A Tribute to My Father and Mother
An Oil Painting by Laura's Mom, Eleanor
Short History of Laura
How the Metro'on Began
Should we begin with a precocious kid, born with a penis, who walked and talked earlier than most girls do? Maybe we could begin with a fourteen year old crossdressing young Christian whose heart was ripped from (he)r chest by Deuteronomy 22:5? (S)he lost (he)r faith when, after denying (he)rself for over a year, although praying fervently every day, God failed to give (he)r the strength to resist the demon within. After that, there were two choices. (S)he had to accept (he)rself as an abomination or recognize that the God (s)he believed in didn't exist.Or perhaps we could start with a newly married Eonist, (he)r first child on the way, wanting desperately to be ``normal'' for the sake of the child. We could relate how (s)he had informed Mary, (he)r fiance, of (he)r peculiar feelings the first day they met. Not only didn't Mary mind, she enjoyed pretending to be a cowboy, dressing up in her brothers clothes. Seventeen and in love, nothing was more important than their love. Until, at nineteen, married and a child on the way. Mary put away her ``game'' of playing cowboy and mandated Laura should put away (he)r ``game'' too.
Laura, determined to find help, sought assistance from the medical community and was promptly informed there wasn't anything wrong with (he)r. Many men, the State psychiatrist said, had this peculiar behavior. It wasn't abnormal. (S)he was an Eonist, an ``affliction'' named after the Chevalier D'Eon.
Maybe we should begin a few weeks later during six months of intense self-analysis. Every night for six months (s)he rode a bicycle for an hour or two while talking to a cheap little battery operated tape recorder. We could dramatize (he)r agony, the tears, the screaming and yelling, (he)r maniacal laughter and suicidal impulses to run the bike in front of oncoming cars.
Shredding (he)rself apart (s)he sought an explanation, hoping to find a cure. ``How could this happen to (he)r?'' Memories, sweet and bitter, weeping and wailing, riding and pedaling, pedaling and talking, but nothing. There was no answer. Bathed in the dawning light from the black caverns of (he)r soul (s)he discovered ... a good person, a person who cared about others and about the world around (he)r. (S)he also knew (s)he wasn't alone. The doctor had said many men were Eonists. (S)he had to find them, help them, ask them to help (he)r, so that no child would ever again have to endure the torment she had been through.
``What would Mary say now?'' Laura was not going to put away (he)r ``game.'' (S)he wasn't going to hide. (S)he had decided, during her rides, that it was wrong to bring a child into the world with secrets, lies, and deceptions. People had been doing that since time began. It had to end somewhere, sometime, with someone; she was that someone in the right time and place.
Maybe we could begin with a young transvestite, trying and failing to talk other transvestites into going public, into offering their talents to others. (S)he had taken to reading tarot for (he)r intimates, and for their families; the price of a reading was respect and acceptance. Almost exclusively (s)he read tarot as a woman. Consequently, a seeress, (s)he was welcome in their homes. Unashamedly, proudly, (s)he was introduced to the families and friends of those who knew (he)r and they called on (he)r often. Always, (s)he was there for them.
However, (he)r own parents, loving (he)r as a man, didn't want (he)r visiting as a woman. In an impassioned letter (s)he wrote of (he)r acceptance into the homes of those who knew her and of their esteem for (he)r, and she wrote that in all of Phoenix there was only one home where (s)he wasn't welcome. Overwhelmed (he)r parents embraced (he)r and brought (he)r into their home. They too became proud of (he)r and sought (he)r out for the wisdom and advice (s)he had to offer. (S)he offered this world, (he)r world, to other transvestites, but they laughed at (he)r, mocking (he)r, and (s)he was powerless to make them understand the goodness (s)he saw in them ... and the magic.
Of course, we could start with a fully grown transsexual feeling sorry for herself. Having chosen to raise her children rather than spending money on Sex Reassignment Surgery. Time passed, her children were grown, her first heart attack was behind her, and she had undergone recent quadruple by-pass surgery. By-pass surgery was experimental at the time and it wasn't known how long before it would fail. Five years, perhaps.
No doubt about it, she was feeling sorry for herself. Standing in the yard of her mortgage-free home, she looked up at the moon. Some primitive portion of the mind, larger in some than in others, supposes there might be something that controls our destinies, something giving purpose to our otherwise meaningless existence, something that makes us feel we are not so terribly alone. A bit of brandy inhibiting her reason, believing she was rushing toward the end of her life, she indulged her bicameral mind. Spreading her arms, standing with legs apart in the spread- eagle position of the Star Goddess, indulgently, she called out in a loud voice, ``Is this how it ends? With a whimper?''
