Living Penumbra: One Trans Artist's Intentional Journey to Self-discovery and Transformation

By Seraphim Penumbra

The journey that had to be taken…

Everyone struggles to figure out who they are and what to do with their lives at some point, right? I took it personally. When I decided to embark on a modern-day vision quest to figure it out, my friends and family thought I was crazy. Maybe I was.

I was positive that a cosmic intervention would deliver me to a heightened sense of identity and purpose when I declared my intention to the universe and followed the signs and synchronicities. It did.

Over twenty years ago, I left my world behind to embark on an amazing journey. "Living Penumbra" is an untainted and sometimes-chilling account of that journey, told through a series of intimate journal entries spanning over fifteen years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350931303

Book preview

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Living Penumbra

One Trans Artist’s Intentional Journey to Self-discovery and Transformation

© 2023. All rights reserved.

All rights and properties of Living Penumbra are retained by Angel Alcantar,

the sole creator of said works as of December 17, 2006.

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN: 979-8-35093-129-7

eBook ISBN: 979-8-35093-130-3

Contents

Prologue

Prayers For a Mild Winter...

The Class

Parker, Alex, and Lee

Later at the studio

Enter the Competition

Cornered

White Nightmare

Masquerade!

At the Cafe

Persephone

Road Trip

Kokomo

The Lioness D.C.

Approaching Shangri-La

In the Village

Soliloquy in Rhinebeck

The Lake in the Sky

A letter to Jackson

Full Moon Gathering

Journey within a Journey

Solomon

Dying to self, 24-hour Silent Meditation Devotion

6:12 pm

A note toward transcendence

Entranced

I won’t fuck up, Mom.

The Clown Speaks

Spun in Richmond

Chasing Rainbows

Babylon in the Woods

On the Way to Mardi Gras

February

Chrysalis

Day 9

Apparitions

Sprung!

The Bus Ride Home

Twin Gemini

24 Hour Greyhound

Plinket’s Village

Moving On

Going West

Back to the Road

Emergence

Exit the Villain

Lizzie

P’Town

Halsey Coalition

911

The lost tribe reunites in a magical garden

The Mountain

Kiki & Herb

Salon

Sweetie and Sammy Jo

My Two Sisters

Halsey

In Between

Pussy Portal

Sexxx Not Bombs

Apocalypse of the NeverNever Party

Violence at a Protest

The Good Luck Show, Saving Halsey

Kissing Jesse

In Ingo’s World, With Lucy

W. 8th

Diaspora Continues

In Darkness

Cabaret Magique

Suxx

Taking Flight

VHOKB

George

I am Seraphim Penumbra

The Twin

Misfits

VIP

South Bronx Kennedy

Crobar

Cracked@Crobar

Voluptuous Horror at Plaid

Pussy Portal

Amp

Kwazy Quilt Cabaret

The Great Piscean Adventure

Apocaluptuous

A Long Night in Heels

NOTS

Paper

Epilogue

About the Author

Prologue

I didn’t know I was gender dysphoric when I was a child because there was no such thing. Well, there may have been, but there was no word for it, and I didn’t have any idea what it was. I knew I wanted to do things a certain way I felt comfortable with, regardless of cultural and societal norms. I didn’t want to make a statement or declaration of my sexuality or desire for attention. I had no agenda that I could articulate. I remember wanting to just be . To follow my own instincts. Everyone said I was precocious. Bold.

When I finally did know what gender-dysphoria was, I didn’t think it had anything to do with me. I had gotten most of my education regarding these matters by watching people reveal their stories with my best friends of the day: Phil, Sally, Rikki, Oprah, Maury, and Geraldo. The things I thought I knew about life were informed by experiences shared with the neighborhood kids on hot, sticky New England summer days.

There were lots of transsexuals on the daytime talk shows. I didn’t think I was transsexual. If I did, it was only long enough to try it on, and realize that it didn’t fit. Even though I very much enjoyed appropriating the behavior and clothing of women, I was simply trying to incorporate them into my own aesthetic and way of being, not to become what I had borrowed.

From my earliest memories, people stared at me and asked bluntly, Are you a boy or a girl? I was just a little kid, so I didn’t think much of it. I didn’t realize it was odd that it wasn’t obvious to people what I was, but after a while I just flushed bright red when people asked. I wished I had the presence of mind to answer,

No.

