Host: Jay Allison
[Uncanny Valley theme music by The Drift playing]
Jay: [00:00:12] From PRX, this is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jay Allison, producer of this radio show, and in this hour from the Englert Theatre in Iowa City, in cooperation with Iowa Public Radio, we bring you a Moth Mainstage event.
[murmuring]
The theme of the evening was Heart of Darkness, and we will open with a short true story told by the host of the evening, Peter Aguero.
[cheers and applause]
Peter is an instructor for The Moth Community and Education Program and a frequent Moth host.
Peter: [00:00:44] The sky was clear, and the sun is shining. It's hot, and there are lots of people and voices and music and noise. It's a beautiful day at the New York Renaissance Fair. I just finished selling a $400 gold dragon ring to a wizard from Hoboken. [audience laughter] And my boss said I could take a break. So, I went into the back room, I started to make myself a sandwich, and there's almost nothing more celebratory than a perfect sandwich. So, I was putting the turkey just right, and the lettuce, a little slice of onion, the tomato cut just perfectly, little bit of dressing, put it together, a little pressure just so everything comes together. And I was going to let it sit for a minute because you got to let everything marry.
And just then, my wife comes into the back of the booth, and she looks beautiful. She's got this long purple and black skirt, and it's got dust all around the bottom. And she's got a big plume of feathers in her hair and a bodice. So, everything is this-- like [audience chuckles] It’s really nice. [audience laughter] But she's got a strange look on her face. I say, "Baby, what's wrong?" And she says, "Nothing. Nothing." "What's wrong?" "Nothing." She starts to cry. I said, "Baby, what's wrong?" And so, she tells me she was over at a cart that we also have where we sell jewelry over by the jousting arena. And while she was over there, she's very friendly. She talks to everyone. She loves to speak in an accent. She does all that stuff.
This guy comes up to her and says, "Hey, do you want to see some pictures?" And she says, "Sure." And he shows her. On the back of his digital camera, he starts flipping through the pictures, and they're like grainy, odd pictures of a woman in a bathtub. It didn't happen at the Renaissance Fair. And she wasn't-- It just-- immediately she froze. And this guy goes, "Hey, can I have a hug?" And she just runs away. And she comes over, and I was like, "Baby, it's okay." I hug her and, "It's not your fault. This isn't your fault. Don't worry, you're okay. You're safe. Everything's fine. It's not your fault." So, I go to find my buddy Sean, who works for security at the fair. And I'm looking all over the place for him. I find him over by the human chessboard. And he's a big dude. [audience chuckles] He's got a kilt on and a big orange puffy shirt. It says Ye Olde Security. [audience laughter]
And I tell him what happened. And he radios his other guys on his team, and they want to be on the lookout for this guy. He's like, "All right, it's okay. Just take care of Sarah. It'll be all right." So, I go back to the booth. I tell my boss, “You know, that I'm going to go work at the cart.” And so, I had given Sarah my sandwich because I'm a good husband. And so, I made [audience chuckles] another sandwich to take on the road. And so, we get down there, and it's just bonkers. There's all-- just all these people all over the place. And I'm just scanning the crowd, and I feel my heart beating. And I'm starting to get angry, and there's, like, a little bit of, like, a flutter in my stomach because I know that it's coming.
I'm not an angry guy. It took me a long time-- I grew up with a bad temper and a bad house. And it took me a lot of years and a lot of meditation and a lot of other things to calm myself down. And I've gotten a hold on it. When I was younger, I played football, but I stopped playing football because it was too violent. I did musicals instead. [audience chuckles] That sort of-- I'm just-- I don't like the feeling of fighting. I've been in-- it doesn't matter-- maybe six fights in my life. Doesn't matter how many I've won, all of them. [audience laughter] But, like, after every single fight, I would cry every time because it just-- it's an ugly feeling because you're out of control.
