Respect Your Elders: Carter Bachmann Came Out as Trans at 64

Respect Your Elders is a monthly column in which Lou Barrett sits down with an LGBTQ+ elder in their community and gets to know them over a cup of tea. Or, a Zoom session for social distancing! 

Carter Bachmann, age 64, was a real treat. He came out as a trans man earlier this year. Carter is funny, and a great storyteller.

“This is something I’ve waited for since I was six years old,” he told me before his dog, Kaia, started barking, and he had to tend to her. “My sister was my mother’s daughter. I was dad’s kid. His nicknames for me were sport and buddy.”

Like many of the people I’ve interviewed, Carter referenced Christine Jorgensen as the only trans person of note at the time he was figuring out who he was. So, talking about feeling different didn’t feel like an option for him.

Carter noticed his attraction to women as a kid, and kissed a girl for the first time at the age of eight. Carter told another story about a little who girl fell off the monkey bars and broke her leg. None of the kids on the playground knew what to do. Carter took the initiative to pick her up and carry her to the nurse. “I’ve always been taking care of people younger or smaller than me. It’s been like that my whole life.”

Carter’s first girlfriend outed him in high school, and his parents didn’t take it well. “They didn’t stop loving me, but they made things very difficult for me.”

He ended up moving in with his girlfriend for three months because of the friction their relationship caused with his family. “Right around Christmas time I started getting a big case of the guilts. I knew I should at least make the attempt to go to Christmas dinner. I called my uncle and he said you better get your ass over here or I’ll come get you.” His uncle knew Carter’s mother was heartbroken, and all she wanted for Christmas was to see her kid.

After breaking up with the girlfriend who outed him, Carter started dating a new girl. They’d often spend weekends at a gay bar that held weekly drag shows.

Carter became a regular at the bar, and became friends with many of the queens, including a guy named John whose drag name was Dana. Carter got t-shirts made that said Danamanians to support his friend and would join his friends at a table that ran alongside the catwalk. A dozen or so of John’s friends would sit there every weekend. “That was our table. Period. End of discussion.”
After a Saturday show, not long after Carter’s second breakup, John and Carter sat in the dressing room. John said, “I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do. Actually, no I’m not,” and started putting makeup on Carter’s face. He’d decided Carter looked like Liza Minnelli. John gave him a dress and heels and taught him how to walk.

“Oh, by the way, I’ve entered you in a contest. It’s two weeks away,” John told him.

“Oh my god!” Carter yelled out to me just as he had to John decades earlier.

On March 12th, 1978 he participated in the contest, and he won. That started his career as a drag performer. He didn’t need a wig. He just cut his hair, and did his makeup.

In 1981, in the middle of a recession, Carter moved to Cleveland to get better work. After couch surfing, he eventually found his own place on Coventry, right in my current neighborhood.

On September 27th, 1981 he met a girl through a friend. They all went out dancing together, and she and Carter hit it off. She was straight. One of Carter’s friends was her dance partner and decided to switch partners so Carter could dance with her. She was nervous, but they had an immediate connection.

They got married just three months later, and had been married for 35 years until she passed away almost four years ago.

Carter brought her into the drag scene. “Do you know like, everybody?” his wife asked after seeing how limitless Carter’s network seemed to be.

Carter’s wife, Ronnie, didn’t want him to do drag. “I was the masculine one and she wanted to keep it that way,” he explained.

A few months after she passed, Carter resurrected Liza Minnelli. One of his friends suggested he come to an event dressed as Liza. He did, and upon showing up to the bar he sat down next to Lady J., an famous queen in the local scene, who immediately told him he needed to be in one of her shows.

Carter started preparing and needed to pick a new name. He initially chose Terri Mann.

“That’s pretty plain,” a friend told him.

“Not if you introduce me right,” Carter added. “I’m Miss Terri Mann.”

After playing with Liza for a little bit, someone suggested he tried performing as a king.

At the time, he’d only done so once before, in 1979. This was my favorite story.

John’s manager told Carter that he needed him for a project. He needed Carter to play John’s date to a pageant, and John didn’t know. They got Carter a tuxedo and an old fashioned medical abdominal binder, and brought up a makeup artist from Miami to do his makeup with facial hair.

It took 4 hours.

“I went down. I got in the limo. Picked up John. He had no idea who I was.”

“Wow!” I laughed.

He said for the week prior, he stuck his face in the freezer and got himself a cold so his voice would be lower.

They did the promo and went on with the night. They took the limo and John invited him up still not knowing who his king was. “I knew all his moves. I knew his pickup lines. I knew exactly what he’d do when we got in, and he did not disappoint.”

