon as I understood this, I also understood that the reality of my race was even more embedded, how I imagined myself as a white American for so long that I didn’t need to even try to conjure an image of myself as an albino Filipino to know that I could not, because I’d relied on my image as a white person for even longer than I had as a woman. Even though I knew I was albino and lived with the sensory reality of poor vision and the palest skin, I perceived myself to be a white person of European descent when I looked in the mirror; I relied on that perception to bolster my belief that I could do well in America, that I was better than the brown rural peasants I left behind.

For most of my existence, mirrors were not just mirrors to me, but bridges made of light to fantastic destinations, where I would be different than myself and lead a better life. If the other side of the mirror was another world, then my imagination was the vehicle that could take me there. In that dimly lit bathroom, I came to acknowledge that I was no longer at my place of origin but at my destination, the world I’d determined for myself I would someday reach, and that my imagination had successfully taken me there, a place where passing had transformed into being.

But having arrived, it turned out my imagination did not have the fuel to take me back, that the journey to this world I now inhabited was a one-way trip. I touched the mirror and felt the truth of its material surface, how it was a piece of glass with beveled edges, coated in silver that had oxidized in places, creating black spots like little islands on the edges of the frame.

It was eerie to be on the other side of that glass, when I once stared at my reflection in a mirror so much like this one and believed I could never become the beautiful woman in my fantasies. Then I remembered that I’d already crossed one bridge toward whiteness and its advantages, including an education I could have never imagined possible, had I been the color I was meant to be.

—

It was sophomore year, the Saturday before Halloween, 1994. I ended up on the top floor of the farthest entryway in Adams House, which I didn’t mind because the eaves made my room feel like a garret. I’d recently learned that word at a lecture on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, where the professor proposed the garret as an ideal space for writers in search of quiet and contemplation. I felt inspired in that room, even though I occasionally bumped my head when I sat up in bed.

I’d skipped breakfast that day, so it was past noon by the time I shuffled into the dining hall. I hoped to see people I recognized after I got food, but when I didn’t, I sat alone at one of the square tables in the middle of that vast space with its dark wood paneling and red velvet curtains, hoping still that someone I knew would come along and join me. I had only lived in the house for six weeks and was slow to make friends.

At the next table, I overheard some juniors I didn’t know well talking about Drag Night, an Adams tradition I’d heard about but didn’t realize was happening over dinner that evening. They were planning to do a number to “It’s Raining Men.”

“We need to go to the thrift store to get costumes,” a compact blond man named Zach said.

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