Something That May Shock and Discredit You

by Daniel Mallory Ortberg

  Jesus in the Gospels tells a number of stories about the kingdom of heaven, sometimes also the kingdom of God; whether the two are interchangeable or merely closely linked is a matter of some debate. He does not spend a great deal of time explaining what the kingdom of heaven is, but in alerting others to its presence. It is like a seed, it is like a net, it is like a pearl of great price hidden in a field, it is like yeast, it is like a merchant who comes across a pearl of great price hidden in a field, it is like a king preparing a wedding banquet and his uncooperative guests; it is near at hand, it is more than just near at hand but currently present, it is an internal condition, it is an external system of justice, it is expansive, it is restrictive, it is the enemy of wealth and tightfistedness, it is a gift that God takes great pleasure in giving, it is the engine that metes out not just justice but retribution and more than retribution, terror, it is mysterious and far-off, it is like children and for children, it is for the childlike, it is seen and unseen, capable of sudden and rapid growth, bursting through and out and up, continually emerging and becoming more of itself, more real by the second and already real, all-welcoming and difficult to enter. The Parable of the Sower reads:

  “Listen! Behold, a sower went out to sow. And it happened, as he sowed, that some seed fell by the wayside; and the birds of the air came and devoured it. Some fell on stony ground, where it did not have much earth; and immediately it sprang up because it had no depth of earth. But when the sun was up it was scorched, and because it had no root it withered away. And some seed fell among thorns; and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no crop. But other seed fell on good ground and yielded a crop that sprang up, increased and produced: some thirtyfold, some sixty, and some a hundred.”

  And He said to them, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”

  —Mark 4:3–9

  This served as a guidepost to me throughout various moments of heartsickness and fear and doubt and hope and joy along my transition, which grew more real by the second and as a result more real retroactively, which was all-welcoming and difficult to enter, which was seen and unseen, capable of sudden and rapid growth, bursting through and out and up, continually emerging and becoming more itself. I often thought, too, of Dorothy Zbornak and her exit from The Golden Girls, a show I often watched on repeat in the evenings when sleep became impossible and sometimes in the afternoon when everything else seemed impossible, too. I’d grown up watching Rose and Blanche and Dorothy and Sophia in reruns, but somehow I’d never seen the series finale or had any sense of how the show had ended.

  I’d been dimly aware of the existence of The Golden Palace, the single-season spinoff that didn’t feature Bea Arthur, who played Dorothy, but I hadn’t expected that the last episode of The Golden Girls would actually show her leaving. One afternoon a friend of mine came over to keep my company and we spent a few hours watching episodes from the first two seasons of the show. I had to leave the house to run an errand, and when I came back my friend was watching “One Flew Out of the Cuckoo’s Nest, Part I,” which I assumed was still part of the early series run. All I knew was that it was a two-parter that featured Leslie Nielsen. I figured, based on the title, that there’d be a strange, farcical spell of some form of institutionalization, like David Duchovny’s arc on Sex and the City, and I thought that was sort of a strange direction for the show to take in a brief run, but I generally like Leslie Nielsen’s work and had a lot of faith in The Golden Girls’ writing staff, so I went with it.

  It was a fantastic arc, maybe the best Golden Girls episode I’d seen, even though the plot was absolutely bananas. Dorothy and Nielsen’s Lucas pretend to get engaged to cheese off Blanche, only to actually fall in love with each other. Oddly, no one else in the cast ever discovers that their engagement started out as a put-on, so when they get engaged-for-real a second time, all the other girls just sort of shrug and accept it as a quirk. Dorothy’s ex-husband, Stanley, drives her to the church and offers her his blessing in the form of a rambling monologue about his hairlessness:

  “Do you see this hair? It is the only one on my forehead. The other traitors receded years ago, but this proud and loyal sprout clings desperately. It is unrelenting. It is true. Dorothy, it is this hair I hate more than all the others. It mocks me. Don’t you see? I am that hair. And you’re my big, crazy, bald skull. I may give you some reason to resent me, but you cannot shake me. I am loyal.”

  One of the things I’d feared most about starting testosterone therapy was the idea of losing my hair, that I might arrive to manhood late enough that its first fruits would be male-pattern baldness, that I would have made a foolish bargain trading away being a reasonably pretty woman for a single proud and loyal sprout of hair mocking my head. Dorothy’s response to this man is, as always, dry, fond, and exasperated, utterly uninterested in humoring male vanity by avoiding the truth: “Stanley, you wore a toupee for twenty-seven years.”

  And then she marries Leslie Nielsen, and then she moves away. That’s the end of the show.

