Heavyweight - #3 Tara

Episode Date: October 4, 2016

Jonathan watched a short experimental video in college in which a little girl sat in silence while her parent sobbed. Now, Jonathan wants to know if that girl is okay. You can find Maxi Cohen's website here: http://www.maxicohenstudio.com/ Credits Heavyweight is hosted and produced by Jonathan Goldstein. This episode was also produced by Chris Neary and Kalila Holt. Our senior producer is Wendy Dorr. Editing by Alex Blumberg and Jorge Just.  Special thanks to Emily Condon, Caitlin Kenney, Peter Clowney, Michelle Harris, Dr. Susan Boulware at Yale Pediatric Endocrinology, Maxi Cohen, Jack Hitt, Jack Turban, Lida Drummond, Mario Falsetto, Peter Rose, and Jackie Cohen. The show was mixed by Haley Shaw. Music for this episode by Christine Fellows, with additional music by Chris Zabriskie, Blue Dot Sessions, Katie Mullins, Y La Bamba, Stratus, and Matthew Boll. Our theme song is by The Weakerthans courtesy of Epitaph Records, and our ad music is by Haley Shaw. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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With Kraken, it's easy to start your crypto journey with 24-7 support when you need it. Go to Kraken.com and see what crypto can be. Not investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. See Kraken.com slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. Hello? What's your favorite movie? I can't talk right now. I'm going out for lunch.

Who are you going for lunch with? Carol. What? Carol. Stand still. The sound on the phone is terrible. Carol. My ex-girlfriend, Carol. Is it okay?

Do you really care? Let's say I said no, I don't. You know, it affects me. Oh, I'm sorry. You're not sorry. Do you know there are many of your ex-boyfriends who I was fond of, and I don't keep in touch with them because I felt like it would be a disloyalty to you. Are you going to talk about me?

Of course. I don't want you to. I gotta go. I'm here. All right, have a good lunch. What are you going to order about me? Of course. I don't want you to. I gotta go. I'm here. All right, have a good lunch. What are you going to order? I don't know. What are we going to...

Do you want to know what we're going to eat? Bon appetit. Bon appetit. Bon appetit. From Gimlet Media, I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and this is Heavyweight. Today's episode, Tara. During my freshman year, I wore black turtlenecks. They were meant to let people know I was an artist. It was easier than actually making art. I wore them so tight that the outline of my Adam's apple

was made visible when I swallowed with excitement, and nothing excited me more than art. Hearing words like chiaroscuro and trompe l'oeil was enough to set my Adam's apple racing up and down my turtleneck collar like an otter trapped in a sleeping bag. Aside from my own saliva, I also enjoyed swallowing espresso,

and in the back row of my experimental film appreciation class, I swallowed oceans of the stuff. The back row was an ideal place to sit, as it was closest to the exit. So, in case I had to get up and smoke a jetan or indulge a panic attack about my future, I could do so unnoticed.

Although I knew I was an artist, I did not know what kind. And so, experimental film felt like a possible calling. I knew I could never make a movie movie, like Raiders of the Lost Ark or Ishtar,

but I could probably get away with making weird stuff. The kind of films that played on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation at three in the morning and prompted my father to demand after several minutes in, what the hell happened to the plot? So point a camera at a sleeping person for ten hours? I could totally do that. ten hours? I could totally do that. In the end, though, I only ever made one single film, a Super 8 short that involved montages of swirling fans and clouds drifting across the sky in speeded-up motion. It was all set to the progressively jazzy strains of Pat Metheny's seminal fusion album As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls.

I named the film Insensito. I can no longer recall why. But I still loved watching movies in class. Window Water Baby Moving, in which the director filmed his wife giving birth, and Mothlight, which looked like a white scratchy film strip. But of all the films in film appreciation class that I appreciated, there's a scene

from one video that I still think about 25 years later. The premise of the video was this. In 1986, the director put an ad in the Village Voice asking people who were angry to come down to her studio and tell her why. The resulting video was simply titled, Anger. I've never been able to find it again, but I remember it clearly. There were ranting punks, a murderer who bragged about all the murders he'd committed, and victims of violence who laid out their plans for revenge. But the person I still think about all these years later is someone who didn't say anything at all.

