Love and Money, Sex and Death

After a suc­cess­ful career, a twen­ty-year mar­riage, and two kids, McKen­zie Wark has an acute midlife cri­sis: com­ing out as a trans woman. Chang­ing both social role and bod­i­ly form recasts her rela­tion to the world. Tran­si­tion changes what, and how, she remem­bers. She makes fresh sense of her past and of his­to­ry by writ­ing to key fig­ures in her life about the big themes that haunt us all — love and mon­ey, sex and death.

In let­ters to her child­hood self, her moth­er, sis­ter, and past lovers, she writes a back­sto­ry that enables her to live in the present. The let­ters expand to address trans sis­ters lost and found, as well as Cybele, ancient god­dess of trans women. She engages with the polit­i­cal, the aes­thet­ic, and the numi­nous dimen­sions of trans life and how they refract her sense of who she is, who she has been, who she can still become. She con­fronts dif­fi­cult mem­o­ries that con­nect her mother’s ear­ly death to her com­pul­sion to write, her com­mu­nist con­vic­tions, her com­ing to New York, the bit­ter­sweet real­i­ty of her late tran­si­tion, and the joy to be found in Brooklyn’s trans and raver communities.

To McKen­zie,

When Lit­tle Richard came to our home­town, he left us some thing like a gift. He came to New­cas­tle on his Aus­tralian tour, in 1957, four years before you were born. He was this churn­ing, surg­ing flame, icon of a new thing called rock and roll. Then his life took a turn while cross­ing the waters of our harbor. 

Your life will take some turns too. I’m writ­ing this to you from your own future, or a pos­si­ble one at least. A let­ter to a young poet, where the young poet is me, forty years ago, not quite twen­ty years old. A let­ter that’s cov­er for a med­ley of oth­ers, addressed to oth­ers, about love and mon­ey, sex and death. 

You — what do I even remem­ber of you? Our past selves are prob­a­bly exten­sive­ly edit­ed edi­tions. Let me see what I can piece together. 

I’ll try not to advise, as you won’t take advice. You nev­er seek it. You are inca­pable of being men­tored. A lot of peo­ple will help you. Per­haps they see the wound that keeps you from ask­ing. They’ll help you in spite of your indif­fer­ence, even antag­o­nism, to care. To accept­ing love. 

You don’t think about this much, but I have to insist: we lost our moth­er young, and we nev­er much liked our dis­tant, irri­ta­ble father. The two front­line adults meant to be there for us, keep the world at bay, weren’t. That made us dis­trust­ful, detached, dis­so­ci­at­ed. Look that last one up, it explains a lot. Like in Kim­ba the White Lion, that TV show you loved when you were lit­tle, you feel alone in the world.

It is obvi­ous to you already that a world that relies on lit­tle iso­lat­ed fam­i­ly units sub­ject to the whims of the mar­ket and dis­ease is a bad idea. You want a bet­ter world. The past hurt you, so you move on, and want the world to move on. You’ve not yet learned to live in the present, so you live in the noth­ing­ness of a per­ma­nent not-yet. 

Your fam­i­ly tend­ed their own wounds after your moth­er died. As the youngest, you couldn’t see that. You need­ed them all to not fall apart so they could hold you togeth­er. They did their best, but you need­ed more than that, so you start­ed look­ing for ways to get attention. 

Big broth­er smoked. You found an old cig­a­rette tin, rolled pen­cil stubs in paper, and made them into a fake brand. You called them ​“Snazz­ies: the cig­a­rette for the fan­cy smok­er.” You made it into a bit, and every­one thought it was cute. Big­ger kids still pushed you up against a wall and took things from you, but some­times they too could be charmed. 

You feel vul­ner­a­ble, frag­ile, too open to the ran­dom­ness of the world. You’ve already got good at mon­i­tor­ing the perime­ter, scan­ning for dan­ger, check­ing you have all your kit. You’ve just moved to Syd­ney from your home­town, and those skills come in handy. 

