In August, most leases were up in the college condos in Gainesville, and the graduates moved back home. Dumpsters were filled to the brim with their discarded belongings. You could find anything in there—TVs, furniture, video games, stereos. Hell, I found money; jars of loose change just tossed in the trash. From dumpster diving, and stealing from roommates’ laundry, I amassed a small collection of women’s clothes which I stored in my room, along with a wig I’d stealthily purchased from a beauty store.
By then, I had heard a few more stories about men medically transitioning into women, though mostly in sensationalized “sex change” tabloid headlines. I had also viewed a VHS copy of the borderline snuff film Faces of Death, a video compilation of actual human deaths, animal attacks, plane crashes, and executions, set to a soundtrack of death metal music, which also featured a full view cut-by-cut recording of a male to female sexual reassignment surgery. Though absolutely terrifying, this also fascinated me.
Even at the 911 House, there was no one I felt I could confide in with my secret about my gender confusion. Sex politics and queer culture were openly discussed in the radical activist punk scene, but gender identity was still a taboo. The acceptance and open-minded politics were part of what drew me to it. Show spaces were supposed to be open to everyone regardless of age, race, class, sex, or sexual preference, but for the most part it was just white kids oblivious to the privilege they came from. It also became clear to me that while these were the politics heralded by the scene, often they were not actually practiced.
Whenever the chance arose to put my dresses on behind a locked door in the 911 House, I would jump at it. If I didn’t have privacy, I would sit on the curb in front of the house alone, chain-smoking rolled cigarettes while drinking, my lips turning black from the constant opening of the painted screw-top bottle. I’d sit and drink and write in my journal.
August 10, 2000—Gainesville, FL
I pull a dress down over my shoulders, following it down my body with my hands. I turn off the light. The lace is exciting to touch. Thigh-high black pantyhose held up by a black garter belt. Black silk panties hiding everything I want to forget exists. Fresh from the shower, my skin is clean and young, hairless on the chest and stomach. There is nothing virgin about me.
A matching black bra from Victoria’s Secret wrapped around my chest, hooked in the back, holds rolled-up socks in place as my breasts. I have perfected this technique over time. Socks work the best. They don’t bounce when you walk, there’s no weight, but they look real in form. With the bra tight enough and the skin of my chest lifted and jammed just right, I have something like cleavage.
The door to my bedroom is shut and locked. I have double and triple-checked. I light up a joint and sit down on the edge of my bed, cross my legs. I inhale long and slow. The high hits, I light a cigarette and suddenly become real. I become her.
By the time I finish my cigarette, my eyes have adjusted to the dark. I stand up and look down at my body. Beautiful under the kindest light. I walk back and forth across the room. The feel of pantyhose covering my legs, the way the dress brushes the back of my thighs as I walk. These small sensations intoxicate me with want.
My broad shoulders, big hands, Adam’s apple, the stubble breaking through on my chin, my big ears, the cock tucked between my legs, all of these things cease to exist here in the dark of this room. I dare not speak to ruin the illusion.
The high always reaches a peak. On the comedown, reality starts to kick back in. I realize the time again. The sun’s always rising in the sky somewhere. Time to undress and face the day.
I tell myself every time that it’s the last time. I swear, just this one last time and then never again.
Deep, deep down inside of me I know that I am not a mistake. I do not feel sick. I do not feel like a pervert. I am not gay. I am not a fag. I am not a drag queen. I am not a tranny. I am not a transsexual. I am not transgender. I am just her, a daughter, a sister, someone’s girlfriend, just like all the other pretty college girls on campus.
August 23, 2000—Gainesville, FL
Quiet night on the curb. Rolling tobacco and Hurricane Malt Liquor. It’s been three days now since I started taking the birth control pills I found in the bathroom. I’m not sure whose they were, but they definitely weren’t being used. I can’t tell if I feel anything. What will happen if I keep taking these? Will I grow breasts? I want to grow breasts. I want to know what would it be like to know my body as a girl.
What would it feel like to wear this dress? What would it feel like to have a boy take this dress off of me? What would the weight of breasts being released from a bra feel like; to have my nipples kissed and sucked? What would it be like to be aroused? What would it feel like to run a finger across my cunt? What would it be like to penetrate myself with that finger and feel my own wetness? What would it feel like to have a boy touch me? What would it be like to have my hips held firmly? What would it be like to spread my legs for a boy? What would it be like to have a boy cum inside of me? What would it feel like to be loved?
There are times when I can push the thought out but it always comes back. What if I were to pursue it? What if I were to have electrolysis to remove my facial hair? What if I started taking hormones? What if I had surgeries, my face, breast implants, tracheal shave? Bottom surgery too? Not that I could ever afford it. I can barely afford cigarettes right now. Would I ever be a pretty girl? Would I be happy as an ugly girl? Would anyone ever accept me as a girl? I could never have a child. These thoughts kill me.
Would it ever be enough?