Carter laughed. “He told me to make myself comfortable and offered a drink, and said I’m gonna get into something more comfortable. He came back and laid on the couch and was being all sexy and shit. I decided I had to tell him or this poor boy was never gonna talk to me again.”

Carter went back to the bathroom and took off all his makeup and the facial hair and put on a t-shirt and shorts. He went back to the couch where John had laid his head back, awaiting his date. Carter slowly walked up, and kissed John’s forehead, “John?” he asked. John jumped up, “What are you doing here!”

“Honey,” I told him, “I’ve been with you all night.”

To close, I asked Carter what advice he had for younger LGBTQ+ people.

“Having presented a woman, a lesbian, and then come out as transgender man… don’t be afraid. You’re not alone. We are worthwhile. We are forever. We are everywhere. All you have to do is look for us. Be who you are. Take the time to figure out who you are. Don’t take drugs, cuz they don’t help. Figure out who you want to be, and then be that. If you’re worried the timing isn’t right, wait til it’s right. You know you. You can still be you. Just remember, you’re not alone.”

Carter was so entertaining and had me laughing the whole time. Talking to him was a joy.

Respect Your Elders: Tea with Trans Playwright and Actress Christine Howey

Respect Your Elders is a monthly column in which Lou Barrett sits down with an LGBTQ+ elder in their community and gets to know them over a cup of tea. Or, a Zoom session for social distancing! 

74-year-old Christine Howey and I met at Phoenix Coffee on Lee Road on the east side of Cleveland. Christine is most known around Cleveland for creating a one-woman show, Exact Change, to talk about her experience as a trans woman, which she adapted into a film. Her daughter, Noelle Howey, also wrote a book called Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods — My Mothers, My Father’s, and Mine, which, like her mother’s play and film, gained nationwide attention. In fact, Christine and her daughter ended up on Oprah’s couch.

Christine serves as the Executive Director of Literary Cleveland, an integral part of Cleveland’s literary community. Literary Cleveland provides writing classes and workshops to new and experienced writers throughout the Cleveland area.

Howey came out as trans in 1990 when she was 45. “I came out here in Cleveland, my hometown. Back then, we didn’t have the word transgender,” she told me. “I thought about leaving town, not having to drag my past along with me, but I was political enough to think there was nothing wrong with this and I wanted to make a statement.”

When I asked if Christine knew other trans people when she came out, she told me about a local community of crossdressers and transgender people. She attended a yearly festival in Provincetown with them.

I asked her more about creating artwork about her identity.

“After I was about 20 years into my life as Christine, I was getting very frustrated by seeing that nothing much was changing. Transgender people were still being assaulted, killed, committing suicide. I felt that since I was a writer, I was a performer, I could put that together and maybe do a show and break down some barriers.”

The show is composed of 40 poems that make up the voices of her family, friends, and others.

When the show started, Christine was performing five times a week. She eventually performed in New York, where she received great reviews. She also created a film after fielding ongoing performance requests from universities

Christine decided to come out in her 40s, encouraged by some of the women she met in Provincetown. Older generations of trans people often lived closeted. I asked if she’d considered that. “I couldn’t put my history away without putting my daughter away and that wasn’t gonna happen,” she told me.

Staying closeted, she told me, “was a rational alternative to god knows what could happen if you come out publicly.” She shared how she was fired from a job, “For no reason, because that’s Ohio.” To this day, with the exception of state employment, Ohio does not have statewide legislation that protects LGBTQ+ people from wrongful firings.

I asked if there was any media she saw as a young person that helped her figure out who she was.

“When I was 7, I saw a headline in the newspaper, ‘Soldier Becomes a Woman,’ about Christine Jorgensen.” She recalled the memory, smiling.

When Christine was in high school in the ’60s, she tried to do research about trans people in the library. “I would go to the card catalog and look up ‘homosexual’ or ‘transexual,’ and they all had a red dot. A red dot meant it was confined to a cage on the top floor of the library and only professionals, doctors, psychologists, professors could access that information.”

“When you try to find out who you are and can’t find any information, the message is, ‘you’re something really awful,’ because this can’t even be spoken of in polite company.” Christine talked about all of the feelings she’d internalized from trying to do that research. “You never really shake that,” she told me.

People say, ‘Must be interesting. You’ve been both a man and a woman,’ when in actuality I was never really a man. I studied so hard to be a man.” She went on to describe her experience with sports and swearing, her attempts at conforming. She wasn’t ‘girly’ so no one ever suspected she was trans.

During her 15 -ear acting career, she always played the villain. “I was always the bad guy, the villain, homicidal maniac, the devil, Richard Nixon.”

