Part 11, Myra Breckinridge

I had a lot to learn about foreskins. I didn't know that the pink region just below my circumcision scar was what was left of the mucosal tissue whose job it was to shield the most sensitive area of my penis, the glans, the little fireman's helmet at the tip, the part that I kept trying to protect with ever-tightening undergarments (and more severe measures that we'll get to later).

I wouldn't learn about the protective function of the foreskin until I was 29-years-old, and I read a book by a guy a lot like me, a guy born in the '60s who'd been circumcised as a small child and gone through a lot of the same same physical and psychological torment that I had.

Long before I ever read that book, I read another book that touched upon another function of the foreskin, the sexual function. That book was Myra Breckinridge.

"Myra Breckinridge?" you say. "Wasn't that the trashy movie with Raquel Welch?"

Yes, that's the one. It was one of those adult-themed movies that all the grown ups would talk about in hushed tones when they were picking us up at the day care center. We had a few of those in the 1960s.

But before it was trashy movie, it was a book, by Gore Vidal, and I decided to read it during Winter Break of my sophomore year in college. I was 19.

What I didn't know when I checked the book out of the Houston Public Library was that Myra, a male-to-female transsexual (We didn't use the word "transgender" in those days.) who does most the narration, had some strong opinions about circumcision. She was opposed. Vehemently opposed. As vehemently opposed as any broadly drawn Gore Vidal anti-hero was ever vehemently opposed to anything.

"Wait," you say, "but Myra was a male-to-female transsexual? Doesn’t that mean…?"

Look, I didn't write the book, OK? I'm just telling you what I read.

And what I read reinforced the anger, shame and grief that I felt around the issue of my circumcision. What Myra told me, in a mocking, pitiless tone, was that circumcision had robbed me of tens of thousands of specialized nerve endings, had in fact taken away the most pleasure-receptive part of my penis. To hear it from Myra, all the sexual experiences I'd had in my life up to that point, either alone or with a partner, were nothing but a shabby imitation, a sad counterfeit of what a whole man experienced.

A whole man, something I would never be.

And now at age 19, I found out that not only did I not have the appearance of a whole man, not only did I not live in the body of a whole man, but I would never have the sexual experiences of a whole man.

It was a lot like the time I first learned that part of my penis was gone, the first time I felt that horrible, bewildering sense of loss. But now I felt a new kind of loss, a loss of something that little boy in Mr. Hoezel's room could never have conceived of.

Part 7, Me and the transgenders

It occurs to me that maybe I'm not remembering the instructions right. Maybe they were more complex than I remember. I think maybe the rule was you could ask about conventional sex, and you weren't allowed to ask about kinky sex, but if you had a question about a practice so aberrant that if you asked your mom about it, she'd clutch her chest and slump over the steering wheel as she's driving your Little League team to the pizza parlor, then those questions you should bring to the Principal or Mr. Hoezel.

Maybe it was a public safety measure. I don't know.

Anyway, it doesn't matter, because every question the sixth grade boys pitched to the Principal and Mr. Hoezel fell well within passed-out-mom territory.

I remember when Mike H. raised the issue of gender-reassignment surgery, the Principal made a point of saying that he felt he had the authority to discuss that topic with us because it touched upon the "bizarre" and he could assume that we wouldn't feel comfortable talking to our parents about it.

"Artificial breasts are inserted into the man's chest," the Principal said, and he cupped his hands over his chest the way men always do when they're talking about women's breasts. "The vocal cords are adjusted. The genitals are cut away." At this point the Principal made a slashing motion with his open palm in front of his crotch. Remember he was sitting on a shelving unit, so he was elevated, and his legs were slightly spread. Looking back I'm sure the way he was sitting was a calculated gesture. "Don’t think of me as your Principal," his pose seemed to say. "Think of me as your pal, the grizzled but good-natured puberty veteran."