Don’t think I’ve for­got­ten that time you came back to New­cas­tle and slept on a for­mer schoolmate’s couch rather than go vis­it your father. Don’t think I’ve for­got­ten how, hard up for cash, you sold a match­box of weed to some­one else you thought you’d left behind. He com­plained it wasn’t much pot for five bucks. You said take it or leave it. He took it, but got his big­ger mates to find you, sit you in a car and make you roll the reg­u­la­tion five joints out of it under threat of con­se­quences. And you did. Grace under pres­sure. And all for­got­ten. Mates again, smok­ing togeth­er in the car. Fuck those losers. You’re not liv­ing in their world again, ever. 

Lit­tle Richard left Macon, Geor­gia, for a life on the road, per­form­ing. He was the son of a preach­er who also owned a night­club. He grew up reli­gious. What he loved most was the ecsta­t­ic, stir­ring ener­gy of church. The inten­si­ty of it, that rav­ing joy and sur­ren­der in a racist world of pain, pover­ty, and police. Not like your upbring­ing at all, although there might be one thing you have in common. 

Now back home for anoth­er brief vis­it in New­cas­tle, back to that steel, coal and port town with its belch­ing smoke and bend­ing beach­es. You were right to fuck off imme­di­ate­ly after high school. You need a city big enough to let you get weird. You want your life to be Wildean and sin­gu­lar. Mate, you have no idea. 

You won’t lis­ten, but I want to talk to you any­way. Need to, per­haps. Need to make con­tact in some way with that skin­ny teenage boy. Boy? Man? That’s the rub. Or part of it. You take refuge in androg­y­ny. That pic­ture of Pat­ti Smith on the cov­er of Hors­es is your icon. Your hair long, wear­ing girls’ jeans, girls’ boots. With your slight frame, you’re often mis­tak­en for a girl, and you like it. What­ev­er those sit­u­a­tions point toward, you’re avoid­ing. Divert­ing else­where with ambi­tions, pol­i­tics, writ­ing, some less hap­py pursuits. 

The thing about diver­sions is that you can nev­er see what’s com­ing up around the turn. 

The diver­sions will go on a long time. Prob­a­bly too long. What if you stopped divert­ing your­self? Or rather, divert­ed your­self dif­fer­ent­ly? Imag­ine there’s streams of par­al­lel time lines, alter­nate ones, in which you come out as trans at forty, or thir­ty, or — right now. In some of those time­lines, I’m not here in your future to be writ­ing you. In this one, we kept our­selves safe, bid­ing our time till we could come out and remain alive. 

Lit­tle Richard had to get out, so he invent­ed rock and roll. The dri­ving beat, the thriv­ing bass, the ecsta­t­ic merge. A church like joy with­out sac­ri­fice. He per­formed in drag some­times, as Princess Lavonne. He — or she — was so dif­fer­ent to you but in this maybe a lit­tle bit the same. Like you, she loved women whom she want­ed to be. She was a girl, and maybe on some lev­el knew it. The only way out was a detour into rock and roll, her art. 

You already sus­pect it — your poet­ry is bad. Give it up. You’re a prose writer. You’re just too lazy to fill the whole page. You read main­ly prose any­way, a lot of it, from your late mother’s library. Lots of cheap Pen­guin paper­backs of mod­ernist mas­ter pieces. You read mod­erns to become mod­ern. A whole social demo­c­ra­t­ic edu­ca­tion across the yel­low­ing, flak­ing pages, as if you were in a race to read them before the acid eats the paper. 

You have access to a charge account at Ell’s book­store, although some­times you steal from it any­way, but that’s anoth­er sto­ry. Sci­ence fic­tion holds your atten­tion when it cre­ates that mod­ern feel­ing of estrange­ment from what the read­er expects. Much of what you read is bad, but there’s some­thing about read­ing your way out of this world into anoth­er that fills a need. 

