Excerpt: Outside the Gates of Eden by Suzanne CookeThat early morning was one of those cold wet foggy San Francisco winter nights and across the Bay to the west of Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge diving board was singing its siren song. Death would be so easy. An end to all the pain, no longer would I suffer the chasm between my body and my soul. It would be so much easier than telling anyone and facing the rejection I had already received from family and the church. After all no one would ever love me, no one would even be my friend if I told them what, who I really was.

Everything I had been raised to think and believe told me that every one whose love and respect I cherished would reject me just as my parents had withdrawn their love after discovering me dressing up. I was sure I would have to leave my cadre, my hippie communal family and as much as that thought hurt, I knew there were other people who lived in San Francisco who were transsexuals the same as I was.

Morey was there for me that night. I didn’t tell him everything because I needed time to gather together my words. I told him that I had within me a deep secret and that I was afraid if I shared it with him and the others in our circle that they would reject me and that I would lose their friendship.

Morey told me something that not even my parents had told me and that was, “If people are truly your friends then they will accept you no matter what and if they reject you because of who you really are then they were never really your friends in the first place.”

Morey assumed I would tell him I was gay, just as a few short years early before I knew the difference I had assumed that was what my problem was. However, experience had shown me that being gay even being a drag queen was something rather different from what I was.

With the New Year, I entered a time when I felt very vulnerable. I was terrified at what my friends’ reaction would be. Someone I had seen around the Haight, a boy who dressed as an elfin princess had committed suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge just as I had contemplated. I was very fortunate to be in Berkeley and surrounded with a family of friends, which was at once permissive and supportive. The Japanese have a word, uchi, it means home but it also means family and nation and Berkeley has long been like that.

At first, I told the people in our group that if I had to go for another draft physical in February I was planning to go in dressed as a girl. This gave me the opportunity to start presenting myself as a woman and to gauge their reactions. That way I could decide the direction I would need to go in and would be able to act accordingly.

I didn’t feel the need to share with them how my experiences at the Oakland processing center the year before had left me with the sense that I would be drafted some time after they took the physically and mentally challenged.

I was unprepared for their reaction upon seeing me as a dressed as a woman. Perhaps they were unprepared to react in the way they did. There was something in that act which just filled in their entire picture of me which I suspect had been very incomplete prior to my doing so. I could see look in their eyes that said, Aha, that’s it, we knew there was something really different about you.

When their initial shock wore off, they looked at me and said, It’s amazing you look just like a girl. Everything about you from the way you stand to the way you hold your hands.

Then one said, You aren’t doing anything different. That’s why I couldn’t tell if you were a boy or a girl when we first met.