I loved to hang out with girls and make up stuff together. We would giggle and laugh with glee at our creations. In the summers I used to wear a towel around my waist all the time, my own sarong, before I even knew what one was. I liked to read and loved to escape into the pictures my mind would create while I was reading. I was never very coordinated, so sports were out of the question, which was fine with me. Boys tended to like sports more, and I liked boys far less anyway (well, most of them).

For as long as I can remember, we were very poor. We couldn’t afford to get our hair cut very often, and that was also fine with me. I loved the feel of my hair when it got very long. I loved to feel it move around on the back of my neck, and how it would blow around in the wind. My mother would have the barber cut it really short, mostly so it would delay our next haircut by that much more. Our grandmother used to cut our hair sometimes, and I begged her to leave mine long.

Boys don’t have long hair. That was always the answer. Boys did this, girls did that. You are a boy, so this is what is, and isn’t, based on that. My mother told me that I needed to look and act like a boy, to play my gender role correctly. I wasn’t ten years old, yet already a failure.

In school I rushed through assignments, bored most of the time. Then I drew or wrote or doodled, attuned to a fantasy world that I continued to build in my mind. I needed to keep my mind busy. You know ice breaker games? The one where you say one thing that nobody knows about you? One thing that nobody knows about me, is that my mind is my greatest gift, and at the same time, my greatest tormentor.

When teachers in public school soon realized that I was smart, I was transferred to a new program for gifted and talented students. That’s what it was called. Gifted and Talented. What did that say about the students who weren’t in our group? Were they ‘less than?’ What I had hoped would be my redemption only underlined me as a freak. I stopped taking the yellow school bus and instead I was picked up at home in a station wagon with a blinking school bus sign on the top. It was the equivalent of the short bus.

I wasn’t very hairy when adolescence came around, and I was a chunk-muffin. I assumed the two were related. I know, it makes no sense, but it did at the time. And my chest. I had a stash of T-shirts that were several sizes too small. I used to wear two or three of them to keep my chest as flat looking as possible. I became an expert at inventing reasons to keep my top half covered. It never seemed odd to me that I had my buds. I guess I always assumed that they were a by-product of my being ‘husky’.

I wore oversized clothes, kind of flowy. I must have imagined myself as a pre-adolescent Bea Arthur. It took me time to learn that fitted clothes are more flattering on husky people than flowy clothes. Until then, I wore baggy, flowy clothes that I could hide inside of. I wore my hair as long as I could get away with and in eighth grade, I figured out how much eyeliner I could wear without anyone noticing that I had it on. I used to try to wash it off before I got home from school because my mother was still on a crusade for me to act like a boy.

I was always so frustrated with her, arguing that:

"I am a boy, so everything I do, and wear, is masculine because I am a boy, and because I am doing it." When I was sixteen, I went to the mall with Phoebe to get my ears pierced. I forged my mother’s signature on the permission slip that was required at the time. I had pierced them several times myself by then, with safety pins. They always got infected, so I decided to have it done professionally. The lady who pierced them asked me what I wanted to do with the other earring.

What other earring? I asked her.

The one I don’t put in! she answered.

What do you mean the one you don’t put in? You sell them in pairs, right? I have two ears! So put one in each ear, and there won’t be an extra earring! She seemed perfectly shocked that I would get both my ears pierced. In her defense, those days, if a boy had any ear pierced, it was his left one only. An earring in your right ear meant you were gay. I still don’t understand that. Earrings come in pairs, ears come in pairs, and jewelry and sexuality are not linked. I would have said Sucking dick is what makes you gay, but now, I don’t even think that is true. Some of my favorite lovers were gay. Not all of them. You figure that one out.

Phoebe and I thought the whole thing was hysterical of course. Phoebe was my art class buddy, and she shared a lot of my interests in art and music, and my disinterests in all things fluffy, pink and mainstream. Phoebe wore her hair in a long bob, had the most interesting clothes and wore black Doc Marten boots.

She was the one who introduced me to the wonderful world of vintage clothes. She was so thin and petite it was easier for her to find cool clothes, but I was chunky and tall and awkward, so I stuck with oversized black anything. The trend for girls was hair poufs, right above their bangs. I hated poufs and bangs.

