Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Transformers remix

Episode Date: October 18, 2022

Yvette Gonzales tells us a first person story about what its like to be transgender in Prison. Gender theorist B. Preciado tells us about what happens when a person takes testosterone without the intention of transitioning from one gender to another. Plus, Jim Elledge tells us about his  biography of Outsider Artist Henry Darger, and why he drew little girls with penises.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Transformers. The day after Bradley Manning was sentenced to prison for 35 years for leaking documents to WikiLeaks, he made an announcement through his lawyer. In the future, he wanted to be called Chelsea. This threw the free Bradley Manning movement for a loop. Posters, billboards, and websites had to be changed overnight. But according to Nathan Fuller, the press liaison for the private Manning support network,

this was not a difficult transition. I see Manning's announcement of her transition as a continuation of her courage, of the bravery that we've seen from her from the last three years. As a soldier, Manning said that she could not be complicit in these crimes and abuses that she later exposed. It's incredibly inspiring that she announces that she is not going to be living as a man. She cannot accept that, and so she's going to announce that she's living as a woman in an all-male prison in a military that does not recognize transgender rights. Some of Chelsea's supporters are hopeful that she might get the hormonal therapy that she's petitioned for.

But we are talking about a system that won't even deliver a letter to Private Manning unless it's addressed to Bradley E. Manning. Fuller and others are especially concerned about what might happen to Chelsea if attention wanes. I certainly feared that Manning would fade from the public eye and saw what happened in 2010 when she was put in solitary confinement and it was months before we really learned the details of that. I think we can't let it slip.

We can't assume that if we turn our eyes, the military is going to treat Manning well. I think we have to keep a close eye. It's difficult to imagine Chelsea Manning getting the hormone therapy that she's requested because when it comes to the correctional system, the standard procedure for transgender individuals is discrimination, humiliation, and solitary confinement. When I asked why am I being put in special housing unit, the only answer that I get is because you look like a female, because the way that you look. That's what I would get, point and simple,

because of the way that you look. A prisoner does time in solitary or special housing when they commit an offense inside of the prison. But Yvette Gonzalez spent three and a half years in special housing in a number of New York state prisons simply because she was trans. I didn't attack no officer. I didn't attack no inmate. I was never caught having any sexual relations in the jails. I was put in there because of me being transgender and me being and me identifying as female and looking like a female. That was the reason that they put me there and no other reason. Today, if Yvette went to prison, she'd go to a woman's

facility. But when she was arrested in 2003, she had yet to complete her gender reassignment surgery. I had taken hormones. I had breasts. I reassignment surgery. I had taken hormones, I had breasts, I had my hair, I had my face, my body, but they defined me of what was between my legs, the genitalia. Prisons use solitary confinement to deal with the worst of the worst. At least that's the official policy. The actual number of Americans doing time in solitary, though, continues to rise every year. And there's growing evidence that the human psyche just cannot withstand these long periods of isolation. You start to develop figments of your own imagination, you can say. You start to develop a friend. You start to talk to yourself. You start to develop a friend you start to talk to yourself you start to answer

yourself you start to see things you start to imagine that there's someone there just to keep some level of sanity I remember sometimes my cell became a runway I remember sometimes I was laid out in the bed and I was in freaking somewhere hot with palm trees and water. I could hear the water. I remember sometimes I was window shopping. I remember sometimes I was on a date with a guy just to feel like I was communicating with a human being. To this day, I struggle. I struggle with being put in solitary for so long.

Individuals like Yvette are housed in solitary, even though they've done nothing wrong, for their own protection. Well, again, that's the official reason. But Yvette Gonzalez totally rejects this. Correction never protected me. When I was taken out of special housing unit, transferred to other jails, and was able to be in population for a few days or a week, I was never attacked by a male inmate. Even the Muslims and the gang members, they took to me. They, hey, how you doing? What's up? How you doing? My name is, what's your name? My name is Eva. the male inmates called me, she, the correction officers

called me, he. So that lets you know right there, the, the, the level of treatment that I was receiving from the inmates who some of these inmates were murderers, rapists. I met a few rapists there. Okay. When I was in Clinton-Dynamore in APPU, Son of Sam, David Berkowitz, used to sleep right next to me. I used to have David Berkowitz sitting on my bed, a man who I fit his profile, and never attacked me. Son of Sam used to call me J-Lo. Wait, wait.

