Self-Made Man

by Norah Vincent

  That’s when I hit upon the name Ned, a nickname from childhood that had long since fallen out of use, but one that was, as it happened, intimately tied to the project at hand.

  I got the name Ned when I was about seven. I got it partly because Norah is a hard name to nick, but mostly because nothing but a boy’s name really made sense when you saw what my parents were faced with in their only daughter. Practically from birth, I was the kind of hard-core tomboy that makes you think there must be a gay gene.

  How else to explain my instinctive loathing for dresses, dolls and frills of any kind when other girls delighted in such things? How else to explain the weird attachments and fetishes that came so young and against all social programming? Why, for example, did I insist on dressing like a ranch hand when I was barely out of diapers? Why did I choose to play the saxophone when every other girl chose the flute or the clarinet? Why did I covet my father’s tube of VO5, and shave my brothers’ GI Joes with his razors? Why was the only female doll I ever owned or liked an armor-clad Joan of Arc?

  Impossible to say, really. Gender identity, it seems, is in the genes as surely as sex and sexuality are, but we don’t know why the programming deviates. Maybe a crossed wire somewhere, or the hormonal equivalent. It seems as likely an explanation as any for how it is that even before she’s old enough to know the meaning of desire or cultural signifiers, being born gay tends to make a girl crave helmets and hiking boots. Whatever the case, I was the happily twisted result of some gland or helix gone awry, a fate that found me playing Tarzan high in the apple tree on summer afternoons, and dressing in full-blown drag for Halloween by the time I was seven.

  My mother has since said that she should have suspected something then, when I borrowed one of my father’s blazers and a porkpie hat, drew a beard and mustache on my face and went out trick-or-treating with all the other fairies and witches. I was, I said, going as an old man. I slid a pillow under the blazer to make a belly and I carried a cane.

  But what would she have known, when I might well have been imitating her? She was an actor, and I had spent many childhood summers scampering around backstage or lurking in her dressing room as she made up for a show. One of her most memorable parts was a dual role in which she played Shen Te and Mr. Shui Ta in Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Setzuan. Shen Te is a kind-hearted ex-prostitute who owns a tobacco shop in the Chinese province of Sichuan. Prey to swindlers and malingerers who take her for a pushover, Shen Te is facing financial ruin. To save her business, she disguises herself as a man, Mr. Shui Ta, her supposed ruthless male cousin, whom she invokes to do the dirty work of collecting debts and fending off beggars and thieves.

  How could seeing my mother in this role have had anything but a profoundly inspiring effect on me, a kid already fascinated by disguise? Did women really pretend to be men in real life? What if they could, I wondered, and what could they get away with? My eyes widened at the prospect.

  Thankfully, for my parents’ sake, my two older brothers were normal. The oldest, Alex, the consummate gentleman, also from birth, was often silently bewildered, but always kind and accommodating. Teddy, the middle one, was not. He was a hellion, the nicknamer in the family and ruthless at his trade. He was the real impetus behind Ned.

  You see, Ned had a deeper meaning, connected intimately not only with my being a tomboy, but with the problems that that particular affliction presents in and around puberty. That’s the time in a tomboy’s life when sexual maturity and gender identity come smack up against each other in an unpleasant way.

  Having older brothers means that the girls they know and like reach puberty before you do. This was always cause for anxiety among the girls I knew, since getting your period and—the real prize—growing incipient breasts was the gate we were all waiting to pass through. It meant everything. For one, it meant that you were suddenly of interest to the other half of the species. Until then, you were just dirty knees and elbows with nothing to show for yourself but the spaces between your teeth. Until then, you were just the last one picked for kick ball, and in my case, the lousy tagalong little sister who got no respect. But those early bloomers that my older brother and his friends were always ogling, the shapely sixth graders with lip gloss and B cups, they had something, and it drove gangly ragamuffins like me into frowning, envious retreats. Our lack of development was a sore subject not to be broached.