I was very entertained by this. “What does that do to a person’s psychology?”

“Oh, it was fun. First of all, they’re great roles. Every actor knows the villains are the best roles.” She continued, “I figured if I could fool people so well, eventually this will just click in my real life and it’ll feel natural.”

I asked if her acting career influenced the way she saw herself at all.

“Not really,” she answered, “I learned how to be an actor and play a role. When I made the transition, I had to learn to be myself”

Lou and Christine

We briefly talked about Christine’s relationship with her parents. She shared a beautiful story about her mother, which is included in Exact Change but still made her cry.

“She didn’t know how to deal with me as Christine. She said, ‘I have all of these friends who know I have two sons. How am I supposed to introduce you? What if we’re out to dinner and a friend comes over? How about I introduce you as my niece, Christine?’” She continued, “I said okay, if that’s what you have to do, that’s fine. Then we went out to dinner, and a friend of hers stopped by and she said, without a beat, ‘This is my daughter.’”

I asked Christine what advice she had for younger trans people.

“I think it’s hard for people in a different way now,” she offered. “It’s sometimes so accepting that when people start exploring their gender, people say, ‘Okay, let’s go shopping. Tell us who you are.’ They want answers right away, but it’s okay if it still takes time for people to figure out who they are.'”

Respect Your Elders: Zoom With 72-Year-Old Therapist Antonio Feo

Respect Your Elders is a monthly column in which Lou Barrett sits down with an LGBTQ+ elder in their community and gets to know them over a cup of tea. Or, a Zoom session for social distancing! 

Antonio Feo is a 72 year old gay man who came out around nineteen years old. During the ’60s, Antonio would use a fake ID to get into gay bars. The bar he went to, Anne’s Bar in Warren, Ohio, presented itself as a straight bar. It was owned by a lesbian, and gay people went there, but they weren’t allowed to touch or dance with same-sex partners. Antonio assumes the owner had paid off the cops to prevent raids; however, the shame and fear was so great that patrons still kept to themselves.

“I think that was pretty much common at that time, because we still had not had Stonewall,” he told me over Zoom, “so bars would present as a straight bar, and a lot of gay men went but you couldn’t do too much.”

Antonio is a therapist who started working in the field in his mid-20s. He moved to Cleveland to be a part of a larger gay culture, a freer culture, and to go to Cleveland State University. He has dedicated much of his career to serving transgender people. When he first started his studies, he was told he’d never encounter a trans person. Little did he know he’d end up working with trans people consistently since the ’80s.

“When I was at graduate school, we would look at pathology. One of the ‘pathologies’ we were reading about was being transgender. The professor said, ‘This is not going to be on the test. Don’t worry about it. You don’t even have to read about it. This is such a rare occurrence that you will never see it in your practice.’”

“Wow,” I breathed. “And this was what year?”

Antonio reminded me that this was in the ’80s. He was working at Laurelwood Hospital, and had always worked with clients with sexual disorders and sexual dysfunctions. Not long after, a patient in the chemically dependent unit was referred to him. The patient was 35 or 40 years old and liked to dress in women’s clothing. Antonio told the patient he’d never met anyone similar in his career, and didn’t know how to help.

“I says, ‘Well look,'” he paused, “You teach me and I’ll take care of you. I will do the best I can. You teach me what it’s all about. And she did. She starting teaching me what it meant to be transgender.”

There were two social clubs for crossdressers and trans people in Cleveland at that time, where crossdressers went and brought their wives. Antonio would go to meetings there. His first patient referred Antonio to one of her friends, and then that person referred him to their friends. Suddenly, Antonio was predominantly working with trans people. The concept of being trans became more well known and Antonio found the Harry Benjamin Society, which later became World Professional Association for Transgender Health or WPATH. They set the standards for care for working with the transgender population.

I asked if he ever found himself working with gay men since he’s gay and people often seek therapists who share their identities.

“When AIDS hit, I started working with different issues. People were mourning their loved ones, they were anxious about getting AIDS themselves. It was a horrible time,” he said.

Antonio has been uniquely exposed to the trials of LGBTQ+ people. While many of us know that queer folks are more likely to have alcohol and drug dependencies, depression, and anxiety, many don’t know the severity. We’re more likely to smoke as well. A lot of this is because cigarette and alcohol companies have targeted us to market their products, and a lot of it is due to the pervasive bar culture that’s so much a part of gay life.

For Antonio, he was seeing the result of these decisions in combination with shame, fear, and trauma. He works hard to remove as much of that shame as possible, and to offer patients healthier choices. Like working with gay and trans people, working with chemically dependent folks has been a big part of his career.

