“I know.”
Danny pulled into the driveway. Billie Jean’s car was gone. She wasn’t home, Vonlee pointed out.
“I love you,” Vonlee said as she got out.
“I love you, too.” Danny took a pause. “Bye.”
Danny drove off, staring at Vonlee in his rearview mirror as she struggled to get her key into the door. As he got farther down the road, the image of Vonlee dissolved smaller and smaller, until she finally vanished altogether, disappearing from his life.
CHAPTER 31
PART OF WHAT ALLOWED Vonlee to fall deeply into the person she believed herself to be, despite the body God had provided, was a steadfast sensitivity she’d established in the core of her soul: she was a female—nobody was going to change Vonlee Titlow into a boy. It wasn’t a disease she had, or some sort of psychological problem she could go to therapy and work through. Vonlee was a woman, a Christian woman at that.
She grew up in the South, where most people rarely held back what they felt or believed religiously, politically or personally. And as Vonlee stepped into those formative, judgmental years of junior high and high school, it became apparent to her that life was going to be an uphill battle from this point forward. It was hard enough, she knew, for gays to come out and tell their families and admit in public who they were; but add gender to that and her days were now an unsettling, stressful, tumultuous journey of explaining who she was to those who did not know her, while putting up with the stares and the comments.
During her prepubescent years, Vonlee had dressed daringly for a young “boy” in the South; that is, cutoff blue jean short-shorts and half T-shirts, exposing his/her midsection. Vonlee’s hair was kept “real long.” Body hair was never an issue because Vonlee did not have much, anyway. Thus, “I looked like a little girl.”
Fast-forward to those critical years of high school and that’s where the problems—socially, culturally and emotionally—began. For one, as a child, Vonlee had no trouble looking like a girl. But as she grew into her teens, “I started to go through a real awkward stage. . . .” And as she changed and fought those changes, the people around Vonlee began to notice.
Vonlee’s mother slowly accepted her more each day as she grew. There came a time when Georgia sold her mother’s house (where Vonlee had grown up) and bought a different house for her. Vonlee then had to change schools. She left behind all those friends she had known her entire life—those who knew her best. Now she was subjected to a new group of kids that had never seen or met her. And that’s when the insults and bullying started.
Heritage High School, home of the Mountaineers, was built in the shadow of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Standing in the school parking lot, one could look out onto what was a stunning display of American landscape, or “God’s country,” as some might be inclined to say. This part of the South is as picturesque and beautiful as any other in the country.
“I went to school with a lot of rednecks and backcountry kids,” Vonlee explained.
A person like Vonlee, who now tried as hard as she could to present herself as a boy, stood out. At first, she tried dating girls. It was one of the hardest things she ever did. Awkward and unsettling. Every bit of it, she felt, was wrong.
“I wanted to do their hair and makeup,” Vonlee said later.
As a male, Vonlee had sex with a female. “But I felt gay, like I was a lesbian. It just wasn’t comfortable for me.”
After that stage, Vonlee went back to being herself, or as much as she could within the boundaries society had erected for her. She didn’t want to walk the halls as a transsexual, not in high school, not in the South. Yet, she still couldn’t hide who she was, either. It was always there, even if she tried dressing like a boy.
“Sissy,” kids would shout at Vonlee as she walked down the hallway. “Wee-wee sucker!” And the ultimate derogatory homosexual insult: “Fag!”
These comments told her how much nobody understood who she was, or how she wanted to live her life.
As her days in school drudged on, it became harder to deflect the reproachful and hurtful comments, threats and ridicule. It was a daily ritual: wake up, get dressed, go to school and be subjected to harassment. As her sophomore and junior years came to pass, Vonlee grew severely depressed. She couldn’t stop trying to be a female—it wasn’t a choice. This was one aspect of being transgender, she explained, that people don’t understand: she would never choose it.
Her grades began to slip.
“I hated school—it was horrible.”
There was one day when Vonlee sat down with her mother. Georgia could tell that her child was having a hard time, not only with school, but life in general. For Vonlee, it was difficult just getting out of bed and going to class. She was sleeping in class whenever she could, because her nights were spent staring at the ceiling, battling anxiety.
“You okay?” Georgia wondered.
“I’m not.”
Georgia sat near Vonlee and took her by the shoulders, staring into her eyes. “Listen,” a mother said to her child, “if you go and take the GED and pass, you can quit.”
They hugged.
It seemed like the logical thing for Vonlee to do.
Not long after she started her junior year, now old enough to quit, Vonlee took the General Educational Development (GED) test and passed. So she quit high school.
The one thing Vonlee knew as she entered adulthood was that she needed to get out of Maryville. There was no way she could stay in a town, standing out like a Union flag, and live life on her own terms, openly being who she was.
There was a guy who had rented a room at Vonlee’s mother’s house during those difficult years. Vonlee soon found out he was gay. She had no attraction to this man. Dating men was not a same-gender relationship for her. Vonlee saw herself as a female and dating men to her would be considered a normal, heterosexual relationship.
“This guy, when I found out he was gay,” Vonlee explained, “I began talking to him about the scene. He introduced me to the gay scene in Nashville.”
