When “Queer” Was a Slur: My Early Brush With Transgender Identity
The other day I referred my wife to an op-ed I’d just read in The New York Times that highlighted distinctive differences between people like me, who were born on the early end of the Baby Boomer spectrum, from 1946 to 1953, and people like her on the younger end, from 1954 to 1965. Social Commentator Jonathan Pontell, it turns out, had coined the term “Generation Jones” in 1999 to distinguish the latter group as a temperamentally aggrieved cohort who never experienced the invigorating, unbridled freedom and idealism of their immediate predecessors and thus were left feeing cynical, bitter and overshadowed, at a perpetual disadvantage in the race to keep up with the Joneses among their older brothers and sisters.
When I pointed out to my wife that the author of the story, New York Times contributing writer Jennifer Finney Boylan, was a transgender woman, she informed me that she’d read Boylan’s memoir, “She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders.” Suddenly, a memory from the formative years of my early Baby Boomer journey came rushing back to me: my first brush with what was then a rare and taboo topic: transgender identity.
An Unusual Assignment
As a freelance writer for an alternative newspaper in Philadelphia in the mid-1970s, I was assigned to cover a transsexual art exhibit staged…