``What was it all about?'' she demanded, her voice growing louder.
``A woman's brain in a man's body; did that amuse you? Did I give you a good laugh? Was I entertaining? Did I cry enough, scream enough, bleed enough to suit your Royal Highness? Did I?'' Tears were streaming down her face. Yes indeed, feeling sorry for herself had turned into a righteous case of self-pity. Still, everyone earns the right to a little self-pity in a lifetime.
``Where's my reward? When a dog's good, I pat it on the head. I throw it a bone. Where's my bone? I want my goddamn bone.'' By this time she was screaming at the top of her lungs.
Lights began turning on around the neighborhood and people were sticking their heads out their doors to see what the racket was all about. Recognizing that the better part of discretion was to shut up, she did. Sitting down on the grass, still a little brandy left in her glass, she brooded for a long time. All of her adult life she had been working on The Book, as it had come to be known. It was her life story, a story she was born to live and born to write. It was done, finished, complete, what more did destiny want of her?
Actually we could start with the magic that began shortly after that fateful night. Money came, a new love entered her life, Joan. Joan was a lesbian and she loved Laura because she was transsexual. Being loved for what and who you are is far better than being accepted. For twenty-eight years Mary loved Laura, but never stopped hoping that one day she would be a man again. Joan didn't want a man. She wanted Laura just as she found her. Nineteen years younger than Laura, knowing Laura's cardiac condition, she wanted her just the same.
Laura and Joan had a magical life together. Living fearlessly, publicly, in a mobile home park, they had three teenage girls visit them and play on their computers. When dissenters had words to say about the strange couple in trailer twenty-eight, the kids quickly put them in their place. One time, overheard outside the kitchen window, one girl was lamenting that she wasn't allowed to visit because they were lesbians. Jamie, the girl who came over most often, advised, ``That's terrible. You oughta work on your Mom. They're wonderful people. We learn more from Laura then we do at school.''
Not long after, Laura and Joan experienced a remarkable occurrence. They were embraced by a rainbow. Driving down highway I-10 at mile marker 231, one end of a rainbow playing on the landscape to the left, the other end visible on the right, it closed on their car. Just before it entered Laura, craning her neck forward and looking up, saw the immensity of the rainbow ring hanging in the sky. Momentarily a golden light filled the car, and then they were through it. When the couple arrived home they each wrote their version of the incident lest, sometime in the future, they reflect back and doubt it had ever happened.
Joan had felt blessed when touched by the rainbow. Laura, her skepticism put to the test, admitted she had felt a tingling in her fingers and she felt a powerful urge to rewrite her book. Reviewing what had been written, she discovered that, while truthful, it was filled with ego and preaching. It needed work.
Denied SRS because of her heart condition Laura, with Joan at her side, had an orchiectomy in Mexico. At the time it seemed the best alternative since the former was not possible. In the passage of time, it was superior to SRS (for her). Laura, hormonally female, no longer had to contend with plumping or ejaculation, but sensation remained. Sexual intimacy was still intensely pleasant and her ``enlarged clitoris'' still stimulating.
Laura's death might be an appropriate place to begin. It was Laura's second angiogram in three months and she died on the table. Long minutes passed as the doctor labored to bring her back. Finally, pushing the envelope of time to its maximum, he succeeded. ``Laura, you're all right, now. We lost you, but we got you back,'' offered Dr. Byrne-Quinn. A chill ran through Laura, she hadn't known she had been gone.
Over the next few weeks, the chemistry of Laura's brain, shaken by the loss of oxygen during her demise, became critical. Can you imagine the atoms of your mind exploding, the connecting fibers and tissues coming loose and floating freely in a mass of gelatin? Can you imagine being depressed, and knowing that you are really happy? Can you imagine feeling the urge to commit suicide while desperately wanting to live? Can you imagine being sane, lucid, and thrilled with life, trapped inside a mind that was out of control, confused, and in agony? Laura didn't have to imagine these things, she was experiencing them.
It was then Julia entered the picture. Sweet, dear, wonderful Julia, post-op, and ready to begin her new life. Laura, battling the complexities occurring inside her head, believing her problems could be terminal, didn't want Joan to be alone. She had also fallen in love with Julia and didn't want her to be alone. Joan and Julia reached out to Laura in her time of trial, embraced her and for one long year, nurturing and nursing her, brought her back from the clutches of Ereshkigal. Even as Asushunamir had rescued Inanna from Ereshkigal, now she had been rescued.