I offered some thoughts on this topic. “I think some people, personally, if they’re seeing a lot of this they might not see it as a problem. If people are just going to the bars or whatever, they may not be thinking, ‘Oh, wow, our community has a real issue with alcohol.’”

Antonio agreed. “Oh no they don’t, they don’t. It exists. It’s a way of coping. As a professional, people come to me and I ask how much they’re drinking.”

I switched gears, and brought up how when the pandemic first shook our lives it was often compared to the AIDS epidemic. I asked if he thought that was a fair comparison.

He didn’t hesitate: “No, it’s not. AIDS had shame and guilt. People called it God’s wrath on gay men. You don’t get COVID through anal sex or sharing a needle. You get it through saying, ‘Hi, how are you?’ and coughing.”

Antonio now owns a private practice in Westlake, Ohio. His practice is gay friendly, and caters to trans people. I asked him about his staff and the requirements he has for straight therapists, and he explained that of course they have to be LGBTQ+ friendly and need to be able to offer their clients “unconditional love.”

“We’re getting a lot of bisexual folks figuring out who they are now,” he told me. Antonio talked about how bisexual people face unique stigma in the LGBTQ+ community and oppression outside of it, and went on to talk about how fluid identities are becoming more and more understood.

It became clear early on in our conversation that Antonio was committed to the needs of the larger queer community and not just the gay community. I added, “It’s interesting that with bisexuality, that if you’re a woman who identifies as bisexual, people just assume you’re straight. And if you’re a man who identifies as bisexual, people assume you’re just gay.”

Antonio laughed, “Yes, yes. The binary is so boring.”

I asked him what advice he’d give to younger LGBTQ+ people.

“I would tell them give yourself and people you love unconditional love, and to make space for yourself in this world and others. Be present for yourself and others. It’s not asking a whole lot.”

Respect Your Elders: Zoom With Lesbian Activist Phyllis “Seven” Harris

Respect Your Elders is a monthly column in which Lou Barrett sits down with an LGBTQ+ elder in their community and gets to know them over a cup of tea. Or, a Zoom session for social distancing! 

Phyllis “Seven” Harris, age 54, the Executive Director of the LGBT Center of Greater Cleveland, is the center’s first black lesbian director. She began acting as Director in 2012, and has since taken the center to amazing new heights.

Most recently, the center acquired a beautiful new building on Cleveland’s west side that really signals to the community that we’re not hiding and are proud of who we are. However, because of COVID-19 Seven and I met from the comfort of our own homes via Zoom. We began our meeting discussing the pandemic and how it has impacted the center’s work.

“My activist flame is fired up,” Seven started. “I told my staff, board, volunteers — this is when your activist wings are on. It’s time to act up, because we cannot be left behind in this in terms of our vulnerability.” By the end of our interview, I would come to truly know how long that activist flame has been burning for Seven.

The center’s existing programming is still up and running, but is now virtual. They’ve also introduced new programming in the wake of COVID-19. They currently have 25 people working to call LGBT elders with scripted questions to help assess their needs during this time. LGBT elders are not only an at-risk group for COVID-19, but are also more likely than non-LGBT elders to live alone and not have supportive family members.

The center is also delivering safer sex kits and Prep copay cards to folks in need, because as Seven explains “the sex work hasn’t ended. People need to be safe.” While so many businesses are running on standby, organizations like the LGBT Center of Greater Cleveland are working to ensure the safety of our people.

Seven spoke about Kimberlé Crenshaw, a lawyer and founder of critical race theory, who famously described how “all of the -isms are interconnected. So as we’re doing this work around sexism and gender oppression and rape culture, you gotta think about racism and classism and all of those other things.” This intersectional understanding of social justice became the inspiration for Seven’s career.

While talking about COVID-19 is difficult to avoid, we soon turned to other aspects of Seven’s life.

Seven knew she was gay for some time before her first girlfriend at 19. “I came out to a community of lesbian feminists, some separatists, and Cleveland Heights had lots of amazing role models of women just being amazing. Because I had community, I could grow and learn and thrive and figure out who I am.”

Later, while in her late twenties, Seven moved to San Francisco to work as a pharmacy tech at the height of the AIDS epidemic. She got a job at a Walgreens on 18th and Castro Street.

“I could see fear in people’s eyes, so I learned to be respectful, to keep my gaze in a way that was gentle and was soft as they were paying for these drugs that may or may not work, and it was so expensive. They’d write a check, and I’d have to look at their driver’s license, and their photo was from three years ago when they looked vastly different. But I’d keep my gaze soft, and make sure I put their change or the pen in their hand and not on the counter.”

