The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [86]
I know tons of transsexuals that were influenced by Jayne County, Man Enough to Be a Woman. Before Hedwig, before Rocky Horror, she was a transsexual that was playing with The Ramones at CBGB. Rocky Horror was one of the things that saved my life. That song, “Don’t Dream It, Be It.” Every time my transition got scary, every time I was physically assaulted, raped, everything that happened to me, that phrase from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, “Don’t Dream It, Be It,” kept me going.
Q: So you’re saying that cultural influences affected your choices, or at least helped you deal with the choices that you’ve made?”
I think that time and place have lot to do with it. I grew up in a very rigid, very conservative family. I’m the only person that’s still alive in my family that’s not a born-againer. I talk to my mother maybe once a year. What’s to talk about? She’s kind of gotten over it, but she used to attribute my being transgendered to demonic possession. So once a year, at Christmas, I’d send her a card and sign it “Chelsea, Princess of Darkness,” and forget about her for the rest of the year. What are you going to do?
You’ve got to keep the books in balance. The gender thing was a bit more extreme. She thought that smoking pot and listening to the Grateful Dead were signs of demonic possession too. I used to be a Deadhead, and I was playing punk rock at CBGBs too.
Q: Let’s talk a bit about Transy House. How did Transy House get started?”
RUSTY: Transy House grew out of our thoughts on The Ramones. [Laughter] Actually, it just sort of evolved. The genesis of it was that Chelsea had been out for a long time. I was coming out around ’91 or ’92 and was basically heavy into transition then. And Chelsea told me that she was one of the last daughters of Sylvia Rivera, and Chelsea told me about STAR House [a refuge for homeless transgender youth], and that was sort of filed away in the back of my mind. We were living in Bellmore, Long Island, then, in an apartment, and after I came out definitively in ’93 and was teaching as a woman at Hofstra, I wanted to buy a house rather than live in an apartment. Since my daughter and son were living in Brooklyn then, with their other parent, I wanted to be close to them. Chelsea and I walked the streets of Brooklyn looking for a cheap place and we found the house that we live in now, and I bought it. And another person, Julia Murray, was living with us and she went through transition about the same time I did. So Julia, Chelsea, and I moved in around August 1, 1994, and then gradually other people … it was sort of unique for trans people to own a house in New York, so other people started to say, “I need a place to live. Can I come and live with you?” I think that one of the first was Christiana, and there’s been a dribble of people that have come and gone over the years.
Transy House just gradually evolved because it was a safe space for transpeople. A lot of transpeople who were fighting their way through their lives would come in and all of a sudden … Bingo! In this house transpeople are in the majority, and no longer is it “You’re weird,” but this is a normal environment for you. And people really appreciated that. They came during transition. A lot of lesbians also stopped by too, people who were just gender variant in any way.
Then also Chelsea and I were the mainstays of an organization called the Metropolitan Gender Network [MGN]. Because we had computers and telephones