The Testosterone Files is a memoir by Max Wolf Valerio‚ who once upon a time was Anita Valerio. Max has always been a San Francisco poet and rule-spoiler, who— ironically— answers every difficult question straight women have ever asked about the men who bedevil, love, or lust after them.
One critic noted in Publisher's Weekly, this memoir "never elicits easy sentiment or empathy from the reader. It is, by intent and in delivery, a tough book."
I like it like that.
Max has been very kind to provide this except:
From "Saying Goodbye"
The Testosterone Files, by Max Valerio
I’m becoming a nonentity. I’ve discovered that lesbians hardly look at the men in their midst; I am invisible. A faintly outlined shroud misting the air, receding, vanishing as I become more and more a man. Other. Stranger. The weird guy in the dyke bar.
They’re picking up on the testosterone tuning my cells; it must be male pheromones, an unconscious attunement to my smell, which has changed. Some subtle yet profound shift in ambience. The mirror and the smoke in the air, bar music driveling on, I sit alone, surrounded by women on all sides.
I’m beginning to feel like a fox in a henhouse.
Wolf man with shackles on his feet
Moon-slurring man, angel with two halves, split
down the middle
One night, after being on testosterone for seven months, I walk into Francine’s. Hardly a soul looks at me. There’s an invisible barrier. A glass wall that feels stronger, more impenetrable each time I visit.
These women speak in another language, although they are moving their lips in a familiar way. I recognize the words, yet can’t quite grasp the meaning. An essential dimension has become hidden. The laughter, the gossip, the exchange of hellos and easy compliments, the camaraderie; I’m not understanding any of these conversations the way I did before.
Why do I still come here? Watching alone, waiting alone. Fascinated with the demise of my female identity. It’s like watching a part of myself die. Doesn’t anyone in this place remember who I was before? I came here often enough as Anita. Bored then, too—an outsider then as well, but not like this. Not with the glass wall.
I once thought of that woman there, the one wearing black engineer boots and a leather jacket, as “butch.” Was it her hair, shaved short on the sides and back, or her jacket? Was it the way she moves her hands, her walk, or her slightly stiff grin? What was I seeing when I was a dyke that made me think that woman was so butch? I stare, trying to solve this newly discovered puzzle. She looks as though she could lift a heavy motorcycle up from the street or lay some pipe in humid weather, walking catlike inside an underground tunnel.
Even so, suddenly, from this new perspective, she seems so much a woman, so female in her hips, her glowing fine skin and small features, her melodic, rich alto. Each time I come to Francine’s she looks increasingly curvaceous, a tiny bit more vulnerable, subtly infused with a conventional femininity. It’s eerie. She’s shifting shape as I do.
From: The Testosterone Files, by Max Valerio
I’m sitting in the dyke bar up the street, Francine’s, the only lesbian bar in the Castro. I’ve started to spend more time here now than ever before, in a furtive, fascinated way.
The experience of sitting, watching, and drinking becomes more and more tedious. Yet I come back. I’m not sure why. I’m looking for something. Waiting for a revelation, a sudden outburst of inspiration. The courage to leave.
I might be saying goodbye.
Bad disco slurs women’s voices.
I watch my reflection in the long mirror directly opposite my bar stool. Every time I come in here, it’s altered slightly. I study the nuances of change and wonder if anyone notices. If so, what rationale would she conjure up to account for this slow shift of gender playing across my face?
Women here look at me less and less. I walk in, slightly hesitant, unsure how I’ll be perceived. Man or woman? There was a time I remember, just last year, when I could turn most of these women’s heads just by striding in. In my black leather jacket and tight black pants, rangy with tomboy insolence, bored. Ready for a long night of standing around, thinking, drinking beer, listening to bad music. Can’t say I’m going to miss that. Yet I’m drawn to live this tedium out again, one last long time. I sit at the bar and stare. Linger and gaze into my past as it retreats out from under me. A time tunnel rapidly receding.
Each week I feel more like an outsider, a voyeur.
As I change, the women in the bar appear to change also, incrementally, in linear resonance with my own physical and psychic transformation. Their faces soften, their edges melt into smooth, sweet surfaces. Even women who before appeared to have mottled, rough complexions now seem to have more of a sheen, a glow to their skin. And their voices sound as though they’re getting higher, more melodic. I never realized how musical women’s voices are! Notes are sprinkled inside the words. I listen in wonder as I step inside the bar. Entranced.