“You were showing ‘I”m not afraid of you,’” I said.

“Yes, I’m not afraid of you. I’m rooting for you, and I’m so sorry this is happening.” Seven soon began volunteering to do home visits for people with HIV.

Around a year into her stay in San Francisco, she decided to come back to Cleveland because she missed her network and wanted to continue the work here. Building on what she learned in San Francisco, she started providing safer sex workshops through the AIDS Task Force in Cleveland.

Seven was soon scouted by the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center, and started working there as well, working part-time at both organizations which happened to be across the street from each other. “That grew my experience around prevention education, and learning how to not be judgmental and all the other -isms people with privilege can be.”

I talked to Seven about how she seems to have been a “for lifer” in non-profit work, and about how people with the drive to do anti-oppression work seem to have an internal resilience and sense of confidence at their core.

“Yeah. I remember looking at myself in the mirror and going ‘Oh my god. I’m a lesbian? That’s what I am? Geez, why?’ But only for a second. Only for a second. Because I had great role models.”

Seven continued, “The game changer for me, I was gonna do what I was gonna do, but what helped me around my confidence in general was that my mother didn’t reject me.” She shared the importance of having parents who accept you, adding, “[My mom] basically said ‘I know who you are. You came from my body. You’re my child.’ I truly believe with my whole heart if LGBTQ+ people have the privilege to have parents who are willing to do the work around their heteronormative view of who has privilege and who doesn’t and who gets love or who doesn’t, then a lot more of us will be alright and the whole world would be too. We wouldn’t have all of the issues we have and the health disparities. So get it together. Love your children.”

Seven has two children of her own. “I tell people I birthed my son, and I caught my daughter.”
I mentioned how she’s had such a massive career and a family, and how people always ask women how they have both and don’t ask men. With men it’s assumed there’s a woman behind the scenes making it all work. It’s also harder for queer people to have children. I wondered how she’d been able to make work, and make it work well.

“I’ve been able to raise healthy whole children through breakups and divorce and all of the messy stuff adults do because of all of the support of many people.” Seven went on to list her ex partner’s family, her children’s schools, and her friends. Leaning on many people for support is unique to queer family systems and other family types that deviate from the heterosexual nuclear family. I think children can be much better as a result of it. Maybe we’ll have the studies to show us that one day.

To close, I asked Seven what advice she’d give to younger LGBTQ+ people.

“Keep on living,” Seven said, “Things are real in terms of what you feel and what you’re experiencing right now. The idea is to continue to grow and develop into a healthy and whole individual, and to understand that we are part of a movement. We’re marginalized individuals who are stronger together. If you can get there and mitigate some of the things that hold us back like getting caught up with addiction, self-medicating, not taking care of ourselves mentally and physically. If you can get through that and find support, on the other side of that is a remarkable adult life. So keep on living. Get on the other side of this. There’s more.”

Respect Your Elders: Tea with Trans Lesbian Poet Barbara Marie Minney

Respect Your Elders is a monthly column in which Lou Barrett sits down with an LGBTQ+ elder in their community and gets to know them over a cup of tea. 

I first met Barbara, age 66, at a poetry reading in Akron. That night, she told the audience that she was so grateful to have found a sense of community there since she and her wife have often struggled with finding community. While I assumed this was because they were a trans lesbian couple — Barbara is trans and her wife is cis — I would soon learn that there was so much more to her story. Eager to find out more, we arranged a meeting.

I got to her beautiful home on a Sunday. It seemed like the home of a couple that has been together for 38 years; it was well-decorated and littered with photos of the two of them and their friends. Barbara and her wife, Marilyn, made me some peppermint tea. Marilyn handed Barbara a mug. She placed it under the Keurig, and then Marilyn added the tea bag. They moved together effortlessly, and had perfected their system.Then Marilyn left us alone to chat on the couch in their living room.

Barbara came out as a trans woman at the age of 63 through an article in the Akron Beacon Journal. She started cross-dressing in her teens, but never thought of it as related to her identity until she started seeing a therapist in her ’60s. For her, cross-dressing started out as a sexual thing. Once it stopped feeling overtly sexual to cross-dress, she realized how fundamental to her identity it really was.

She later met another cross-dresser on FetLife and attended an event at a “seedy dive bar” in Warren called Girl’s Night Out. A week later, Barbara and her wife got brunch with the cross-dresser she’d befriended and her wife, and they started attending Girl’s Night Out events and similar events together.

I addressed how so many relationships don’t survive transitions, and that it seemed to be such a testament to their connection and marriage that they were still so close. “Do you think bringing her in right away and having her be a part of your transition, and going to Girl’s Night Out helped?”