Phoebe and I had a similar aesthetic; we had our hair dyed black and wore black eyeliner. It was a little riskier for me as she was a girl. I liked her because she didn’t judge any of my behavior or fashion choices. She didn’t care if I was challenging gender roles or wearing eye makeup. To her, I was just a comrade.

While I say I didn’t think I was gender dysphoric, I thought other people’s understanding of sex and gender were fucked! Not mine. My mother used to plead with me to be a normal boy. I didn’t think ‘normal’ was anything that I aspired to, and certainly outside my capacity. Exceptional is fantastic. I couldn’t be exceptional and normal at the same time.

When it comes right down to it, had I known the term gender dysphoric back then; I would not have ascribed it to myself. It implied that I was not happy with my gender. That I wanted to change it. I saw people on the talk shows who said they felt like they were a woman trapped in a man’s body. I understood that, but I didn’t feel that way. I didn’t want to change my gender, nor did I feel I was born in the wrong body, I just wanted freedom to vacillate on the spectrum of gender at will, without having to explain or defend my identity.

Kinsey created a scientific vocabulary for organizing everyone on a scale, which described sexuality in terms of a number, zero to six, zero being exclusively heterosexual, and six being exclusively homosexual. His research theorized and proved that the majority of the population existed not at either end of the spectrum, as one may have expected, but squarely in the middle. If gender could be expressed similarly, say zero being female, and six being male, maybe most people would be at opposite ends of the spectrum, but it might reveal that gender was something that could exist in between zero and six, as a fluid concept, instead of a binary one. That is where I lived, in flux, between the two poles.

By the time I was in high school statistics indicated that the leading cause of teen suicide was denying self-identity. I wasn’t going to commit suicide, so I had to express my gender as somewhere other than in the binary structure that most people used to understand sex and gender.

I had shit to get done, no matter what gender I was, there was no room for it to take center stage. When people asked me why I was wearing women’s clothes, or why I acted like a woman, I would respond:

These are my clothes, or This is how I am, and I am not a woman, therefore I am myself, and wearing my own clothes. I came to understand that most people didn’t care, but the people who did, who were upset and reactive to what I was doing, usually had a few skeletons in their own closets, let’s just say. As far as I was concerned, the only thing I could think of that was truly feminine, was a nope, I got nothing. Everything else was applied, and subject to cultural mores.

I wasn’t being a gender revolutionary, I was simply doing my thing, and you’re doing your thing, and if everybody was doing the same thing, what would be the point of that? I didn’t think I was queer, in those days queer was a bad thing, and I still thought of myself as a good witch. A lot of people along the way seemed perturbed that I didn’t conform. The way I saw it, I wasn’t the one with the problem. I didn’t want to be a separatist yet either, I just genuinely wanted to do my own thing; the way I thought everyone should, and have my expression be a part of what was considered normal. When I was about sixteen my mother, like a broken record, still begged me to just be a boy. I snapped.

Look, in two years I’m going to be able to do whatever I want without your approval or consent. The time between now and then is practice time. Just back off and give me the freedom to be myself, because in two years, I’m going to do it anyway, but with two extra years of resenting you, for holding me back. So, what’s it going to be?

She was shocked silent, but she backed off. I didn’t do one thing differently from then on, except not hide from her.

Our relationship was transformed. We would be at Wiggin’s having coffee and smoking cigarettes and talking about whatever. We weren’t friends exactly, but we were less like mother and child than we ever had been before. I started to call her by her name, Penelope, instead of mom, or ma. I always thought it was kind of stupid to refer to people as their relationship to you rather than their name. It seemed less personal.

And I wasn’t going around in miniskirts and pumps. I wanted to wear oversized clothes. Preferably black, with my hair long, and a little black eyeliner. For some reason I sketched eyes on everything. I’d use markers, safety pins, sequins, and just depict an eye on my jeans, my jacket, a boot, or on my bag, a vintage Polaroid case. Everyone tormented me for carrying a purse. So misunderstood. And that was my version of drag at that age.

