Fresh Air - Best Of: Biden's Last Campaign / Trans Writer Lucy Sante

Episode Date: March 9, 2024

New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos recently interviewed Biden for his new profile about the president's accomplishments and failures in office, his current face-off with Trump, and the fears of many voters that he is too old for the job. Also, we'll hear from writer Lucy Sante. She's been writing books since the 1980s, exploring everything from photography to urban history. In her latest memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name, she writes about coming out as a trans woman in her 60s. Maureen Corrigan will review Sloane Crosley's new memoir about grief. For sponsor-free episodes of Fresh Air — and exclusive weekly bonus episodes, too — subscribe to Fresh Air+ via Apple Podcasts or at https://plus.npr.org/freshair Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Tanya Mosley with Fresh Air Weekend. Today we'll talk about President Biden's final campaign with New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos. He recently interviewed Biden for his new profile about his accomplishments and failures as president, his current face-off with Trump, and the fears many voters have that Biden is too old for the job. Also, we'll hear from writer Lucy Sant. She's been writing books since the 1980s, exploring everything from photography to urban history. In her latest memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name, she writes about the bombshell she dropped in 2021, gender transitioning in her 60s. I'm seeing and experiencing things I've seen and experienced a million times, but with a completely different lens now.

And Maureen Corrigan will review Sloane Crosley's new memoir about grief. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. In a new interview with The New Yorker, President Joe Biden says that, without a doubt, he believes he is the best option to beat Donald Trump in the November presidential election. Joe Biden makes this declaration despite the latest national polling, including the New York Times' Siena College poll, which shows Trump leading among registered voters by 48% to Biden's 43%. As Evan Osnos writes in his latest article titled Joe Biden's Last Campaign, by the usual measures, President Biden should be cruising to re-election. Violent crime is at a 50 year low. We're also experiencing low unemployment and more Americans than ever have health insurance. But one of the biggest hurdles for the president is his age. At 81, polls show voters are concerned

about his mental and physical agility to run the country for four more years. There's also been fallout on his handling of issues like immigration and Israel's war in Gaza. Evan Osnos is a staff writer with The New Yorker who covers politics and foreign affairs. He's written three books, Age of Ambition, Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, Joe Biden, The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now, and his most recent book, Wildland, The Making of America's Fury. Evan Osnos, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thanks, Tanya. It's great to be with you. So you met with President Biden in the Oval Office in January, and it was about two days after

the Republican caucuses in Iowa. And among the many things the two of you talked about, Donald Trump seemed to take up a lot of the conversation. Biden actually told you point blank that he thinks he's the only one who not only has ever beaten blank that he thinks he's the only one who not only has ever beaten Trump, he believes he's the only one to beat him again. And I'm just wondering, how was this language and this focus on Trump different from the last time you sat down for a one-on-one with him? It really was striking to me, Tanya, because the last time I talked to Joe Biden about his presidential hopes, this was in the summer of 2020 during the pandemic. I went and visited him at home

and interviewed him from a distance. You know, we sat across the room from each other with our masks on. And at the time he situated the idea of running for president in this sort of larger set of issues. It was partly about, at the time, it was partly about race. It was partly about economics. It was partly about getting through the pandemic. It was about trying to put the country on a more, in his mind, more normal footing. And I think what we saw this time, what I saw right away, actually, just from the moment I stepped into the room in the Oval Office was he sees this about Donald Trump. This is really a moment of decision making for the country about whether it wants to put this person back into power. there's something, Tanya, that's kind of fascinating for Joe Biden after 50 years in politics to find his life and ultimately his legacy entwined with this person who is so

different from he is in both his politics and in every way. I want to get even more into the strategy behind this to focus primarily on Trump with the issues being secondary. But I want to also talk about these numbers, these poll numbers, as I mentioned in the introduction. Former President Trump is slightly ahead of President Biden across the board on just about every issue voters are asked about. How does Biden view those poll numbers? With a lot of skepticism, which is a big fact because typically, it's not surprising, often a candidate who is trailing in polls will question them, but this is a different thing. This is about him and his advisors having a fundamental belief that the science of polling right now is failing us, that it just doesn't capture the way we feel