  But broaching the unbroachable is what infernal brothers are for.

  After school one day, Teddy and his friends found me playing with my small plastic army men on the front lawn. Bored as usual, they began taunting me about my lack of physical development. The unbroachable. I cowered, hoping they’d drift off if they didn’t get a rise out of me. But Teddy was inspired on this particular day. The nickname Ned was already in use by this time—they’d all been using it in their taunts, none of which was remarkable enough to remember. That is, until Teddy shouted above the fray the unforgettable and infuriating:

  “Ned ass and no tits.”

  Unsurprisingly, this elicited howls of laughter from the group.

  It was true. Ned indeed had no ass and no tits and Ned knew it and wasn’t happy about it. I didn’t look up at this point, but I began pulling up fistfuls of grass. Then for some unknown reason—who, after all, can fathom the adolescent stream of consciousness—Teddy began shaking his hips back and forth suggestively, the way a bimbo who had hips or an ass might, and singing the word “milkshake!” as he did so. Naturally, all of his friends found this endlessly amusing and chimed in.

  At this I promptly snapped. The sight of five boys loudly and publicly lampooning my pained, pathetic prepubescence in song was simply too much for me. I stood up, went into the garage, and emerged—by then in a teeth-gritting rage—brandishing one of Teddy’s ice hockey sticks. The boys found this funniest of all, which, of course, enraged me even more. I chased them around the neighborhood with the hockey stick for a good hour, with them laughing, dancing and shouting “milkshake,” then running and hiding, and me stalking and screaming and swinging.

  And so, Ned was born. And that, in truth, was where this book began—that is, with the Ned who had no ass and no tits.

  In Ned I had my new name and a starting point for a male identity. But once I had resolved to become Ned, I still had a fair amount of work to do to make passing as a man in daylight feasible on a regular basis. The first and most important step was to find out how to make a more believable beard than the slapdash version my drag king friend had taught me years before, something that would look real at close range over the course of an entire day or evening if need be.

  As it happened I was lucky in this department. I had a lot of friends in theater, many of whom proved helpful in bringing Ned to life.

  I decided to consult Ryan, a makeup artist of my acquaintance, who told me about a facial hair technique he’d used in a recent show. He said he thought it might work for me on the street if used sparingly.

  It was far more subtle and specialized than the glue job I’d done in the Village, though in the end far simpler.

  First, Ryan suggested using wool crepe hair instead of my own or someone else’s real hair. Wool crepe hair comes in long braided ropes, which you can buy from specialty makeup companies. It’s offered in a whole range of colors, from platinum blond to black, so I could buy whatever shade best matched my hair and always have a ready supply at hand without having to butcher my haircut.

  Ryan showed me how to unwind the braids, comb the strands of hair together, then take the ends between my thumb and index finger and cut them with a hairdressing scissor into millimeter-or smaller-size pieces. By cutting them onto a piece of white paper and spreading them evenly across it, he showed me how to avoid clumping the hair when I applied the pieces to my face. He suggested using a makeup brush to do this—a large blush brush for my chin and cheeks, and a small eye shadow brush for my upper lip.

  Next he applied a lanolin and beeswax-based adhesive called stoppelpaste to t
he portions of my face where I wanted the hair to stick. This would work better than spirit gum for several reasons. It’s invisible, whereas spirit gum tends to turn white on the skin and show through, unless you’re wearing a full hairpiece, which doesn’t ever look real on a woman’s face in the daylight. (I tried this.) Also, stoppelpaste is gentle on the skin, and can be taken off with a moisturizing makeup remover. Spirit gum, by contrast, must be removed with a harsh acetone thinner. It also dries and stiffens quickly. Stoppelpaste doesn’t. This, I imagined, would give me more freedom of movement and natural expression, an indispensable tool for making Ned believable.

