How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

by Alexander Chee

  This power I feel tonight, I understand now—this is what it means when we say “queen.”

  Girl

  MY FASCINATION WITH MAKEUP started young. I remember the first time I wore lipstick in public. I was seven, eight years old at the time, with my mother at the Jordan Marsh makeup counter at the Maine Mall in South Portland. We were Christmas shopping, I think—it was winter, at least—and she was there trying on samples.

  My mother is a beauty, from a family of Maine farmers who are almost all tall, long-waisted, thin, and pretty, the men and the women. Her eyes are Atlantic Ocean blue. She has a pragmatic streak, from being a farmer’s daughter, that typically rules her, but she also loves fashion and glamour. When she was younger, she wore simple but chic clothes she often accessorized with cocktail rings, knee-high black leather boots, dark sunglasses with white frames.

  I kept a secret from my mom, or at least I thought I did: I would go into her bathroom and try on her makeup, looking at myself in the mirror. I spent hours in front of that mirror, rearranging my facial expressions—my face at rest looked unresolved to me, in between one thing and another. I would sometimes stare at my face and imagine it was either more white or more Asian. But makeup I understood; I had watched the change that came over my mother when she put on makeup, and I wanted that for myself. So while she was busy at the makeup counter, I reached up for one of the lipsticks, applied it, and then turned to her with a smile.

  I thought it would surprise her, make her happy. I am sure the reddish orange color looked clownish, even frightening, on my little face.

  “Alexander” was all she said, stepping off the chair at the Clinique counter and sweeping me up. She pulled my ski mask over my head and led me out of the department store to the car, like I had stolen something. We drove home in silence, and once there, she washed the lipstick off my face and warned me to never do that again.

  She was angry, upset, she felt betrayed by me. There was a line, and I had thought I could go back and forth across it, but it seemed I could not.

  Until I could. Until I did.

  I was not just mistaken for a member of other races, as a child. I was also often mistaken for a girl. What a pretty little girl you have, people used to say to my mother at the grocery store when I was six, seven, eight. She had let my hair grow long.

  I’m a boy, I would say each time. And they would turn red, or stammer an apology, or say, His hair is so long, and I would feel as if I had done something wrong, or she had.

  I have been trying to convince people for so long that I am a real boy, it is a relief to stop, to run in the other direction.

  Before Halloween night, I thought I knew some things about being a woman. I’d had women teachers and read women writers; women were my best friends growing up. But that night was a glimpse into a universe beside my own. Drag is its own world of experience—a theater of being female more than a reality. It isn’t like being trans, either. It isn’t, the more I think about it, like anything except what it is: costumes, illusion, a spell you cast on others and on yourself.

  But girl, girl is something else.

  My friends in San Francisco at this time, we all call each other “girl,” except for the ones who think they are too butch for such nellying, though we call them “girl” maybe most of all. My women friends call each other “girl” too, and they say it sometimes like they are a little surprised at how much they like it. This, for me, began in meetings for ACT UP and Queer Nation, a little word that moved in on us all back then. When we say it, the word is like a stone we pass one to the other: the stone thrown at all of us. And the more we catch it and pass it, it seems the less it can hurt us, the more we know who our new family is now. Who knows us, and who doesn’t. It is something like a bullet turned into something like a badge of pride.

  Later that night we go to Club Uranus. John and Fred have removed their wigs and makeup. I have decided not to. Fred was uncomfortable—a wig is hot—and John wanted to get laid by a man as a man. I wasn’t ready to let go. As we walked there, we passed heterosexual couples on the street. I walked with Fred, holding his arm, and noted the passing men who treated me like a woman—and the women who did also. Only one person let on that he saw through me, a man at a stoplight who leaned out his car window to shout, “Hey, Lola, come back here, baby! I love you!”

  My friend Darren is at the club, a thin blond boy done up as Marie Antoinette, in hair nearly a foot tall and a professional costume rental dress, hoopskirts and all. On his feet, combat boots also. He raises his skirts periodically to show he is wearing nothing underneath.

  Soon I am on the go-go stage by the bar. On my back, riding me, is a skinny white boy in a thong made out of duct tape, his body shaved. We are both sweating, the lights a crown of wet bright heat. The music is loud and very fast, and I roll my head like a lion, whipping the wig around for the cool air this lets in. People squeeze by the stage, alternately staring at and ignoring us.

  I see very little, but I soon spot Fred, who raises his hand and gives me a little wave from where he is standing. I want to tell him I know the boy on my back and that it isn’t anything he needs to worry about, but he seems to understand this. I wonder if Fred is jealous, but I tell myself he is not, that he knew what he was getting into with me—when we met, he mentioned the other stages he had seen me on around town. Tonight is one of those nights when I am growing, changing quickly, without warning, into new shapes and configurations, and I don’t know where this all goes.

  In that moment, I feel more at home than I ever have, not in San Francisco, not on earth, but in myself. I am on the other side of something and I don’t know what it is. I wait to find out.