because of a few things. One is that there is this feeling that, well, for one thing, cell phones make it very hard to get people on the phone. It used to be that pollsters could rely on about 70% of people to respond when they called. Now that number has dropped to about 1%. It's just a transformation. But this applies to everybody. So it's not as if these polls are just harder on Joe Biden than they would be on other candidates. So something else is going on from their perspective, which is that as the incumbent president at a time when we are in a state of, let's call it what it is, there's a real, there's a lot of pain in this country still

left over from the pandemic, from the political turmoil of the last few years, that they think that if you ask somebody, are you happy with Joe Biden? That often what people really are answering is I'm not happy with the country. I'm not happy with the sour mood in our politics. So the key fact from the campaign's perspective is that they reason that only about 25% of the voters in swing states that will be so important really have absorbed the reality that this is going to be a choice between Trump and Biden. And they think that until that number goes up a lot, these polls don't really capture his chances in seven months. And that's a very controversial point, Tanya. There are a lot of Democrats, strategists and others who don't agree with that assessment.

Yes. Okay. I definitely want to get into that. Also, just recently, Vice President Kamala Harris has called for a temporary ceasefire in Gaza. President Biden has said he's called for this in the past in the release of hostages held by Hamas. You asked him in January if he intended to apply more pressure on Israel's leaders. And what did he say? He said that he was trying, but it was clear that this was a point of some difficulty for him. He believed that the right strategy was to work this from behind the scenes at the very beginning. And I heard very clearly in his comments to me that he was realizing the limits of that possibility. He asked for patience, frankly, from Democrats who are dissatisfied with him.

As I was listening to him say it, I thought, I'm not sure that's going to really persuade a lot of people who say that this is an urgent matter. But it is a sign of his core political logic. His belief has always been that I'll get more done if I work something behind the scenes, even with people who I have deep disagreements with, like Bibi Netanyahu. But I think what you're right, that Kamala Harris coming forward to

talk more explicitly and bluntly about the pursuit of a ceasefire is a real shift in the American strategy. And it's one that Joe Biden has come to gradually. And I think a lot of Democrats would say too slowly, but they're trying to now meet the moment. And you also write about how he's asking Americans to wait to hold judgment while he privately negotiates with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But the next day after you all talked, Netanyahu publicly dismissed his idea, for instance, of a Palestinian state. I'm wondering, how does Biden view the discontent among Americans who are really upset with his handling of Israel's war in Gaza, especially among younger voters? You know, he understands the depth of feeling about this. One thing that's been a pretty powerful thing to watch

is that his public appearances have now become almost inevitably the target of protests. And so he went to give a big event on the subject of abortion. And there were protesters there, more than a dozen of them, over the course of the speech. It was a kind of collision between an issue that he knows, two issues that he knows are important to young people. One is trying to restore abortion access after the Supreme Court took it away. And then, of course, the issue of Gaza. And these two things are on a collision course. I could sense in my interview with Biden that there is a way in which he knows that young Democrats are not satisfied. And people of color and people of Muslim Americans and Arab Americans. This is a reality. was that members of the administration, not the campaign, of course, went out to Michigan to meet with members of the Muslim community there to say,

in effect, we made mistakes and it didn't satisfy people or solve the problem right away. But it was a sign of a shift in how Biden and his administration are talking about this. You also spoke with Muslim voters. And what did some of them say to you? There is a huge amount of anger there. I talked to a man I've known for a while named Muhammad Khazaz in Dearborn, Michigan. And he had been a real Biden fan in 2020. They'd had a conversation, curiously enough. They'd met at one point by phone during the COVID pandemic. And Biden had helped him. Basically, the Biden campaign had been linking the candidate up with regular Americans. But this time when I talked to him, he was infuriated. Honestly, he felt, Tanya, as if