So, my buddy comes up to me and he says, "Hey, listen, we're still looking for this guy. We got reports that he'd been doing it to other people, including some, like, young girls. So now we're really looking for him. If you see him, Pete, don't do anything." And I was like, "All right, man. Okay, no problem." So, the 5 o'clock joust is over. Spoiler alert: Robinhood won. [audience chuckles] He always wins, every-- every day. And the queen fell off her horse, and then she sword fought. It was pretty intense. And so, the crowd is filing out. And there I'm like the T-1000. I'm just, like, looking around at the crowd, just scanning and scanning. And then I see him. I say, "Baby, is that him?" And she just says, "Peter, don't do anything." And she goes and hides.
And now I'm pissed off because she was having a great day. She was doing this thing that she loves to do. We'd been working at that fair for years. Her mother married a guy named Pepe who makes amulets. That's a long story. [audience chuckles] But she loved doing this. It was a fantasy world, and she enjoyed it. And this guy stole it from her. And he stole it from her. No one has the right to do that to anyone else on a beautiful day. So, I walk toward him, and the rest of the crowd disappears. It's just me and him. And he's got, like a-- his hair's a little too long in the back. He's got a Budweiser T-shirt with no sleeves, jean shorts. And I'm just going toward him, and I get right in his face, and I just-- he looks up at me askance, and I say, "Show me the pictures." And he says, "I don't know what you're talking about."
And I lean in and I say, "Show me the pictures you showed my wife." And now the flutter is starting to be-- it's starting to tremble because I can feel myself get out of control, and I'm scared. And he says, "I don't know what you're talking about." I said, "Show me the pictures you showed my wife." And he just said, "Oh, man, get out of my way." And I lean down and I get in his face, and I'm so close, our noses are touching. I can feel and smell the fear coming out of his mouth. It smells like old copper. And I get really close and I say, "I'm going to kill you in front of all these people. I'm going to dig my fingers into your throat, and I'm going to rip it out in front of all these people." And he's terrified.
Now, mind you, I'm wearing these breeches and a big blue shirt and this hat [audience laughter] with, like, a flower garland on it and these horns. It's absurd, completely absurd. [audience chuckles] And he just says-- he says two words. He just looks up at me. He goes, "Please don't." And I feel myself-- I see in the future, 15 seconds, where I'm just throttling this guy in front of children and Robinhood and the Queen and everybody. And just then, here comes the security. They come bounding out of the woods, and they're like, "Oh, we got it. We got it. It's fine." And then the cops are there, and-- and I step back, and my buddy pushes me to the side. He's like, "You're all right, man. It's all right. It's all right."
And the cops handcuff this guy, and they're pulling him out, and he's like, "I want to press charges. He threatened me. He threatened me. I want to press charges." And the cops stop, and they say, "Okay, you can press charges, but we're going to give him 15 minutes alone with you in the woods first so he can earn them." [audience chuckles] He's like, "I don't want to press charges." And they take him out of there. [audience laughter] So, I'm over there on the side, and I'm just breathing heavy, and I'm just trembling, and I'm going crazy because this monster, this thing that took me my whole life to kind of put a leash on is now unleashed inside of me, and I can't control it. And my buddy in security comes over, and he just-- he hugs me. He's like, "All right, you did it. It's all right, man. It's okay. Go take care of Sarah. She needs you right now. You did a good job."
So, I walk over and I sit down on this rock, and Sarah comes over, and she sits behind me, and she throws her arms around me, and I start to cry because I hate that feeling, and I don't want it to come up anymore. And she just holds me as I'm crying, and she says, "Baby, it's okay. It's not your fault. You're all right. Everything's okay." Welcome to The Moth of the Englert Theater. How you doing, Iowa City? [audience cheers and applause]
Thank you so much. You guys are beautiful. Thanks for coming out tonight. This is The Moth. So, when I asked our next storyteller what is it that turns you into a madman that needs to be stopped? He said it was clickbait posts on Facebook. So, [giggles] listen to this story, and at the six-minute mark, something's going to change your life. [audience chuckles] Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Jim Bennett.