School was most­ly a bore, so you read on your own. Your oth­er source of books, and more, is the local branch of the Com­mu­nist Par­ty of Aus­tralia. The com­rades: our mar­vel­lous men­tors. I still know how to run effi­cient meet­ings. Your com­mu­nism, like more things than you care to know, is more felt than thought. About your mother’s suf­fer­ing, you could do noth­ing; about the suf­fer­ing of labor, that need not be as inevitable as death. 

Lit­tle Richard was on tour in Aus­tralia when the Sovi­et satel­lite Sput­nik arced bright over­head. An alum­minum orb, trail­ing tech­no beeps on short­wave radio. That read like an omen, a por­tent. It was call­ing. Some­thing had to be sac­ri­ficed in a cold world war whose loom­ing strife seemed of bib­li­cal pro­por­tions. And that offer­ing would be made, by Lit­tle Richard, right there in the town where you were born. 

In the dis­trict par­ty office hung two por­traits, Marx flanked by Lenin, strung on two of three nails. On the third, bare, once hung Stal­in. Oppo­site: a vivid poster of com­rade Angela Davis. Like in a chapel, she is in the place of the moth­er, fac­ing off against the father, son, and holy ghost. One had come down from his nail already. 

When Sovi­et tanks churned into Czecho­slo­va­kia in 1968, the par­ty split, as else­where, into tank and anti-tank fac­tions. On this rare occa­sion, the anti-tankies, those who denounced the Rus­sians for invad­ing anoth­er social­ist state, pre­vailed. The par­ty became a mix of old left and new left, oblig­ed to get along by the rules of demo­c­ra­t­ic centralism. 

The com­rades remained in sol­i­dar­i­ty with the rev­o­lu­tion even though they knew, in their gut, that we are a defeat­ed peo­ple, a lost cause. Yet at least they refused to con­cede, to acqui­esce. Which was maybe why it was the com­rades alone whom you accept­ed as elders. And why I still hold them in my heart, still write to pass along their end­less strug­gle to come. 

When the Sovi­et Union invad­ed Afghanistan in 1979, the local par­ty elders entrust­ed you to lead the dis­cus­sion at the branch meet­ing. You affirmed the par­ty line, con­demn­ing it. Open­ing up an old wound for those who remem­bered when Sovi­et tanks rolled into Prague, or before that Budapest. 

You had heard about the inva­sion via car radio, dri­ving at night on a dark coun­try lane head­ing back to Syd­ney from your sister’s place in the coun­try. After the news flash, the car died. Just stopped run­ning, and on a blind curve. Electrics dead. Look­ing at the bright light on the hori­zon, your first thought was: well, that’s it then. Nuclear war. Sydney’s gone. The car’s electrics fried by the elec­tro­mag­net­ic pulse. You sat with that thought for a bit. Then ques­tioned it. The flash­light still worked, so you got out and looked under the hood. A cable had come off the battery. 

You became the repos­i­to­ry of many sto­ries. The com­rades bore the scars of a series of defeats, some world his­tor­i­cal: the Span­ish Civ­il War, Stal­in­ism, the Sino-Sovi­et split, the mas­sacre of the par­ty and many oth­ers in Indone­sia, the fail­ure of the new left, the coups against Nkrumah in Ghana, Allende in Chile. Some more local, such as the party’s failed attempt at a gen­er­al strike in 1948, and the loss of some of its con­sid­er­able pow­er in the union move­ment in the cold war decades. You felt these personally. 

You also heard tell of more local strug­gles. How the coastal ship­ping was unionised — after lights out, with fists. How the par­ty fought evic­tions in the depres­sion by destroy­ing the prop­er­ty the bailiffs came to claim. Or how Bob Hawke, a future prime min­is­ter, drunk as a skunk, pissed under the table at a May Day func­tion in the Namatji­ra Room of the New­cas­tle Work­ers’ Club. 

You divert your­self from your­self with pol­i­tics, but then the diver­sion with­in the diver­sion, of polit­i­cal art. A pre­dictable turn for a petit bour­geois rebel like you. A chance encounter with Mau­rice Nadeau’s His­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ism laid out a key moment in the ten­sion between polit­i­cal and aes­thet­ic rev­o­lu­tion. You go look­ing for that confluence. 