A little girl. She couldn't have been more than eight or nine. She sat silently watching her parent, who described herself as being intersexed, weep tears of anger and frustration over how hard her life was. Then, the little girl, with her chin raised, stared directly into the camera. And this is what I remember so well,

meeting her gaze and how complicit I felt to be watching her. Why would the woman have brought along a child that day to hear all this? From the look on the little girl's face, it was hard to tell what effect these words were having on her. And over the past 25 years, every once in a while, I find myself worrying about what might have become of this little girl and wondering if maybe finding her would put my mind to rest. I've never been able to talk about it with anyone

because no one I know has ever seen the video. Lately, I've been trying to find it online, but because I don't remember about it with anyone, because no one I know has ever seen the video. Lately, I've been trying to find it online. But because I don't remember the director's name, it's been virtually impossible to Google. When I punch in anger plus video plus 80s, my search yields a heavy metal music video for a song called Anger. In it, a shirtless Viking with a spiral perm wields a cardboard sword. My middle name is Stuart. I email old film school friends, but none of them know what I'm talking about. Then one night, I hear back from a retired professor.

God, yes, he writes. Even with failing memory, I do believe I know what you're talking about. He sends a link to the video on YouTube where it sits with few views and not a single comment. I press play and I'm shocked after all these years by how much I remember.

For all you vidiots out there, this one's for you. You boys step off. Yuppie, step off. It starts with a group of skinheads and punks giving the camera the finger. Back in the 80s, giving a camera the finger was a big thing. I'm junking, I'm proud of it. There's the wrongfully accused police detective forced out of his unit amid scandal.

I'm angry enough right now that if I saw something happening in the street, possibility I wouldn't do a goddamn thing about it because it's none of my fucking business. You let another guy handle it. I was never like that. I loved what I was doing.

Now I wouldn't do shit. There's the ethereal young woman wearing a pink sweatshirt with ducks who speaks of being attacked at knife point and how a month later her boyfriend left her.

Everything you do to someone does eventually come back to you. Everything you do, all actions have reactions. And if I didn't believe that, I would have kissed the D train a long time ago. There's the artist couple, once in love, but now filled with raw hatred for each other, who, because of the realities of Manhattan real estate, were forced to live as roommates in a small artist's loft.

This is the kind of double-sided thing that's going on. Can I speak now? Can I please speak? What are you asking permission for? You're always asking permission. Well, shut the fuck up then! Then, the scene I've not been able to forget, the weeping woman and her little girl. I went to an endocrinologist and I found out through many of the tests that they did that I was biologically a woman and a man at the same time. I was intersexed. In her powder blue knee-length skirt and pearl necklace, she looks to be out of an entirely different era,

like a nun from the 50s on her day off. She sits on the stool, wringing her hands. After two years of constantly crying night after night after night, and my wife being upset, and my child being upset, and the constant harassment from people on the job. I became so helpless and finally after seeing many doctors to try to have some way to have it corrected it it was an impossibility and it was a question of being a circus for the society or choosing to be a woman. And I thought at that time that it was much easier for me to be a woman.

As she speaks, the camera pans to the right, and sitting beside her is the little girl. She's wearing a purple dress, her long brown hair pulled back with a headband. She sits there as though absorbing radiation. It's hard to tell what she's thinking. Some of what the woman says is hard to follow. She doesn't want sex reassignment, but she doesn't want to live in the middle. And although I'm not married to my wife anymore,

we still live together as sisters, the child. But it's a small 9x by 12 for three of us. I think that I've worked so hard to try to make a success out of my life, only to wind up at the bottom. Seeing the video again still makes me feel as powerless as it did all those years ago. What had their life been like in that 9 by 12 room?

And where was the little girl now? The video, at least the online version, ends just before the credits begin, so there's no way to know who the weeping woman and the little girl were. But the director's name was there, Maxie Cohen. And it turns out, she's not hard to find. Oh, hi, it's Jonathan. I didn't get that, but, uh, okay. Maxie's place was just a subway ride away.