“It was a process,” Barbara admitted. They made a YouTube video to share their story. Barbara said it was difficult in the beginning, when she was not living as a woman full-time and was sometimes wearing men’s clothes, sometimes women’s clothes. However, the experience brought them closer to each other and they ultimately remarried as wives. Both Barbara and Marilyn now identify as lesbians.

Barbara said she’s found community in the Akron poetry scene more than anywhere else.

We continued talking about her relationship with Marilyn. She said they had to figure out, “how to relate to each other sexually.”

She said they’ve been reading a book called How to Fuck a Trans Woman. I asked if it was “fetishy,” because I didn’t realize immediately that it was written by a trans woman. She was talking about Fucking Trans Women by Mira Bellwether

“It’s not fetishy, but wouldn’t bother us at all because we spent some time in the BDSM community too.”

“Yeah I like wanna talk about that,” I laughed. She’d alluded to this earlier, and I really wanted to dig in.

We both agreed that people who are really sexual think about sex from the time they’re kids. We also both agreed that glass dildos are pieces of art. Barbara and I proceeded to have an in-depth conversation about these topics that I’m going to keep to myself out of respect for Barbara and her wife’s privacy. I just wanted to give a little tease.

Barbara got me another tea and we continued chatting.

From the talks I’ve had with older LGBTQ+ people, there seems to be controversy around people waiting until they’re older to come out.

While coming out at 63 may look different from coming out at 15 like I did, it doesn’t need to be seen as lesser than. We discussed how Barbara’s work as an attorney was so important to her, and that coming out publicly could have jeopardized her career. Her decision to have her career be what she wanted it to be makes perfect sense. We can only hope that over time people won’t feel a need to choose between having a meaningful career and living authentically.

To close, I asked Barbara what advice she had for younger trans women.

“I have a little bit of concern about these young people saying they’re trans at an early age. At the same time, I would say if you really feel that and feel that’s authentically who you are then go for it. Transitioning later in life like I did… there’s a lot of regrets. I think, ‘Could I have been as happy, and having the fun and joy in my life that I have now back then?’ Just be sure, and then move forward in a way that allows you to be yourself and allows you to live authentically. Don’t hold back. Be who you are. And don’t be afraid to embrace who you are and say who you are. It took me a long long time to learn that lesson, so don’t make the mistake that I made.” She laughed.

I left her house with a smile and a book about the basics on BDSM ethics. It was amazing getting to know her, and to discover the many ways we’re similar. We left each other agreeing that the conversation was “fucking incredible.”

Respect Your Elders: Tea and Trans History With Jacob Nash

Respect Your Elders is a monthly column in which Lou Barrett sits down with an LGBTQ+ elder in their community and gets to know them over a cup of tea. 

I met up with Jacob Nash at Algebra Tea House, one of my favorite places in Cleveland. It’s a staple on the east side, in the heart of Little Italy. They make Middle Eastern food, and have shelves full of spices, home goods, and loose leaf teas. It’s super cozy and relaxing. I’d only seen Jacob once before in person, speaking at a trans rally in the Fall of 2018. As I walked into the tea house, his big scraggly beard caught my eye. Though this was our first time formally meeting, we managed to get talking right way.

Jacob came out as trans in 1998 at the age of 33. He knew he was different from his female peers since he was young, but didn’t have the language to describe how he felt. He later went on to see a documentary called What Sex Am I? that included a trans man, that clarified his experience.

Soon after, he started his journey with transitioning. At the time, he lived in New Hampshire. In order to receive approval for hormone therapy, he had to drive three hours to Connecticut to see five doctors: a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a social worker, an endocrinologist, and a primary care doctor. He got approved for hormones on his 33rd birthday.

Jacob has always been very spiritual. If he thought God would have a problem with him transitioning, he would’ve never done it. As we talked, he shared with me his moment of clarity and acceptance of his own identity.

Shortly after his trip to the clinic, Jacob asked God to show him a sign while on his way to check the mail. When he got to his mailbox, he found his approval letter for his transition. It was the sign he needed.

I asked Jacob for more clarification about his journey to self-understanding. “You said you knew about trans women, but you didn’t know about trans men. Why do you think that was?”

He pondered. “Well, I think because I didn’t really think about it.” Jacob elaborated about how trans women have often been portrayed in the media as a spectacle, appearing on shows like Jerry Springer. “As far as trans men, I think society just often thinks women can be tomboys and that’s okay. I was seen as a tomboy for years. It felt much more acceptable for a woman to wear men’s clothes than it is for men to wear women’s clothes.”