You were the first from your high school to find the punk rock scene at the Grand Hotel on Church Street, same street as your father’s archi­tec­ture prac­tice. There was only one good band — Pel Mel, who played every week­end. Some of their songs are still in me. 

It is in the space between the polit­i­cal and aes­thet­ic rad­i­cals of our old home­town that you met Glenn Hen­nessy. Just a cou­ple of years old­er, he wants to fuck you and you know it. But he also cares about you, takes you seri­ous­ly as some­one who reads, who thinks. He makes you meals for the con­ver­sa­tion. Glenn is both gay and Abo­rig­i­nal and is open­ing up your aware­ness to both those worlds a lit­tle. Please do bet­ter to trea­sure him. 

“Am I gay?” I know you ask your­self. Sure, some peo­ple just are, but for oth­ers, for you, the self can be a lot of things, and can change. Maybe there real­ly is noth­ing but fic­tion and prop­er­ty hold­ing the self togeth­er through time. 

I know you will under­stand that last sen­tence. You have already read enough Marx to see how prop­er­ty shapes and sorts every­thing. You’re teach­ing your­self French by trans­lat­ing Rim­baud and have puz­zled out the phrase ​“Je est un autre” as ​“I is an-oth­er,” selv­ing as oth­er­ing. Togeth­er through the decades we will vary, elab­o­rate and ampli­fy these dis­cov­er­ies. It’s just fic­tion and prop­er­ty that bound the self and bind it to a line through time. 

But if that isn’t true, could we even know it? 

Any­way, Glenn isn’t the first or last man who will want to fuck you. You know you’re vul­ner­a­ble to that atten­tion, which is some­times benign and some­times not. You need to feel seen, feel held. You also need to feel fem­i­nine. There are ways that this need is exploitable, and you won’t always know how to get what you need from these transactions. 

I’m not going to say you are a girl, or that you always were. You’ve been read­ing trans­sex­u­al mem­oirs on the sly already and not find­ing your­self in that ​“born in the wrong body” sto­ry. You feel like your body is already a girl’s body. Sure, you envy the bod­ies of oth­er girls, the curve of hip and tit, but lots of girls have feel­ings like that. You feel like it’s your self that’s too male, not your body. The prop­er­ties that bind include gender. 

Maybe some sorts of trans­sex­u­al peo­ple ​“always knew,” but you didn’t. You’re always swerv­ing, blind­ly falling through gender. 

For a long time, I ​“for­got” about this sto­ry. I won­der if you’ve already pushed it out of memory: 

The first trans women you met were street­walk­ers. Or so you assumed. What did you see when you saw them? When you were nine­teen you dis­cov­ered, by acci­dent, Pre­mier Lane. It’s one of those mys­tery streets of Syd­ney. The city ambi­ence you love. Dark and nar­row and with no obvi­ous rea­son to exist. Some eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry colo­nial surveyor’s fol­ly. You have been in Syd­ney about a year. You are going to Mac­quar­ie Uni­ver­si­ty on the bor­ing north shore, so you dri­ve over the Syd­ney Har­bour Bridge to the east side for fun. It can be hard to park a car, so you look for those secret spots. That’s how you stum­ble on Pre­mier Lane, the trans sex work­er stroll.

You’d been danc­ing in Dar­linghurst. Came back to fetch the car and found three girls sit­ting on top of it, two on the roof and one on the hood, singing along to a tran­sis­tor radio. ​“She’s got — Bette Davis eyes!” They leaped off quick­ly, apol­o­gised. You told them you didn’t mind. They stood their ground though. With a steady gaze, they read you. The trio all rocked the same look. Long hair, short skirts, red lips, fish­nets. Wiry, thin, bois­ter­ous. About your age. The frames of their bod­ies so like yours. Speedy: you know from speed already. Talk all jit­ter-chat­ter. Big hol­low eyes, wide and dark to swal­low all light. You’ve left me no clear image of any of them in mem­o­ry as their talk cut and wove between kinet­ic bod­ies, danc­ing and singing. ​“Bette Davis eyes!” Tee­ter­ing heels on the steep­ish rake of the lane. They ask you if you want to par­ty. You decline. 