  I kept watching in increasing confusion, thinking, They’re going to have to come up with some reason to get rid of him really fast, because I know the next five seasons of The Golden Girls don’t prominently feature Leslie Nielsen as Dorothy’s husband Lucas, who lives next door and is always stopping by for iced tea and cheesecake. But they don’t get rid of him; he marries Dorothy and they move away. I didn’t know the end was coming—I didn’t even know what I was watching was the end of something. I proceeded to entirely lose it, and started sobbing in front of my friend. We had watched the pilot episode only a few hours before. I had thought we had more time. In the very first episode, Blanche almost moves out of their shared home to get married, but her fiancé turns out to be a bigamist and a con artist who gets arrested right before the ceremony. Blanche takes to her bed for three weeks. She finally comes out of her room to talk to the rest of the girls:

  BLANCHE: At first I wanted to give up, to die, truly. Only time I ever felt worse was when George died. But then I had the kids with me and I pulled through it. This time, I thought, “This is my last chance, my last hope for happiness.” I just thought I’d never feel good again.

  SOPHIA: How long is this story? I’m eighty. I have to plan.

  BLANCHE: This morning I woke up and I was in the shower, shampooing my hair, and I heard humming. I thought there was someone in there with me. No, it was me. I was humming. And humming means I’m feeling good. And then I realized I was feeling good because of you. You made the difference. You’re my family, and you make me happy to be alive.

  ROSE: Let’s drive to Coconut Grove for lunch.

  BLANCHE: Okay!

  ROSE: My treat. We have to celebrate.

  SOPHIA: What, that she came out of her room?

  ROSE: That we’re together.

  DOROTHY: And that no matter what happens, even if we all get married, we’ll stick together.

  ROSE: Then we’ll need a much bigger house.

  DOROTHY: Sure, Rose.

  And I kept trying to explain that to a friend, through tears, that I felt betrayed by a long-since-canceled sitcom about a house of retirees. That show, that particular vision of retirement, had promised me something, implicitly, or rather through that show and other visions like it I had promised myself something I could now no longer keep. My security had rested in a sort of negotiation with compulsory heterosexuality, such that when all my friends had outlived their husbands, we’d all get to move in together and eat cheesecake and wear comfortable loungewear for our seven extra statistically predetermined years of life. Whatever else might change in life, we could at least count on that. And that even if we got married, even if we married men, we weren’t going anywhere in terms of our relationship to one another; the show wasn’t called The Golden Placeholders Until I Meet Leslie Nielsen. It was a negotiation that existed primarily in my own fantasies, of course, but it was a load-bearing fantasy, and the architecture of my mind suffered from the loss of it.r />
  I’d never hated Leslie Nielsen before—I thought the Naked Gun movies were overrated, but I didn’t blame him for that—but Lord, did I hate him then. He tugged Dorothy through every door in every scene. You could barely keep him in a shot. He was always disappearing just out of frame. Let’s get a move on, let’s get out of here, time’s a-wasting. What are you in such a hurry for, Leslie? There’s no rush. Sit down in the kitchen with the girls and have some iced tea. I didn’t mind that Dorothy got married, but I minded that he took her away from that kitchen table. There was room at the table for him, if he’d just pulled up a chair and sat down.

  Later that day I tried looking up The Golden Palace to see if it would cheer me up, but then I read the plot summary of its own series finale: “Following the cancellation of the series, Sophia returns to the Shady Pines retirement home, appearing as a cast member in the later seasons of Empty Nest. What becomes of Rose, Blanche, and the hotel is left unresolved.”

  My friend attempted to remind me that it was perhaps not especially useful to assign an old sitcom the job of reassuring me that everything was going to be okay, that transition would not take me out of my place in the world or in the lives of the people who loved me, that intimacy does not require total personal immutability, but I still felt for all the world like Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre upon learning that Mr. Mason has arrived, that all of his plans and hopes for the future have come to nothing, that the full force of his past is coming back to claim him, that his attempts to force Jane into the shape of a wife through the sheer force of his desperation and will must prove ultimately fruitless—

  “Jane, I’ve got a blow; I’ve got a blow, Jane!”

  Later I ended up calming down enough to go back to an earlier episode, one where Rose and Dorothy enter a songwriting competition and write a jingle about Miami. I still knew the blow was coming, but once you’re prepared for the hit, you can get into position and wait for the force to pass through you. On the other side of sobriety my life was not given over to a daily battle against the desire to drink; after starting to transition my life was not given over to a daily battle against the desire to be a man. One no longer has to fight battles after giving up; something new can happen then. Once you accept that you’re going bald you can start to look for toupees; once the mountains are in the sea you can stop imagining they’re going to move at your command; once the blow hits, you are free of the dread of the blow, and you can start to mend from it.

  CHAPTER 11 Captain James T. Kirk Is a Beautiful Lesbian, and I’m Not Sure Exactly How to Explain That

  A while ago I received a copy of William Shatner’s latest autobiography. My friends have a general sense that I have some sort of one-sided relationship to William Shatner that does not extend to wanting to know anything about his personal life, but that’s about as far as we usually get on the subject. I haven’t read the book yet. Odds are I won’t get around to it.