[cheers and applause]
Jim: [00:09:45] We're both taller. So, I was part of the team that brought marriage equality to Iowa, [cheers and applause] and I love Iowa. I work for Lambda Legal, and we like to think of ourselves sort of as the gay mafia, [audience chuckles] and we're just bringing the gay agenda of civil rights, and we do it through our work in the court. And we knew back about in early 2003 or 2004 that it was really Iowa that could deliver marriage equality and bring it to the Midwest. It had only been in the coast up till then. And Iowa has this incredible history of civil rights that you may be aware of. [applause] It's the first state in the north where if a slave made it here, they were free. It's the first state that allowed a woman to be a lawyer and be part of the Iowa bar. They desegregated the schools 100 years before Brown versus Board of Ed. [cheers and applause] And so, we felt good about the courts, but we also need to win in the court of public opinion. And apparently there's a conservative element here as well. [audience laughter]
And so, my job is to develop these field campaigns and work throughout the state and have town halls and really talk to anyone that will talk to us about why marriage equality is awesome. And ultimately to convince at least 51% of Iowa that it's perfectly Iowan for gays and lesbians to be getting married. And so, we began our efforts, and I would go around, and I was assigned mostly to the west side of Iowa originally. And so, I would go-- [audience laughter] We are everywhere. But they would--
And so, we would have these town halls, and Iowans have a thirst for knowledge. They want to know everything going on. So, we would get both sides, and the opposition would come out just as strong as people that were for us or trying to figure it out. But they're Iowans, so they would bring hateful signs, but they wouldn't hold them up when I was speaking because [audience laughter] that would be distracting. And they wouldn't yell over me because they did want to be respectful, because that's the Iowan way. [audience laughter] And so, we moved forward, and one of the comments that we would hear over and over is, "If you really want the hearts and minds of Iowans, you need to ride RAGBRAI." [audience chuckles]
And for the maybe one person here who's chosen to visit Iowa in the dead of winter, RAGBRAI is the Des Moines Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa and it starts at the Missouri river and it ends at the Mississippi. And it's seven days of riding through corn [audience chuckles] and eating your way through. And in fact, on the official RAGBRAI jersey, it had a giant picture of an apple pie. Rarely do you see that on a bike jersey. [audience chuckles] And then at night, you pull into these small towns, and they really roll out the carpet for you. And all of the churches compete by having these big church dinners, and that's their fundraiser for the year.
And so, in April 2009, we win the case, and we're going to do a team. So, we formed Team Lambda Legal. Because if you're on a team, it's easier to register and get in, and it's a little cheaper. And we-- so we get our team together. We design these beautiful jerseys because we're gay, so they're stylish and awesome, [audience laughter] and-- and I even convinced my partner, Terry, who does not enjoy sweating or athletic things, to join us. But he's really more about the food than he is about celebrating equality. But whatever, he's going to be with us. [audience chuckles] And so, we begin the ride and I was a little nervous, but I had to say everything went great. Like, people were so wonderful to us, and couples would come up and tell us about getting married or that they were going to get married. And people would congratulate us on the victory. And we certainly had people that were not so excited about marriage equality coming to Iowa.
But the worst they could muster is sort of a look of stern disapproval. [audience chuckle] And I can deal with that. That's what my friends and people closest to me look at me like that all the time. [audience chuckles] So, we begin the ride, and you immediately sort of settle into this routine. And Terry and I, our routine would either be stopping to eat food or talking about what we would be eating at night. And so, on the last third of the ride, we'd begin just talking about where we're going to eat or what we were going to have.
And on one day, which is the century, which is the longest day, over 100 miles, we're literally starving. [audience chuckles] And there's this sign that just appeared out of a mirage that said "20 miles until ham balls." [audience laughter] And-- ham. This is ham, as in pig, not hand. Ham balls. And Terry, who loves meat, is just like, "Oh my God, this is perfect. This is exactly where we're going to go. Ham balls." [audience laughter] And I just smiled and hoped that he would forget it, but in the back of my mind, I knew this would be my destiny. [audience chuckles] And five miles later, we see another sign. "Ten miles to ham balls." And again, Terry is like, "I love ham. I love balls. [audience laughter and applause] Like, this is going to be incredible." And so, I give in, because I know it's going to happen anyway, and I don't have any other idea. But then five miles later, we see another sign, and it's 10 or 5 miles to ham balls. But this sign was different because it had the location, and the location was this Evangelical Lutheran Church. [audience reaction] And I should point out that the Lutherans usually love the gays. Like, they marry us, and they think we're awesome, and we play in their organ in the church.