the Democratic Party, which he had put so many hopes in, and that Joe Biden specifically, had failed him in this moment. And he said, look, I think that they expect that we will come back to the party in November. And my message is we're not coming back. And I think there is a feeling among Biden's advisors that in some ways the course of the war will shape how many of the voters who are so embittered right now by the war in Gaza, how many of them might ultimately decide that they can't afford to have Donald Trump back in office. But as one of his advisors said to me, it depends on whether this is a three or four month war or whether it's something more. And we're right now in the fifth month. And I think

that remains a very open question. My question also, when I hear voters say things like, this is my candidate, but I'm so disappointed. I'm not sure if I'm going to vote for this person this time around. Have voters talked to you about their alternatives? Are they saying then they're going to vote for Trump or are they looking at third party candidates? I think it's very hard for people to go and say, OK, I now want to vote for Trump because it's not as if we don't know who Trump is. And I don't hear that very often from people. What you more often hear is that the option that is crying out to them is the couch, you know, staying home on election day, or if some third party candidate comes along that might appeal to them. Look, right now, third party candidates have not generated a movement. You don't see people

like Robert F. Kennedy or Jill Stein or Cornel West yet moving the needle in a decisive way. But what we know from history is just really glaringly clear, which is that in a very tight race, something as small as even a 5% share for third party voters can tip the scales of the election. There's just no question about that. And so one thing that will become more and more important is whether or not that feeling of protest, which is very strong right now, whether that dims over time as people begin to say, I had my time to try to shape policy. But now the way that I will try to shape policy is by putting somebody into the Oval Office who is closer to my values. My guest is Evan Osno, staff writer with The New Yorker. We'll hear more of our conversation after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.

Let's get back to my interview with Evan Osnos, a staff writer with The New Yorker who covers politics and foreign affairs. He sat down with President Joe Biden in January. His latest article is titled Joe Biden's Last Campaign. And in it, he explores doubts about Biden's age and the latest poll numbers that show that he's trailing behind Donald Trump in the run up to the November election. Another big focus right now seems to be Biden's age. He's 81 years old. Trump, by the way, is 77. But those who responded to several polls say they are concerned about Biden's mental and physical stamina for the presidency for the next four years. You have interviewed Biden several times over the years. What did you see during this latest meeting with him? Yeah, I've interviewed him on and off since 2014.

So I was going in alert to this question. I wanted to see how has he changed? How is he different today than he was when he was 71? And one of the things that's very noticeable, immediately noticeable, is his voice is thin and it's kind of clotted. He has a reflux that makes it necessary for him to clear his throat and cough a lot. And he's kind of, his gestures have slowed. He doesn't say as much as he did before. But I have to tell you, I mean, the thing that really I was looking for and that was most significant from my perspective was his mind seemed unchanged.

He didn't mangle a name or a date or anything like that. It was, in some ways, he struck me as a more solemn person now, Tanya. There's not that, there used to be a quality about Joe Biden that was a little bit of the life of the party. And there's something about him now that feels grave. And I think it's that he feels on his shoulders both the sense of responsibility not to allow Trump to come back to power in this country, but on some level it is clear and it's painful to him to realize, I think,

that the world doesn't see him feeling young the way he might in his own body, in his own mind feel young. He came to power as a very young man. And in some ways that imprint is lifelong. He still sees himself as the young man on the make. And that's been hard to come to terms with the reality that that's not how he seems to people on television. Yeah, I thought it was really interesting that you write that Biden can't really separate questions about his age from feelings of being underestimated by the establishment

over the life of his career. They're very much intertwined. Yeah, it is in some ways, it's the core of his thinking about so many issues goes back to who he was, even as a very young person. He once wrote of himself talking about his childhood. He says, I was small, I was young for my class. And he says, and this is the key phrase, he said, I made up for it by being gutsy. And there's a way in which that pattern has repeated over his life. And, you know, when he ran for the Senate for the first time against a man who was a real colossus, you know, somebody who had won seven elections in a row.

