Crumb's Rejected Cover

In 2009, celebrated artist R. Crumb was commissioned to do a cover for the June issue of The New Yorker.  After agonizing over it for a number of months, Editor-in-Chief David Remnick returned the work to Crumb, refusing to give an reason.  This led the artist to vow never to do work for The New Yorker again.

The work in question is at left.  It features a couple whose genders are indeterminate -- or is it their biological sexes that are?  They are applying for a marriage license, and the individual dressed in a blouse, skirt and heels is a caricature of a man in drag, bulging muscles and all.  The individual holding her/his hand is slight, delicately featured, and dressed in man's business suit.

At first glance, I thought it was mocking slap at gender variance, but as I began to look closer, little details began to change my mind.  The most obvious is the sign with one red arrow, pointing to "GENDER INSPECTION."  Then there are the two arrows of the "MARRIAGE LICENSE" sign, which point decisively down to the gentleman filling out the license, and his expression of ... what?  Dismay?  Confusion?  Terror?  on his face.  And if the person in female drag is a caricature, as is the one in male drag, so is the man in the window decked out in bureaucrat drag, complete with white shirt, skinny tie and pocket protector.

Why was the cover rejected?  What did Crumb want to say?  What do you think?

Thanks to Allison Atwood for the pointer; more info can be found here.

Way-points

On a compass route, a "way-point" is an intermediate stop along the journey.  They're important because they prevent one from having to do the entire route in one compass reading.  It's next to impossible to walk a route precisely, and errors accumulate over distance.  Way-points allow you to navigate a short distance, perhaps to a distinctive rock or other prominent landmark, one that is visible even if you're a ways off.  In this way, you can re-orient yourself, erasing any error, and literally "toe the line" once again.

The transgendered life can be like that, sometimes.  We have way-points, intermediate achievements along the path.  Buying our first wig.  Taking a makeup lesson.  Sneaking out of a motel room in the dead of the night.  Just kidding.  But even that one, as furtive and unfulfilling as it may be, can also empower us to move along, and like a way-point, re-orient us on the path.

Gender Testing for Fun and Profit

I don't remember much about my childhood, a fact that has kept my therapists rapt with interest over the years.  What I do remember are individual incidences of dressing as a girl, from the proverbial trying on of Mama's slips and pantyhose to full-on dressing up, like the time I went trick-or-treating dressed as a little girl for Halloween.  That episode is the earliest I recall -- it had to have been before I was eight, and it may have been as early as four or five.  Questions of nature versus nurture aside, I was exploring my feminine side long before I those annoying black hairs started to grow on my, ah ... legs.

Increasingly over the past few years, I've wondered just where I am on the transgendered spectrum.  I'm not  a "classic," early-onset transsexual: I have not felt from my earliest days as if I were a female trapped in a male's body, I have not hated my penis and longed for a vagina, nor have I experienced a significant amount of discomfort due to my male body. (Other than wishing my very masculine body proportions were just a bit  more a feminine ... oh well, that's what padding is for.)