So Many Books... - Debbie Harry Sings in French

You know what I said earlier about all the stuff going on? Well, the first couple of chapters take Johnny from a 12 year old living with his parents (mother a paralegal, father unspecified on the road all the time for work) through the death of his dad (obviously depressed, fell asleep at the wheel), which sends his mother into such a tailspin that Johnny takes care of them both for about three years, into a Goth with a severe drinking problem and a best friend who adds drugs to the alcohol and straight into rehab when he ODs on E he didn't take intentionally. Phew. His mother has by that point suddenly snapped out of the grief-coma when her sister sends her a book called - brace yourselves - Good Grief! (it has some sub-title which I'm too lazy to look up). And I mean suddenly, as in overnight, and equally suddenly, it seemed to me, becomes a fundamentalist who tells Johnny he's going to go to Hell when she catches him watching Interview with a Vampire. At 17. I'd used too many of my 'Well, it could happen that way' tickets already, but Johnny's best friend suddenly spouting the stereotypical alienated (Goth?) teen 'Hate them all, wish I'd a gun and could shoot them' line annoyed me. And for a self-described alcoholic to go to rehab for a bit, come out having discovered Debbie Harry and say that drinking didn't make him happy, drugs didn't make him happy, but dancing to her music did make him happy and then once - ONCE - express longing for a beer - well, I certainly wish anyone recovering substance abuse that easy a time of it.

And now - finally! - comes the gender and sexuality greyness. Or supposedly so. When Johnny's mother decides she can't cope with him any more, she ships him off to his uncle (father's brother) in South Carolina. Good thing too, as his uncle Sam is instantly accepting, trusting, and an all-round good guy, in sharp contrast to the mother. (Or at least, as she is now.) More importantly, in the smalltown school, where Johnny is bullied and assumed by pretty much everyone to be gay (not unrelated, of course), he meets Maria. Maria's got issues of her own, as it later turns out, but she's super-cool, in a hot kind of way (haha, yeah, sorry) and most importantly, on a nearly miraculously serendipitous trip to a thrift shop she gets Johnny to answer the question of what he likes about Debbie Harry. He says "I dunno. I guess it's just the whole thing. The music. The band. I like the way they look. I like her style. She's tough, but she's really beautiful, too. I want --" He goes on to say that stupid as it sounds, he sometimes wants to be like that. On the way out, they happen to see a white dress which looks just like the one Debbie Harry wears on the cover of a Blondie album, and Maria buys it.

Next time he's over at her house she plays him Patti Smith and then gives him the dress. He's shocked and thinks she's making fun of him, but she says she did it so he could be tough and beautiful and she just thought it would be fun. And he eventually tries it on, seemingly more out of angry confusion than any independent desire to do so and then has a huge cathartic flood of tears about missing his father and his mother and loving Maria and feeling 'That I wanted to be somewhere else all the time, but I didn't know where or how to get there."

Maria then gets him to enter a drag competition as Debbie Harry, which he does because he wants to earn the prize money to give her, and he later tells his school counselor that it was 'fun', and then is asked if he wishes he were a girl. Here's his answer:

I had to think for a minute. Did I really want to be Debbie, or any woman? Did I want to be myself but with a different set of equipment? Was that the key? It seemed like a whole new set of problems.

"I like - I love women. They're beautiful and - they're just different. Sometimes I wish I could be gentle and beautiful and not be called a queer. But I don't hate myself or anything. I'm doing better, right? My grades are okay. I'm not getting into trouble. So what's wrong with putting on a dress every once in a while?"

"Nothing, John" is the right answer, of course, but I think Johnny asked the wrong question. More bullying happens, Maria's problems (her mother) come up and Johnny gets so badly injured by the bullies that his mother is called to come to the hospital. She plans to whisk him back to Florida because she thinks he's "turning into a gay" and he tells her he's not, but he thinks he's a transvestite. After a shock-horror reaction she suddenly says he can wear whatever he wants as long as she doesn't have to come to the E.R. to find him unconscious again, and lets him stay. (Picture me the kid in Strictly Ballroom looking in bemusement at her pal, saying "That was unexpected!")

Here's the kicker though - Johnny's Uncle Sam told him about how his dad used to be 'exotic' and how his mother 'made him' cut his hair, get a job, settle down - Sam had thought at the time that Johnny's mother wanted his dad to be something he wasn't. At the end, Sam gives Johnny a trunk full of his dad's clothes from his pre-married days - and it's not entirely clear whether he was just dressing in the glam rock style or whether he actually was transgender/cross-dressing too, but the implication is the latter.

So, after reading, I was quite disturbed about the lack of urgency Johnny has to cross-dress - although it would put him in a very small minority, he might not have experienced the desire to until he was 17 (or possibly one could say that the Goth eyeliner and lipstick satisfied the desire, but I think that's rubbish), but he's actually pushed into it by his girlfriend. This is -- well, I really don't think this is at all likely. And a drag show performance is a completely different thing again anyway. Plus there's his response to dressing en femme - when he's getting ready to go on stage a very nice Cher getting ready beside him looks in horror at the socks stuffed in his dress and provides a spare pair of falsies - he has no reaction to wearing them at all, except calling them 'frighteningly realistic' and then Maria walks in and gasps in admiration when she sees his cleavage. No - don't buy this as any kind of decent representation.

Then I got thinking a bit more about Maria. At first she seemed merely the 'perfect girlfriend': so understanding she knew what Johnny wanted even before he did. I actually had the phrase 'the girlfriend we all want' come into my head, before correcting (for myself, 'natch!) into 'the girlfriend we all want to be'. I didn't actually warm to her that much myself, but that can happen with 'perfect' characters. (Oh, she's not perfect really - she does get jealous and insecure when she finds Johnny dancing with a guy who's giving him a good old ass grab after the competition. But it's only briefly.) And then when I thought about how out of left-field the mother's sudden religious tract, damning behaviour seemed, combined with her even-more-sudden ability to accept his 'transvestitism', and combined that with the father's sadness and the sense that came through that he wasn't living life at all - and then he dies, of course - and it seemed that the book wasn't about Johnny, the supposedly transgender teen, but about women. Who can either be so super-extraordinarily insightful that they know what their menfolk need when the men don't have a freakin clue, or they can be the ones who don't understand, and so are soul- and life-destroying. (Though - thank heavens - there's a second chance if they have children, as they may, just may, learn a little something eventually.) And I know this isn't fair to the book, and I know if I hadn't jumped onto the 'that's how we women are supposed to be' bandwagon I wouldn't be so cross about it now, but I still hold that the book fails to some degree to do what it set out to do, which is portray a teen transgender boy.

I'm certainly not thinking there is one transgender experience, and if it isn't described here, the book fails on that account. All the same, had I read the book knowing little or nothing about the issue, and believing the book to be an informed depiction, then I would most likely have been seriously misled. And had I been reading as a teen who was transgender myself, I think I'd have been either incredibly frustrated that it didn't show anything of the very real need to express the 'other' (non-assigned) gender or left feeling even lonelier and weirder. (Sadly, given society's level of understanding and acceptance of transgender and transsexuals, chances are very good indeed that a teen *will* feel weird and lonely for at least some period of time.) Those are far more serious problems than the narrative flaws.