  Real

  I AM PROUD FOR years of the way I looked real that night. I remember the men who thought I was a real woman, the straight guys in the cars whooping at me and their expressions when I said, “Thanks, guys,” my voice my voice, and the change that rippled over their faces.

  You wanted me, I wanted to say. You might still want me.

  Real is good. Real is what you want. No one does drag to be a real woman, though. Drag is not the same as that. Drag knows it is different. But if you can pass as real, when it comes to drag, that is its own gold medal.

  But mostly I’m still too aware of how that night was the first night I felt comfortable with my face. It makes me wary, even confused. I can feel the longing for the power I had. I jones for it like it’s cocaine.

  The little boy I used to be, in the mirror making faces, he was happy. But the process took so much work. I can’t do that every day, though I know women who do. And that isn’t the answer to my unhappiness, and I know it.

  When my friend Danny gives me a photo from that night, I see something I didn’t notice at the time. I look a little like my mom. I had put on my glasses for him—a joke about “girls who wear glasses”—and in that one picture, I see it all: the dark edges of my real hair sticking out, the cheapness of the wig, the smooth face, finally confident.

  I send a copy to my sister and write, This is what I would look like if I was your big sister.

  I can’t skip what I need to do to love this face by making it over. I can’t chase after the power I felt that night, the fleeting sense of finally belonging to the status quo, by making myself into something that looks like the something they want. Being real means being at home in this face, just as it is when I wake up.

  I am not the person who appeared for the first time that night. I am the one only I saw, the one I had rejected until then, the one I needed to see, and didn’t see until I had taken nearly everything about him away. His face is not half this or half that, it is all something else.

  Sometimes you don’t know who you are until you put on a mask.

  A FEW MONTHS AFTER Halloween, a friend borrows my wig. He has begun performing in drag on a regular basis. I have not. I bring it to the bookstore where we both work and pass it off to him. It looks like a burned-out thing, what’s left in the wick
of a candle after a long night.

  I go to see my friend perform in the wig. He has turned it into the ponytail of a titanic hair sculpture, made from three separate wigs. He is a hoop-skirted vision beneath its impossible size, his face whited out, a beauty mark on his lip. Who was the first blond to dot a beauty mark on her upper lip? How far back in time do we have to go? It is like some spirit in the wig has moved on, into him.

  He never gives me the wig back, and I don’t ask for it back. It was never really mine.

  After Peter

  In memoriam, Peter David Kelloran

  17 December 1961–10 May 1994

  I slept but my heart was awake.

  —Song of Songs 5:2

  I AM A MINOR character in Peter’s story. Peter David Kelloran—Peter D. Kelloran, as he liked to appear in print—was a painter. He died in his bed at the age of thirty-three on the afternoon of May 10, 1994, at the Maitri Hospice in San Francisco, where he had been admitted after deciding he could no longer care for himself in his apartment at the edge of town. There was a solar eclipse that day, and his passing occurred during it. He had spoken with his mother that morning on the phone. His dementia had parted enough for him to tell her that he loved her. “And then he started to go,” his friend Laura Lister says. The room was full of women friends of Peter’s and they laid hands on him in a circle. Laura recalls the phone ringing, and she took her hands off him to answer it. “He lunged up off the bed.” He went slowly. “I begged him to go, begged him to let go at that point. He needed to go. He wouldn’t go, though,” Laura says. “And then one of the male volunteers came in and he took Peter’s hand in his. You could see the change. Like a light came over him. And he was gone.”

  “All the people there with him at the end, I can never thank them enough. They were all so beautiful, so strong,” his mother, Jill Kelloran, says from her home in Chicago. “They did what I physically could not do. Peter’s death was tearing me apart and I literally could not be there. They cared for him to the end. And I will always be grateful to them for that.”

  “We were there until he grew cold,” Peggy Sue, a friend who was present, says. “Maitri being a Buddhist place, you lie in state. So we sat with him.”

  I FIRST SAW HIM when I worked in the Castro at A Different Light, a gay and lesbian bookstore that in those days doubled as a reference library and community center. I was twenty-two years old then. Peter was twenty-eight, tall and broad-shouldered and thin. He had a wide Irish frame and usually wore leather: a motorcycle jacket, boots. A dyed blue tuft of hair glowed across his forehead. I’d seen him walking through the Castro, and I’d seen him at demonstrations. A year would pass before I’d hear his voice, speaking to me.

  The store was the first in the country to have a section devoted entirely to AIDS/HIV issues; it was located at the front of the store, beside the cash register. I supposed, the first day I saw Peter, he’d either seroconverted recently or had recently decided to do something about it. I saw many people in this way, on their first few days, and I was forever inventing some story about them, never mentioned to anyone, simply to fill the hours. I was often the first person they had to deal with after being diagnosed, a bookstore clerk who would show them the short shelf of books, expanding weekly but still short.

  That day he just ran through the books and selected a few on strengthening the immune system, and then paid when someone else was at the register. I saw him leave. His blue eyes had a searchlight intensity, and it seemed clear what he saw and what he didn’t. He didn’t see me. I felt called and commanded by him immediately, and to this day I cannot say why it was, only that it was immediate, and thorough. I was surprised by how much I wanted to be seen by him.