It turns out that Maxie hasn't thought about the movie in years, and was surprised by my interest. I guess I assumed an experimental video director's place would be piled from floor to ceiling with towers of alt publications, possess a bathtub overflowing with bicycle parts for future art projects. You know, gritty. But Maxie's place is fancy. I'm greeted at the door by young interns

who inform me that Maxie will be with me in a moment. In a moment. Well, la-di-da. It seems I've caught them just before lunch. In the kitchenette, a meal of kale and beets is being prepared. Maybe I should have become an experimental film director after all. Maxie still lives and works in the same Soho studio where she filmed Anger 30 years ago. Well, at first I set up a studio somewhere else

because I didn't know if I wanted all these angry people in my house. But yeah, I just asked people what made them angry, what were they angry about. That was really all I asked. And I think the people that really responded were people who were deeply troubled. I asked her if she's ever followed up with any of them. Not really, except about a year later, or sometime later, maybe it was a year or two later,

the commissioning editor from Channel 4 in London saw the piece, and he was so distraught that I had made this film. And I remember the producer from Channel 4 thinking I was totally irresponsible, that I hadn't kept... He wanted to know what happened to that little girl. This sound is an audible gasp. I hadn't told Maxie that the reason I'd come to see her

was specifically to ask about the little girl. Let's back up. the little girl. Let's back up. I have Maxie go back to the day of the shoot and tell me what she remembers about the little girl. She just looked at her face while her mother talked or her father talked.

She was it all went in and I was really concerned about her hearing all of this but her parent said no no no keep her in the room like she was just fine there

now this is the only person that I did not talk to before I shot and I don't even know how it happened because all of a sudden somebody showed up on location the day that we were shooting and I had no idea what I was in for

so you said that it was a guy from the BBC who got in touch with you who was curious about this little girl he was so distraught after watching it. And he, why didn't I keep up with her? And what has happened to her? And really made me feel that it was my responsibility to do that.

How long ago was this that he got in touch with you? Oh, this was maybe a year or two after it was broadcast. It was still the late 80s. Still the late 80s, okay. So I tracked her down. And what Maxie learned wasn't very much. The woman was getting used to wearing blouses and the little girl had just gotten a bicycle.

And at the time, how did you get into touch with them? I guess I have their phone number, which I could still possibly have if anybody still has the same phone as they had in 1986. Yeah, 30 years later. It's possible. People don't even have phones anymore. Right. That's true. But you have that information?

I probably do somewhere. Because... You want to track her down, don't you? I really want somewhere. Because. You want to track her down, don't you? I really want to, yeah. When I saw it all those years ago, she stayed with me. Yeah. Well, maybe next week I'll have the time to look. You still have that stuff?

I might. I might. I do tend to. I mean, I went through one cleaning. Uh-huh. And I can't remember if I got rid of it or kept it, so I could look. Is that a big undertaking? To find it?

Yeah. All right, well, let's see. Maybe if, let's see what time it is, maybe we can go down now. I could go down. We could go down and I could see if it's easy or not. There's a lesson here in the importance of archiving. Real estate in New York, you know, where do you put it all? Maxie's basement locker is filled from top to bottom, and a 30-year-old phone number,

unless it's been inscribed on a block of asbestos and Maxie's up for a cleansing fire, doesn't seem likely to be found. Nevertheless, we go through boxes, some marked and some not. You know, now that I just think about it, the releases would have people's names and numbers on them, right? Yeah. So...

We search through folder after folder for release forms signed in 1986. It isn't looking hopeful, but then... Oh, there's so much stuff this brings back. Anger... Oh, maybe here are the releases. Okay. We even find the information for those yuppie-hating punks. Such neat handwriting for punks.

Yeah. So the woman whose name is Laura, that's the woman who's intersexed. Is there a phone number there? There is. Wow. This sound... Wow. ...is the sound of my amazement.

Maxi gives me the numbers of everyone in the video. The number you dialed is not in service. The number you dialed is not in service. The number you have dialed is unallocated. I love that unallocated guy. Unsurprisingly, every single number is disconnected. Except for one. Hello?