Why did Son of Sam call you J-Lo? Because I'm curvy, you know, my butt and stuff like that. Yvette did not need protection from the other inmates. She needed protection from the guards. I would sleep in a cell with David Berkerowitz before I slept in a cell with a correction officer. After Yvette was sentenced, she was moved from Rikers Island to a prison upstate,

and she was immediately put into special housing unit, SHU, or the box. But for some reason, the night guard moved her to the last cell on his block. And this is where we pick up the story. When the night guard pays Yvette a nighttime visit. Okay, so a quick warning. You're about to hear a graphic description of sexual violence. But it's very important that you listen. Yvette is not talking to herself anymore.

We are not figments of her imagination. We are real. I heard my cell open. Because it makes a loud like, and I'm like, why is my cell door opening? So then he comes, the officer, and he opens the door and he stands and he's putting on gloves, latex gloves, and he's like on the search. so he comes in and he says stand up and i wouldn't i wouldn't have thought this anything to be unusual because they search they do random searching it is the norm that they can search a cubicle you know search your surroundings and that. But when it comes to stripping and stuff, they usually have more than one correctional officer. He was alone. Um, and he told me to stand up. He said, I want you to strip. And he told me to turn around and he looked behind him like this at the door and kind of closed it a little bit, the metal door.

And then he tells me, bend over on the bed. And I'm like, no, what are you talking about? And he's like, turn around and bend over. And I wouldn't. This guy was about, I'm like 5'7", 5'8". This guy was about 6''m like 5'7", 5'8". This guy was about 6'3", big white guy, like a big husky type guy. And he comes to me and he punches me so hard in my ribs, so hard that I felt like I was choking, like I couldn't breathe.

And I started crying from the pain that I felt on my ribs, and then he hit me again. Boom! He said, I fucking told you to bend over on the bed, and he hit me again. And then he hit me again, and he hit me again. And then he gets closer to me and pushes me down on the bed. And I remember him getting behind me. And I remember feeling his breathing on the side of my face

and I remember he said, you're going to love this. When that officer moved me to that back cell, I just thought that what he said, he didn't want me close to him. I just thought he was probably racist, homophobic, transphobic, whatever. But when that officer moved me to the back cell and my first attack, when he first attacked me in that back cell and he raped me in that back cell, I knew then that his intention of moving me to that back cell was to rape me and to get away with it. That officer made sure that I was locked down 24 hours a day. I didn't even get to go to the yard so that no one would see me bruised up, so that I was unable to talk to anyone. Being in solitary, I was an individual who never saw a psychiatrist or anything. And being in solitary affected my life.

Affected my life tremendously. I'm not the same person. It took who I was. It took my happiness. It took my joy. It took everything I was. It took my happiness. It took my joy. It took everything from me. And to this day, I still suffer. And to this day, I still sometimes feel like I'm in that cell. Locked in.

Not being fed. Cold. No being fed. Cold. No shower sometimes. With an officer on top of me. Telling me that I'm gonna like it. The End When you want to use testosterone, if you've been assigned female gender when you were born, you have to declare yourself gender dysphoric. And therefore, you go through kind of a legal, medical, and psychiatric protocol. And basically, I decided to take testosterone outside of those legal and medical frameworks.

This is Beatriz Preciado. At least that's her legal name. I like to call myself B. B uses both male and female pronouns. She's a trans feminist thinker whose work revolves around gender and the political history of the body. In other words, she studies the things that shape identity. I mean, all these terms like the gender binary and even the notion of gender, they have been invented by the medical system and the legal regimes.

