Guests were about to arrive, so Monique and I hurriedly set up the room. I placed the president’s coaster in its place and a placard that read “The President” at his seat, as if anyone would have dared to take his chair.
“Oh, we forgot a few name plates!” Monique nervously exclaimed. “Can you run back to our office and get them?”
Before she could finish the sentence, I was sprinting to our office. As I turned the corner, I noticed a group walking down the columned, marble hallway. They had their backs to me, but I noticed, in the center of the pack, what appeared to be a man about a foot shorter than the rest, dressed in a nicely fitted suit.
That looks like Andy, I thought to myself. Wait. That is Andy. I was afraid if I called to him I’d signal something I wasn’t ready for. I still hadn’t sorted everything out. Or so I thought.
Don’t say anything. He’ll get the wrong impression.
“Andy!” I yelled down the hall, almost uncontrollably.
Andy, startled by the outburst, turned around. He looked just as suave as he had when he got out of his car on our first date. When he realized that it was me who had called out to him, a smile crossed his face. He knew exactly what it meant.
And I knew what it meant, too. It seems simplistic, but standing in that hallway, I knew that I would eventually be with Andy, and I knew that this was what I wanted.
A few weeks later, when a friend of Andy’s and I were scheduled to serve on a panel together back in Delaware, Andy enthusiastically volunteered to give up his entire weekend to come along on the thinly veiled pretense that his friend needed a ride, an otherwise cheap and easy trip on Amtrak.
Wanting to save both of them the cost of a hotel room and to spend more time with Andy, I invited them to stay with me at my parents’ house. Although the house was about an hour away from the panel site, Andy quickly jumped at the offer. Even though he was technically the tag-along on the trip, Andy was an instant hit with my parents and my friends. He made a lasting impression on my mom when, as I slept in on Saturday morning, Andy made his way downstairs to our kitchen.
As my mom washed dishes, he sat down at our kitchen table and said with a familiarity that my mom’s warmth instantly invites, “Sal, come on over. I’d like to get to know you.” My mother sat down with him and talked about our family and our story, about their fears when I came out, but about how positive the trajectory had been. Then she asked Andy about his life.
Every relationship is the result of a series of events and coincidences that lead people to one another. For both Andy and me, our developing relationship was built on a unique, shared experience: the by-product of years of each of us fighting to be ourselves. While there were a number of different reasons I was falling for Andy, our shared identities as transgender people were at the center of those early interactions. And for both of us, it was a connection a lifetime in the making.
* * *
Andy’s own journey had begun a few years before mine. He was born in 1986—four years before me—in the small town of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin.
“That’s where Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Titanic is from,” I exclaimed, when he first told me the name of his hometown.
“Yeah, our town went wild when Jack said that in Titanic,” he laughed. “One of the biggest things to happen to us.”
Andy had a fairly privileged childhood, much like mine. If my neighborhood in Delaware was like Leave It to Beaver, Andy’s Chippewa Falls was Mayberry. The tree-lined neighborhoods were filled with American flags hanging from the front porch of every other home. A main street with brick-front stores leads down to the Chippewa River. And with just over thirteen thousand residents, everyone knows one another.
Andy’s family, the Crays, was almost like Chippewa Falls royalty. His grandfather Seymour Cray was considered “the father of the supercomputer,” the precursor to our modern personal computers. In the computer industry, Seymour Cray, a brilliant but eccentric man, was the 1960s and ’70s version of Bill Gates. Cray Research, which consistently produced the fastest and most advanced computers in the world under Seymour’s leadership, was one of Chippewa Falls’ largest employers for decades.
Seymour’s first wife was Verene, a feisty minister’s daughter who was so progressive that during the height of the Vietnam War she managed to get herself appointed to the Chippewa Falls military draft board just so she could ensure that only those who wanted to serve were drafted. Seymour and Verene had three children: Susan, Carolyn, and, Andy’s father, Steven.
In the late 1970s, as a law student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Steven married an incoming law student, Ardis Audorf. And after graduating and starting their own separate careers as attorneys in Chippewa Falls, Steven and Ardis had two kids, Andy and Scott.
From a young age, Andy was clearly talented. He started talking early. He was athletic, playing baseball and basketball. He was artistic, learning multiple musical instruments, from the clarinet to drums, from the guitar to the trombone.
He was also a rule follower. Once, when asked what the worst thing he had ever done was, an eight-year-old Andy replied, “Sometimes, when my mom tells me to go to my room and think about what I’ve done, I don’t think about it.”
As with any transgender person born before the twenty-first century, when Andy was growing up, transgender identities were out of sight and out of mind for most. And while he asserted nearly from day one that he was a boy, his parents, like most at the time, just assumed he was a tomboy. For his fourth birthday, he was consumed with the concern that people would give him “girls’ toys” for his birthday.
“What do I do if someone gives me a doll?” he asked his mom.
“Tell them ‘thank you’ and we’ll return it later,” she instructed him.
A few days later, Andy was given a Barbie by a family friend, Mitch.