Hello, is there a Laura there? Robert? No, a Laura? Who's Laura? That's who I'm calling for. That's you? No who I'm calling for. That's you? No, I'm calling for... Hold on, hold on.

Hello? Yes, hello. I was looking for a Laura... That's me. Oh, that's you. Yes. Wow, okay. My name is Jonathan Goldstein,

and I watched a short movie that you were in from many years ago, from the late 80s. It's possible, but I mean, it's like, I'm 76 years old now. Well, it makes sense, because I think in the short film that I saw, you were 40 or so. As I continue to talk about the video, it doesn't seem to evoke any memory. For the duration of the conversation, Laura acts like getting a call about an interview from 30 years ago is all in a day's work. Because I called you just now thinking, there's no way that this person is still going to be at this phone number.

Yep. People... They still live in the same place, too. You're kidding. No. But what isn't the same is that Laura is now Robert. Again. Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, life keeps going on and on.

I just, you know, I go with the flow of things, and that's it. Wait a second. Because, okay, in that movie, you had said that you had made the decision to live as a woman. Right. And now I just, now I live as a male now. When did that change occur? That was maybe a couple of years ago already. It was only a couple of years ago? Why?

I don't know, because that's the way my life was, and things keep changing and everything, and I just made certain decisions, and that was it. Let's recall that this question of gender was once so crushing that Robert couldn't even talk about it without breaking down. And now he seems surprisingly at peace. You showed up with your daughter. Do you remember? at peace. You showed up with your daughter. Uh-huh. Do you remember?

Well, not that I don't remember, no. But it's possible. You were sitting on a stool, talking to the, you know, facing the camera. And it sounds familiar, though. Who are you talking to? I'm talking to somebody on the phone.

What? Yeah. It's my very good. It's my wife. Oh, okay. Who is it? Hello? Yes, hello.

Hi. I was just, I was, my name is Jonathan. Yeah. And I saw this movie that Laura was in from the late 80s. I don't know nothing about that, but okay. So what is this about then? He came to the movie with your daughter, I think, when he went to be interviewed,

and she sat beside him while he was telling his story. This was 30 years ago? Almost 30 years ago. Holy smoke. Oh, wow. I don't know anything about this village. He was talking at the time about having to decide with his doctor

to become a woman? Yes, yes. Somehow he decided not to do it. That's why he changed his name back to Robert. And do you remember why he decided to change back? Well, he was getting up in age, and he wasn't attracted to men. And you guys are still married after all these years?

Yeah, we're still married, yeah. And nowadays, people... Some of what he was talking about is more... Yeah, now it's more open than it was, like, 30 years ago. Now it's more open now. Yeah. And you know what? Sometimes you can't change the human mind.

You can't. You can never... You can't reverse the human mind. If you try to fight the human mind and forget about it, you could go crazy. I talk with Robert's wife for a while and eventually ask her what her daughter's name is. And she says, it's Tara. After the break, Tara. I take out Tara's number, but before picking up the phone,

I find myself worrying about what to say. After all the years of wondering what had become of her, now is my chance to find out. All during our conversation, I keep just wanting to say, how are you? Are you okay? But such questions are hard to come right out and ask, even to friends and family, let alone a perfect stranger. Tara tells me she had no idea that such a video even existed, and is reluctant to talk about that time. But maybe she's a bit curious too, because when I ask if we can meet up, although she's

hesitant, she says yes. I suggest meeting at a quiet place, and since you can't talk at libraries, and a cemetery would have seemed plain creepy, I rented the conference room of a local chain hotel. Oh, here we go. Tara liked the idea, but when she shows up,

she seems a little nervous. And so there's water. I have my own water, it's okay. And I do my best to put her at ease. Um, okay. So, yes. But I still somehow feel like I'm selling timeshares in Orlando. And this was close by for you, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This was actually... Tara's now in her late 30s, but looks younger. She has an open and kind face and still has long, straight brown hair. She looks a lot like the little girl from the video. And as we talk, her face seems to toggle between adult and child. She showed up with her husband and some photographs. This was my first communion. And this is my father, dressed as a woman. He's looking like, I don't know how you would put it, like kind of like a 50s housewife or something, you know? That was his mental picture of what, you know,

he wanted to look like as a woman. He grew up in an orphanage raised by the nuns. That molded his idea of what a woman should look like, yeah. You know? And I told all my friends that he was my aunt. I understood the situation, but I never knew what to say. I was always walking on eggshells, so to speak, because it was like, do I say this? Do I not say this?

