We called him Cam. He didn’t use his given name. A slip of a man, with cheerful blue eyes that didn’t betray depression, suicide attempts, his dark stories or the fantasy life that kept him going until the end, just last week – 3 months before his 100th birthday. He was barely 5 feet tall. Boy size glasses, clothes and sandals fit him perfectly.

Life in a Nevada mining town in the early 1900’s with a saloon keeper father who called him a sissy didn’t keep him from wanting to make one last visit there. He insisted he was going alone – just last year. After all, he said, his car was reliable and he had a cell phone if he really needed anything. I wondered if he planned to stay there – since there was no there, there anymore. In spite of his description of himself as ‘perennially indecisive’ many of his life stories told of curiosity, intelligence and pluckiness.

His mother divorced his father -after taking a shot at him for continuous adultery -when he was about 9. She re-married, moving to Santa Barbara. Cam – he was actually a Junior, no wonder his father chided him – shared summers with his Father and new step family back in Seven Troughs and with his father’s sister, Aunt Charlotte in Sacramento.

The best story about Aunt Charlotte and her companion – corsetieres who made him their delivery boy - happened when he arrived the summer before he was 10. When they met him at the train station, he was visibly distraught and implored them to go back to the railroad car saying that he’d forgotten Elizabeth. He babbled on about Elizabeth until Charlotte stopped him demanding “Who the hell is Elizabeth?” He choked out “My do -uh- lly”, through his tears.

Pre-teen photos show him in a swim suit with a definite ‘come hither’ look. He recounted numbers of conquests he initiated in his teens. In retrospect, he said he felt fortunate that one of his early lovers took him aside and told him that since he was a man, he should act like it, as it would make his life much easier.

He finished high school and some college before mother and son set out with a traveling Chautauqua troupe – he as a dancer - sometimes an Indian – with dreams of making it to the silver screen. Eventually the Depression and tuberculosis resulted in them going on welfare. When he was able, he trained to be a hairdresser and supported his mother and her dogs until her death. He did take a year out to go around the world on a steamer with Cliff and later, Josephine, whom they found along the way.

So intrepid he became then that he and his mother held secret meetings in their Highland Park home for the outlawed Matachine Society. There was a cloak and dagger flavor to the events where members came to share their mostly hidden lifestyle and tell about police beatings and humiliation when they did dare to follow their unchosen paths.

One day he showed me a photo. It was a little girl with long blonde curls a short frilly dress, socks and Mary Janes - hugging a teddy bear half her size. I’d say she was about five. As I took in the picture, Cam said “I knew then I was Rosie Geyer – I was really a girl in a boy’s body. I never saw myself as homosexual. Back then there were no descriptions for what I felt. No one I met shared my feelings.” I felt sad for him until the next sentence reminded me of the daring streak his size camouflaged. “As a young transsexual now, I’d have definitely had a sex change operation.”
Kathleen Rubin