  At room temperature stoppelpaste is fairly dense stuff and tends not to spread easily, so Ryan suggested using a hair dryer to heat it for a few seconds before applying it. This melted it just enough to make it roll on smoothly. Doing one small patch at a time, he applied the stoppelpaste to my face, then dabbed the makeup brush in the clippings, then patted my face lightly with the brush until my whole chin and upper lip were covered in a light stubble.

  Later, as I refined this process, I found that the scissors didn’t produce small enough pieces. If the pieces were too long, they tended to look more like they were glued to my face rather than growing out of it. I needed to make the pieces minuscule, so that they would look almost like dots. To achieve this effect, or the closest I could come, I bought a men’s electric beard trimmer and ran it across the tips of the hair, producing actual stubble-length pieces that, when applied, looked like a five o’clock shadow.

  The key with the beard was not to put it on too heavily. My skin, like most women’s, is not only softer to the touch, but much smoother to the eye than a man’s. It’s also quite pale and pink in the cheeks. Consequently, as Ned, people were always telling me that I looked a lot younger than thirty-five, even though I had a lot of gray in my hair. But if your skin goes from peaches and cream above your cheekbones to Don Johnson below you look a little like Fred Flintstone. So I had to be careful not to get carried away with the stubble and try to stay within the bounds of what a young, fairly hairless man with fine skin would believably grow.

  To help square my jaw I went to the barber and asked him to cut my hair in a flat top—a haircut I usually abhor on men, but which did a lot under the circumstances to masculinize my head. Then I went to the optician and picked out two pairs of rectangular frames, again to accentuate the angles of my face. One pair was metal, for all the occasions when I’d want to look more casual, and one was tortoiseshell, for the occasions—like work or on dates—when I’d want a more stylish look.

  With the beard and the flat top, the glasses helped a lot in getting me to see myself as someone else, though the transformation was psychological more than anything else, and it took time to sink in. At first, I had a lot of trouble seeing myself as anyone but myself with hair glued to my face. I’d been looking at my face all my life, and I’d had short haircuts for much of that time. The stubble didn’t really change that. I was still me. But the glasses did change that, or at least they began to. Then it became a mind game that I played with myself, and soon, with everyone else as well.

  In the beginning I was so worried about getting caught—not passing—that in order to ensure my disguise I wore my glasses everywhere, and often a baseball hat, along, of course, with the meticulously applied beard. But as time went on, as I became more confident in my disguise, more buried in my character, I began to project a masculine image more naturally, and the props I had used to create that image became less and less important, until sometimes I didn’t need them at all.

  People accept what you convey to them, if you convey it convincingly enough. Even I began to accept more willingly the image reflected in the mirror, just as the people around me eventually did.

  Once I’d finished doctoring my head and face, I began concentrating on my body.

  First I had to find a way to bind my breasts. This is trickier than it sounds, even when you’re small breasted, especially when you’re determined to have the flattest possible front. First I tried the obvious—Ace bandages. I bought two of the four-inch-wide variety and strapped them tightly around me, fixing them in place with surgical tape to make sure that they wouldn’t unwind midday. This made my chest very flat, but it also made breathing painful and labored. Also, depending on how I was sitting, after a while the binding often slipped down and pushed my breasts up and together instead of out and down. Not a good look for a man.

  In the end, cupless sports bras worked best. I bought them two sizes too small and in a flat-fronted style. Naked, it didn’t make me a board, but with a loose shirt and some creative layering it worked fine. It was the most dependable method. It never moved. It never fell. It did, however, dig into my shoulders and back, especially as I got bigger.

  And I did get bigger. That was the next step in transforming my body. Lifting weights. Lots of weights. I consulted a trainer at my local gym, telling him about the project and asking his advice about how best to masculinize my body as much as possible without using steroids. He suggested building muscle bulk in my shoulders and arms.

  Building muscle bulk happens in a two-step process. First by lifting heavy weights at low repetitions, and second by eating your body weight or more in grams of protein per day.