In the 19th century, the key of the management of identity and sexuality was basically increasing the reproduction of the nation through repression of non-reproductive sexual activities, homosexuality, fetishism and of course masturbation. For the 19th century medical discourse masturbation was a pathology. The thing is that when we come to the 20th century basically we're going to see something very different, which is pornography becoming popular culture. I mean, if the 19th century physicians wake up

in the middle of the 50s and 60s and see Playboy becoming the main entertainment empire that it was in the 50s until the 80s, basically. I mean, they die. They go crazy. Today, Bee says, it's more complicated to resist the norms that shape identity than it used to be. The state is not as important anymore. We have to be much more careful in terms of politics, in terms of activism, because it's not only like a dialogue with the state, a dialogue with the law, but it's really, it

has to be a way of opposing capitalism and the way in which these new industries are managing identity. We continue to use heterosexuality and homosexuality as if those were like real things that are outside there in nature right and still people are thinking like I'm a homosexual I'm a heterosexual or I'm both or I'm bisexual or whatever and I'm basically I like to think about those as living fictions, as political living fictions that we identify with. The new media technologies, the new internet, they provide a lot of normative codes

for reproducing this gender binary and for reproducing the fictions of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and to think about transsexuality as pathology and so on. In 2005, Bee decided to do an experiment challenging that idea of transsexuality as pathology. For 263 days, he self-administered a testosterone gel, which he got from a friend and had no prescription for. The experiment changed B's physical and social experience of the world, increasing his feelings of social recognition, inclusion, and strength. And it also invigorated his writing.

He came to see himself as one in a long line of philosophers who have explored the mind by experimenting with the body. It starts with Nietzsche, basically, and goes to Freud, and Freud using cocaine, and Benjamin using hashish, and Hasley using mescaline, and I mean all these thinkers that have been using the body as a platform for experimentation. The writing Bee did during that time became a book that not only details her experiment, but also the wider history of sex, drugs, and biopolitics since the 19th century. It's called Testo Junkie. Yeah, when you're using testosterone this way,

then you become a junkie in a way. Then you basically, what you're doing is just like taking a drug that is as illegal as any of the other drugs and then you have to actually decide how much you take, who is giving it to you, and how are you going to take it, right?

What's so radical about what Bee did is that she did it without any desire to transition from female to male. She's part of a growing number of individuals who don't identify with the binary system of gender at all. I have a lot of friends that are doing exactly the same thing that I do. So more and more we're kind of a, I would say, kind of a generation that we are in betweeners. It has nothing to do with just like gender reassignment or not being basically comfortable with your own body and wanting to become a man or something

like that. It's like a form of gender dissidence. And in that respect for me it's like an embodied political activism. We need a new grammar, we need a new way of thinking about gender, sexuality, and we cannot continue using just the words that have been provided to us by the medical system or the legal system. We are seeing this new generation really wanting to ask new questions. So I kind of look at it with hope myself. Henry Darger is one of the art world's most famous mysteries. He spent most of his life working at Catholic hospitals in Chicago doing janitorial work. And when he died, his landlord discovered a pile of large paintings in his room, most of them featuring little girls with penises.

I think that his representation of the little girls with penises really were his way of representing the queer theory of the day. Jim Elledge is the author of a new biography of Henry Darger called Throwaway Boy. He says the answer to the mystery of the little girls with penises can be found in Henry Darger's sexuality. I really do believe that he was gay. There's just too much evidence to deny that. And because of that, these were little boys that he was painting who just appear like little girls, little boys who are dressed up like little girls or little boys with girls' hairdos.

Now, I own most of the weighty Henry Darger monographs that have been published, and I've watched Jessica Yu's 2004 documentary film about Henry. So when I heard about Jim's book, I was very intrigued. A biography? In the documentary, we learned that the people who lived in the same rooming house as Henry knew so little about him, they couldn't even agree on how to say his name. Henry Darger. Henry Darger. I always pronounced it Henry Darger. It seemed to me that was what other people in the neighborhood called him.

Darger. Darger. Darger. The information there was was perfect for myth. You know, like janitor found after his death. That's Art Spiegelman. One fold out that's two-sided. In 1990, he and his wife, Françoise Mouly, published 10 pages of artwork by Henry Darger in their magazine Raw.

