I Want What I Want

By Geoff Brown

‘I want what I want . . . not what other people think I ought to want.’ What Wendy Ross wants is simple – to live and love openly as a modern, independent woman. The problem is that according to her birth certificate her name is Roy Clark and she is a boy. Mistreated by her father, who is appalled at having such a child, misunderstood by her sister, whose clothes she has stolen, and committed to a mental hospital where she is mistaken for a homosexual, Wendy finally gets her chance to escape when she turns twenty-one and inherits a small legacy. But life isn’t easy for a transwoman in 1960s England, and things get even more complicated when she falls in love with the handsome Frank ...

A groundbreaking novel and a landmark of transgender fiction, Geoff Brown’s classic I Want What I Want was originally published in 1966 and was the basis for a 1972 film adaptation written by Gillian Freeman and starring Anne Heywood. This edition, the first in decades, features a new introduction by Prof. Michael Bronski of Harvard University, an award-winning writer of books on LGBT history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Valancourt Books
• Release date: Nov 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781943910588

Book preview

I WANT WHAT I WANT

GEOFF BROWN

with a new introduction by

MICHAEL BRONSKI

VALANCOURT BOOKS

I Want What I Want by Geoff Brown

First published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1966

First U.S. edition published by Putnam in 1967

First Valancourt Books edition 2018

Copyright © 1966 by Geoff Brown

Introduction © 2018 by Michael Bronski

Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

http://www.valancourtbooks.com

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

Cover design by Henry Petrides

INTRODUCTION

Geoff Brown’s extraordinary I Want What I Want (1966), a British novel of the life of a transgender woman transitioning and living in the working-class city of Hull, is a revelation. Mostly unknown to contemporary readers, it is compelling, insightful, and—for a book that is more than half a century old—it feels remarkably modern. While the myriad, acutely observed, details of life in a small British city in the 1960s locate it in a specific time and place, the internal struggles of Wendy Ross, its protagonist, are strikingly similar to narratives and personal journeys in trans-novels today.

I Want What I Want is written in the first person. The novel reads almost more as a series of diary entries —although it is fully plotted—than the stream of consciousness journey of Wendy Ross as she transitions from being Roy Clark, a young working-class man from Hull who works in his father’s fish and chips shop, to an independent woman living on her own. Needless to say, life is not easy for a transwoman living in a small British city that has barely emerged from the devastation of World War II.

Before emerging publicly as Wendy, Roy’s life is a series of humiliating and painful experiences: caught stealing his older sister’s clothing, being beaten by his father when he is discovered dressing in female attire, forced for a time into a mental hospital where he is mistaken for being a homosexual by a kindly older gay man. After turning twenty-one and coming into a small inheritance from her deceased mother Wendy moves out of her father’s house and begins her new life, which is far better than before, opening doors that were previously only fantasy. But her life is still crammed with unfulfilled dreams and heartache.

I Want What I Want feels singular and groundbreaking. It is, in many ways, unique in the history of transgender literature. The concept of transgender—or what was called transsexuality then—was not completely new at the time. Roberta Elizabeth Cowell had published Roberta Cowell’s Story in 1954 detailing her life before and after her sex reassignment surgery. Christine Jorgensen had made front page news in the United States—‘Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Bombshell’—in 1952, although her autobiog­raphy Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Biography was published a year after I Want What I Want. (Danish artist Lili Elbe, who underwent sex reassignment surgery without hormone treatment in 1930, and was made famous by David Ebershoff’s 2000 novel The Danish Girl, was relatively unknown until recently.)

But I Want What I Want is a work of the imagination, and radically different from the external matter-of-factness of the Cowell and Jorgensen texts. There are potentially some British fictional antecedents to Brown’s novel. Charlotte Charke’s 1755 A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke, Youngest Daughter of Colley Cibber, esq. Written by Herself; Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 doom-laden, inversion-driven The Well of Loneliness, and Virginia Woolf’s 1928 cheerful gender-shifting romp Orlando: A Biography are all read now as transgender narratives. But even these fictions—the Charke memoirs are essentially fictionalized—do not match the intense interiority of Brown’s novel. Nor do they have the broader, contemporary medical context that permeates I Want What I Want. In the post-Jorgensen world both Wendy and the reader are well aware of the possibility of sex reassignment surgery and hormone treatments.

