Hida Viloria - Born Both: an intersex life

MANHATTAN, NEW YORK

NOVEMBER 1988

T HE TREES ON THE sidewalks of the West Village are in that lovely, colorful state of transition. Its my favorite neighborhood in Manhattan, this enclave of winding cobblestone streets lined with beautiful old brownstones and decades of queer history, like the Stonewall riots of 69 and the infamous Halloween parades down Christopher Street that Id been lucky enough to attend in high school.

I find the address Im looking for on Perry Street and ring the buzzer.

Hey, girl! I hear Jade say over the intercom. Im up on the third floor.

Jade is my good friend from high school. Shes a year younger than I am, and the minute she showed up at St. Francis Preparatory School in Queens, she was the girl all the straight boys wanted. I thought she was hot too, but we were in high school in 1985, and Prep, as we called it, wasnt just Catholic but prided itself on being the largest Catholic high school in the United States. In other words, it wasnt exactly okay to make it known at school that I was into another girl.

Jade was more than just a hottie though; she was cool. She was someone who could, like me, hang equally well with the artsy outcasts, the jocks, and everyone in between. She had stayed in New York after high school to go to the prestigious Parsons School of Design and had been trying to convince me to come visit her new place in the city ever since I dropped out of Wesleyan.

Not many folks drop out of Wesleyan, and I certainly hadnt planned on it. When I first arrived there, I had the time of my life. I was away from my parents and living with the largest group of cool people I had ever been around. During freshman year, however, this all changed.

My father, a doctor, lost his medical license after he was accused of sexually abusing a fourteen-year-old patient at gunpoint. Although the charges against him were eventually dropped, the state medical board had been unwilling to reinstate his license to practice medicine.

I knew my father had a gun because my brother, Hugh, had told me about it when we were kids, and he, my younger sister, Eden, and I had taken it out of its hiding spot in my parents bedroom before. It was a silver handgun, and I remember thinking it was quite heavy. I also remember not wanting to handle or mess with it too much. Fortunately, neither did Hugh or Eden.

Shortly after the sexual abuse charges against my dad were filed, Hugh told me that our father had pulled the gun on him the year before, on the morning after his ex-boyfriend had called the house. I was a senior in high school and Hugh was a senior in college, living at home while going to Pace University in Manhattan, and the call happened late, while we were all asleep. The incessant ringing woke me up. After some time, I heard someone walking downstairs to answer it, followed by my fathers voice angrily asking who was calling in the middle of the night. Then I heard him hang up and go back to his room. However, the phone continued to ring, with my dad getting angrier each time he picked it up, raising his voice and cursing at the caller in his thick Spanish accent before the commotion finally ended and I was able to fall back asleep.

Hugh told me that when he woke up the following morning, there was a gun pointed at his head, and my father was holding it, demanding that he tell him whether he was gay. Apparently, Hughs ex had said something that implied it, and my dad wanted confirmation. Hugh was terrified and had answered that he was bisexual in the hopes of staving off a lethal response.

Although my brother got him to put the gun down, our father promptly kicked him out of the house and even stopped paying for his college tuition. He also took back the car he had bought him as an early college graduation presentand gave it to me to take to Wesleyan.

During the fall of my sophomore year, my family had gone to the proceedings against my father to show support. Everyone but me, that is. I felt bad for not going, but I just couldnt bring myself to do it because deep down, I believed that he was guilty. For some reason, despite the lack of evidence, and the fact that he was my own