  Each day I trained a different muscle. Through the week I worked each body part to exhaustion, but only once a week, taking at least one day off on the weekends for recovery. In my off time I ate and drank as much protein as I could shove down my neck. After six months, I’d gained fifteen pounds. I was still a small guy by normal measures, but my shoulders were recognizably broader and squarer, and this alone pushed me one step closer to manhood.

  To complete the physical transformation, I went in search of a prosthetic penis that I could wear for verisimilitude as much as anything else. At a sex shop in downtown Manhattan I found what I have since come to refer to as a “packable softie.” This wasn’t a dildo, which, at its full and constant tumescence would have proven uncomfortable for me and alarming for everyone around me. Instead, this item, which I nicknamed “Sloppy Joe,” was a flaccid member designed especially for what drag kings call packing, or stuffing, your pants. It was better than a sock, and would give me, if not others, a more realistic experience of “manhood.” To keep it in place I wore it inside a jockstrap, since in a pair of tighty whities it moved too far afield when I walked and became too much of a distraction.

  Finally, once the basic anatomy was in place, boobs strapped in, shoulders squared, beard applied and cock tucked, I took Ned shopping for clothes, in drag, of course. I bought him preppy, safe things like rugby shirts and khakis and baggy jeans. I didn’t want to splurge on a suit, but Ned needed a wardrobe for work, so I bought him three blazers, several pairs of dress slacks, four ties and five or six dress shirts. I bought a large supply of men’s white crew neck undershirts, which proved to be a staple of my wardrobe, casual or dress. I wore them under everything, partly as an extra layer to hide the seams of my bra, and partly to stouten my neck, or at least distract the looker’s eye from my lack of Adam’s apple and my hairless chest.

  I made my last stop for Ned at the Juilliard School for the Performing Arts, where I hired a voice coach to help me learn to speak more like a man. My voice is already deep, but as with so many other things, I found that when you are trying to pass in drag, all the characteristics that seem masculine in you as a woman turn out to be far less so in a man.

  My tutor went over a few gender cues in our lessons, but it took being Ned for quite some time before I realized just how differently men and women talk and how much damping down I would have to do as Ned so as not to arouse suspicion.

  My tutor said, “Women tend to bankrupt their own breath.” She described and demonstrated the process by thrusting her chest and head forward when she spoke, and cutting off the rhythm of her breathing as she forced a stream of words from her mouth.

  “Admittedly, this is a stereotype,” she said, “but ge
nerally women tend to speak more quickly and to use more words, and they interrupt their breathing in order to get it all out.”

  I found this to be true in my own speech patterns, which jesting friends have sometimes described as torrential. I often run out of breath before I’ve finished my thought, and either have to gasp in the middle to make it through, or push the words out faster to finish sooner.

  Since my training, I have also observed this phenomenon in action at various dinner parties or in restaurants. Women often lean into a conversation and speak in wordy bursts, asking to be heard. Men often lean back and pronounce with terse authority.

  Naturally, what you do with your breath affects how your voice will sound. Using fewer words, speaking more slowly and sustaining my breath through the words all helped me to use the deeper notes in my register and to stay there. This meant, of course, that I couldn’t allow myself to get too excited about anything, because this would change my breathing, and my voice would pinch up to its higher reaches. Conversely, I found that relaxing and breathing deeply before I embarked on a day as Ned helped me to get into his voice, then his bearing and then his head.

  The process of getting into Ned’s head raises an obvious question, and one that many people have asked about this book, mostly as a means of clarifying exactly what the book is meant to be and what they should expect to get out of it.

  Am I a transsexual or a transvestite, and did I write this book as a means of coming out as such?

  The answer to both parts of that question is no.

  I say this with the benefit of experimental hindsight, because after having lived as a man on and off for a year and a half, if I were either a transsexual or a true lifestyle transvestite, I can assure you that I would know it by now.