  William Shatner, through no particular fault of his own, has always produced in me such a combination of powerful sentiments, such a furious mixture of longing and frustration and incoherence, that I can scarcely bear to think directly about him. By most accounts he is an unpleasant man and I think it unlikely that we would have much to say to each other, although that’s not exactly why I don’t want to know what he’s thinking or saying or working on these days. I have had to remind friends that I don’t want to hear about what fights William Shatner is getting into on Twitter, that I do not want ever to be put into a position where I might have to say hello to him, that for us to ever meet would result in great humiliation for me and moderate confusion for him. I have never sought to consummate any of my desires. I could never stand to be in a room with William Shatner. I would almost certainly burst into tears and quite possibly ask to suck his dick, and I can’t imagine he needs that kind of vibrantly upsetting energy in his life. I do not know exactly what I would require from him, and my guess is that he has spent probably enough of his life around people who overreact to his presence. The only thing I really want from him is to be left alone so I can contemplate him properly.

  William Shatner guest-starred on two different episodes of Columbo, but I shall only require you to see the first, from 1976. Shatner’s second appearance, 1994’s “Butterflies in Shades of Grey,” is necessary only for the compulsive Shatner completist. Better to watch “Fade in to Murder.” Columbo, like the original run of Star Trek, regularly tried to imagine how to solve problems without immediately resorting to violence, and showcased a certain sort of competent, empathetic male peacefulness that makes me cry when I try to explain it to someone who’s never watched the show.

  I have been trying very hard not to talk to you about Star Trek, but I’m afraid I’ll have to. No one really wants to hear how someone else got into Star Trek any more than they want to hear about your dream last night; those stories all sound the same and never quite tell the truth. I will confine myself to this: I had no real choice when it came to loving Star Wars. I saw it for the first time when I was six years old and was not yet grown enough to be able to decide where to bestow my adoration. I loved Star Wars helplessly, reflexively; I came to it before the age of accountability, which does not apply only to theological matters but those concerning the heart. For example, I was baptized at twelve, yet when it happened, I did not think of myself as too young for it at the time; it is the same way with Star Wars. For better or worse, I am a Star Wars person. I neither regret nor wish to change that part of myself, but I cannot take credit or responsibility for it. Star Trek, however, was something that belonged to me as soon as I saw it, and William Shatner belonged to me most of all. He was always being framed in gauzy close-ups, which was exactly how I wanted to look at the sort of man who compelled me—that is, handsome men of less-than-average height dressed in stretchy, breathable fabrics, with countless best friends committed to nonviolence, who had slightly feminine hips, who solved puzzles, and maintained erotically charged eye contact with other men and lady science officers: Yes, just like that, more of this, but don’t get any closer. Give me the outlines as sharp as you can, but stop zooming in.

  At any rate, Bill Shatner is more than Star Trek—or at least I want to believe that he is more than Star Trek, which is why I am trying to put off talking about Star Trek for as long as possible. In “Fade in to Murder,” Bill plays Ward Fowler, an actor famous for playing the television detective “Lieutenant Lucerne.” He is also a murderer. He wears lifts in his shoes and a toupee and is following a joyless studio diet to keep his weight down, and spends the majority of the episode sheepishly acknowledging the truth about his body.

  “I’d appreciate a certain amount of discretion in that matter, Lieutenant,” he tells Columbo after each confession/discovery. “Public image, you know.”

  I never know how to refer to previous incarnations of myself in a way that honestly acknowledges the present without sacrificing the past. There is truth, sometimes, in saying that I used to be a woman of sorts, although I don’t think I’d much appreciate hearing someone else say this about me. Let us say that there was a time when I was a person who appreciated a certain amount of discretion in the matter of my public image, a time in which making decisions about my own life felt a bit like contemplating murder, a time when allowing any other person to see my body felt like inviting a detective to arrest me.

  We know, of course, that William Shatner was well-known for wearing lifts, and a toupee, and following joyless studio diets to keep his weight down, and spent the majority of his post-sixties career acknowledging and apologizing for himself, at least on-screen if not in his memoirs. I’m not sure that it was ever strictly correct to call myself a closeted trans man. I think as soon as I knew I was one, or wanted to be one, or that one was pretty much the same thing as the other, I told somebody else about it. But a closeted trans man might experience a certain type of transmasculine resonance, watching that scene play out (your transmasculine resonance may vary; transmasculine resonance not
guaranteed).

  It should perhaps go without saying that unless you are Kevin Pollak, I do not want to hear your William Shatner impression, but I will say it nonetheless, in case you are ever tempted. You might practice your Shatner in the privacy of your own home until your speaking voice becomes indistinguishable from his and you baffle your own ears, and find strange new depths in your own throat. Call me then, but not before.