He's just hanging around the Polk Street bar; a scrawny man with the look of wasted youth and wasted life. A tight leopard-print shirt, way too short to cover his navel, covered over with a loose, baggy, black coat. He's a lost soul, I think, I hope he doesn't come up to me… but he does, I'm a magnet for lost souls. Angel got this thing for transsexuals… he loves transsexual women. I don't know why, but my first feeling of repulsion turned into a kind of curiosity, then to a there-but-for-fortune recognition, and finally to one where I saw a potentially brilliant human being who society just flushed down the toilet. He talked of visitors from other planets populating the earth. The destruction of the environment, loss of fossil fuel. He talked about civilizations dying off. And how we too will die off if we can't transition to the next age… the Age of Nanotechnology, with universal embedded intelligence created from living DNA… Now how on earth did a lost soul, a pitiful wasted creature, know about that? |
You see, Angel is a transgendered person too. I don't know where he is on the gender spectrum, and neither does he. When he would "dress up", as he called it, he would do crazy stuff… stuff like use hammers and screwdrivers as hair ornaments. He doesn't want to live as a woman, just to express himself… and why not? I was the first transsexual woman that Angel met who wasn't a user… who didn't want to use him for money, for sex, for dope. He loved many transsexual women, but never got to know them as people. Once they found out that he "dresses", that was it… out the door. It's a tough way of life when you don't know where rent money or next meals are coming from. And life can take some strange turns when you're transgendered. |
Angel lost his job because of it. How could that be, in San Francisco, which has one of the best employment nondiscrimination laws in the country? Well, somehow they forgot to write a law to protect individuals from themselves. You can fight society's discrimination, but self-discrimination eats away at the soul. Angel's shame and fear of rejection became so strong that one day he just called up his boss and said he couldn't come into work anymore. After 18 years on the job, Angel was out living on the street, homeless, penniless. Laws are great, but without education and pride they are powerless to protect. Like a one-legged stool, they can't stand up by themselves. I've only been in San Francisco a few times. This time I was there on business. The first time was in the 60's. Both Angel and I were there at the height of the hippie/Haight-Ashbury days. We both did dope. We both panhandled for loose change. We both were trying to deny and suppress our true, transgendered selves. But I was able to turn my life around; to quit the dope; to finish college; to get back into society… and to deal with being transgendered in positive, productive way. Angel never got out of it. A once-brilliant mind still dimly glimmering despite three decades of speed and coke. He gave up his place in society. Friendless, lonely, in despair and on the verge of suicide, Angel just can't live with his transgendered soul. |
We
talked for hours, and I told him about myself… how I couldn't
have any real friends until I started accepting myself, my true
gender. With that self-acceptance came an acceptance by others,
and my world changed. I don't know why I opened up to Angel,
but I did. Maybe it was because as I was speaking his eyes betrayed
something about that lost soul. They told me that he never achieved
that self-acceptance and he was still friendless.