It was hard for Vonlee to say she “felt comfortable” within the gay scene. But it was as close as she could get to feeling normal: meeting men who might be into her and living her life as a female.
“The gay community was accepting of me, which was why I embraced it,” Vonlee later recalled. “But there were also bars in downtown [Nashville] geared toward transsexual life.”
Vonlee walked into a club one night and there on the stage performing a “drag show” was a transsexual that looked “just like a Barbie doll.” Vonlee felt at home for the first time in her life. By now, Vonlee was on a host of female hormones and her body was tightening up and shrinking. Her voice, quite effeminate to begin with, was changing remarkably. She looked and sounded like a female, now more than ever—as opposed to a male trying to sound like a female. Her body was changing and her mood and mind were fitting congenially into the mold of who she truly was emotionally. For what seemed to be the first time, her life was on track.
Staring up at the stage, drink in her hand, Vonlee looked at the drag queen and thought: Oh, my gosh . . . a live Barbie . . . look at her! That’s what I want to do. That’s me. I’m home.
Vonlee spoke to the drag queen after her set. It was liberating to hear the person speak about living life the way in which she wanted. No boundaries. No waking up feeling as though she had nowhere to go. No worrying about being insulted around every corner.
“You have to understand,” Vonlee said, “back home, I would hide who I was in a lot of ways.... I would go into the bathroom and do my makeup. Then I would wash it off. So any chance I got to dress completely like a female, I would do it.”
And now here was the opportunity not only to dress the part, but live it day in and day out.
Still, as time went on, meeting the Barbie drag queen, for Vonlee, “That was okay. But it wasn’t who I wanted to be. I wanted to be a woman. Not a stage show.”
It was 1984 t
hrough 1985, the height, one could argue, of the AIDS epidemic and crisis just reaching the gay community. It was not easy being different then.
But as she made her way through the Nashville scene, Vonlee made a decision. She was going to do something about her lifestyle. And the choice she was about to make would shock even her.
CHAPTER 32
ON SEPTEMBER 2, 2000, Danny was behind the counter rearranging some rings underneath the glass case when Vonlee walked into the store.
“Why the hell ain’t you answering your phone?” Vonlee said upon greeting Danny.
Danny knew what she meant. Vonlee had called him that morning at 9:47, 11:06, and then that afternoon at 12:43. Each time, Danny watched the phone ring, but he did not pick it up.
“I just got into shop,” Danny said. “Listen, I been going through a lot of emotional issues. Come on.”
Vonlee was curious. Something was up. She could sense it.
“Everything will be okay as long as you don’t talk to nobody about what I told you,” Vonlee said. She stared at Danny.
“Okay . . . okay—” Danny tried to say something before Vonlee cut him off.
“If you have a nervous breakdown and decide to go to the police,” Vonlee said (according to notes Danny made of the visit and conversation shortly after), “I will tell them I was lying and the only reason you’re doing this is because I stopped seeing you!”
Danny looked around his shop. There were a few customers meandering, checking out necklaces and bracelets. He walked out from behind the counter. Put an arm around Vonlee’s waist.
“Let’s go outside there and talk,” Danny said.
Vonlee appeared dazed and upset.
“It’s okay,” Danny said, sounding as reassuring as he could. He kissed her. “I need to work right now.”
“If you want to go out with me, call me,” Vonlee said.
“Okay, okay.”
As Danny stood by and watched, Vonlee got into her vehicle, started it and took off.
CHAPTER 33
SHE STEPPED OUT OF the shower. Grabbed a towel, dried herself off. Fixed her hair and makeup. Then she gently tucked her penis underneath and in between her legs to hide it completely. She stood in front of the body-length mirror, staring at . . .
A woman.
“I just wanted to see her,” Vonlee recalled, speaking of herself in the third person. “It’s like she was in there . . . but I was constantly fighting on the outside to fit in somewhere.”
Being transgender was a frightening thought. But there was very little Vonlee could do about it. She’d go through trends, trying her best to do “what guys are supposed to do,” and then go back to being female. At one time, it was a continuous battle, rooted entirely in the way society viewed her.
Living in Nashville, going to the clubs that accepted her, Vonlee felt “the easy thing for me to do was to be a gay boy.” She would not go against the grain and force herself onto a world that wanted to keep her confined inside drag queen clubs. Even in a city that was conservative but had liberal foundations, it was a constant struggle for her to live as a female outside of the box. Some did not want to accept the fact that there were people without a choice in the world, living lives they did not want.
“People really didn’t understand transgender then,” Vonlee explained about the mid-1980s. “So it was so much easier just to be gay, and date gay men.”
But it felt wrong. She was fighting internally with herself. Vonlee had many of the parts of a female, except the one that mattered most. What stopped Vonlee all her life about getting the final operation was not the money, as some would come later to believe (she could go to Montreal, Canada, and get it done for twenty-five thousand dollars or less—and had already picked out the doctor and had spoken to him), but the finality of it all.
