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sex
with a female, and I think a female might say the same thing, the penis
. 68 .
9780670025527_MyBrotherMyS_TX.indd 68
4/23/13 4:12 PM
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Who Has It Better, Men or Women?
could belong to either one. You can’t really tell who it’s attached to.
You close your eyes, there’s no light in the room, and it’s very easy to get lost. Most people don’t think about that.”
Or, I think, maybe they know but repress it. Because somehow the
act of sex shatters boundaries we need to keep in place. By idealizing
sex as “making love,” we can retain the idea of our unique male and
female individuality. But we’re merged, more like e. e. cummings’s girlboys and boygirls.
Chevey thus confirms what the transsexual community went to
great lengths to deny: the theory advanced by Michael Bailey of autogynephilia (i.e., having an erotic obsession with the image of oneself as a woman).
The term, which made Bailey anathema to the transsexual com-
munity, was from psychologist Ray Blanchard’s study of a man who
hadn’t cross- dressed but had fantasized himself as a naked woman
having sex with a man. Bailey’s book, designed for the general public,
brought down the wrath of the transgender community in particularly
vicious terms.
I can understand the resistance to the concept, if not the venom of
the attack. The image smacks of Narcissus, even a betrayal of the sex-
ual partner, which makes it hard to accept. Also it’s a reminder of the dark side of sex, the aloneness at the moment of climax, and the fact
that there’s a certain amount of autogynephilia in all of us, as well as curiosity about what it’s like to be the opposite sex.
This is a fantasy that may be stronger in some than in others. One
of the most fascinating revelations in recent Hemingway studies (or
rather, insights that have emerged from a less protective view of mate-
rial already available) is a more precise understanding of the “dark
side” he often wrote about. Details accumulate in both the novels and
the life, like the recurring hair fetish. In A Farewell to Arms, Lt. Fred-
. 69 .
9780670025527_MyBrotherMyS_TX.indd 69
4/23/13 4:12 PM
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My Brother My Sister
eric Henry describes the erotic charge he receives watching Catherine
have her hair done (his voice becomes “a little thick from being ex-
cited”), and she wants them to cut their hair the same lengths, so they can be “just alike.”
Catherine: “I want to be you.”
Henry: “We’re the same one.”
Catherine: “At night we are.”
Similarly, in the early days in Paris as described in A Moveable
Feast , Ernest and Hadley, at his urging, grew their hair long together; throughout his marriages and friendships he urged his women to dye,
cut, or otherwise change their hair, and supervised the process, even
dying his own hair red in a moment of stress. Both Ernest and Mary
Hemingway, his last wife, wrote about her wanting to become a boy,
and about the sex games they played in which she was the boy and he
the girl. What Hemingway considers a dangerous loss of identity is
reimagined in his posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden , when another Catherine cuts and cuts her hair and changes and
changes (“I’m a girl, but I’m a boy too and I can do anything and any-
thing and anything”), and when, in the dark of their lovemaking, the
writer protagonist becomes Catherine, and says, “Now you can’t tell
who is who, can you?”
For Hemingway such deviancy was a “corruption” that gradually
corrodes the self. And ends— at least for Catherine— in madness.
Gregory (Gigi), Hemingway’s third son (he wanted a daughter), was
considered the most talented of Hemingway’s children, the most like
his father, and also, in the words of Gigi’s son John Hemingway, the
“black sheep of the family.” In Strange Tribe , John describes his father’s mental instability, his manic- depression, and the cross- dressing
. 70
with a female, and I think a female might say the same thing, the penis
. 68 .
9780670025527_MyBrotherMyS_TX.indd 68
4/23/13 4:12 PM
22145
Who Has It Better, Men or Women?
could belong to either one. You can’t really tell who it’s attached to.
You close your eyes, there’s no light in the room, and it’s very easy to get lost. Most people don’t think about that.”
Or, I think, maybe they know but repress it. Because somehow the
act of sex shatters boundaries we need to keep in place. By idealizing
sex as “making love,” we can retain the idea of our unique male and
female individuality. But we’re merged, more like e. e. cummings’s girlboys and boygirls.
Chevey thus confirms what the transsexual community went to
great lengths to deny: the theory advanced by Michael Bailey of autogynephilia (i.e., having an erotic obsession with the image of oneself as a woman).
The term, which made Bailey anathema to the transsexual com-
munity, was from psychologist Ray Blanchard’s study of a man who
hadn’t cross- dressed but had fantasized himself as a naked woman
having sex with a man. Bailey’s book, designed for the general public,
brought down the wrath of the transgender community in particularly
vicious terms.
I can understand the resistance to the concept, if not the venom of
the attack. The image smacks of Narcissus, even a betrayal of the sex-
ual partner, which makes it hard to accept. Also it’s a reminder of the dark side of sex, the aloneness at the moment of climax, and the fact
that there’s a certain amount of autogynephilia in all of us, as well as curiosity about what it’s like to be the opposite sex.
This is a fantasy that may be stronger in some than in others. One
of the most fascinating revelations in recent Hemingway studies (or
rather, insights that have emerged from a less protective view of mate-
rial already available) is a more precise understanding of the “dark
side” he often wrote about. Details accumulate in both the novels and
the life, like the recurring hair fetish. In A Farewell to Arms, Lt. Fred-
. 69 .
9780670025527_MyBrotherMyS_TX.indd 69
4/23/13 4:12 PM
22145
My Brother My Sister
eric Henry describes the erotic charge he receives watching Catherine
have her hair done (his voice becomes “a little thick from being ex-
cited”), and she wants them to cut their hair the same lengths, so they can be “just alike.”
Catherine: “I want to be you.”
Henry: “We’re the same one.”
Catherine: “At night we are.”
Similarly, in the early days in Paris as described in A Moveable
Feast , Ernest and Hadley, at his urging, grew their hair long together; throughout his marriages and friendships he urged his women to dye,
cut, or otherwise change their hair, and supervised the process, even
dying his own hair red in a moment of stress. Both Ernest and Mary
Hemingway, his last wife, wrote about her wanting to become a boy,
and about the sex games they played in which she was the boy and he
the girl. What Hemingway considers a dangerous loss of identity is
reimagined in his posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden , when another Catherine cuts and cuts her hair and changes and
changes (“I’m a girl, but I’m a boy too and I can do anything and any-
thing and anything”), and when, in the dark of their lovemaking, the
writer protagonist becomes Catherine, and says, “Now you can’t tell
who is who, can you?”
For Hemingway such deviancy was a “corruption” that gradually
corrodes the self. And ends— at least for Catherine— in madness.
Gregory (Gigi), Hemingway’s third son (he wanted a daughter), was
considered the most talented of Hemingway’s children, the most like
his father, and also, in the words of Gigi’s son John Hemingway, the
“black sheep of the family.” In Strange Tribe , John describes his father’s mental instability, his manic- depression, and the cross- dressing
. 70
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