When I was a freshman in high school, there was this kid, a senior, who was brilliant and amazing, and smart and real. God, I loved him. Anyway, a bunch of us were heading to a concert (The Cure) and I said:

Yeah I can’t wait, we’ll all be in our best drag and it’ll be great!

Drag? What do you mean by that? he asked.

I hesitated a little and finally answered,

"You know, with our hair all did, and our eyeliner, and our finery on... Looking... Fierce..." The memory popped into my head when I learned what drag meant. I wasn’t far off, I just didn’t know what I was talking about.

In my final year of high school, we had to record our ambitions for our yearbook. I stated I wanted to try ‘Hollywood,’ which I knew would be misinterpreted to mean move to Hollywood, California, to be a movie star. That wouldn’t have been so bad, given my penchant for acting and performing, despite being painfully introverted.

What I meant was Meshach Taylor’s flaming window display designer character from 1987’s Mannequin. I loved mannequins and window displays. I also thought it would be funny to say that I wanted to be the Queen of England, but I wrote that I wanted to be the drag queen of England. Phoebe pointed out,

Isn’t Boy George already the drag Queen of England?

Maybe so, but we aren’t honeybees, there can be multiple queens!

I was just making light of the whole thing. I had enough difficulty just getting from day to day, much less declaring what my life ambitions were at sixteen, or seventeen. Or any age since.

We both went to Summer Academy, an advanced arts program at a nearby college, and we attended Drawing and Painting Workshop Intensives at the Museum School in Boston. We went partly because it was fun and interesting and to meet other freaks like us, and partly to hone our skills. Phoebe and I were supposed to go away to art school together. We went to our portfolio reviews together, and both got accepted. It was easier for me knowing I was taking a little bit of home with me.

A few weeks before the move, she changed her mind, decided to stay home, and commute to City College. That was fine, but for so much of the last year we had fantasized about leaving the small-minded suburban town behind to explore our beautiful new lives where surely people were more open minded, and we could focus on our art and being cute.

I can’t say I was devastated because I wasn’t. Deeply disappointed perhaps, but there was enough in motion that it seemed more difficult to change my mind than to move on without her. I could make new friends, that was the point, right?

Art school wasn’t as fabulous as we had planned. People were just as mean and hateful as anywhere else, except it stung more, because I expected people in the arts to be a little bit more progressive and be able to look past my otherness and see me as a talented artist with a voice.

I didn’t last long. Managing classes and homework and working almost full-time to have money for food and art supplies was more than I could sustain for long. My parents weren’t terribly supportive, which surprised me because no one in our family had been educated past high school. I thought that though I was in art school, it was still college. They didn’t see it that way; they just thought it a waste of money.

I had a boyfriend, Sam, not my first. I’d been living with him part time in Allston, MA and spent the rest of the time in Beverly, MA at school. We had so much in common, and he barely acknowledged that I didn’t conform to gender roles; I just let myself fall for him. Allston was a suburb of Boston, twenty minutes by train from school.

It was winter break, and I was visiting Penelope, escaping from a feud Sam and I were having. He couldn’t find me, and finally called Penelope looking for me. His message on the answering machine outed me and ruined any chance of getting any support from my mother.

Things back at school weren’t going well at all either. I’d been experimenting with drag more and more and sneaking into the city to be with Sam.

I think he was bi-polar and when our relationship ended over halfway through my second semester, so did my career at art school.

I moved back home with my mother and her husband. They married when I was thirteen or so, and I made no room for a new parent, so he was simply, my mother’s husband.

Prayers For a Mild Winter...

February 1993

Walking from my mother’s house, where I’d been staying since dropping out of art school, to the bus terminal downtown to catch a bus to work, I took stock of my life and replayed the events of the previous year.

Just about the time I felt my limbs begin to stiffen and my stride begin to slow, I arrived. My running nose had formed twin icicles on my nostrils and upper lip. The blast of heat in the entrance was comforting. The terminal was complete with a crabby, old ticket lady, menacingly long ash was clinging to the cigarette swaying from her bottom lip while she barked arrivals and departures.

The pungent aroma of an unseen cigar permeated my clothing, the temperature was just shy of comfortable enough to take off my jacket. This temperature was designed to ensure patrons did not overstay their welcome. Airports, train stations, bus terminals... all just temporary waiting points, servicing the transitions of the transitional, the transients, and the vagabonds. I decided that the cooler temperature was a good thing, though a sense of doom closed in on my throat just sitting in that putrid space.