And but there was an element to Biden that has always believed that he can almost will things into being. I mean, he booked his celebration party, his victory party for that election very early in the campaign when he was still polling at 3%. So there's a degree in which he believes that through a kind of determination to game it out, as he says, that's his term, game it out, that he can do things that people tell him he's incapable of. I'm wondering how does Biden's campaign schedule compare to four years ago? Well, you know what's striking to me? If you look at how these two men started their campaign

schedules, it tells you a lot. I mean, Donald Trump's first rally of the campaign was held in Waco, Texas, which is a place with pretty unsubtle significance. It was the site, of course, of the siege between federal agents and a cult back in 1993, which has really become an iconic touchstone in the far-right anti-government movement. And Donald Trump held his first rally there and played a song that was sung by members of the January 6th insurrection from inside prison. This was not a, you know, the message here was draped in the aesthetics of anti-government resistance. And it was all about January 6th. And what was fascinating was that Joe Biden held his first rally of 2024. And it was also about January 6th, but in a very different way. It was held near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, of course, where George Washington led troops in the winter of 1775. And the message that he said was that this really is about American freedom on the line. I think it's almost striking, Tanya, to step back and realize

we're having a presidential campaign that's not about education policy or healthcare or things like that. It's really most of all about whether or not the notion of American democracy is actually sound and durable, or whether in fact you're going to have a president who calls it into doubt from the very first moments of his campaign for reelection. That's not something we've had before. At the same time, like you talked with political consultant David Axelrod, who said he's pretty sure regular everyday people are not sitting at the dinner table talking about democracy every night. That what he's implying there is that they care about the issues. They want Biden to be talking about the things that impact their day-to-day lives.

Absolutely. This is a really important perspective. And David Axelrod, I think, speaks for many within the Democratic Party who are worried that they say, look, any political message is a judgment about what you put in the foreground and what you put in the background. It doesn't have to be either or. But if you talk about freedom and democracy to the exclusion of things like acknowledging that grocery store prices are really high, that rents are high, that interest rates are high, that you, in a way, you might be talking past people and that what you have to do is do both. You know, David Axelrod

said something to me that was really interesting. He said, when I think back on the 2020 campaign, sure, I get it. They talked about the soul of the nation and that was meaningful. But what they also said was Joe Biden is, as he said, one of us, you know, he's somebody who cares about the military because his son Beau was a veteran. He cares about his faith and he cares about middle-class Americans. And in that way, it was a very tactile, very approachable message. He says, I hope I'm wrong, but I worry that by focusing so much on democracy, that we're going to leave people behind who don't hear something that means something really immediate to them. Something you point out in your piece that feels alarming, half of Americans polled

by CBS in January said that they believe that the losing side of the coming election will resort to violence. Has Biden at all responded to that fear? You know, he talked about it with me because it's clearly in his mind something that he's struggling with because it's so at odds with his conception of the country and our politics. As he said to me, I just kind of can't believe that Americans would vote for somebody who has been supportive of violence in politics. I'm paraphrasing there, but that's what he was saying. He finds it almost impossible to imagine that people would vote for Trump again after January 6th. And yet at the same time, the reality is he'll be the president at a time when the country faces the genuine risk

of more violence in our politics. And he said very bluntly, he said, I have no question, I have no doubt that Donald Trump will contest this result no matter what it is. He said, I think he'll do anything he can to avoid losing again. And he's preparing in effect for Donald Trump to do what he did last time. I said to him, what specifically are you worried about when it comes to violence in the election? He said, everything from last time plus, meaning last time it was a violent storming of the US Capitol. This time, it could be that plus more. He didn't spell out exactly what he's talking about. But I think there is a fear among Democrats that there could be efforts to try to disrupt voting, disrupt vote counting, prevent people from getting to the polls. We saw a deep fake robocall in New Hampshire this year, which was a fake version of Joe Biden's