For the contemporary reader, familiar with transgender memoirs and novels such as Jennifer Boylan’s 2003 She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders, or Brian Katcher’s 2009 young adult novel Almost Perfect, I Want What I Want may feel pre-modern, even old-fashioned. Wendy’s evolution, while self-determined, is made in an uncomprehending world that is filled with danger and little possibility of full acceptance. It prefigures Leslie Feinberg’s 1993 Stone Butch Blues, although it is far less unrelentingly harsh and brutal in its depiction of anti-transgender prejudice.

It is tempting to read I Want What I Want as a curious sociological text. Brown was clearly moderately familiar with medical and psychological discourses about transgender identity and sexuality since the novel is quite careful to distinguish Roy from being homosexual or engaging in cross-dressing. This is surprising because at the time of publication there were few available writings about the medical aspects of transitioning. Halfway through the novel Wendy reads in the Daily Telegraph:

A Baltimore Criminal Court judge authorized an operation to change the sex of George Lloyd, 17, who is awaiting sentence on the charge of stealing 15 women’s wigs valued at £400. Two doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital described Lloyd as a psychic hermaphrodite and said the operation would be in his best interest.

This, as far as we know, fictional story sends her to a physician with whom she has a discussion about transitioning surgery. (Although fictional, this news story is accurate in that in 1965 gender theorist John Money was spearheading transsexual medical options at the newly formed Gender Identity clinic at Johns Hopkins; a fact of which Brown was clearly aware.) The doctor, in the novel, denies Wendy’s request, but it is clear from the discussion in that scene that Brown knew far more than most people about transgenderism, including the prevailing medical advances and prejudices of the time.

Very little information is publicly available about Geoff Brown. Contemporary Authors notes:

Family: Born March 5, 1932, in Yorkshire, England; son of Frank and Lily (Spencer) Brown; married Estella Baggley, June 3, 1969. Education: Attended Hull College of Art, 1953-57. Politics: Chauvinist. Religion: Church of England. Military/Wartime Service: Royal Air Force, 1950-52.

He published I Want What I Want in 1966, and a second novel, My Struggle, about a mentally disturbed man who believes, in part, that he is Adolf Hitler, in 1977. He died on August 20, 2008 at the age of 76.

As a postwar British novel about gender and sexuality I Want What I Want bears little relationship to the homosexual-themed work of Francis King, James Courage, Robin Maugham, and C.H.B. Kitchin. While Brown’s narrative here is centered on the intense inner life of Wendy Ross the larger context—indeed, the setting—is post-war urban Britain, specifically Hull. As a coastal city with industry and ports, Hull—four hours north of London—was hit hard during the Blitz. Much of the commercial heart of the city was destroyed, and ninety-five percent of homes were damaged, many badly. At least twelve hundred residents died, and three thousand were injured.

The Hull of I Want What I Want totters on post-war recovery. Parts of the city are thriving and even Wendy’s father’s fish and chips shop is doing well. But there is a greyness over the city and these lives. The rooming house to which Wendy moves after she leaves home, and the ‘nice’ house owned by academics in which she later takes a room, are, like Wendy, are in a process of transformation, struggling toward something new. In many ways, I Want What I Want resembles the postwar novels of John Braine, David Storey, and Alan Sillitoe of a national culture that is scarred by ever-evolving class ambiguities and conflicts. Brown’s favorite novelist was Evelyn Waugh, and while both of his books reflect that author’s concern of class distinctions, Waugh’s flippancy is replaced by a moral seriousness that reflects a nation struggling with ruptures in national and economic identity.

I Want What I Want is also a novel of consumption. Wendy’s journey to being publicly viewed as the woman she is, is most often is described in the clothing she wants and buys:

I ordered a black skirt, a pair of black slacks, two blouses and two pair of shoes—one pair had flat heels, for wearing with the slacks and the other pair were high-heeled court shoes—two brassieres, a suspender belt, two slip and pantie sets, two pairs of briefs for wearing under the slacks, two nightdresses—one black and one red—and four pair of nylons.