But this church was a little bit different. And we knew them because they had been posting signs along our route of fetuses in different stages of formation. And the fetuses would have thought bubbles over their head. And those thought bubbles would be thinking things like, "I hope my first bike is red," or, "I can't wait till my dad takes me on my first bike ride." And one of the little fetuses had a teeny little helmet on to teach us about bicycle safety. [audience chuckles] And we all just found this completely outrageous, [audience chuckles] because it's like that fetus has a million other things to be thinking about right now. [audience laughter] I mean, it's dividing and whatever.
So, I had to break the news to Terry that we could not go to this church, that there were plenty of good churches that we'd be able to go to, but you're not going to have ham balls. [audience chuckles] And Terry was completely nonplussed. He's like, "I'm going to-- I have to have ham balls. I love ham balls. I'm going to have a ham ball." [audience chuckles] And so, I reluctantly agreed. But I told him, "Look, we are not telling anyone on the team that we have gone to this church. We are going to tell them that we went to the Unitarian church and had a spaghetti supper.” [audience chuckles] Unitarians accept everyone. And he agreed. And so, we're fine.
And we get to the church, and we pay our money, and then we start going down these basement stairs. And it hits me like we are going to be trapped in a basement with a lot of conservative Evangelical Lutherans. And so, I grab Terry and I tell him, "Do not talk to anyone. Just get in there, eat your ham ball, and get out. Like, we're going." [audience laughter] And so, he agrees. And we get in line, and you get your plastic utensils that are rolled up in a napkin, your plastic or-- your little plate, and then they just start piling on green beans from a can, and then these cheesy scalloped potatoes. And then these balls, these like-- and they're about the twice the size of a meatball. And the cook told us that they're exactly like meatloaf, except instead of hamburger, it's ham, and instead of saltines, it's graham crackers. And instead of a loaf, it's sort of a circular formation, [audience chuckles] and they have this sort of shellacked, red sauce. So, it's exactly like meatloaf. [audience chuckles]
So, I take one because I'm very polite and then Terry fills up his whole plate, [audience chuckles] and we go off into this sort of corner of the church that's empty, and within just a minute or two, four women who I assume are from the church, join us. And they're in a really pretty heated discussion about these ham balls. So, that one is concerned that they're too fibrous, and one feels that they switched the recipe, because apparently Iowa has an official ham ball recipe. [audience chuckles] And they're going back and forth, and Terry is immediately engaged. [audience laughter] And so, he begins asking them if you could put cheese on the ham ball and what the recipe is and how is it different from the official one? And so, of course, they love us. [audience chuckles] And so, they start asking us questions like, “How do we like the ride?” And “Where are we from?” And then, of course, “What team are we on?”
And then I look over at chatty Terry, [audience chuckles] and now he's just looking down at his plate and rolling his ham ball with a fork. [audience laughter] And so, I just said, "Lambda Legal. We're on Team Lambda Legal." And it was greeted with this painful silence. And then one of the women, to make things feel better, I guess, starts just talking about the silverware. [audience chuckles] And so, she starts saying, "You know, this is really unusual. It's actually silver, and usually it's white or sometimes Lucite. And I would think it was real silverware, but you can tell from the weight that it's not. It's very loud." [audience laughter] And so, it was worse than the silence.
And so, [audience laughter] I finally just say-- I start to explain what Lambda Legal is and what we fight for, and then the woman interrupts me again and says, "Oh, we know who you are." And I look over at Terry, and he just had his horrible sad face, and there is nothing worse than that horrible sad face. And he's grabbing his ham balls, and he's looking for the nearest exit. And I honestly felt like I just wanted to die because we had been on this for years, and things had gone so well, and it was just this great moment of victory. And then all at once, we're sort of back to the beginning. And I just wanted to leave, but I kept thinking, this is my job, and this is why we're here, and it's an important cause.