voice telling people not to vote. In that case, it was done by a consultant hired by one of his rivals in the New Hampshire primary. But I think there is a fear that that kind of technology is so much more powerful now than it was even four years ago that the risks of that are significant this time. I'm also interested in how the press is contributing to this because I'm thinking about your interview from the last time you were on this show a few years ago, and you talked about how from the very beginning, Joe Biden was treated with some skepticism from the media because some press looked at his mistakes on the trail as being out of touch. I just thought that was something really interesting to bring up in this current day with the discourse when that was something that we've been talking about for many years in the media? There is tension there. I think there's also something important, Tanya, which is Biden said to me at one point that he thought that the press has become numb to the rhetoric of Donald Trump. It's become numb to the idea that he's going to casually threaten to terminate the Constitution or things like that. And I think it bothers Biden that he thinks that there's too much attention on his age and not enough attention on how much Donald Trump really

represents this radical departure from the history of American democracy. I think that really bothers him. Evan Osnos, thank you so much. My pleasure. Thank you, Tanya. Evan Osnos is staff writer for The New Yorker. His latest article is titled, Joe Biden's Last Campaign. Writer Sloane Crosley is celebrated for her novels Cult Classic and The Clasp and her three essay collections, all distinguished by sharp social observations and wit. Her latest book, Grief is for People, is an idiosyncratic memoir of loss. Book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review.

The subject of Sloane Crosley's book is as traditional as it gets. It's an elegy to her friend, former boss, and mentor, Russell Perrault. Until his death in 2019, Perrault was the head of publicity at Vintage Books, an esteemed publishing imprint. He hired Crosley when she was 25. As Crosley depicts him, Perrault was part Sheridan Whiteside, the tetchy critic character from The Man Who Came to Dinner, and part Auntie Mame. He was the kind of boss who'd cheerfully tell a job seeker that he would reject her because you're not fun. But he was also a practical jokester and generous host of getaway weekends for the entire office at his Connecticut farm. Quickly, Crosley and Perot bonded, becoming for decades the kind of friends slash family

slash whatever for which we don't have an adequate word in English. Crosley herself struggles throughout the book to nail their relationship, which she says is both over and ill defined. We are not husband and wife. We tend to think the other is exaggerating when we gripe about our families, as neither of us has been forced to spend holidays with these people. I am not his person. He has a person. And yet, every man I have ever dated has felt the presence of a second father, and Russell's partner has felt the presence of a daughter. In July of 2019, Perot and Crosley had dinner in New York at a restaurant near her apartment. They discussed a plan where he would sleep at her apartment and take care of Crosley's cat while she went off to a literary festival.

Three nights later, Perrault killed himself at the Connecticut house he shared with his partner. Did you know, people asked Crosley, seeking, as she recognizes, to manage chaos, to usher in a sense of coherence, to use me to inoculate themselves. No, she didn't know. I said that grief is for people takes the form of a traditional elegy, but there's nothing traditional or twice cooked about Crosley's voice, her arresting observations on being engulfed by grief. Here's a passage where Crosley, who's keeping a kind of vigil outside the restaurant where she and Perrault had their last dinner, talks about the free-floating social category of being a bereaved friend. To mourn the death of a friend is to feel as if you're walking around with a vase, knowing you have to set it down, but nowhere is obvious.

Others will assure you that there's no right way to do this. Put it anywhere. But you know better. You know that if you put your grief in a place that's too prominent or too hidden, you will take it back when no one's looking. This is why I spend my nights looking into the restaurant. I fantasize about keeping Russell in front of me for a little longer. Each time the restaurant closes, each time he drops me off at my door, each time he walks off into the dark, and then he's gone, and I am still holding this vase.