I met Danielle at Common Grounds, a coffee shop by day and music venue by night. She had to buy me drinks since I was only 19. I didn’t know anything about her or where she was from, just that something about her radiated in a way that called to my heart. Already a mother at 22, she still lived with the child’s father, her ex-boyfriend, in an apartment above a crack den. I came over one night and asked her to take a bike ride with me. We rode out to Paynes Prairie, careful not to wake sleeping alligators along the swamp trails. Walking out into the clearing from the trees, I turned to her and saw her face, gray in the moonlight, almost light blue, and fell in love instantly.
I had gotten a job training as an auto mechanic as part of a Christian-run charity program that helped dropouts like me get GEDs and training for eventual placement working in a real garage. Sometimes late at night, Danielle and I would break into the junkyard at my work and fuck in the cars. It felt like magic to hold a warm naked body against my own, and hers was ever so fragile.
In between sneaking off to desecrate the back seats of abandoned GTOs, I kept writing songs. The band booked our first proper recording session at Goldentone Studio in town to record a five-song EP called Crime as Forgiven by… Against Me!. Jordan took care of the cost of the session, and then had the songs pressed as a seven-inch. A DIY punk label from Bloomington, Indiana, called Plan-It-X Records agreed to put out the CD version, since Jordan couldn’t afford to do both.
I was so hungry for the road, eager to go to all the places that I’d never been. I spent that Florida winter with Danielle, dreaming about touring while working on cars, going to classes, slowly saving up money to buy a van.
James hadn’t been part of the recording of Crime, but he joined us on the tour we booked to support it. We also enlisted Dustin to play bass. In my mind, I will always think of James, Kevin, Dustin, and myself as the classic Against Me! lineup, if one wanted to believe in such a thing. There was no band like us at the time, mixing acoustic and electric punk sounds. That version of Against Me! spawned a long lineage of imitative folk-punk bands that followed, for better or usually worse.
It seemed overkill to load the van up with a thousand copies of Crime, but to our amazement, we sold all of them over the course of the tour. At three bucks each, we had enough money to buy gas and even some beer now and then. I noticed a shift on this tour. We’d show up to play somewhere and there would actually be an audience waiting. Wo
rd of Against Me! had started to spread.
While the tour was a new high for us, it ended with us upside down in a ditch. We were driving home from the final show in Bloomington, the last one the four of us would ever play together. Just north of Atlanta, we’d stopped at a Wendy’s drive-thru and merged back on to 1-75, southbound. I was driving, James was riding shotgun, and we were the only two wearing seat belts. As soon as I saw the semi’s headlights in the rearview mirror, I knew it was too late. The truck clipped the left side of the back of the van, causing us to skid and the driver’s side tires to blow. We rolled, I’m not sure how many times. I only saw the French fries and Frosty hovering weightlessly in midair in front of me, as if we were floating through the zero gravity of space for a moment, then violently darting forward and exploding against the inside of the windshield. When we landed, all I could hear were gasps of panic from my friends. Kevin was the first one out, and he pulled us out one by one. We all walked away, glad to be alive, but the van was fucked and so was our gear. That moment will stay with me forever. For all I know, we died in that accident and everything since has been just a dream.
After we divided up the insurance money from the accident, we had a falling-out of sorts. Kevin decided he wanted to quit the band to go train-hopping with his girlfriend. I took his decision personally—probably more personally than I should have. Without Kevin, I didn’t see a future for Against Me!, and I was crushed. I felt like he had broken up with me.
Left with no band, I had more time to spend with Danielle. In my mind, my future was set—I was going to be a mechanic, I was going to be a man. Just six months after we’d started dating, we were married. She proposed to me in a Pan-Asian restaurant in front of friends. I couldn’t really say no. I was in love with her, but also terrified about the fact that she was already a mother. To me, that meant instant domestication.
I bought $75 silver rings from the Gainesville shopping mall, and we made it official at the county courthouse. We rented a small house and bought a 1970 Chevelle with my share of the insurance money from the van accident. We were trying to be a family: husband and wife and all that bullshit.
She was working as a waitress in a bar called the Top and got me a job checking IDs at the door. I was only 20. The owners didn’t know I was underage, so I had to be ruthless with my authority. I never let anyone slide and even started taking pleasure in busting kids who presented fake IDs. A free meal, free beer all night, and I got to hang out and talk shit with my friends. The best job I ever had.
Dustin and I were keeping our eyes open for a new drummer to replace Kevin and were also recording another seven-inch for Sabot. Since it was just the two of us, it ended up being a five-song acoustic EP. Both this release and Crime were well received in the punk scene, getting glowing reviews in Maximum Rocknroll and all the other prominent zines. People were listening to the records, and we were getting a lot of positive feedback about what we were doing. Even though there really was no real band to speak of, the name Against Me! was gaining traction. Local punks were starting to give me compliments around town and would ask when we were playing again. One of those punks was Warren Oakes.
I’d known Warren from the Florida activist scene. He was from Sarasota. All of the radical activists who ran Food Not Bombs chapters in Florida would meet up every month in a different city and talk about what was going on in their community. We’d organize May Day events, activist training camps, Youth Liberation conferences, and protests. Many gallons of homebrew were downed, and many campfire songs were sung.