And so, I begin to sort of make the case for marriage and why this matters, and the woman interrupts me again and says, "Oh, you know what? We're fine with gay marriage. This church is crazy. We're just here for the balls." [audience laughter] And that is Iowa. [cheers and applause] You cannot separate a fine Iowan cuisine from a fine history of civil rights. And the honest truth is, Iowa changed. It's a game changer. [audience laughter] It changed everything. I mean, when you look at it, we've doubled the states. You now have your neighbors. It took us five years longer, but Illinois and Minnesota followed along. [cheers and applause] DOMA has been struck down and we'll be back in the court soon on our 50-state strategy, which is coming faster than I ever could have imagined. And my partner Terry and I will be getting married this June in Chicago and ham balls will be on the recipe. Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
[upbeat music playing]
Peter: [00:21:57] Ladies and gentlemen, Jim Bennett.
Jay: [00:22:01] To see a picture of Jim and Terry on their wedding day, visit themoth.org. End of note: We're happy to say that marriage equality became the law of the land in June of 2015. To share any of the stories you hear on The Moth Radio Hour, go to themoth.org where you can stream the stories for free and send the link to your friends and family. We'll be back in a moment with more stories from this live event in Iowa City.
[upbeat music continues]
The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by PRX.
[murmuring]
This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jay Allison. You're listening to a live Moth event held in Iowa City with theme Heart of Darkness. Here's your host, Peter Aguero.
[applause]
Peter: [00:23:30] Okay, so our next storyteller. Remember how we asked all of our storytellers, "What is it that makes you just say the horror? [audience reaction] [laughs] What puts you into just a state of madness in which you need to be stopped?" She said, "You know when you see somebody and they're folding a map and they're doing it the wrong way?" [audience laughter] And she just-- she stopped talking. She just like went like this for a second and I was like, "It's okay. You're going to be all right." So, it's folding maps is something that just makes her crazy. Please welcome our storyteller, Stephanie Summerville. Come on.
[cheers and applause]
Stephanie: [00:24:13] Thank you so much. So, I grew up in southern Indiana in the late 1960s to overprotective parents. We were a barely middle-class family living in a not-so-great neighborhood. But my parents wanted the best for me and better than what was in the world around me. So, to that end, I led a very sheltered life. I only went to home, school, and church. At the age of five, I began piano lessons. I could go there, but I could not play with any of the kids in my neighborhood. I could only play in the backyard with my little sister.
Now, my mother was a beautiful and elegant woman. She was a bit of a fashionista. She was the kind of lady that would get dressed up to go to the mailbox [audience chuckles] and she dressed in the style of Jackie O.
Now, my father was an incredible charismatic person. He had an upbeat attitude and a can-do kind of spirit. And he dressed and moved and looked like Sidney Poitier. And I was the center of his universe, as he was mine. When I was a little girl, as a toddler, he would dress me up, I'd go with him on errand day and he would be obnoxious with a camera. He would get total strangers to take pictures of us together. And then he would regale them with tales of my brilliance as a 3-year-old. [audience chuckles]
So, when I got a little older, I was about 8 years old, I became more of the son that my father never had. And I spent a lot of time in his study. And we had one of those studies like you saw in the movies. He had a floor-to-ceiling bookcase with the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. And he had a big oak desk with clawed feet. And I used to sit in his lap and he would teach me how to write with a fountain pen. My father had the belief that one of the things that you needed to make your way in the world was a distinctive and impressive signature. So, he taught me how to copy his signature with a fountain pen and how to create one of my own, a unique signature of my own. And that's one of the best shared moments that I had with my father.