All the women here seem softer, rounder, more distinctly feminine, prettier than they were before. Even the butch women . . . the women I used to think of as “butch.” Sometimes butcher or more masculine than me. They’ve changed. And I know that they would hate me for thinking this, but I perceive their “womanly” qualities without intending to. Suddenly, their feminine qualities are painfully apparent—in my face. It’s an odd surprise. Each time I come here, these changes are more pronounced. Yet I know these women aren’t actually changing. My perceptions are. Can it be I’m beginning to perceive women as men do?
My neck’s thickened. I’m getting more muscular, as though I’ve been working out a lot. I haven’t. I don’t feel comfortable enough yet to use the men’s locker room, so I have to use my wits. Going to the gym as a man, I sneak into the women’s locker room. Stealthily, feeling criminal, I strip down and into my gym shorts, unbind, remove my pants stuffer, then work out as a woman on the weights and the bicycle. Then I run back into the women’s locker room! I shower in a daze. Ignoring the naked women all around me, I steal into a bathroom stall to change quickly into my street clothes, bind down, stuff my pants, then rush out, back into the world as a man!
I won’t be able to keep this up much longer. Although it might be my last opportunity to be around so many topless women without being charged for it.
Weird stares poke at me from all corners. I’ve been on testosterone only a handful of months, but the juice works quickly and the effects become more pronounced with each week. I snatch up the weights so fast! One weight lifter guy stares at me with an odd, puzzled look on his face, some mixture of disbelief and awe. Must be the way I’m moving the weights around, or the fact that I’m getting muscular so quickly—not just muscular, but masculine.
My features sharper, my legs hairier, my eyes slanting in virile concentration. I have so much energy! And the weights are getting lighter and lighter . . . I yank them up easily, expecting them to be much heavier. Another guy, the one who signed me up for the gym, is wide-eyed, looking at me as though in a trance when I ride the bicycle.
Apparently, even though there are women weight lifters here who are seriously strong and pumped, there is something unusual about me. Something off, something not like normal “woman in training.” However, since it’s practically unheard-of, a science fiction solution that reeks of fantasy, no one will ever guess I’m becoming a man. These guys probably just shake their heads and muse, “Wow, there’s one tough chick!”
I thought I was a lesbian. Fourteen years of believing that. Two women circle the pool table, trading shots. Intent. One wears tight Levi’s and a checkered cowboy shirt. The other wears a red tank top and a leather vest; short, tight blond curls sweeten her neck. They stride and lean into the table to shoot.
I was convinced I was a lesbian. What does that identity mean now? What will it mean to me in years to come? Was there something redeeming in all those years, in spite of the fact that I eventually chose to leave? Or did I waste all those years of my life?
I won’t be coming to dyke bars much longer. The choice I’ve made precludes that. But was it really a choice?
Perhaps my transformation is as much a recognition, an acknowledgment of my abiding male identity, as a choice. Jung said, “Free will is the ability to do gladly that which I must do.” Fate, free will, destiny, and choice—points of reference that appear oblique, veiled, as life animates them. As meaning is played out through one’s blood. I’ve been hurtled by a more intractable force than choice toward this moment; it could be revelation.
Transsexual science fiction writer Rachel Pollack has described transsexual identity as an experience of revelation.
I am a voyeur of my own transformation.
I’ve become an audience to my demise as a woman, as a lesbian. I want to see it. I strain my eyes and search the faces of these women to witness my transformation as it registers on their expressions, as it glows in their eyes, an uneasy glimmer. As it twists into their lips a smear, heretical. Woman to man, the impossible choice. The worst possible thing in their world, to go from lesbian woman to heterosexual man. I observe and wait; I watch these lesbian women whom I’ve known and felt an uneasy yet tangible identification with for almost a decade and a half, my entire adult life. We were all in it together and now I’m leaving. A spoiler.
I’m becoming a nonentity. I’ve discovered that lesbians hardly look at the men in their midst; I am invisible. A faintly outlined shroud misting the air, receding, vanishing as I become more and more a man. Other. Stranger. The weird guy in the dyke bar. They’re picking up on the testosterone tuning my cells; it must be male pheromones, an unconscious attunement to my smell, which has changed. Some subtle yet profound shift in ambience. The mirror and the smoke in the air, bar music driveling on, I sit alone, surrounded by women on all sides.
I’m beginning to feel like a fox in a henhouse.
