Even through the darkest daze
Be it thick or thin
Always someone marches brave
Here beneath my skin.
And constant craving has always been.
Maybe a great magnet pulls all souls towards truth
Or maybe it is life itself
Feeds wisdom to its youth.
And constant craving has always been. Constant craving.
– kd Laing, “Constant Craving”, from the recording Ingenue

There’s a hero if [...]

During my pre-adolescent years, gender was not a huge issue for me, aside from those times when my mother attempted to expose me to femininity. But when adolescence hit… I remember clearly telling my mother when I was 12 that I was never going to get married. I was deeply serious, and knew what I [...]

In Forest Grove, I reveled in living in a small-town atmosphere, with no lesbians around. I had crushes on several of my classmates at Pacific University, more often than not reciprocated, but the padlock was still firmly locked. Several straight female classmates pursued me, apparently not realizing what they were doing. This was the post-hippie [...]

The first few months I lived in Portland were wonderful. I made new friends, realizing I’d depended so much on Val and Tracy to provide me companionship, I had never developed friendships in my own right. My roommate Ivy had recently broken up with a lover, so we were both single. We discovered a mutual [...]

Sex had become an obsession with me, because I knew with certainty that the root of my problems in relationships lay in my warped view of sex. However, I did not yet realize there was a difference between sex and gender. My real obsession was with gender, and it played out through my sexuality. I [...]

I had just turned 31 when the Choir formed in October of 1986. The summer before the Choir formed, I had already decided to ride my bike once again to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, in 1987. I was planning to be gone for about five months, and now felt conflicted about this, as the [...]

That fall, I reconnected with the Choir. Erin, Liza and I became best of friends. I had never discussed relationships with anyone before, but I began to talk about my feelings more with Erin and Liza. I remember confessing to them that I always thought, on entering a relationship, “I wonder how this one is [...]

During the Choir season of 1994-95, we were working on a four-chorus, three-city concert tour, with groups from Seattle and Vancouver, B.C. The concert, “Under One Sky,” was the most ambitious project the Choir had undertaken to date. Liza was the overall coordinator of the event. I was coordinating the housing for the other choruses [...]

Lucy had heard bits and pieces from Alan while he was living there, but had not had an opportunity to hear the story from my viewpoint. A number of friends had helped me move a bedroom’s worth of stuff over to Lucy’s, and when they left, we both sat down and looked at each other [...]

I had fired my therapist Margaret in late summer, and was in search of a new therapist. Alan had found the only trans support group in town, and thus this was not an option for me. He got there first. I tried not to resent this, but I needed support also and was feeling very [...]