Books

A A A Comments By Rachel Kramer Bussel Tuesday, Mar 29 2005

Novelist Jonathan Ames explores sex changes as the editor of Sexual Metamorphosis, gathering pieces from photographer Loren Cameron, former Bond girl Caroline Cossey, and professor Jenny Finley Boylan.

photo: Travis Roozée

Ames: Not attracted to transsexuals per se

Details

Sexual Metamorphosis
Edited by Jonathan Ames
Vintage, 336 pp., $13.95

Buy this book

More About

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Offstage Voice Newsletter: (Up to multiple times a week) Information on theater and the performing arts.

How do the more recent memoirs differ from the older ones? It was almost a family tree: The earlier books were groundbreaking and left a legacy for the later authors.

What surprised you the most?Transsexuality is a real condition and there are symptoms all these people shared. I was moved by their courage, the scorn they had to face, including rejection, ridicule, physical pain. They had to see this through.

As someone who is not transsexual, but has been attracted to transsexuals, how did this affect your reading of the memoirs? I'm not attracted to transsexuals per se. In my distant past, as I was sorting out a variety of Freudian issues, I was attracted to pre-op transsexual prostitutes. I found them to be beautiful in this otherworldly way. I liked watching them in their clubs—it was theater, it was criminal, it was underground. To me, they were mythical, and being around them was my escape into a world of risk and eros and beauty and tragedy. My old attraction didn't affect my readings of the memoirs. What the authors in this anthology described was a separate issue from what I had experienced in the demimonde of early-1990s Times Square.

Check out this week's featured ad for News