Like, what's okay? What's not okay? That kind of thing. Why do you think he brought you with him that day to the video shoot? Um, I don't know. I think it was, I think it was to use me as a tool to have somebody to have sympathy for. To have sympathy for him? Yes.

How? Because in his mind, I guess, I mean, you know, I have this beautiful, young, well-behaved daughter. And I'm, you know, we're forced to live in this one room. We're forced to live this way. He's forced to live in limbo and, you know, all these things. I think it was a cry for help. You know, all these things. I think it was a cry for help. And I think he was using me as a tool in his plea and cry for help.

In the video, he refers to himself as intersexed. Mm-hmm. So how did you understand what to mean? From what I was always told was he had a medical condition. When Tara asks her father about his medical condition, it's hard to get a clear answer. In the past few years, he's been diagnosed with dementia. And so there's a lot he just doesn't remember. And Tara ends up relying on what she was told as a child. Lately, the last couple years, you know, I started to just question certain things about,

you know, how this whole transition happened. And I did some research and I found an article that was written by this doctor from Germany. It's not just an article. It's a study conducted by two German doctors over the course of 20 years with Tara's dad as its sole focus. It was published in a journal called Archives of Sexual Behavior. And in it, Tara's dad is diagnosed as having Kalman syndrome, a rare hormonal disorder that, among other symptoms, delays puberty or stops it entirely. So if you're male, this means your voice never lowers,

your body never grows hair. While the video captures one moment in Tara's dad's life, the article presents a portrait of his life since childhood. So alongside the data on his hormone levels are details like how at the orphanage he was caught spying on the girls and as a punishment was forced to dress as a girl. He was also discharged from the Air Force for concealing female clothes in his footlocker. The article also documents a history of misdiagnoses, psychiatric hospitalizations, thwarted attempts at gender reassignment surgery, and suicide attempts. He'd even set himself on fire.

Throughout his entire life, Tara's dad insisted his gender confusion owed solely to the Kalmans, a physical hormonal condition. Nonetheless, the doctors he was treated by labeled him with the mental disorder transsexual, a diagnosis he violently rejected. It's also a diagnosis that no longer even exists. The article states, she always refused to consider herself as transsexual.

As a result, she found herself, quote, stuck in the middle. Because of this stressful situation, she became emotionally even more disturbed. Tara's dad was never able to get the life he wanted or the treatment he needed. After reading the article, the overwhelming sense I'm left with is that while things are by no means perfect, the medical community's understanding of gender has changed drastically and society's has too. Had Tara's dad been born 25 years later, being quote stuck in the middle might not have been the curse it felt like back then and perhaps he might not have experienced quite so much suffering and Tara might have been spared having to

witness so much suffering. In watching the video, it doesn't feel as though you're being protected from any kind of like thing that is being expressed. No. I mean, I knew more about this stuff as a young child than most kids know. And was that just a function of, you say that the apartment that your dad describes in the video is like, it's just a room. I believe it was like 12 by 14. Really? Yes.