As it proceeds, Grief is for People becomes not only Crosley's elegy to Perrault, but also an elegy to the woman that for many years Crosley thought she was in New York, someone in the know, secure, connected. Exactly one month before Perrault's suicide, Crosley's apartment is broken into and all her jewelry stolen, including two pieces from her awful grandmother, an amber amulet the size of an apricot, and a green cocktail ring, a dome with tears of tourmaline. Think kryptonite, Crosley advises. Think dish soap. In a way that makes bleak emotional sense, Crosley conflates these two ruptures in what was her life, and then later in the book adds a third that occurs in the spring of 2020, namely the pandemic's obliteration of normalcy in New York.

Eventually, Crosley tells us, I will look back on the burglary and see it for what it is, a dark gift of delineation. I know when my first bomb went off. Not everyone gets to know. Throughout, Crosley cites Joan Didion, whose two personal books on grief, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, she obviously sees as a touchstone for her own. To me, Grief is for People is every bit their equal in eloquence, intensity, and toughness. Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley. Coming up, we'll hear from writer Lucy Sant.

In her memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name, she shares her story of transition from male to female at 67 years old. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. Who am I? is a question writer Lucy Sant has been asking herself for the better part of her life. As she writes in a new book titled, I Heard Her Call My Name, A Memoir of Transition, Sant describes how she found herself in the unlikeliest of places in 2021 through a gender-swapping feature on FaceApp,

which allowed her to turn pictures of herself as a man into a woman. Throughout her life, she says, changing genders was a strange and electric idea that lived somewhere in the recesses of her mind for the better part of 67 years. Lucy Sant, who was assigned male at birth, is known for her incisive criticism and cultural commentary for the New York Review of Books. She's also written nine books that explore subcultures and urban history, including Low Life, Lures and Snares of Old New York, Evidence, a collection of rarely seen New York Police Department evidence photographs taken in the 1900s, and The Other Paris, a look at the French capital's underbelly.

Sant recently retired from Bard College, where she had been a visiting professor of photography and writing for over two decades. Lucy Sant, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you, Tanya. Glad to be here. Can I have you take us to February of 2021, when you wrote to around 30 of your closest friends in an email with a subject line that read, a bombshell. Can I have you read the first page of that letter? Of course. The dam burst on February 16th when I uploaded FaceApp for a laugh. I had tried the application a few years earlier, but something had gone wrong and it returned a badly botched image. But I had a new phone and I was curious.

The gender swapping feature was the whole point for me, and the first picture I passed through it was the one I had tried before, taken for that occasion. This time it gave me a full-face portrait of a Hudson Valley woman in midlife, strong, healthy, clean living. She also had lovely flowing chestnut hair and a very subtle makeup job. And her face was mine, no question about it. Nose, mouth, eyes, brows, chin, barring a hint of enhancement here or there, she was me. When I saw her, I felt something liquefy in the core of my body. I trembled from my shoulders to my crotch. I guessed that I had at last met my reckoning.

Lucy, thank you so much for reading that. You uploaded these photos of yourself on February 16th of 2021. And less than 12 days later, you were essentially ready to let the world know about this big life-altering thing about you. What do you think it was about those altered photographs that unlocked this intense need to come out and let everyone know? Because at this time, you were about 67 years old. Yeah. Well, it was seeing, you seeing, I had to collect these photographs from all over the house. They were in boxes and albums and baskets here and there. Not that many pictures.

I've always been camera shy. But well, first of all, it took all this time to collect them. Yeah. And that's a point because I realized I didn is something, a realization I came to very recently. I had a time lock on my trans ideation. What do you mean? I mean that I would think about it for an hour or two, fantasize, whatever, and then some internal mechanism would force my thoughts in a different direction. And, you know, because I spent so much of my life trying to avoid, I mean, I never like cross-dressed because I knew it was going to be a one-way trip. And when, but when I saw these pictures that represented my whole life, really, beginning around age 10 or so. And furthermore, in this eerie kind of way, the app seemed to know what my fashion choices and hairstyles would have been all those years.