Jacob Nash

We talked about how gender nonconformity is treated differently when its masculine verses feminine. I offered how androgyny has become almost synonymous with masculinity, because of the styles we consider gender bending or androgynous.

“Its seen as the highest form of power,” Jacob started. “We still live in a culture where masculinity, manhood, being a man is the number one thing. We minimize and degrade women and girls from the time boys are yeigh high. The message to boys is, ‘You don’t want to be like a girl.’ So many trans men feel a pressure to take on toxic parts of masculinity in order to be seen as more ‘male.'”

He continued. “Until we kind of come into our own and realize… now I’m gonna shed this thing that society says I’m supposed to be in regard to my identity and my masculinity and my manhood. I’m gonna take all that off and just be me.”

Jacob met his wife, Erin Barr, one month after his first shot of T. “My wife has been an out butch lesbian since she was 16. You don’t mess with my wife.”

Throughout our conversation, he described his wife with so much love and admiration. It’s clear that they really have been a team in advocating for his rights, and their rights as a couple. Their relationship gained media traction in the early 00’s when they were refused a marriage license.

“We applied for our marriage license. It said I was male. And it was denied.”

“On what basis?”

“Because they said it was a same-sex marriage.”

“But how did they know?” I was intrigued. We’d found a rhythm, starting our next thoughts before the other finished.

They knew, despite the fact that his birth certificate was corrected to say male, because Jacob had legally changed his name there.

Jacob said that the magistrate wanted to see what his birth certificate said. After seeing it, he said, “It doesn’t matter what your birth certificate says. The state of Ohio goes by chromosomes.”

“Noooo! That’s such a wild thing to say,” I practically shouted.

“Right. They don’t even do blood tests, but he’s saying, ‘We go by chromosomes,’” Jacob scoffed.

That started a two-year long court battle. Their story has been documented in numerous magazines.

At the same time that Jacob and Erin were fighting for their right to get married, a trans man in Florida was fighting for custody of his kids after he and his wife got divorced. His name is Michael Kantaras. The court ruled in his favor, and he won custody.

“So it was really interesting. I think it was one of the few times that trans men got that much visibility.”

Jacob never seemed to hesitate in his decision to publicize their case to help the cause. I got the sense that Jacob has been fighting for himself and for others for a long time. I then learned that advocacy work has been important to Jacob ever since he came out. He was the first trans person on a local steering committee for the Human Rights Campaign and he also started Margie’s Hope in Akron, Ohio, an organization that offers assistance and support to trans individuals through things like support groups for trans kids, parents of trans kids, and spouses of trans people.

To wrap up our conversation, I asked Jacob how he felt younger people’s trans experiences differed from his, or what he thought younger trans people should know.

Jacob closed by saying that young people should value their elders, and I took that to heart. I am in awe of how much I learned from him in one conversation.

Respect Your Elders: Tea With Two-Spirit African-American and Haudenosaunee Writer M. Carmen Lane

Respect Your Elders is a monthly column in which Lou Barrett sits down with an LGBTQ+ elder in their community and gets to know them over a cup of tea. 

M. Carmen Lane and I met on a Sunday afternoon in Cleveland Heights. Carmen is the founder of ATNSC: Center for Healing & Creative Leadership, “an urban retreat center and social practice experiment in holistic health, leadership development, Indigenous arts and culture” and the Akhsótha Gallery, located in the historic Buckeye-Shaker neighborhood. Carmen is also a birth/postpartum and end-of-life doula.  We met on the east side of Cleveland at Luna Bakery. Our city is very community driven with lots of long standing small businesses like Luna Bakery. The space is cozy, and full of really good sweets. Carmen wore a maroon sweater and a fedora. We’d never met, but their jewelry and black rimmed glasses led me to them.

“Coming out has always been a layered process for me,” Carmen told me over avocado toast.

Carmen, 44, is a two-spirit African-American Haudenosaunee artist and consultant. When they first came out, they were 19. A student, they were working towards their degree in Women’s Studies and identified as a black lesbian feminist. In their late 20s, they later came out as two-spirit.

“Two-Spirit is a shorthand, because it’s an English translation. It’s more like two ‘worlds’ or the totality of creation. So when someone says they’re two-spirit, it doesn’t mean half man/half woman or both man and woman. It’s like I’m male and female and not male and not female and I’m a man and I’m a woman — it’s all of these things that bridge space and time, because who we were and are and continue to be has been molested by colonization.”

Carmen talked about how as someone who was immersed in women of color feminism, the word “queer” never felt right for them. They see it as a word used by white gay men. Nonetheless, Carmen sometimes uses “queer” to bridge the gap between generations or “non-binary” when talking to non-Native people.