And you have to give him and Mr. Hoezel credit. That air of informality seemed to work. The boys opened up. They asked a lot of questions. I mean they were questions that would have made your mom careen into oncoming traffic, but they were questions. But when he made that slashing movement, he kind of lost the room a little bit. There was nervous laughter. There were some exclamations. I'm sure the girls in Mrs. Vay-ZAH-deez's room wondered in the hell was going on next door.

I might have been responsible for some of the noise myself. Not that I was a noisy kid, but I remember feeling shocked at the idea of transgender people. Shocked but fascinated. I remember making a mental note to myself: "Must find out more about guys who turn into women." (I wouldn't learn for a few more years that transgenderism could work the other way, female-to-male).

Many years after sixth grade, the Renée Richards story started appearing in the news. She sued the U.S. Open Tennis Association for the right to compete in the U.S. Open as a woman. I think she was the first transgender person I ever heard of by name and the first one I ever saw a picture of. I also remember as a teenager reading about Christine Jorgensen in People Magazine. She was the first person ever to have gender reassignment surgery. And I read some books from the library and tried to catch as many transgender-themed shows on "Donahue" as I could. (That often involved skipping school, because we didn't have VCRs or TiVo back then.)

It seemed like the story of a transgender person's life would always start out the same way: "For as long as I can remember, I felt trapped in the wrong body. I'd look in the mirror, and what I saw there didn't match my understanding of who I was. Every day I would think about how much I wanted to get out of that wrong body and start living my life in the right body."

I'd always have the same thought when I'd read or hear about that part of a transgendered person's life. I'd think "That's what being circumcised feels like."

Part 6, Question and answer

Now I don't want you to get the idea that the question-and-answer session was a total bust, and we just all sat around in Mr. Hoezel's room in awkward silence after the lights came on. No, we actually had quite a lively discussion period after the movie. Or were there two movies? Looking back, LuAnn's wardrobe and hairstyle and the NASAesque penis animation seem to have come from two different eras.

In any event, the lights came up, and as Mr. Hoezel rewound the movie (in those days a somewhat technically demanding procedure), the Principal, now perched on a built-in storage unit in the rear of the classroom, reiterated the ground rules for asking questions. I don't remember the exact words, but the gist of it was "If you have a question about the kind of ordinary garden variety sex that normal people have, then wait until you get home and ask your parents, but if you have a question about some bizarre aspect of sex that you would feel uncomfortable talking about at home, then ask away. Just bring it on. Mr. Hoezel and I are at your service."

I know. Seems like it should be the other way around, right? Were our parents cool with the idea of us learning about kinky sex from the Principal? I wouldn't think so. I would think that could lead to some heated PTA meetings. "What are you teaching the children?! We took little Timmy to Sears, and he asked the salesman where they keep the nipple clamps!"

By the same token, did any of us sixth grade boys have a clear idea of what constituted a question about normal sex? "What do Mr. and Mrs. Brady do for foreplay? Do they take off their pajamas first?" Would that have been a normal sex question? Even today I'm not so sure.

As things turned out, the point was moot. Nobody had a normal sex question. Of course not. We were 11 and 12 year old boys. We didn't want to learn about normal anything. We had an instinctive attraction to the macabre, the outlandish and grotesque. We shared a rich tradition of urban myths that began with the words "This guy caught a twenty-foot shark, and he starts cutting it open…"

I wish I could remember more of the questions, but I only remember one, and I guess it wasn't so much a question as a sort of a color commentary, like Howard Cosell used to throw out in the middle of Monday Night Football. "A lot of people don't know this about Roosevelt Grier, but he knits his own socks."

Anyway, the question. Mike H. (a troublemaker, whom I'd once taken a swing at for trying to steal my apple during lunch period) raised his hand and said "I heard about this guy who had an operation and they turned him into a woman."

All eyes turned to the Principal, and I can only assume every boy in the room was thinking the same thing I was: "There's no way he's going to tell us to go home and ask our parents about that one."