Wolf man with shackles on his feet
Moon-slurring man, angel with two halves, split
down the middle
One night, after being on testosterone for seven months, I walk into Francine’s. Hardly a soul looks at me. There’s an invisible barrier. A glass wall that feels stronger, more impenetrable each time I visit. These women speak in another language, although they are moving their lips in a familiar way. I recognize the words, yet can’t quite grasp the meaning. An essential dimension has become hidden. The laughter, the gossip, the exchange of hellos and easy compliments, the camaraderie; I’m not understanding any of these conversations the way I did before.
Why do I still come here? Watching alone, waiting alone. Fascinated with the demise of my female identity. It’s like watching a part of myself die. Doesn’t anyone in this place remember who I was before? I came here often enough as Anita. Bored then, too—an outsider then as well, but not like this. Not with the glass wall.
I once thought of that woman there, the one wearing black engineer boots and a leather jacket, as “butch.” Was it her hair, shaved short on the sides and back, or her jacket? Was it the way she moves her hands, her walk, or her slightly stiff grin?
What was I seeing when I was a dyke that made me think that woman was so butch? I stare, trying to solve this newly discovered puzzle. She looks as though she could lift a heavy motorcycle up from the street or lay some pipe in humid weather, walking catlike inside an underground tunnel.
Even so, suddenly, from this new perspective, she seems so much a woman, so female in her hips, her glowing fine skin and small features, her melodic, rich alto. Each time I come to Francine’s she looks increasingly curvaceous, a tiny bit more vulnerable, subtly infused with a conventional femininity. It’s eerie. She’s shifting shape as I do.
And that other woman there, she seemed so “butch” to me before also, rough looking, broad shouldered, hardly “pretty” in a conventional sense, and now, it’s startling, I see her softness. She’s become “pretty.” There’s a seductive lilt in her voice, something that might even be construed as maternal about her expression and earthy wide hips. How come I couldn’t see these attributes so clearly before, when I was a dyke?
Is this the way men once saw me? I used to think, “Why do they always come on to me, can’t these guys tell I’m a dyke?” Now I’m beginning to understand why my butch or male qualities weren’t as obvious to men as they were to myself.
I have always preferred feminine women, and actually dated mostly heterosexual or bisexual women from 1984 on, finding many punk and “alternative” bohemian girls to be open to new experiences. It’s not that I suddenly find these butch women attractive enough to date; they still have a missing “feminine essence,” or look dowdy or plain if not entirely masculine... yet they are so much more feminine to me now than they were before.
Will has the same experience, and tells me over the phone that after being on testosterone a while he had a hard time telling the dykes from the straight women. It’s like we are losing our gaydar. He also said, “Before, 20 percent of the women looked attractive, and now 80 percent of them do.”
This change in perception is due to the fact that when you see someone, you unconsciously compare them to yourself. You are your own standard. These women are now more feminine in comparison to my own changing image in the mirror, my own deepening voice, my quickly masculinizing body. It is startling and strange to experience.
It’s similar to how young people look younger as you age; when you’re sixteen, other sixteen-year-olds don’t look extremely young, they look normal.
I’m beginning to discover just how many of our “perceptions” are contextual—in contrast to, or grounded in, who we are, relative. Perception could be as much about the relationship between the observer and the observed as it is about actual definitive observations. I’m experiencing an odd variant of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle firsthand, without recourse to a physics lab.
The other night I sat down at the bar at Francine’s, ordered a Bud. A woman leaned over and asked me, genuinely puzzled, “Why do you come in here? Don’t you like to go to boys’ bars?”
It’s almost time to go.
A couple of weeks later, I go to Francine’s on a whim and sit befuddled, facing my reflection in the mirror opposite the bar. One beer. It’s a slow night, Tuesday, and only four women are here. All talking together. They ignore me as though I’m completely invisible. They order pizza. Each woman has a sumptuous slice with cheese, olives, mushrooms, tomato sauce. One of the women walks to the bar to retrieve her slice and sits right next to me, inching her way toward the bartender with a big smile. She doesn’t look at me, or even appear to see me.
I watch them eat and realize that I’m no longer welcome. These women will abide my presence, but they will no longer welcome me.
When I get up to leave, no one lifts their eyes to see me out.
One morning in a restaurant, a lesbian waitress strolls over to my table to take my order. I shift in my seat, uneasy, and smile at her as though I’m holding a guilty secret. She’s a woman I’ve seen around for years at lesbian events or clubs. I glance up shyly from the menu, expecting to hear my old name. She looks right at my face, right into it, and without any hesitation calls me “Sir.”
I know then that I have gotten through—to the other side.