That's what I think the actual size was. It's very small. I was right in the middle. It was very hard for them to keep any types of secrets from me. Just because of the nature. There wasn't any closed doors. There wasn't any escape. She remembers seeing her father come home with a black eye

from the building he worked at as a doorman. The other doorman had beaten him up and told him to never come back. There were a lot of people that picked on him, abused him. I think it would have been better if he probably moved away and started somewhere new with a new life. So why did he stay? At the end of the article, the authors hypothesized

that living in between rather than, as they put it, quote, a real woman, allowed Tara's dad to continue to live with his family. I wrote to one of the article's authors to ask what that meant. His explanation was simple. Nowadays, he wrote, we see many transgender persons who stay together with their spouse and family. You have to remember that this happened in the 1980s. If Tara's dad had undergone sex reassignment, he says, it might have broken up the family, and family was very important to him. Tara's dad was put into foster care at age one

and lived in an orphanage until he was a teenager. So maybe this, living all together in one room, a communal bathroom down the hall, Tara having to sleep in the same twin bed as him, was the only way he knew to keep his own family together. I mean, my parents were very supportive of me in everything and anything I wanted to do. I went through private school, even though we had no money. My mother decided to work Saturdays doing their bingo in exchange for my tuition. She worked that out? Yes.

that out. Yes. Yes. You know, the only thing I would say that I lacked growing up in that kind of environment was having my own sense of privacy. That is the only thing that I really lacked. How did you negotiate that? When I was really young, I actually used to go out into the hallway and they had outlets in the hallway, and I would bring my stuff out in the hallway and just kind of make my own little private little, even though you had people that passed by once in a while, I still had quite a bit of privacy there. We had at one point, we had a small little portable TV.

I brought that outside. I mean, I would do whatever. I'd bring my blanket outside in the hallway. So is it happy memories? Yeah, absolutely. For Thanksgiving, the tenants would sometimes set up a table in the hallway so they could all eat together, like a family. Tara was one of the few kids in the building, so people were often stopping by to give her little gifts. Even the most experimental of short videos can only show what lies within the frame,

not what lies outside of it. Neither Tara, her mother, nor her father remembered the video. Until I reminded them, the video had been swallowed up by all of their other days, some bad, some good. There's one last thing that bears mentioning about that article. Tara appears in it as well. The authors write that in spite of the situation, Tara appeared to be dealing, quote, exceptionally well. They also said that to her parents, Tara was a major source of pride. Tara and her husband are looking to buy a house, and Tara says she'd like one with lots of space.

They plan on starting a family. When she was a kid, Tara's family made a couple cross-country road trips together. They lasted almost the whole summer. She says that after she left their shared room, went off to college, and graduated, she decided to do one last trip with them. She says she was probably never going to have a chance to do it again, which says a lot. It's the kind of thing a happy family does. Chooses to be together.

Chooses to be squeezed in close. Just because they want to go. Now that the furniture's returning to its goodwill home Now that the last month's rent is scheming with the damage deposit Take this moment to decide If we meant it, if we tried Or felt around for far too much From things that accidentally touched Heavyweight is hosted and produced by me, Jonathan Goldstein, along with Chris Neary and Kalila Holt.

Our senior producer is Wendy Doerr, editing by Alex Bloomberg and Jorge Just. Special thanks to Emily Condon, Caitlin Kenney, Peter Clowney, Michelle Harris, Dr. Susan Boulware at Yale Pediatric Endocrinology, Maxi Cohen, Jack Hitt, Jack Turbin, Lita Drummond, Mario Falsetto, Peter Rose, and my beloved friend, Jackie Cohen. The show is mixed by Haley Shaw. Music by Christine Fellows. Additional music for the episode can be found on our website, gimletmedia.com slash heavyweight. Our theme song is by The Weaker Thans, courtesy of Epitaph Records,

and our ad music is by Hayley Shaw. Follow us on Twitter at heavyweight, or email us at heavyweight at gimletmedia.com. We'll have a new episode next week. And if you're a fan of Wiretap, the show I used to make at the CBC, you can now find seasons 6 through 11 on Earwolf's Howl app. Go to howl.fm and sign up for a free 7-day trial. Oh, anger, anger is my middle name Oh, anger, anger is my middle name

Oh, anger, anger is my middle name Oh, anger, anger is my middle name That was really pretty, Matthew Boll, lead audio engineer at Gimlet Media. Thank you. What's your middle name? My middle name is Matthew. Well, what's your middle name?

Matthew. You don't have a middle name? No, that is my middle name. You use your middle name as your first name? Yes. You know what my middle name is? No, I don't. It's Stuart.

Oh, that's nice.