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We all have traumatic high school memories. Mine just happened to involve mental health wards, straitjackets, and the schizophrenia drug Thorazine. For much of my youth in suburban Chicago, especially while I was locked up after being diagnosed an "inappropriate female," painting was my only outlet. Without my art, I would probably be dead--not a successful artist-writer-activist living in the nation's capital. I found that through painting and writing I could externalize what had always been an internal struggle. Shortly after writing my memoir, The Last Time I Wore a Dress (Riverhead, 1998), I changed my name from Daphne to the gender-neutral Dylan.
To me, art is not a choice. I do it to help heal myself as well as others. Sometimes it's emotionally abstract, and sometimes it's more straightforward, but it's always painfully honest. I have this line in a current painting that reads: "You can't see your reflection without light." By putting my rawest emotions on the canvas--becoming a sort of emotional mirror--perhaps I can help illuminate the suppressed emotions in other transgender people.
Mostly I paint about my experience living in this body: the struggles I face being transgender, queer, and an ex-mental patient. I want my art to help people see the absurdity of it all. After all, I was locked up in the United States of America for not acting like a girl. When the insurance ran out and I got my freedom, I learned to be comfortable being me in a very public way. You can see that in my art, my writing, and even on my skin.
The word tomatoes is tattooed across my knuckles because I relate to the silly debate over labeling a produce item. Is it a fruit or a vegetable? Is it a boy or a girl? Even gay people think in binary terms of gay-straight, male-female, and butch-femme. We're supposed to be the outlaws--the imaginative, fluid ones--yet even we can't escape a world with two essential choices: the men's room or the ladies' room.
Though I've always identified more as a man than as a woman, society told me I had to use the ladies' room--and so I did, despite overwhelming anxiety and fear. Then about five years ago--tired of being gender-policed, beaten up, and literally dragged out of airports--an epiphany hit: You're perceived as male, so use the men's room, Dylan! I haven't had a single bathroom incident since.
There are days when even breathing is difficult. Enduring a major trauma at such a young age is a powerful sucker punch that can take the wind out of you for a lifetime. But when people approach me at my art shows offering heartfelt hugs of gratitude or
e-mail me to say, "Oh, my God, your story happened to me, thank you," it helps me catch my breath. The anger is still there, but now I have the power to transform it into hope.
Making a conscious choice to live every day is not effortless. The words live and life are tattooed on my wrists--a reminder, in case I ever ponder killing myself again, that there's so much more to accomplish. --As told to Andrew Noyes
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