It is not just Wendy’s gender identity that is being expressed here, but her conscious desire to move from her father’s fish and chip shop to becoming a middle-class lady. She relishes clerks in women’s shops calling her ‘madam,’ and enjoys being seen as well-to-do and proper. This emphasis on post-war consumption comes directly from Brown’s own experience of poverty. Not particularly well-off growing up, Brown and his sister fell into deep poverty after their father—who worked first as a cooper and then, after metal barrels replaced wood, a joiner—died and his second wife’s family took control of any property and money.

Did Brown consider himself transgender—or transsexual in the language of the time? Certainly My Struggle—which, like I Want What I Want, is a stream of consciousness first-person narrative—a denser, more deeply internalized book than his first, gives us no hint as to who Brown was. It is impossible to draw any conclusions about the author. To add to the ambiguity Brown noted in an interview that ‘I Want What I Want is about transvestitism, My Struggle is about paranoid-schizophrenia. It would seem that I write about abnormal psychology. What is it that causes me to concern myself with such murky things when, really, I am so very like Julie Andrews?’

More telling is his wife Estella’s Brown statement to the publisher of this edition that ‘extreme poverty forced [Geoff] to live in imagination, there was never any possibility of real action because there was no money. I imagine Roberta Cowell could finance her efforts to change sex but Geoff couldn’t. I think that more important than sex or gender change was a desire to be other than who he was. It was lousy being Geoff Brown.’

What is absent, for the contemporary reader, from I Want What I Want are the politics of gender or, in a larger sense, sexual politics. This is unsurprising since the term ‘sexual politics’ was first used by Kate Millett in her 1969 groundbreaking study Sexual Politics. Australian feminist Germaine Greer continued this public discussion in The Female Eunuch a year later. If Brown’s I Want What I Want feels dated it is because it seems untouched by the feminist analysis of sex and gender roles that was only a few years away.

The 1972 film version of I Want What I Want—written by Gillian Freeman, whose 1961 gay-themed The Leather Boys (written under the name of Eliot George and filmed in 1964)—is far more attuned to contemporary ideas about sex and gender. Here Wendy is much more assertive and forthright about her sexual desires for men, whereas in the book her flirtations with a man she meets verge on abuse. The film also has a far better sense of the potential for sexual violence against women and how Wendy is impacted by that. Freeman even has Wendy—in two separate scenes—reading Simone de Beauvoir’s groundbreaking feminist analysis The Second Sex. Freeman also gives the film a more upbeat ending—possibly the ending that Brown could not imagine in 1966 because of poverty as well as the lack of a feminist movement.

Read today, I Want What I Want is more than a historical curiosity: it is a fully realized portrait of a person—a transwoman—becoming herself in a specific time and place which both defines her and which she transcends.

Michael Bronski

January 2018

Michael Bronski is Professor of the Practice in Activism and Media in the Studies of Women, Gender, Sexuality at Harvard University. His Queer History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2011) won the 2011 Lambda Literary Award for Best Nonfiction as well as the 2011 American Library Association Stonewall Israel Fishman Award for Best Nonfiction. Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps (St. Martin’s Press) won the 2003 Lammy Award for Best Anthology. His last two books have been "‘You Can Tell Just By Looking’ and 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People" (Beacon Press, 2013) (coauthored with Ann Pellegrini and Michael Amico) and Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics (Beacon Press, 2015) coauthored with Kay Whitlock. He is now at work on a YA edition of A Queer History of the United States which will be published next year. He has been involved in gay liberation as a political organizer, writer, editor, publisher, and theorist since 1969.