It was uncanny. And I was given this evidence. It was irrefutable. Plus, I'd broken through that time limit, and I had no choice. I came out to my shrink 10 days later. Wow. So yeah, it took you quite a while to compile all of these photographs. We're going to get to that not only saw yourself in them, it allowed you to go back in time and revisit these memories of what it would have been like, those moments in time, had you been a girl, essentially rewriting memories. Well, yeah, heavily rewriting them, total alternative timeline, because as I also point out in the book, if I had, in fact,

been born female, my life story would have been very different because, you know, my relation with my parents would have been different. My first, I had a very difficult family situation and I was happy to escape. And my escape was provided by a scholarship to an all-boys Jesuit high school in Manhattan when I was 14. And that would not have happened if I'd been a girl. I mean, at the time that you wrote that email to your closest friends, you also came out to your wife, your partner, and your son, and then quickly walked it back. How come you walked it back when you had such a resolve to let everyone else know? Well, I knew that my romantic relationship would not survive this.

We're still best friends, but I knew that the romance part was not going to survive. And furthermore, I felt, and this had been a major inhibitive factor for decades, which is that I like girls, and I figured that this would repel them. And since I had been given the proof of this repulsion by my partner, I was trying to talk myself back into the closet. How was your relationship with your son? How did your son react to it? He was totally chill because he's Gen Z. My son is now 24. He is, as I'm fond of saying, straight as a highway in Texas, but he's known trans kids since he was 11. He went to middle school in Woodstock. He did LARPing, live action role playing, which really brings out the trans kids. So he didn't bat an eyelash. His only concern was what he should call me. What does he call you?

Nothing. He refers to me as Lucy to other people. He's never called me that to my face. And but he, you know, in fact, when I came out to him, I said, I just keep calling me, Dad, you have a mom. You know, I don't want to go bother that that particular relationship. But quickly, I mean, within six months, it was no longer, calling me dad was no longer really tenable. When you first transitioned, you worried that somehow the name change from your dead name to Lucy would change your reputation for those who knew you by your dead name, which we often refer to as the former name

of someone who has transitioned. I like the term dead name a lot. And people are freaked out by it though. But it was a preoccupation and it seems so weird to me now. I mean, why would I think that this would present any kind of difference in my career? I mean, for one thing, my name is so unusual. My last name is rare, you know, and I'm only changing one letter. But the fact is that that was a kind of cover for a deeper existential reckoning with myself, you know, this unstable personality because, well, first of all, having come here as an immigrant child and learning to speak English, being the only immigrant kid around, trying to pass myself off as an American,

trying to speak English and learning English and then trying to get rid of my accent as quickly as I could. Because your family was from Belgium, yes. Yeah, my family was from Belgium. So that was my first attempt at passing, as it were. And I guess there's always been a kind of unstable relation between my inner self and what I show the world. And so changing my name, rather than changing my gender per se, is changing my name that set off this weird kind of existential freefall.

Like, who am I? You know, this bizarre uncertainty that manifested as this completely ridiculous fear. Did you ever think that maybe maintaining this secret, though, was in opposition of your profession as a truth-teller? Well, yeah. That's, you know, I told myself regularly how I was being a hypocrite. And I'm not in favor of hypocrisy as a general rule. You know, I make a practice of being honest. And, well, the interesting thing is that since I've transitioned, I've become brutally honest.

I can't lie anymore. I tend to speak my mind sometimes a little too loudly and indecorously. But in any event, yeah, I was painfully aware of that gap between intention and actual result. And it's really set me free as a writer as well, I think, now. What a time you were in in the 70s and 80s in New York City, as you mentioned. Like, you were around people who were strung out. You were also in the company of emerging artists and creatives that we've come to know, the likes of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, for instance.