  That day in the store, after he didn’t look at me, he moved quickly back out onto the bustling sidewalk, the afternoon sunlight making long, crowded shadows. I didn’t know his name or anything about him, except that he was handsome in a way that made me lose my breath, and he was hurrying away. And that he was possibly, probably, positive.

  In fact, when I first saw Peter he had been positive for three years. “He wrote to me from Morocco,” Laura says, of a trip he’d taken in 1986. “And he could only write about how sick he had been. And after he got back and he tested positive, that was when we figured out, that was his onset.”

  He would keep it a secret for years, not telling anyone besides Laura, who kept his secret as well. “A lot of people were angry at me for that,” she says. “But people thinking about your death, that’ll put you in the grave. And besides,” she adds, “if you didn’t get your business dealt with when someone dies, that’s your own fault. You had every day before then to deal.”

  I was not part of the group that was called when Peter died. I found out three months after his death, in New York, with my friend Choire, who had also moved east by now, and we were speaking about our friends back in San Francisco when he said, “Well, after Peter died . . .”

  I felt like he had been cleaning a gun and it had emptied into me.

  “Sorry,” Choire said. “Thought you knew. Hate that, when people don’t know.”

  WHEN I ARRIVED IN San Francisco, there was no way to find the Castro on any map. People were forever calling the bookstore for directions to the neighborhood. In my group there was the sense that we were a wave arriving on the West Coast from the East: postcollegiate youngsters seeking and finding a paradise of cheap apartments and thrift stores bursting with the old athletic T-shirts and jeans and flannel shirts we all prized. I remember when I put the empty clothes together with the empty apartments, on an ordinary sunny afternoon walking down the sidewalk to work: there on a blanket stood a pair of black leather steel-toed boots, twelve-hole lace-ups. They gleamed, freshly polished, in the light of the morning. As I approached them, feeling the pull of the hill, I drew up short to examine the rest of the sidewalk sale. Some old albums, Queen and Sylvester; three pairs of jeans; two leather wristbands; a box of old T-shirts; a worn watch, the hands still moving; a pressed-leather belt, western style; and cowboy boots, the same size as the steel-toes. I tried the steel-toes on and took a long look at the salesman as I stood up, feeling that they were exactly my size.

  This man was thin, thin in a way that was immediately familiar. Hollowing from the inside out. His skin reddened, and his brown eyes looked over me as if lightning might fall on me out of that clear afternoon sky. And I knew then, as I paid twenty dollars for the boots, that they’d been recently emptied. That he was watching me walk off in the shoes of the newly dead. And that all of this had been happening for some time now.

  I lived in San Francisco for two years, arriving right after I left college in 1989. When I say I was part of a group, I mean I was part of a group of activists who divided our time and energy among a number of organizations and affinity groups: ACT UP and Queer Nation were the seeds of a great deal of what happened there, and what happens there to this day. We engaged in direct-action protests, spent our free time discussing new protests and the ways in which our past protests had been perceived. We thought about politics and its relationship to our personal lives, to the point the personal was political, because that was all there was. We had bitter feuds and disputes, we had angry meetings, we had raucous celebrations. We had vigils and parties, made mistakes and made amends. The average member was twenty-three, HIV-negative, white, and college-educated, usually gay or lesbian and from another part of the country.

  I was twenty-two, HIV-negative, Amerasian, college-educated, and from another part of the country. Pictures of me at the time show a thin, dark-haired young man who seems inordinately happy for someone who spent a good deal of his time wanting to be dead. They all show me smiling. This young man I was drove a motorcycle, worked at a bookstore, hung out with drag queens who didn’t attend meetings of any kind, and was known to dance on a bar or two. He was a member of ACT UP/SF before the bitter split of the group, a member of Queer Nation, and a pesky intern at Out/Look, a queer academic journal. He w
as on the media committee of ACT UP and had a reputation at first for dating no one, and then for having dated everyone. He hollowed his desire to die with the knowledge that other people were dying who wanted to live, and this was the single strongest motive for his participation in direct-action AIDS activism. Being an activist meant, among other things, never being alone, and being alone was when he got into trouble. And so he made sure he was never alone.

  AT THIS TIME IN San Francisco, it seemed that the world might either go up in flames or be restored in a healing past imagining. The world seemed ripe for fixing and rescue. I think now, twenty years later, this feeling might always be true. Those of us who were in ACT UP and Queer Nation then were accused at one point of “gay Zionism,” and if it was true, I think it was true only in that, in a way similar to Jewish thought, we believed we could repair the world and do it by staying together, working together.

  Why am I telling this story? I am, as I’ve said, a minor character, out of place in this narrative, but the major characters of all these stories from the first ten years of the epidemic have left. The men I wanted to follow into the future are dead. Finding them had made me want to live, and I did. I do. I feel I owe them my survival. The world is not fixed, and the healing is still just past my imagining, though perhaps it is closer than it was. For now, the minor characters are left to introduce themselves, and take the story forward.