They make you anx­ious, on lay­ered lev­els. They see your sort. They expose your own con­tra­dic­tions, inhi­bi­tions, prej­u­dices. About sex­u­al­i­ty, about sex work, about class, about gen­der, about your inabil­i­ty to think at all about who you might be or who we might become. All the things you find so many ways, use­ful and not, to avoid think­ing and feel­ing. You feel seen, but also like a voyeur whose glance alights by acci­dent on that scene that looks back at you. 

You will become me when it seems like you can — and not die. If you are in receipt of this let­ter — we made it. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you any­thing. Maybe it’s just ran­dom, how we get through time. Or maybe it’s like a jazz solo — points chanced through har­mon­ic space, picked out by the play­er from all the pos­si­ble oth­ers. We love the small-group jazz of Miles, Monk and Coltrane. Jazz is an adven­ture of con­nect­ing one moment to anoth­er. (Time is an-oth­er). I know jazz is already a guide for you. Since you not only left New­cas­tle for Syd­ney but dream of leav­ing Syd­ney for New York, jazz — all of Black music — is a good way to learn the secret his­to­ry of Amer­i­ca. Let’s say no more of what hap­pens, in the drifts and riffs between the times of you and of me. Who even knows if mem­o­ry is any more reli­able than antic­i­pa­tion? The mis­takes we made only mul­ti­ply. They are all we have. And they lead you to become me. Our mis­takes are us, you and me. But you are going to hurt Mu. There’s noth­ing I can do to stop that. It’s one of the few things we will regret while we breathe. 

Lit­tle Richard heard the call in New­cas­tle. Some say this hap­pened in Syd­ney, some say New­cas­tle, which for our pur­pos­es is a more inter­est­ing sto­ry. On the waters of the har­bour, on the fer­ry — the punt as we used to call it. She thought the call came from God. And maybe it did, or maybe from anoth­er deity. She told her band­mates God was call­ing, right there on the punt, on the water, call­ing her to change her ways. They said if she is seri­ous that she should cast her pre­cious dia­monds and pearls into the waters. And she did. 

◆

I keep say­ing that you won’t want to lis­ten to me — but can I lis­ten to you? I’m try­ing. Old­er peo­ple can lose track of what was vital in our younger selves. That sound of sur­prise, shock and delight in life. Every­thing of note sound­ing out clear, not bound in worn chords of mem­o­ry. I see my peers hide out in nos­tal­gia. See­ing the same old bands, gone slack, bald and bored. 

You aren’t bored with life, and nei­ther am I. Hon­est­ly, if one has a capa­cious rela­tion to one’s var­i­ous gen­ders, one could tran­si­tion just to save one­self from bore­dom. To be restored to curios­i­ty, even to unpleas­ant sur­pris­es. Chang­ing sex edits your rela­tion to a lot of things. Includ­ing history. 

Since I tran­si­tioned, I’ve recov­ered some of your elec­tric­i­ty, that lust for life from which you were then also too often detached. From which you divert your­self, with var­i­ous ambi­tions, per­son­al, aes­thet­ic, polit­i­cal. I’m try­ing to bring that into this writ­ing. I’m try­ing to lis­ten for you, still in me. As you’ll see from these oth­er let­ters, I’m try­ing to wind back through the wounds. The writ­ing writes us. Writ­ing is the birth of the author; the text is the afterbirth.

Lit­tle Richard lost her rings. Lat­er she’d joke that down under fish have them. I have them now. Well, metaphor­i­cal­ly, at least. The sparkle of one’s dif­fer­ence. The thing I wan­dered off in search of, in a man­ner of speak­ing, was right here, in the waters of home.

Love and Mon­ey, Sex and Death is out now on Ver­so Books.

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