And there was also a transgender population that was visible during that time period. How did you view and interact with them? I didn't. It's funny because I was close to Nan Golden. We actually dated for about a week. And when Greer Langton, the artist Greer Langton, who was trans, became her roommate, I was terrified. I avoided her. The idea of an actual trans woman just scared living daylights out of me. They were going to take me by the hand and pull me across the line, and I wasn't ready, and oh my God. But you were aware, because that's interesting. That takes a certain amount of awareness to know that that fear, that's the reason why you feared it, or is that a pun reflection? No, no. This was happening at the time. And then actually, when I was writing Low Life, I had an office a block away from Tompkins Square Park. And at that point, every year there would be a thing in Tompkins Square Park called Wigstock, which was celebration of all things gender bending. You know, trans women, drag queens, there wasn't that much of a distinction made in those days. I could hear the festivities from my office, but I never – I'd wait until everybody had gone home before I'd slink back up the side of the park to my apartment.

I was scared. I – you know, I – the Pyramid Club was half a block from my office and that was the epicenter of all things drag and lower east side at the time. I never set foot in that club, not once. It was really like a big, big job of avoidance that I was doing in those days. Was it part of that thing you described that, what did you call it, one-way ticket or like a point of no return. Yes. I mean, and, you know, of course, the irony is that I simultaneously yearned for that. I yearned for somebody to come along and take my hand and pull me across the line, even though I knew people who I was terrified that they might do that.

You know, this is the kind of internal war that just raged in me for decades. You don't see yourself being like a spokesperson, but you know that you are just by virtue of you telling your story, that people are looking to you for that, especially during this moment where trans rights are at the top of the conversation. That's right. You know, I know a lot of trans writers, but I know some who write for a trans audience. They've given up trying to write for a general audience, which is not just a trans problem. It's today, you know, there being no big stage and everybody's writing for their own share, their own little pool. And in my case, I, you know, I'm trying to take on the job of

explaining this to cis people who are well-meaning but do not understand, which is most cis people, frankly. They just don't get it. They have no idea how, especially, I mean, to this day, you know, people who are very, very close to me and love me, they don't understand you mean you carried on this deception for 50 years and we never knew? And that reflects back on them, right? Anyway, so, but they have no idea what the mechanism, how this feels. You know, I had a very close friend write to me after reading my discussion of men and women, you know, where I say, like, you know, with women, I feel at ease. I feel like I don't have to hold down an arterial position. With guys, I feel like I'm in a struggle I didn't sign up for, you know. And I had a very close friend write to me and say, I feel the exact same way as you do, but I've never wanted to be a woman, you know? So I have to explain that to

people and explain to the parents of, you know, children who've expressed their transness that, no, this is not a passing fancy. I mean, it's a moment of liberation. Across Generation Z, people are getting permission from their peers to come out. And so it's this great moment of release, which, of course, the right wing is trying to stomp on as hard as they can. But, you know, I want to explain to the parents, this is not a will of the wisp. It's not going to go away. And, you know, I am lucky to have survived my own repression. I think a lot of people in my position have not.

You write about how, or you have written about how, at almost 70, slight worry that people will think you're jumping on a trend. But is that really how you feel? Because, I mean, your friends tell you that they're seeing you smile with your whole face now. People have known you for 50 years and have never seen you smile. Yeah. No, that's true. I mean, well, I never opened my mouth in a grin. I never showed my teeth. And I used to think that, well, how did I even phrase it to myself? I think it made me look too vulnerable or something. Well, I mean, it made me look too feminine because it's, you know, I mean, I look distinctly better when I'm in a good mood and I look most feminine when I'm smiling or grinning or laughing or whatever. I mean, the things seem, those two things seem to,

happiness and female appearance seem to be intimately connected for me. It's really kind of inexplicable, but there you have it. Lucy Sant, thank you so much for this book, and thank you for this conversation. You ask wonderful questions. Thank you so much. Lucy Sant's new book is titled, I Heard Her Call My Name, A Memoir of Transition. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Sallet,

Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelly, and Susan Yakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. For Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.