That and the 1976 Summer Olympics. Because first of all, it was our first world event together. And for the first time in Olympic history, something had happened that had never happened before. An athlete was awarded a score of a perfect 10. And it was given to Nadia Comăneci at the age of 16 for her impressive and flawless gymnastics routine. And my father explained to me how difficult that was because the athletes were rated on two different scales. They got a rating for artistic impression and one for technical merit. And those were averaged out together to get a perfect score. So, she had to get a 10 on both ratings in order to come up with a perfect 10 for a final score. And when I learnt this, I became obsessed with the Olympic rating scale. I began reading everything in my life [audience laughter] on the rating scale. My dad's pancake flipping, his left-hand turns into the driveway. My scales in arpeggios I could play, this thing took over my life.
So, in 1979, I turned 13 and two very important things happened. First of all, I got a summer job. And two, I began to notice boys. Now, this summer job was an early work program because my parents were like overachievers and they wanted me to get started on my job experience and character references. So, it was about me and about 19 other 13-year-olds. It was about a mix of 10 boys, 10 girls. And our job was to detassel corn, which I'm sure you all know [audience reaction and applause] in Iowa. Thank you. Hellacious, hellacious job, okay? In the burning hot sun and high mud. And so, after the first week of this, most of the girls cut out. So, it was only like me and one other girl by the end of the week. So, I instantly became the center of attention and the person-- one person who became the center of my attention was Robert Buster Townsend III [audience laughter].
And Buster. Buster was delicious. [audience laughter] He was [chuckles], he was a fair-skinned, freckle-faced black boy and he had an athletic build. And he was not the brightest bulb on the tree. But I did not care because he could have read a grocery list and I was mesmerized. [audience chuckles] So, about a week of like fishing around with each other and flirting, we finally decided that we liked each other. And that's when Buster first made the attempt to kiss me. Now, I had not had the birds and the bees speech with my parents yet. And the only things I knew about sex I had gleaned from the Harlequin romance novels that my spinster cousin had left over at my grandma's house. [audience chuckles]
And so, the things that I got out of them were this was first of all that all intimate relationships began with a kiss. And according to the writing, all of these women who got this kiss were somehow forever changed. [audience chuckles] Like the writing would get all flowery and you wouldn't know what was going on. But that's the only thing you could figure out. So, the only thing that I could parallel this with, the only other stories I could parallel this with in my own life that I knew about were Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [audience chuckles] and Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Those were the only stories I knew where people started out one way and then something happened and they were forever changed. [audience laughter] So, I figured that if I started to-- if I had Buster kiss me, then something I was going to transform in some way that I could not control. So, I just wouldn't let him kiss me.
So, we went through this whole process where we would after work we'd hang out in the parking lot and hold hands and flirt and then he'd try to kiss me and I wouldn't let him kiss me. So, one day we're holding hands and my father pulls up into the parking lot kind of early. So, I go skipping off and I get in the car and I immediately notice that my dad is really angry and really silent. I could tell something is going on because he's staring straight out the windshield, and he's not looking at me, and he's gripping the steering wheel. And so, I look over, kind of nervous, and I say, "Dad, is there something wrong?" And my dad erupts into what sounds to me like this loud, long lion roar of a monologue. "I SAW YOU TALKING TO THESE BOYS. I SAW YOU HOLDING HANDS WITH THESE BOYS." [audience chuckles] And he pulls out, like, these big SAT words. "BOYS ARE LICENTIOUS AND NEFARIOUS CREATURES." [audience laughter] And so, now I am both terrified and amazed. So, he doesn't speak to me for the rest of-- the rest of the evening.
And so, we get back in the car, and he's taking me to work the next day. And he's giving me a less vocal rendition of the licentious and nefarious speech. But instead of me being frightened, I'm starting to get angry. And I'm getting more and more angry to the point where by the time we get there, I'm kind of pissed off. So, I look at him when I get out of the car, and I slam the car door and I turn around. And that's when I made the decision that I am going to let Buster kiss me, come what may. I didn't care. [audience chuckles] Didn't care.