This is one of the first major publications to feature Henry's little girls with penises. I don't take any special credit for shining a flashlight on it because it's a perfect story and the artwork's really great. Well, I'm convinced that this issue of Raw Magazine is the reason Henry Darger can count so many cartoonists and cartoon fanboys like myself as early members in his fan club. I still recall being blown away by the images. But the total lack of biographical information was definitely part of the appeal. So I dropped by Art Studio in Soho

to tell him about Jim Elledge's new book and to ask him what he thought about the idea that there might be more to the Henry Darger story. You know, one assumed he was virginal because he was said to be so outside of any social discourse, a total outsider. And then at some point early on, looking into it, it would be like,

oh, and he kept like a weather journal of what the weather was supposed to be and what it actually was that day, which to me was hilariously compulsive. But if the story surfaced now, the fact that he's gay would actually help his career. We're living in the gender studies moment. I think he's still a pretty strange character. If I found out that he'd gone to, as a student to the Chicago Art Institute, I'd be a lot less interested. Jim Elledge's new book blows up the idea that we don't know much about Henry Darger. The Throwaway Boy is an incredible work of scholarship. Drawing from a wide range of sources, city records, medical journals, and newspaper accounts, Jim Elledge is able to show us the real world that Henry Darger, outsider artist, inhabited.

Henry Darger grew up on the north side of Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. At the age of seven, he was already on his own. His mother was dead, and his father spent most of his time in an alcoholic stupor. One night, Henry, at the age of seven, was picked up by the police. He was caught coming home late at night, having visited a night watchman who worked at a lumber yard

with whom Henry had developed a relationship. The police put him in the city's insane asylum, for his protection, of course. Henry was rescued by his father, who finally understood that something had to be done about his son. So he put Henry in a Catholic mission, an orphan's home. But the mission was not a safe place for boys like Henry. At the time, a newspaper article had been published saying that the boys who live at the mission were involved with what the newspaper reporter called evil. They learned more evil, he said, in one night than they could have learned for weeks out on the streets. Henry lived at the mission until he was 12. But then,

one day, the priests decided there was something evil about Henry. And so they went back to his father, who was now living in a charity home. And they told him that they were going to kick Henry out. This is when Henry's father made a decision that would change the boy's life forever. He had his son committed to an asylum for feeble-minded children downstate Illinois. He went to see a famous doctor in the loop, a man named Otto Schmidt, to get the paperwork. And so what they did was to fill out a three-page application to this asylum. The doctor actually filled it out and he mentioned self-abuse three different times, one time on each of the pages as it turns out. Now at the time, self-abuse was the

nice word, a euphemism for what we call masturbation. It was also a code used by many medical men, physicians primarily, to indicate that somebody was either already homosexual or was about to become homosexual. In Henry Darger's imaginary world, the little girls with penises, the Vivian girls, are fighting a war to liberate the child slaves. Many of his large paintings depict battle scenes or massacres from this war. Little children are subjected to unspeakable horrors, beatings, mutilations, decapitations. But mostly, Henry shows us little children being strangled by adults. The state of Illinois investigated the asylum about a year after Henry Darger escaped. And in the thousand-page report, there's evidence that Henry most likely experienced the things

he put into his art firsthand. Boys were routinely beaten with boards and other sorts of things like that. But more importantly, in order to control these boys, the adult caregivers would strangle them. They would strangle them until their faces turned blue, until their tongues protruded, until they blacked out. And then they could do anything they wanted to the boys. So what he is painting then is obviously, to me, representations of himself and other gay boys that he knew at the asylum and on the streets of Chicago

and who had been physically and sexually abused by the adults around them. Most of Henry Darger's artworks are illustrations for his novels. Henry actually thought of himself more a writer than an artist. He wrote a lot. The book about the Vivian Girls in the realms of the unreal is the largest. 15,000 pages. His second book, Crazy Town, is also huge. 10,000 pages plus. And his autobiography slash weather journal, that's gigantic as well. 5,000 pages in manuscript form. Altogether, the books that Henry Darger wrote come to about 35,000 pages.