Julia had been Goddess sent. Laura learned she had not been battling alone all those years. While she had been waging her war against ignorance others had been battling with equal strength and resolution. Some of those people were Margaret O'Hartigan, who inspired Julia with revelations of a noble past as Gallae, Anne Ogborn, twice pilgrim to India, learned first-hand the heritage of our Hijra sisters, and so many other beautiful spirits in our community who have dedicated lives to researching our past and present, making the information accessible in a way that heals and restores us. Not the least of these, Chrysalis Journal and AEGIS, the creation of Dallas Denny.
July 4, 1991, the day of the rainbow incident, was equally magical for Julia. At the same moment in Baltimore Julia was celebrating the beginning of living full-time as a woman with some friends. Particularly she was inspired by the writings of Joseph Campbell, Merlin Stone, and Riane Eisler on Goddess cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world. Cybele spoke to her in dreams, radiant in the purple and gold of a majestic sunset. Dreams and yearnings that spoke of a past yet hidden from her view, a mythic path opening to unknown spaces. Intuitions were over time confirmed in reading the scholarly works of Vermaseren and, quite recently, Randolph Conner's text, Blossom of Bone. She felt guided by a mysterious hand through life's encounters, the same hand which brought her to Laura and Joan at a time of need. Under the full moon of March 26, 1994, the Mystery bonded them together and out of this bond has come the Metro'on in the Catalina mountains.
Metro'on is a Greek word for a focus, grotto, or temple of the Great Mother (Cybele, Rhea, or any of a thousand names in as many languages). Always she is known for her special (priest)esses who, through sacrifice and magic, have transcended the boundary between male and female; between matter and spirit.
Fully aware that Gallae in times past were revered and despised, honored and feared, there was nonetheless a place and a people where young Gallae could turn, a niche in the fabric of their society. That niche is missing in the contemporary American scene. Recognizing a shift toward spirituality in other gender mixed people, ``a disturbance in the force'', many of us are ready to embrace one another. No longer can we pretend there is anything but dishonor hiding in closets. No longer can we endure the denigration, deprecations, and diminishing of our people without raising voice to speak in our own behalf.
We have been labelled by others outside of our community. These labels isolate us from one another, divide us, suggest that we are dysfunctional, aberrated, and are recent products of a world slowly going mad. Some claim, and actually believe, that none of us existed before Christine Jorgensen went public. So thorough has the attempt been to separate us from our sisters and mothers of antiquity that, for a time, we believed the lies.
Let us name ourselves, reconnect with the Gallae of ancient Rome, our own European tradition, paralleled in other parts of the world. We are not the Hijra of India, although they are our sisters. We are not the Winkte of the Lakota, the Lhamana of the Zuni, nor the Nadle of the Navajo, although they too are our sisters. When we identify with them the Indians don't perceive us as one of them. They consider we are stealing, or trivializing, their sacred traditions. In our rush to be whole again, we need not dishonor others by appropriating their terminology. We have a name of our own, a noble name springing from our own heritage; the Gallae.
It was for these reasons that we chose to call ourselves Gallae and to reclaim the name of the Metro'on. We have found there is empowerment in calling ourselves by this ancient name, that we connect with not only those in our sacred past, but with all gender-mixed people in the present. More than connecting with the past and present, we are proud we are Gallae. We are a magical people surrounded by mystery, extraordinary in every sense of the word.
Once, before I knew my full heritage, I posted on a BBS that I was proud of being a transsexual, that I had learned a lot of wonderful things in the process. A man asked, ``Oh, so you're trying to tell us you're better'n the rest of us?'' I replied, ``Yeah, I suppose I am. After a lifetime of being called an abomination, being told I was sick or depraved, it feels good to recognize myself as someone special.'' Of course, we're not ``better than'' others, we are merely special in a different way than they are special.
It's no longer just myself that I, that we, recognize as exceptional. Gallae, in whatever form or shape, are invariably singular. We, in Catalina, believe it restores our self-esteem to identify as Gallae, uniting us all under a common name and a common banner. We hope to see associations of The Metro'on cropping up all over the nation, even if by other names. ``Evolvere'' is a sister group in Tucson identifying as Gallae. They seek unity, as we seek unity, and in that unity we are one. Each association, by whatever name, shall be sovereign, and serve their local people. No allegiance or fees are owed The Metro'on of Catalina. We are here for those Gallae in our area who have need of us, who seek the information we have accumulated. We are also here to help other people in this locality, non-Gallae, usually other women. We provide our magic and mystery for those who love and respect us. We offer the opportunity for those of you who feel as we do, to do the same.
The Pages of the Metro'on
Laura originated our creative and imaginative answer to a promise to the Mystery of Life.