No sooner had I found a suitable place to sit than my bus arrived. I stood in line as the bus consumed its passengers like a hungry beast tricking its prey. I paid my fare. The bus driver’s eyes were cold and gray. Not exactly mean or sad. More defeated, remorseful maybe, bitter most likely.

I walked toward the middle of the bus and selected a seat somewhere between alcoholism and severely unfortunate. Mercy was with me as the bus was so drafty I couldn’t smell anything. This was a good thing because there were some mysterious yellow stains round and about.

The bus lurched into departure, with the steady Beep! Beep! warning as the bus jerked into gear. I saw the crabby ticket lady, the cigarette ash had finally fallen and crashed to the ground. The bus groaned and rattled as it attempted to pick up speed and my mind wandered.

I tended the cappuccino bar in a cafe next door to the campus, the campus itself I was more than familiar with, and it was beautiful. The chapel and old-style buildings reminded me of Dickens’ Old-World London. Streetlamps dotted the walkway leading to a bridge that spanned a man-made pond. The pond itself had a feature fountain that shot three towers of water at least twenty feet straight up into the air.

The pond was on the border between what they called ‘old campus’ and ‘new campus.’ Old campus was my favorite, it looked, well old, with its ivy-strung walls. New campus was hideous, with its 1970s architecture and institutional-looking buildings. Old campus hosted the Summer Academy for accelerated art, drama, and music students.

That was the start of many things for me, and it was nice to reminisce as I passed through on my way to the cafe. That was the setting of my summer of discovery. For the first time I was immersed not only in the arts, learning, and art making, I was also immersed in a community of other artists. Other students who inherently knew what it was to be... other. And the faculty all looked you directly in the eye. They knew. They knew what lay ahead for you, and they knew what was going on. Certainly not all artists were the same, but it just felt good to be in close proximity with people who were perhaps ‘wired’ differently than the world at large. Or, at the very least, weren’t judgmental, I guess. I felt at home. That was also where I met Oliver Kelly. My first time at the academy was the summer before my senior year at high school.

It wasn’t exactly a choice, but the more I could identify myself as ‘other,’ the more I seemed to create and evolve my own kind of drag. At first it was fun because my own kind of drag was menacing to most everyone I saw and therefore, they were afraid of me. I was a Cure fan. Siouxsie. Peter Murphy. Dead Can Dance. I never wanted to be dead, but something about the aesthetic of mortuary makeup resonated. The clothes and makeup were so dramatic and beautiful. I grew my hair out and dyed it black. Black! Black! Black! my mother would shriek at me. Black clothes. Pale skin. Black eyeliner. Sometimes black lipstick. Safety pin earrings. Most people thought I was a Satan worshiper, so they were afraid of me and kept their distance. This I liked.

Something then changed. So many of my friends, who were also in the drama and art clubs, were queer in some way or another. So, were we vampires who turned each other gay? I don’t think so, but something changed in there, and instead of being feared, we were mocked and ridiculed. It was an eventuality I suppose. It’s interesting in retrospect how art was a medium which allowed us not only to express ourselves, and also became the building block of community. It brought us together. Were we artists because we were queer or were we queer because we were artists? All art wasn’t queer so none of it made sense. It was simply what it was.

One time, Oliver and I took a bus to Boston to hang around Harvard Square, where I first saw Rocky Horror live. We wanted to go to a Boston Alliance of Gay Lesbian Youth or BAGLY meeting. They did this thing where we took turns explaining our sexuality, our gender identity, our name, and whatever else we wanted to say. I knew they were trying to give us a safe place, but it was still so institutional.

My name is Angel. My sexuality is Angel. My gender identity is also Angel. Some people laughed, some stared, and some people resonated with what I had to say. That reaction followed me everywhere I went.

It was also there on that campus where I met Mari Jones, of Mobius, Boston. God Bless Mari Jones. She was the head of the drama program, and she brought in the most talented people. She exposed us to these real artists, and we would soak up everything they said. I often thought of her as our savior. She would perform ritual-like pieces, with chants and props, rich with symbolism and meaning. She was breathtaking. She was into Persephone at the time, and it was she who introduced me to the world of the creation mythology. You know, other than Christianity. No offense. Well, not none, but not a lot.