“Two-Spirit became an important word for me, because all of these commas and qualifiers didn’t feel good to me for myself and in the larger LGBT movement.”

They addressed how mainstream LGBT culture is informed by white LGBT people and their worldview. “The expectation is that my experience of being in a body that is brown is in addition to that worldview.”

Later, Carmen expanded on these ideas.

“Two-Spirit helped me to reclaim the whole of me that was also culture, because how we understand gender is culturally bound. So I reject the ways in which particularly white LGBT people get to define my norm and expect me to get on board with them. So I’m not particularly interested in tacking on Black or tacking on Indigenous to a very tiny white frame of gender identity, so a part of my coming out has also been about coming out to not locate myself within the larger LGBT community.”

We shifted between many topics throughout our conversation, but this was one we continued coming back to: The idea is that white queer often don’t see how it affects our experience of being gay or trans or lesbian etc. Because our culture is lived through the lens of whiteness, we aren’t forced to consider what that means for how we came to be who we are.

Carmen put this all into one concise statement. “I’ve never heard any kind of white queer or white trans person or a white nonbinary person say that their whiteness informs their meaning making around how they understand their gender and themselves.”

Carmen has also identified as butch for much of their life. They’ve always dated femmes. As a femme who exclusively dates transmasculine and gendernonconforming people, many of whom identify as butch, I’m always delighted to talk to someone who uses the word butch with pride. I also admit that I loved being able to ask Carmen questions about the butch experience that would be much harder to ask a lover.

They told me about how they wept while reading Stone Butch Blues with their friends. “We were crying like babies over this book. That’s not a fiction, and I think its still a reality for many people when it comes to folks who are masculine and cannot pass for straight or cisgender.”

We both agreed that there are issues with the ways that people discuss, or don’t discuss, butch/femme relationships.

Carmen offered, “I find, to my horror, a lot of critique through a lens of classism of butch/femme dynamics.”

I asked them to elaborate.

“I think given all the conversations we like to have around gender and gender variance at all, somehow butch/femme isn’t included in that,” Carmen continued, “That feels classist. That feels racist. It feels biased when it comes to creating a hierarchy of what kinds of gender variance is acceptable and can be visible, and it also erases the notion that butch/femme is also about gender identity and that gender is relational, and I think in a western context people want to make gender about themselves, and there’s no way to be gendered without being interconnected.”

While I’d thought about gender as performative, and something that can influence a reaction or an action, I hadn’t conceptualized it as relational. I said I’d need to give it some thought, and have been thinking about it every day since.

I continued with my agenda, “I hate people’s critiques of butch/femme relationships as heteronormative, because I think it’s such a simplified view of gender and what those relationships look like.”

“And it’s a view that’s absent of curiosity.”

Admittedly, I love talking to butches so that I can better understand how they feel about their femme counterparts in relationships.

Carmen talked about the powers femmes have. They also shared their opinion on one thing that can go wrong in butch/femme relationships. “Part of how a femme can break your heart is by both acknowledging your masculinity and then making your masculinity the problem.”

I haven’t stopped thinking about that since our conversation either.

While I have such a deep interest in relationships between butches and femmes, I knew our conversation was about many different things and turned my focus to other topics. As with the conversation on whiteness, we continued finding our way back to Carmen’s two-spirit identity and what it means for them.

Carmen shared that unlike queer people in Western society, two-spirit people are centered rather than marginalized. “I’m Mohawk and Tuscarora, and some of those teachings talk about two-spirit people being at the edge of the woods. That means you come to me. I don’t come to you. I don’t need to assimilate or bend in a direction that has nothing to do with what I’m responsible for in the community.”

After talking for almost an hour and a half, I asked what advice they had for the younger generation of queer people.

“To know their history, and to know the multiplicity of experience of those who came before them and decide the multiple ways that they get to express and grow over time… The advice more simply is to be curious in an intergenerational context, because it doesn’t matter how old you are — if you’re not curious about the other you’re gonna lose some learning, you’re gonna lose connection, and you’re gonna lose the nuance.”

Finally they said, “Do not have any expectation for the mainstream LGBT movement, but be clear about what your work is.”

I left our conversation feeling energized despite the chamomile tea I’d enjoyed. We can read all about queer history in books, but nothing beats talking to someone who lived it.

You can catch Carmen at their upcoming talk, Open the Door: Memory, Mourning, and the Ancestor as Foundation, at Northwestern  University on February 18th, or check out their exhibition, AMALA: She Could Not Stay (In Their Black Bodies), at the Praxis Fiber Workshop in Cleveland opening on February 7th. For more information, visit their website.