The Transvestites of Weir House: Ibye Weir

Ibye Weir was long deceased by the time Collin Weir, the narrator of Weir House, was born, but her tower rooms are now his retreat.  It is in Ibye's old rooms that Collin Weir dresses up in his dead mother's clothes.

There is a secret surrounding Ibye which set in motion the events that led to the bones being secreted under Weir House.  I do not want to make this a spoiler, so I won't go into Ibye's life except to say that she was a young, libertine cross-dresser who ran around with her brother, Col's grandfather, during the flapper era.  Ibye, who preferred women sexually, believed that she was accepted as one of the guys as she hung out with her brother, Jonathan Weir, and his friends. This misconception led to a tragic series of events on the Evelyn Irene, the last steamboat commissioned and owned by the Weir family.  

The Transvestites of Weir House: Tina Drew

Cross-dressing as a child saved Tina Drew's life.  The circumstances of her gender displacement began so early that it is impossible to guess whether Tina would have grown up a regular man had she not been in those circumstances.  Tina is homosexual in orientation, but due to age and circumstances she lives like a spinster.

Tina is a seamstress, whose customers are the transvestite queens of the Memphis night life and stage.  Tina herself does not fit the popular stereotype and does not become personally involved in the scene.  She doesn't go for glamour and cheesecake affects, but lives and dresses like a frumpy, aging dowager.

Tina is a motherly soul who regrets her inability to have born children.  She has experienced the very worst of life, but has managed to come through with highly developed ethics. No one protected her as a child, so she is drawn to protect the strays who stumble her way.  She has saved Col's life more than once, and was attracted to him sexually when he was a minor but her ethics prevented her from acting up on it.  Instead, she fills the role of an older female relative who is always there when he needs her.  She nags at him when she thinks he is too morose, gives him unsolicited advice, and helps him rescue his niece Clara.

Unlike Col, Tina is truly gender displaced.  She is trapped in an overweight, unattractive man's body that insists on producing a heavy beard which she must constantly shave, but she has adjusted to these inconveniences with humor and an offbeat sort of elegance.

The Transvestites of Weir House: Collin Weir

In his youth, before he knew there was more than one set of bones buried beneath Weir House, Collin Weir lived "the gay life", had many lovers, and interacted with transvestite scene in Memphis, Tennessee.  In these years, he fit the stereotype of what people who have never known a cross-dresser perceive their lives to be. 

His life changed when he became an uncle, intensely protective of his nephew and niece whose mother, his sister Mary, had only episodic grasps upon her own sanity.  He is also tired of the scene with the endless parties and lack of stable relationships.  He no longer cross-dresses in public places.  The practice of putting on his murdered mother's clothes ceased when he outgrew them.  Now he has replicas of her clothes in larger sizes, but as the years pass, the room where he keeps them becomes a retreat.  He goes there when he cannot cope, when his failure to save his nephew and sister shatter him, when he loses his niece and exists at Weir House alone like a morbid ghost.  His mother's clothes were what they have always been, a refuge.  They embrace him in her ghostly arms. 

In a sense, Col's cross dressing is all about the loss of his mother.  This is true of most male transvestites I have known in real life.  By cross dressing, many of them step into the persona of a mother, an aunt, a grandmother, some female relative who affected them deeply and in inexplicable ways impressed part of their soul upon them.  Few are as straightforward as Col, who bears an uncanny resemblance to his mother -- to the point that he haunts and terrorizes his father, whose crime has gone undiscovered except for his children who witnessed him kill their mother in a fit of jealous rage.

When Col, dressed up, looks in the mirror, he sees his mother, and this comforted him throughout his childhood, amused him when he turned the resemblance against his father, and outraged him when he discovered the truth about her.

Col's transvestitism does not arise from a conviction that he is born as the wrong gender.  If he and his sister Mary had not witnessed the murder of their mother, he would probably still have identified as homosexual, but whether he would have been drawn to wear women's clothes is difficult to say.  Homosexuality and the urge to wear the clothes of the opposite gender sometimes occur in the same individual but by no means is it universal, any more than it is a given that cross dressers are gay.  

Am I a LGBT Writer? Hmmm, Maybe

WEIR HOUSE has three transvestite characters, all of whom are gay or bisexual.  Even so, I don't think of my book as a "story about gays and transvestites."  It is the story of Collin Weir, and the fact that he dresses up in women's clothes is just one aspect of his personality.  At the time the narrative begins, Col has other things to worry about than the question of gender displacement.  He has become the caretaker of the family bones.  He is concerned for his own sanity, and for the fate of his loved ones.  The fact that he began cross-dressing as a boy, putting on the clothes of his murdered mother is important to the story, but it is not what defines Col as a person. Rather it is his keen sense of family loyalty, misguided though it may be, and his determination to save the unsavable. 

Gay and cross-dressing characters appear in some of my other works as well, but I have never come to the keyboard with the thought "I think I'll write a story about a gay person."  Rather a story begins speaking to me, and some of the characters who are involved happen to be gay or transgender.

Does that make me a LGBT writer, or even a writer of LGBT literature?  Possibly, if one focuses on that single presence within my work.  But even as cross-dressing is not the sum of Col Weir's identity, neither is it the sum of my work.  Nor is it the sum of anyone who may qualify for the label "transvestite."  There is more to them than that.

Resurrection

Amazingly, I have 98 views on this blog.  Amazing because I forgot I had a blog.  Life is not easy for the deranged, that is my excuse.

I re-discovered my presence in blogland when it occurred to me that I had opinions that I wished to give to the universe outside of my head.  I went to blogger, which advised me to login using my gmail account.

Which I did, and there I found traces left by my previous self, the one who existed in 2011.  He doesn't seem to have had much to say.  Pity.