None have ever been published in their entirety. It would probably be pretty impossible for that to happen. Sometimes he repeats things over and over. He adds too many details here and there. And so the novels take a lot of effort to read. It took Jim Elledge almost two years to read everything. He says there are many instances where Henry alludes to his sexuality, especially in his book, Further Adventures in Chicago or Crazy Town. One of the main characters in Crazy Town is a little boy named Weber George, who gets in trouble trouble just as young Henry Darger did. Jim Elledge is convinced that this little boy provides us with the answer to the

mystery of the little girls with penises. At one point in the novel, Darger addresses the reader and he says that the reason why Weber George is such a bad little boy is because he had wanted to be born a girl, and he was angry that he wasn't. Then Darger drops a bombshell. He says, dear reader, you may think this very strange, but the author knows many little boys who wish they had been born little girls.

In the 1920s, a group of University of Chicago sociologists conducted interviews with gay men who lived in Henry Darger's neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. Many of these men claimed they were women trapped in male bodies. But is this something that Henry believed? Was he part of a gay or transgender subculture? Those questions are impossible to answer. But Henry Darger definitely had a long-term serious relationship with a man. This is perhaps the most striking revelation in The Throwaway Boy, Because the evidence is not something

Jim found buried in the Henry Darger archives or something hidden in one of the texts. It's something that's been staring us in the face all along. You see, Henry Darger had three photos of himself. And these photos have been printed in almost every article and book. They even show up in the movie. And they all feature Henry and his friend Bill Schlater, or Willie. Jim Elledge says it's time to acknowledge that these two men were more than just friends. The photographs, the three I'm talking about with Willie, were taken at a photographing studio at Riverview Amusement Park. People would go into the studio and choose a setting. One of the more popular ones that couples, heterosexual couples,

who were serious about one another or who had just gotten married or who were about to get married would often choose was the back of a caboose. It was a honeymoon caboose, and there was even a song at the time that talked about this very thing. And in all three of the photographs of Henry and Willie, they chose the exact same setting. It was the honeymoon caboose. Their relationship was far, far, far more

than just a typical straight guy friendship. His power's in the rear In that little red caboose Behind the train The fast express came The first photo was taken in about 1911 and the last in the early 30s. Henry and Willie palled around, that's the phrase Henry liked to use, for almost 30 years. They never lived together. Henry roomed in cheap boarding houses, and Willie lived with his two controlling sisters, Lizzie and Catherine. In 1931, Lizzie died, and Catherine decided that

she and her brother should move as far away from the frigid Chicago winters as possible. After a few years in the suburbs, they settled in San Antonio, Texas. Henry and Willie never saw each other again. When Henry received word of Willie's death in 1959, he sent Catherine a letter. He wrote, I feel as if lost in empty space. Now nothing matters to me at all. This is something that someone who was in love with another human being would have written. They weren't just friends.

They were so much more. In Henry Darger's imaginary world, the little girls with penises don't fight alone. Magical dragon-like creatures called blingons sometimes come to their aid. And sometimes sympathetic adults are drawn to their struggle for freedom and liberation. One of these adults was named Captain Henry Darger, and he had a friend named Willie. This is an excerpt from The Realms of the Unreal. His friend's name is William Slater. The two are regular hawks. They are the head presidents of the Children's Protective

Society, called the Gemini, a lodge of men congregated who are terrible enemies of all those who prove themselves child haters. I have a picture of them both. And he produced a picture of two tall men, not handsome in looks or appearance, but nevertheless with a grim determination upon their faces. There are ways that creativity will ignore the obstacles in an artist's or a writer's life and figure out ways in order for that artist, that writer, to express what needs to be expressed. And for him to be able to figure out how to tell his queer story, not just to queer people, but to anyone who wants to know it, is quite amazing and very heroic, I think, ultimately. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Transformers.

This episode was produced by me, Benjamin Walker. It's one of the first Theory of Everythings I made when we started Radiotopia back in the day. It featured Yvette Gonzalez, B. Preciado, and Jim Elledge. For more information, visit theoryofeverythingpodcast.com. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia from PRX, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.