During my senior year I did an internship at Mobius and met Rochelle Fabb. All I did there was handle the mailing list database, but it was great just to be there. There was a veritable Who’s Who of concept artists at Mobius. And Rochelle was gorgeous and fabulous, and I loved her! All of the Mobius artists performed administrative duties, fundraising, grant writing, the grime of the non-profit world. There were many amazing artists at Mobius but mostly I gravitated toward Mari and Rochelle because they were more familiar, and I was socially awkward.

The sad truth is most of the working artists I met split their time between seeking funding and doing their work. I was undeterred. I had been exposed to a real working art center, and I was doing a thing.

It was there at the Academy where the seed to go to the Museum School was planted. I could take all the art classes in the world, and if I later decided to pursue a degree, I could take advantage of the affiliation with Tufts, though I doubted I would do that. I wanted to learn how to use all the different media, and maybe even incorporate performance as part of it. Performance Art.

Ultimately, I could only afford to attend the Drawing and Painting Intensives and I ended up going to Montserrat. Phoebe and I referred to it as Monster Art; hardly original, but we were seventeen and that name was ironic, or something…

Going away to art school was huge for me. I had no intentions of going to school after graduation; I was just over so much of it. Besides, being queer in high school put me at odds with most of my experiences anyway.

I was poor, partly white trash, literally from a trailer park in the Midwest, in Sioux City, Iowa. I always thought it was so ridiculous to live in a trailer park in a place known for tornadoes. It wasn’t Kansas, but very much in tornado alley. I remember as a little kid coming back to the park after a tornado hit. Some people’s trailers were destroyed, others were missing altogether. Ours miraculously was spared. We wouldn’t stay long. but we were trailer trash before Jerry Springer made it a trend.

Basically, I started this life out with nothing, and I still have most of it left. So, I kept running into the challenge of supporting myself while attending classes and balancing my workload.

I’d kept in touch with the head of the Art Department at the Summer Academy. She asked me to design a few classes and create the lesson plans. I was excited to stay involved. Oliver Kelly was there as well, teaching theatre improvisation to the students in the Junior Academy.

We struck up an instant bond and spent all our breaks together and ate our lunch together in the dimple. The dimple was a depressed grassy knoll in the courtyard of the old campus where we sat in the sun and exchanged our ideas, stories, and laughter. Our collective students would fan out around us, watching and listening. We were the cool kids. Oliver was still in high school, but he was a teacher’s assistant that year in the Drama Department. We stayed on campus, this campus, long after the daily programs were over and mostly we just talked. Sometimes we used the pool in the athletic center. There was a building with a cafe on the old campus, and downstairs were rehearsal studios for the Dance Program. I couldn’t play piano, but Oliver plunked along as best as he could while I sang every song he knew, show tunes mostly. Phantom. Les Miz. Superstar.

The age difference should have been enough to keep us from being such close friends but we both seemed ageless to each other, and it was never an issue. I always thought of him as my peer. Oliver matched my wonder and enthusiasm in ways that I couldn’t with the Goth kids I usually associated with. I appreciated the aesthetic, but not necessarily everyone who liked black eyeliner. It was kind of funny when you consider what drew us together initially was our difference from the norm, yet after a while we associated only with others who were like us. When I thought about it, that was the main reason I avoided friendships with the cheerleaders and jocks.

Oliver was always more mental than emotional, and I responded to that. He was a Gemini, and though I was a Pisces, my ascendant was in Gemini. He was a great singer and respected actor by his peers in the drama department. He shared my abhorrence for routine and monotony, and even though we were both technically outcasts, we were each relatively charismatic in our respective elements, and onstage.

Oliver Kelly lived on the other side of campus from where I lived, and he used to ride his bike to the Academy.

He knew his parents would have never approved of him having me as a friend and because I was somewhat older, they would assume I was a bad influence on him. Sadly, it meant that if we were going to spend any time together, it would involve him sneaking out or lying to his parents. A few times he would sneak me into his room, and I was envious he had his own private entrance, his own apartment in the basement of his parents’