Prologue

My name is Wendy. The rain was dreadful this morning. My name is Wendy. Does this bus go to the city centre? My name is Wendy. I am twenty-one years old. I am not married. I haven’t got a boy friend. I haven’t got a job at present. I am living on some money that my mother left me. She died. Actually, she was killed. She had an accident with an electric tooth-brush. It was a terrible shock. Please don’t pull my hair. Would that yellow dress in the window fit me? Have you got the same style in blue? I want to buy a handbag. I want a red cocktail dress with a square cut front. Excuse me, constable, this man is annoying me. He seems to want to pull my hair. I think he’s jealous. I can’t do shorthand or typing, but I could learn. Could you tell me the way to the Ladies’, please? I am Wendy. My mother and I lived in Cottingham. My father was a professional soldier. He was a colonel in the Green Howards—no, he was in the Coldstream Guards. That’s why I’ve grown up tall. His name isn’t in the Army Lists—because—because—because I’m a liar. Actually, he was an artist, a painter. He was a most wonderful man, but he never made any money. He was a lamb. My mother never really recovered from his death—she never really recovered from her own death. I’m all that’s left. I’m a girl, Wendy, just a helpless girl, alone in the world on high-heels. I love heels. I’m a girl. When I was born the doctor went to my father and said, ‘It’s a girl.’ My father was overjoyed. He always wanted a daughter. I’m his daughter—or I was when he was alive. I often think how lucky I am to be a girl. This is my skirt and my blouse and my shoes and my stockings and all the things I can’t tell you about. I’m very prim. That’s why I don’t want to go on the stage. I’m Wendy. I now have two nightdresses. I now have four pairs of stockings. One of my nightdresses is red and the other is black. I’m going to get them out and have a look at them in a minute. I’m sure they’ll be lovely. I love nice things. Tonight I’m going to sleep in a nightdress—the black one, I think. Don’t you wish you had two nightdresses like mine? I chose the most romantic ones in the catalogue. They arrived this morning. Would you like to wear a black nightdress? You can’t. I won’t permit it. It belongs to me. It is mine. A girl has to be careful of all sorts of things. On wash day I have to keep a look out in case some kinky boy comes and steals some of my undies off the line. I think every­body is going mad nowadays. Boys wanting to be girls! I can understand a girl wanting to be a boy, but I can’t under­stand a boy wanting to be a girl. But I suppose there are a lot of things one doesn’t understand when one comes from Cottingham. Actually, I used to live in Cottingham. It was very quiet. On Sunday mornings I used to go to church with my mother. I’ve always believed in God. I think it’s best to be on the safe side. Imagine being attacked by a man! My mother and I used to go to church in white gloves carrying white hymn books—we wore the rest of our clothes, of course. I love wearing clothes. Church on Sunday mornings was very nice. They were all very nice people there. It was nice to wear nice clothes and be in church. No one played the trombone in the vestry and I never got my hair pulled. Mother and I lived very quietly after father died. He was the noisy one. He used to get terribly drunk and fight—artists are like that, you know. Once a man came and said something horribly insulting to me—I can’t tell you what it was—and my father gave him a fearful thrashing. My father wasn’t always terribly civilised. But one has to make allowances for men. They wear such dismal clothes that they have to do violent things occasionally to keep themselves from going crazy. It must be dreadful to be a man. I’m very glad that I’m a girl. My name is Wendy. Wendy Ross.

Part One: NO NAME

1

Dr Strickland said, ‘Of course your thinking is still very dualistic.’

I knew what he meant. I could have told him that he should not talk like that to a person who had not been to university, but there was no need for me to pretend about that. I did not really care that I had not been to university. I knew what I wanted.

If I had gone to university, I would have liked to go to Oxford. I had read about it. The only things I liked doing at home were reading and dressing up.

Dr Strickland was a tall man, lounging in his swivel chair. His face was long and pale. It was a face that would have been more suitable for a young man but it had grown middle-aged. His eyes did not look as confident as I thought a middle-aged man’s eyes should look. He was like a student.

I was pretty. I sat neatly, small and careful in a black sweater. I was conscious of the stomach in the middle of me. In the beginning there was the stomach that reproduced itself without sex. Now there was the stomach, and below it the sexual organs, and above it the brain. Sometimes it felt as though there were two things, the mind and the body, and the mind wanted to leave the body. It felt like that when I was too pure and intellectual. When those times came I was frightened that my mind might float away from my body. I might be sent to Ward Nine for the rest of my life to live in the dream world with the old men.