“Look, I knew who I was and who I wanted to be, but I thought then, okay, this is enough for me. I’m attracted to men. So I could dress up every now and then and just live as a gay man. I thought it would be enough. ”
Every time she wanted to complete the transformation, she’d go back to the fact that it was irreversible, and that thought overpowered her feelings.
There was a chance that after the operation, Vonlee explained, she could lose her sensation of ever having an orgasm again (either as a male or a female), and it played heavily on her decision.
As she entered the gay scene, Vonlee was attractive to many of the more “manly” gay men that liked effeminate guys. She’d always go for “older men that happened to have a lot of money,” she explained, but not as a shark on the hunt. It just happened that those were the men she was attracted to, she claimed.
“They took me on trips and showed me things I had never seen before,” Vonlee said.
She found a happy medium, one could say. These guys did not mind her dressing up as a female from time to time, but all of them were unified in that they did not want her to ever change her body completely. They wanted her to stay male. Anytime she mentioned the words “transsexual” and “operation,” she would get an argument.
“They wanted me to be a feminine boy,” Vonlee said.
The claim that Vonlee sought out men with money and made it a routine to land them was, at best, farfetched. “I never gravitated toward men with money,” she said with a sarcastic laugh. “Men with money gravitated toward me.”
The thing about Vonlee then was that she came across as extremely intimidating: Most insecure gay men were afraid to approach her. She had a visceral, almost glamorous quality to everything she did. It was evident in the way she dressed and spoke, the things she liked, even the exotic drinks in her hand.
“Why wouldn’t you come up to me earlier?” she’d ask a man who had kind of lurked around her for hours in a club before introducing himself.
“Because you’re beautiful and intimidating” was the common response.
The guys with money—the confident ones who were happy in their own skin—were less intimidated by her, however.
On top of that, “I did not want to date a bum,” Vonlee said, again laughing at herself. “Why would I want to do that?”
As Vonlee forced herself to get used to the Nashville gay scene, she wound up working at a salon (she had gone to cosmetology school outside of Nashville after relocating from Maryville), where she did hair and nails. She also managed a few restaurants and bartended. She had no trouble making money and supporting herself.
Back then, life was comfortable and quiet, Vonlee explained. Still, living as a gay man, dating only gay men, was not what she wanted deep down. Vonlee yearned to live her life as a female, completely. That meant dating heterosexual males and getting the final operation.
A relationship she soon entered into with a gay man, however, turned into more: Vonlee fell in love. It was a time when she had amped down the female hormones, and the transformation was in a sort of holding pattern.
“I had these little bitty titties,” she explained, “and was very . . . um, androgynous—people would look at me and say, ‘Is that a girl or a guy?’ Kind of like that Jodie Foster look.”
But her body and attitude changed as she took her medication and soon got a job traveling, selling cleaning products.
“That job was perfect for me.”
She was in New York one week, Los Angeles the next. Big cities. More accepting. Bigger scenes. Different people.
Then she traveled to New Orleans one time and met a man. He was gay.
Generally, whenever Vonlee went out, she did her makeup and hit the clubs as a female. One night, while in New Orleans, the power was out and she couldn’t convert herself into a female, so she went out as a male.
A man walked up to her. He was manly. Gay, but truly a “guy’s guy.”
“Bill, good to meet you,” he said. There was an attraction almost immediately between Bill (pseudonym) and Vonlee. An energy.
It was love, Vonlee said. Maybe not at first sight, but shortly thereafter.
T
hey began a relationship.
“I really, really loved this guy,” Vonlee explained. “The sex was good. We connected on just about every level.” The problem was that “he did not want me to become a female.”
Her hope was that after she explained that her life’s desire was to complete the transformation, he would accept her and they could continue. But there was no way. He wanted to be with a guy. He was a homosexual.
Vonlee loved him enough not to go through with it. They moved in together. The years added up. Now heading toward her midtwenties, having lived in a gay relationship (as a gay male) for three years, Vonlee sat Bill down and got honest with him to see if perhaps he might change his mind.
“I cannot do this anymore.”
“What?”
“Us.”
“Us?”
“Yeah. I need to be who I am. . . . I need to get back on track.”
They lived another three years together as Vonlee went back to focusing on taking the hormones and working toward the operation.
Bill finally said one night, “Look, I love you, but I will always look at you as a boy in a bra.”
By this point, they owned a home together. Yet, when Bill mentioned how he would always view her as a boy, “something just clicked for me,” Vonlee remembered.
They sold the house. Split all of their assets equally.
“And we stayed really best friends,” Vonlee said. “I just . . . He never looked at me the way I wanted a guy to look at me—which was, you know, that look of me being the girl that I was.”
Vonlee now faced a blank-slate future she could write for herself. This would require a substantial move. She had a friend who liked to dress up, but had not made the transformation with hormones like she had. They’d worked together.
“Denver,” Vonlee’s girlfriend suggested. “I used to live there.”
Vonlee had heard there was quite the transgender scene in Denver. And on top of that, she needed to break away from her memories in Nashville. Also, she was thinking about starting a new business with several “girls” she had met and befriended, along with several more she was told lived in Denver.
If You Only Knew Page 12