“Thank you, we’ll return it later,” he announced.
In middle school, Andy’s parents divorced. Steven went on to marry a woman he went to high school with. And Ardis married the father of one of Andy’s best friends, the town dentist Richard Sweeney.
At about the same time that Andy’s parents separated, and still clearly trying to find himself, Andy became an evangelical Christian, a not-uncommon phenomenon for LGBTQ people struggling with their identity. Despite neither of his parents being particularly religious, Andy became a dedicated member of a church in Chippewa Falls throughout high school.
After graduating as valedictorian from Chippewa Falls High School, Andy moved to Chicago to attend Northwestern University, first majoring in film and then, following in his parents’ footsteps, law.
Andy’s faith remained a significant part of his identity when he went to college, but he was increasingly struggling with his other identities. He took a big step when he started dating his first girlfriend, Heather, and when he started venturing out into queer circles.
It was at a queer sorority party on campus during the first semester of his freshman year that Andy met another first-year named Kelsey. In no time, the two became best friends. Both Andy and Kelsey identified as lesbians and evangelical Christians at the time. Together, they’d grapple with their mutual identities. They started an LGBTQ Bible study together. They’d explore gay life in Chicago’s LGBTQ neighborhood, Boystown. Already into Star Wars, it was through Kelsey that Andy’s interest became a joint obsession. Andy was R2-D2 to Kelsey’s C-3PO.
Through sophomore year and the summer after, Andy began to read more and more online about trans identities. Like me, budding social media platforms like LiveJournal and Myspace opened up a window to people who were just like Andy. And when he returned to school for junior year, he and Kelsey met back up.
“I think that I’m a guy,” Andy blurted out.
Kelsey looked up. “Me, too,” he responded.
Andy’s admission had given Kelsey the permission t
o open up about his gender identity, too: “I feel like we’re brothers.”
So they stepped out into the world and began their transitions together.
CHAPTER 5
The political is personal.
“Why doesn’t Andy join us?” my dad piped in, clearly excited about his own idea.
In just a week, our family was scheduled to fly to Barbados for a family trip. My dad had rented a house on the southern Caribbean island with close friends and their family. Unfortunately, the other family backed out due to a work-related conflict.
Sitting around a table at a restaurant in downtown Wilmington, Delaware, my parents and I brainstormed people to join us and to help fill the house, which was now twice as large as what was needed.
“I’m serious. What about Andy?”
Bringing Andy on the family trip had crossed my mind. Both my parents had come to love him since that first visit to our house in Delaware a few months earlier. They were both as excited about my budding relationship with Andy as I was. Since finishing up my semester internship at the White House, Andy and I had been spending more and more time with each other. The kindness I saw on that first date proved to be as real as his brilliance. When he was working, we were texting or chatting over GChat. When he wasn’t working and I wasn’t in class finishing up my final semester of college, we were together.
I was spending an increasing number of nights at Andy’s apartment, located in a large, art-deco building at the top of a hill in the center of Washington. His apartment was an eclectic mix of mature adult and immature kid, with his law books displayed on a shelf right next to the toy robots he had collected throughout his childhood. Andy’s place felt like a home, filled with pictures, knickknacks, framed artwork, and toys for Andy’s two black-and-white cats, Flapjack and Waffles. After four years of sparsely furnished and cold college student apartments, Andy’s one-bedroom was a welcome and warm escape from campus.
We’d sit on his big, L-shaped brown couch and indulge in our favorite pastime: eating. Fortunately for both of us, Andy was an exceptional cook. On his nights, he’d orchestrate a delicious, elaborate meal with sides and restaurant-quality protein. Flavorful roasted chicken? Check. Perfectly cooked salmon? Check.
On my nights, I’d whip out store-bought taco mix or spaghetti. Ever the kind soul, Andy would eat those meals as if the greatest chef had made them. And each night was like a date night. We’d dim the lights, light some candles, and eat our delicious—or not-so-delicious—home-cooked dinners.
Even though Andy was working a traditional full-time job as an advocate at the Center for American Progress, he’d operate on my college-student schedule, staying up late with me to watch movies and, perhaps most commonly, enjoy our mutual addiction to terrible reality television. We’d talk into the early hours of the morning about events, policy, and the law, and explore issues of philosophy and morality.
He’d challenge me to be a better person. He’d encourage me to fight for equality in a way that respected every person’s dignity, to abide by certain unbreakable “first principles.” When a conversation about outing anti-equality politicians who are secretly LGBTQ themselves came up, he pushed back when I initially sided with the arguments that we should expose those politicians’ hypocrisy.
“There are certain lines we should not cross,” he told me. “Yes, hypocrisy is bad, but if exposing that hypocrisy requires us to commit an even greater evil, then we shouldn’t do it. We should challenge people on their ideas. We won’t bring others to our side by harming people, even hypocrites. It may feel satisfying, it may even be in pursuit of the good of revealing hypocrisy, but it violates a first principle.”