Dr Strickland was talking to me.

From where he was sitting he could look out of the window and see the wallflowers growing in their little squares in the lawn and the drive with the sun shining on it and the lodge at the gate and the cars passing on the road.

I could not concentrate on what he was saying.

My father had looked ill when he was hitting me. He had dragged me by the collar as though to get me to the sink. Suddenly he had punched me on the top lip. Then he had punched me in the body a few times. If we had been able to stop my mouth bleeding, I would not have had to go to Dr Booth.

I still felt amazement when I thought of that young woman coming to ask for her stolen panties back. But they were her knickers. Perhaps she felt that her vagina had been stolen and she had to have it back. She was a fetishist.

Most people were fetishists. If it was not one thing, it was another.

It would soon be dinner time. After he had finished with me Dr Strickland would go outside and get into his car and go home. His wife would be preparing his dinner. She would be in the kitchen in her clothes. I wished that I were his wife. She had his social position without having to moil with insanity. She did not have to do with all the miserable and hopeless things that crept about in the hospital. She would be cooking dinner. They had a little boy. He might be playing in the garden because it was a summer day. She might go out and pick him up and carry him into the house to have his dinner.

My mother might have carried me into the house once. I could not remember. The main fact about my mother was that she was dead. My sister, Shirley, had taken her place.

Shirley told me that our mother was shouting to the Lord Jesus Christ for forgiveness when she was dying. She died of cancer. Shirley said she was twisted up in the bed through the pain.

Even if I were able to get a lot of money and have an opera­tion, I would never have a little boy. Mrs Strickland did not know how happy she was. It was part of being Mrs Strickland not to know how happy she was. If she did not take it all for granted, she would not be herself; she would be like me pretending to be Mrs Strickland. In her bedroom there would be drawers and drawers and a wardrobe full of clothes. She could choose what she would wear. All the time she was dressed up, but for her it was not dressing up; it was just being herself. There was day after day of being a woman. When she went into a room the gentlemen stood up. When she went to wet she had to sit down. She had no choice. She was always a woman.

If she ever woke up to find that she was Roy Clark, the shock would cause her mind to leave her body, and she would have to be taken to Ward Nine to live with the old men. She would be fortunate if her mind never returned to her body. And all the time I would be Mrs Strickland. I would have her clothes. No one would ever know. I would have to be very careful at first until I learned all about her. I would have to find out about her past life by questioning, without it being known that I was questioning. Dr Strickland would make love to me.

He was saying things to comfort me. He always ended the interviews by saying things to comfort me.

2

The ward was on the ground floor, and at the far end there were french windows that led out onto a square of grass with a hawthorn hedge round it. When one stood at the french windows one could see the cooling towers on the outskirts of Hull. At night one could see the lights of Hull.

After dinner Jim and I took our cups of tea and went out of the french windows and sat in deck chairs on the little lawn. Jim had been determined to be my friend ever since my first night in the ward. His appearance made me think of the White Knight. There was his white hair and his stained grey suit and the brown shoes that he kept telling me he had bought in Australia. His face was sad and his eyes were blue. His hand trembled as he put his cigarette to his mouth. He sucked on it and blew a steady stream of smoke.

‘When I was in Australia I got very low sometimes. Do you know what it is to be right down, Roy? No, you don’t; you’re too young. I got right down. When I got into bed at night I used to want to die. They’re such hard people out there. There’s no humanity. I went to this coffee bar place kept by this Italian bloke. And he says to me, They’re hard. They’ve got no humanity. That’s Australia. I’ve been there and I’ve seen it, Roy. To look at me, would you think I’d been to the other side of the world?’ He turned his pale eyes on me for an answer.

I was not sure what he wanted me to say. I said, ‘Well, you look like a man who’s seen a few things.’

It was the right answer. He made a wink and pushed out his bottom lip. He spoke slyly and confidentially: ‘You know, Roy, we’re on a good thing here. Three meals a day and as much supper as you want and a good bed to sleep in. That’s the main thing: bed and board. You’ve got to have something