Myra Breckenridge Didn't Play Volleyball

** Please note. This essay contains strong language as spoken by the President of the United States. They are his words, not mine.

When I was twelve, my brother began hearing voices from people who didn’t exist. As a result, the entire family was signed up for psychiatric evaluation and psychological counseling. This followed a life-long pattern of absentee parenting, punctuated by periods of intense parenting, often by proxy.

About once a week or sometimes twice a month, they’d load me up into my mother’s sensible automobile and drop me off for sessions at Highland Village, which is a great place for shopping but also helpful when your child needed braces or help with their poor self-evaluation or psychosis.

My psychiatrist gave me a fairly hefty paper test with multiple choice answers to see if I, too, was hearing voices. I always thought it was very decent of them to trust that I would tell the truth with this test instead of trying to hide whatever murderous psychosis I might not want them to know about.

My psychologist noticed that I was almost never without my sketchbook and notebook. Sometimes, I don’t socialize easily, so looking busy drawing away in my sketchbook or scribbling in my notebook was a good excuse to avoid making small talk.

Dr. Draper noticed that, while some of my models were adults, most often the sort of drawings you saw in comic books and the covers of adventure novels, many of my models were young people, just beginning puberty like I was.

Human beings begin life with very few physical differences between the genders, at least in terms of things an artist would notice. Boys and girls are roughly the same sizes and have the same musculature. While puberty brought on marked differences in their anatomical physiology, leading up to that, there are almost none.

My doctor became interested in how I was portraying gender in my drawings, which were mostly things that we humans construct rather than what is innate. Things like length of hair, clothing styles, and, in particular, body positions are how I portrayed gender in my drawings. All of these were things that either gender could easily change, but at eleven, they were almost all anxious to portray the gender they saw themselves as, even if gender didn’t really matter yet.

It became clear that my doctor was trying to establish my sense of self-evaluation and perhaps get a glimpse at my burgeoning sexuality. I don’t know that my sexuality has ever finished developing. Although I have loved many people, I don’t know that I’ve ever been in love, at least not in the sense of being able to give up a piece of myself in exchange for a piece of someone else. I much prefer finding ways to be the hero in someone’s life for a while and then finding a way to escape.

I believe that sexuality is a matter of spectrum. On that spectrum, I weigh in very heavily on the hetero side of the scale, to the point where I’m often accused of objectifying women in my drawings and my writings and sometimes in my personal interactions. Gender plays an important part in my art and my writing. I have an intense interest in trying to dissect human masculinity. Hemmingway was obsessed with it, too. I feel like he did a much better job of it than I did.

Gender and sexuality often dominated the conversation in post-modern thought, although, at the time, they almost never labeled it as such.

When J. Edgar Hoover died, President Richard Nixon reportedly said, “Ha! That old cocksucker.” That a sitting president would make such a comment about one of the most influential people in the twentieth century portends quite a lot.

Normally, I try to avoid discussing the sexuality and gender influence of people beyond what they discuss themselves. I believe pretty intently that people have the right to define themselves, and it’s nearly impossible for a third party to do it accurately. That being said, J Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn were both infamous for investigating people’s private lives and then blackmailing them over it, so, as far as I’m concerned, they’re fair game.

Hoover was described as what we would now call Transgender, preferring to spend his time at home in women’s clothing and occasionally going out pretending to be his own aunt. The problem with Hoover is that people hated him so much that reports about his private life were unreliable. Stories of his cross-dressing sound an awful lot like the stories he made up to ruin other people. What we do know is that Hoover never married, and he had a life-long male companion. We may never know the facts about how Hoover lived, which I suppose was his objective. That he and Cohn used information like that to ruin other men is troubling.

In the years before the war, German doctors began experimenting with medical gender reassignment or gender-affirming procedures. These experiments ended with the rise of the nationalist regime, which began executing anyone not conforming to strict guidelines regarding sexuality and gender.

Following the war, a U.S. veteran named Christine Jorgensen brought the issue of medical gender-affirming procedures back to light after having them done in Denmark. Jorgensen’s story became the inspiration for the Ed Wood Film Glen or Glenda and the Gore Vidal novel Myra Breckenridge.

Although Vidal never mentions it, there are parallels between his Myra and Myron Breckenridge and Virginia Wolfe’s Orlando. Vidal sold the rights to Myra Breckenridge and then washed his hands of it. He disliked film work and wouldn’t take it up again until the disastrous “Caligula” ten years later.

Following “One Million BC” and “Fantastic Voyage,” Raquel Welch hoped her starring role in Myra Breckenridge would make people take her seriously as an actress. Very conservative and a supporter of the Vietnam War, Welch found the subject matter distasteful but was willing to stretch her horizons.

Mae West was seventy-seven years old when she was cast opposite Raquel Welch in the film “Myra Breckenridge.” The director and the producer thought she was considerably funnier than she actually was and made the movie mostly about West’s one-liners and songs. It became known as one of the worst films of all time. Whatever Gore Vidal was trying to say about gender and sexuality in the novel didn’t come through in the film.

On Saturday, I spent a few hours checking out the scene shop at Millsaps College, with the plan to attend the football and volleyball games following. Volleyball is mostly a women’s sport. What was interesting about Saturday was that the football players for both schools got showered and then attended the Volleyball game, giving me the opportunity to compare the gender differences between male and female athletes of about the same age and about the same culture.

Volleyball is mostly about freedom of movement, so the athletes' clothing was related to how well they could move. The uniforms did not attempt to give any gender clues. One thing I noticed was that nearly all the female volleyball athletes on both teams wore their hair shoulder-length or longer, while none of the male football athletes wore their hair much longer than ear level. While none of it had anything to do with their performance, all of these athletes chose to include gender-revealing clues in their personal grooming.

Civic and social justice regarding sexuality and gender is an evolving thing. That it’s in flux and not affixed disturbs some people a great deal. We’ve progressed beyond the point where you can blackmail somebody about their sexuality, but we haven’t progressed beyond the point of trying to limit how gender-affirming medical procedures are performed and where by legislation. Recently, the Mississippi Legislature used the strong arm of withholding funds to force the University of Mississippi Hospital to shut down their gender-affirming clinic. You’d be surprised how often Mississippi legislatures think they know better than doctors.

In a way, it was considerably easier for people like Gore Vidal to deal with these issues than it is now. All he had to do was open the door a little bit, write a satirical novel, and then wait for people like William F. Buckley to threaten to assault him on national television to make his point. There are people, quite a lot of them, who would like to see the sexual and gender mores in America roll back to what they were in 1969 and are actively seeking that. I think they’re in for more of a fight than they realize, but I worry they will hurt innocent people along the way.