I

College

This is what you see when you drive down Los Angeles’ Santa Monica Boulevard, just east of La Brea: a 7-Eleven, a Shakey’s Pizza, a low concrete building with a fish painted on the side, and a taco stand. There’s a Chinese takeout place and a triple-X video rental store, a gas station, and four lanes of traffic, two in each direction. Old people waiting for the bus. Young mothers dragging children in flip flops. A discount store, a laundromat, and a bunch of teenagers standing and smoking. If you watch for more than a minute, you can tell that most of these teens are girls and that they are more ethnically mixed than other cliques in this segregated city. But that’s it. Santa Monica Boulevard has the sun-bleached chain store feel of most of Los Angeles.

If you’re a transgender girl (meaning you were born a man but live as a woman), you might notice something extra about this stretch of Santa Monica. It’s here that you’ll find girls swapping secrets on how to inject black market hormones bought at swap meets in East Los Angeles. If the hormones aren’t working fast enough to manifest your inner vision of wider hips and C-cups, you can find out about “pump parties” in the Valley, where a former vet or Florida “surgeon’s wife” will inject silicone Industrial-grade foam that floats freely on your hips, buttocks, breasts, knees, even your cheeks and forehead. Of course, this is dangerous when the oils change and form hard lumps in your armpits and thighs, but you’ll look good for a while.

In Santa Monica, you can learn which dance clubs, like Arena (with its crudely painted ocean mural outside), allow underage children and have go-gos for dancing. You can find out which motels, a block from Sunset, are safe and clean and have weekly rates. You can learn about the telemarketing company that hires transgender youth, regardless of their appearance, to sell garbage bags and first aid kits over the phone. Of course, for work you’ll have to memorize a script that says you’re disabled and that these household items are offered at higher prices because they employ people with mental disabilities like you. And while it makes you sick to say it, technically it won’t be a lie; Transgender people are still dubbed “mentally ill” by the medical community, much like gay people were in the 1970s. This is how the telemarketing company gets away with cheap labor.

In Santa Monica, you can walk with a friend to the Jeff Griffith Youth Center, one of the few outreach agencies that meets and nurtures struggling transgender kids under the age of twenty-four. It’s right on the corner of Sycamore; you’ll recognize it by the thick bars on the windows and the hand-drawn sign that says DON’T FIGHT. Here you can sign up for a shower or get free bus tickets or a subsidized meal on a tray that looks like the one served in the cafeteria of the high school you ran away from. There’s also a big TV and a pool table with no pool balls, and you can hang out until the place closes at six o’clock without cars stopping you on the street and asking, “How much?”

And when downtown closes, you can visit Benito’s, the 24-hour clapboard outdoor concession stand, and “Home of the Rolled Taco” for another diner. Teenagers can always eat.

At Benito’s, on top of the sizzle and pop of grease from the day before, kids preen and hurl insults and drink oversized sodas out of wax paper cups and look in cars for cute kids who might pass by. As the girls wait for the night, when the clubs open, Benito’s parking lot fills with them, laughing, screaming and running towards each other with half-hearted hugs, as if they haven’t seen each other in a long time and haven’t seen each other yet. I don’t want to dirty his clothes. Most are nothing like the drag queens or transvestites that stereotypes dictate or that strangers expect. They’re young and soft-faced, wearing jeans and T-shirts or, if it’s a Saturday night, tight dresses and big hoop earrings.

“Tracy girl, I haven’t seen you since last month! You look good! Where are you staying?” This is the kind of joke one might hear when girls find themselves buying post-taco Slurpees at 7-Eleven.

“Angel! I know, it’s been a long time, that’s because I’m not staying in Hollywood anymore, girl. I got myself a husband and we moved to Culver City.”

A husband is an exaggeration, but it is a term that children often use in an attempt for permanence or stability. When Tracy asks Angel more questions about her man, Angel is likely to stay unless the two are legitimately good friends. Teenagers are notorious for stealing each other’s boyfriends, especially when there is a perceived shortage, like the one in this community.

Standing on the corner of Highland and Santa Monica, you can feel positively cultured, as canned classical music blasts out of a speaker and into the parking lot all night long. I hear it was the Chinese restaurant that put this up, in a weirdly misguided attempt to curb loitering. But teenagers like Vivaldi as much as anyone else, and they gather there, yelling over their trills, nodding their heads in time to four-four. Gossip races down the sidewalk as the boys exchange secrets about crushes and losses, and talk about how bad the man stole from another girl. Some kids, though certainly not all, are jumping in and out of cars, rushing for cash. In this crowd there’s competition for men and money and good clothes and popularity like any high school in America, and on the Boulevard you can find out who’s winning. The Boulevard is also where you can hear about who just got her boobs pumped and looking great, and who came home to live with his mom, becoming a kid again. It’s where you can learn from older girls that not everyone gets surgery and not everyone wants it, because a woman can have a penis and… girl! No one can tell her that she can’t. It’s where you can listen to Pink’s new CD on your friend’s Walkman and play video games all night Donut Time. It’s where you can feel normal, connected, modern. It’s where you can be a teenager.

Around the corner from Santa Monica and up the street on Highland is an ordinary brown office building. It’s the kind of place that’s home to dozens of low-rent, high-turnover businesses: limousine services, temp agencies, computer repair places, accounting firms. Every weekday morning, a handful of transgender kids bump into the rumpled brown suits and people with briefcases, because in the basement of this building is some kind of high school. Or was, when I became a teacher there.

I don’t even remember how I first heard about Eagles, the small, scrappy high school for gay and transgender teens. Probably just from a new acquaintance in passing conversation. But it had piqued my interest; I was curious who would go there, since when I was a kid, there were no gay schools, and hardly any gay students. Would these children be harassed, troubled, needy? I was wondering if I could help in any way. By then, I had been living in Los Angeles for six months, and a searing boredom with the city had begun to creep up my spine. Having moved from New York so my partner, Robin, could pursue a Ph.D., I lacked an urban edge and a secluded community beyond my dining room table. I worked at home as a freelance writer for a magazine and had extra time to volunteer, maybe once a week, maybe twice. So that winter (which didn’t really feel like winter at all), I called the school.

“Eagles!” a harsh voice answered my call. And then, “Fiona! Put that iron down! The exit is for the coffeemaker!” I heard a dull thud. “I’m sorry. Eagles Academy. Can I help you?”

“Yes, I said. “My name is Cris Beam. I’m a writer who just moved to town and I’m calling to find out about her school – what it’s about and if she needs…”

“Fiona!!” the person yelled, not covering the phone. The voice sounded masculine, but without the deep tones of a man, like a teenager whose voice hadn’t changed, except that this person was clearly an adult. I detected a slight German accent. “Sorry. I’m going to have to call you back.”

Abstract
The above is an excerpt from the book Transparent
by Chris Beam
Published by Harcourt, Inc.; January 2007; US$25.00; 9780151011964
Copyright © 2007 by Cris Beam