Most of the gatherings would devolve into a campfire “Depends party,” named after the adult diapers, where people would dress up in nothing but a diaper and then proceed to piss or shit themselves for a laugh. If I was drunk enough, I would hang my chain wallet from my dick piercing and swing it around for a party trick. Everyone was all about non-monogamy. In other words, it was an orgy.
Warren was a year younger than I was, but I assumed he was a decade older when we first met because of his huge beard. He had this hippie-punk thing going on—dreadlocks, no shoes, dirty. I mean, we were all dirty, but Warren was dirtier. I admired Warren’s politics, and still do. He has a kind heart and a gentle soul, and he treats people fairly.
He told me how much he appreciated what Dustin and I were doing, and I told him how badly I wanted to play with a drummer again. We made plans to meet up and try playing together. His feel behind the drums was significantly different than Kevin’s, and nothing like the chemistry I wanted, but he was the best option. Warren’s style completely changed the sound of Against Me!. He was a technically better drummer, but he played with cymbals in his kit and half as much heart. He also didn’t have the same musical influences, so we didn’t have common references to work with. I had to adapt my arsenal of songs and my songwriting process to his style. Songs didn’t come as easily. But slowly, over the course of a long fall in Gainesville, we put together 11 songs with the intention of recording a full-length LP. Most of the songs were reworked from preexisting Against Me! releases, with only three written and arranged by the four of us.
In December 2001, four years after I recorded Against Me!’s first demo tape alone in my bedroom, I stepped into Goldentone with James, Dustin, and Warren. In two days, for the cost of $800, we recorded the band’s debut album. Once again, I designed the cover, cut-and-paste-style with an X-Acto knife and glue stick: the band’s name in huge red letters behind a black-and-white outline of my former childhood hero, Axl Rose.
Punk had taught me to hate bands like Guns N’ Roses and everything they represented—the greed and the commercialism, the excess and the egos. That world was utter bullshit to me now. Those bands had done it their way, and now it was time for me to do it mine.
Of course, what no one tells you when you’re young and arrogant is that you eventually grow up to become the thing you hate. Or if they do tell you, you’re too cocky to listen. Decisions aren’t always cut-and-dried, and I would have to learn that lesson the hard way. But in the righteous punk arrogance of my youth, I wanted this album to stand in opposition to the corporate-owned music industry. I wanted it to light a fire, establishing an ethos and a set of principles that not only we could live by, but all bands that came after us.
I aimed to take my guitar, travel the world with it, and reclaim rock and roll, city by city. So I came up with a title and wrote it in the bottom corner of the cover. Against Me! Is Reinventing Axl Rose.
3. WE’RE NEVER GOING HOME
No Idea Records didn’t have high expectations when they released Reinventing Axl Rose in March 2002, as evidenced by their modest first printing of 1,100 LPs. But we sold through the run pretty quickly. And then the next printing. And the next. To date, it has sold over 200,000 copies worldwide, and it is the bestselling album in the label’s history.
Even though No Idea was an independent record label, owned by a husband and wife in Gainesville, I started to hear rumblings that some punks weren’t pleased with our decision to branch out from the DIY scene we’d started in. Punks are particular like that. Any hint that you might actually be making a few bucks off of your art and they’re ready to come after you with pitchforks. It wasn’t a personal decision to leave Plan-It-X. The label owner didn’t even have a phone number to reach him. Occasionally, he would mail me a box of our CDs, and that was pretty much the extent of our communication. As the band grew, we needed more support than he could offer.
Either way, I was overjoyed to finally be receiving any validation, and thankful to not be eating out of a dumpster anymore. At 21, I was working at the hippest bar in town, playing in the coolest band in town, and driving a muscle car. It was an absolute prime. Then my wife got pregnant.
The pregnancy was not planned. I was starting to see possibilities opening up for the band while also starting to feel more and more confined by the relationship. I felt guilty about it, but I wanted to tour. I didn’t want to be changing diapers for the rest of my life. She asked what
I thought we should do, and I told her that while I would ultimately support whatever decision she made, I didn’t think we should have the baby. We could barely support the child she already had with a now-absent father. We were struggling to pay our $500 monthly rent. I was at home watching her kid during the day while she pulled waitressing shifts, and then I’d head to the bar to work through the night.
I wasn’t sure what her true feelings about the pregnancy were, other than being certain that she resented me for the way I felt about it. She started drinking pennyroyal tea in an attempt to terminate the pregnancy. When that didn’t work, she had a group of friends give her a home abortion, a “menstrual extraction.” She didn’t tell me until after it had already happened.
Although all of the women involved in the extraction were going to school to become midwives, they had little experience with that sort of procedure. There was a clinic in town that she could have gone to, and we had the money to pay for it. I was still willing to have the baby. I was blown away by how irresponsible I felt she had been, putting herself in danger like that. What if something had happened? What about her daughter? I was further hurt that she did it without telling me. Then she made a zine detailing her experience and distributed it around town for all of our friends to see. It was almost too much humiliation for my male ego to handle. I took on more work shifts just to stay out of the house as much as possible.
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