I still pushed back. “But these people are harming so many others with their policies.”
“What if you outed someone and they committed suicide because of it?” he shot back. “That’s not an impossible outcome. Is revealing hypocrisy worth someone potentially losing their life? Are you willing to bear the responsibility for that outcome? Is that one person’s hypocrisy really worth, potentially, their life?”
He was right.
Principles are worth something only if you stick by them even when they feel inconvenient. It’s easy to rationalize and find seemingly altruistic reasons for betraying a moral imperative, but that’s exactly when our principles are most important. We shouldn’t try to build a world in which every person has individual agency over their own gender or sexual orientation by utilizing tactics that remove or undermine that right. If your ultimate goal isn’t an unbreakable principle, then what is?
I was in awe of Andy. His insights repeatedly blew my mind. As someone still in college and four years Andy’s junior, the more I got to know him, the more I was amazed that he was interested in me. But that was the thing about Andy; he’d routinely make clear that he felt the same way about my feelings for him.
We both felt lucky to be with each other, a feeling that only intensified as we discovered, slowly but surely, our shared, cringeworthy affinity for baby talk and nicknames.
At some point in his life, Andy had started calling his bed a “beanpod.” And given the fact that neither of us were morning people, we began referring to each other as “beans stuck in the beanpod.” Soon enough, he became “big bean” to my “little bean,” partly a reflection of our age difference, but more so an ironic commentary on the pervasive gender stereotypes that told us that we should be insecure about the fact that I was taller than him.
By the time of our family trip to Barbados, Andy and I were inseparable, either physically together or constantly communicating. So when my dad suggested that I invite Andy, I jumped at the idea. I immediately stepped out of the restaurant and called him.
“Bean, I know this is ridiculous, but would you want to come with me and my family to Barbados in a week?”
“Uh, are you kidding me?!” he responded. I could tell he was giddy at the invite. Fortunately, Andy had flexibility when it came to getting off work for a week on such short notice. He also worked so hard that he was likely long overdue for a vacation. “Let me just rework some meetings, but I am so in.”
His friends later told me that the moment he got off the phone with me, he went into hyperdrive, buying new clothes and bathing suits ahead of the last-minute trip with my family.
Together, we flew to Barbados a few days later. Andy, already close with my mom, seamlessly ingrained himself with my family. As two attorneys by training, my dad and Andy listened to the recordings of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments on the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s ban on same-sex marriage, Proposition 8, by the pool.
Andy and I routinely cooked breakfast for everyone, serving eggs, bacon, and toast on a beautiful patio table surrounded by a lush green yard and towering palm trees. We rented Jet Skis with my brother and skied the open ocean, me in the driver’s seat and Andy holding on to me for dear life as I dangerously flew over small cresting waves. I could tell he was terrified.
On our second-to-last day in Barbados, Andy and I took the family rental car to the north shore of the island. The day before, my parents had visited the northern end of the island, a sparsely populated area with large cliffs overlooking the ocean, and recommended the sight.
The drive, they warned us, was an overwhelming forty-minute journey, first through a crowded marketplace with narrow streets and then along a winding road. To make matters more confusing, drivers in Barbados drive on the left side of the road but still use cars built for driving on the right side. It’s like dropping an American-made car onto the streets of London.
Andy looked at me, frightened at the prospect.
“Uh, Bean, I don’t know if I can drive. That sounds horrifying,” he blurted out.
I smiled and hopped in the driver’s seat, then guided our car through the narrow streets of Speightstown’s busy marketplace. The tiny streets were packed; passersby sur
rounded our slowly moving car as traffic drove by in the opposite direction, with each car missing the passenger-side mirror by a mere inch or two.
“Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! I’m going to hit something or someone!” I screamed the entire way.
Eventually, we made it through the town, completed the winding, forested second leg of the trip, and came to a dead end. We were pretty sure we had taken a wrong turn on our way to the main tourist spot along the cliffs, but after seeing the water through some bushes with the sun about to set, we decided to cut our losses and check it out.
We parked the car and Andy grabbed a bag from the backseat and followed me toward the water. I made my way through the bushes and, sure enough, found myself standing atop the towering cliffs lining the northern shore of the island, two hundred feet above the ocean.
The sun was setting to our left, filling the sky with bright orange and yellow hues and almost repainting the brown cliffs into a soft gold. The peacefulness of the scene, completely devoid of people, was interrupted only by the crash of the waves on the cliffs directly below.
As I turned around, I saw Andy setting down a blanket and pulling out food for a surprise picnic. Sitting on the blanket facing the setting sun, Andy and I took in the beauty of the scene.
“It’s breathtaking,” I said, looking out toward the ocean.
Andy didn’t respond.
“Isn’t it, Bean?” I turned toward him, but he was already looking at me. Our eyes met and he took a deep breath. “Can I say ‘I love you’?”
It had been almost eight months since our first date and four months into our more serious relationship. We were spending nearly every day together, but we hadn’t yet said “I love you.”
Tomorrow Will Be Different Page 9