So now here it is after work, and I'm standing in the parking lot, and I let Buster kiss me. And can I tell you, it was the most amazing thing. It was delicious. Okay? [audience chuckles] When our lips met, it was like somewhere in my mind, a door swung open to a room full of incredible sensations. And that room, I realized, was called pleasure. [audience chuckles] And it was like a medium long kiss. But when it was over, Buster's parents were there, and so he kind of disappeared. And I'm standing there, basking in the glow of this kiss. And I realize that this is a very monumental moment in my life. One that needs to be rated. [audience laughter]
So, I quickly-- it does. It does. So, I immediately start to rate this kiss. I'm considering its artistic impression and the technical merit. [audience laughter] And so, I decided-- I did. I decided to give Buster a 9.7 for technical merit and an 8.8 for artistic impression for a combined score of about 9.3 which I thought was good because it left room for improvement, but it was a pretty good kiss. [cheers and applause] So, I had settled all of that in my mind. And then I looked up and realized that I was the only kid left in the parking lot. So, I just started to walk home because that's what you did in the 1970s, we didn't have cell phones. You let your kids just kind of wander home. [audience chuckles] So now I'm walking home and I'm thinking about the consequences of this kiss, because now I'm going to be forever changed. So, I'm checking myself to see if there's any kind of transformation it's going to take place. And I'm developing contingency plans in my head in case my behavior changes and I can't control it. [audience chuckles] So, this is where my head is at.
And finally, when I get to the door of my house, before I can barely even knock on the door, my mother opens the door and she says, "I need you to help me with your father." And so, I go into the living room and I look and my father is lying in the fetal position on the couch, and he's shaking violently. And we had to take him to the hospital. So, we get him registered in emergency, and it takes about an hour and a half and we filled out paperwork. And my father comes back and he's lying stretched out on a gurney, and he's not quite shaking as much, but he's in a hospital gown. And I look at him and his eyes are very wide. They kind of remind me of the look that the bunny rabbits have that graze in our backyard.
And it was the first time that I saw my father looking so frail. And I said, "Dad, are you all right?" And with that classic smile and that can-do spirit, he didn't say anything, but he sort of just smiled and nodded. And as they wheeled him away on the gurney, my father's downward spiral begins as he spends 30 days in ICU and a coma and finally dies. And that's when my world began to implode. Because from that day, I never went back to that job. I never saw Buster again. And I never had time to process any of this because I was too busy trying to share household responsibilities with my mother while trying to keep up with the expectations of my father.
And it doesn't even really hit me until one day I'm 29 years old and I'm on my lunch break and I'm standing in an open-air parking garage, and the smell of corn comes wafting in over the Ohio River. And it comes back to me and I start to cry because I remember that the last real interaction that I had with my father was when I slammed the car door. And it didn't make me feel very good. I started to feel very guilty. But then the smell of the corn brought back the memory of that delicious kiss, [sobs] 9.7 for technical merit [audience chuckles] and 8.8 for artistic impression. And even kisses today have a very complex emotional feeling that it brings up inside of me of nostalgia and guilt and pleasure.
And it took me a very, very long time. But later what I realized was this is that no kiss in the world could ever taint or destroy my father's love for me or his legacy that lives in me of his indomitable spirit, his can-do attitude and his kick-ass signature. [audience chuckles] Thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Peter: [00:36:42] Ladies and gentlemen, that's Stephanie Summerville.
[pleasant melodious music playing]
Jay: [00:36:47] Stephanie Summerville is a musical theater performer living in New York. She's a singer with Secret City, an Obie Award-winning art salon held monthly at Dixon Place. She's also a proud graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and an alum of the New York Shakespeare Festival Lab at the Joseph Papp Public Theater.
We'll be back in a moment with our final story from this live event in Iowa City. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by PRX.
[murmuring]
This is The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Jay Allison. You're listening to a live Moth event held in Iowa City with the theme, Heart of Darkness. As a caution, the next story contains a homophobic slur. Here's your host, Peter Aguero.
[applause]
Peter: [00:37:41] We have one final storyteller this evening. And when I asked that final storyteller, I said, "What is something that drives you to the point of madness? Something that would make you pull that Marlon Brando like, don't learn your lines, sit in the mud and be nuts kind of Kurtz thing." And our next storyteller said, [giggles] "Tailgaters," because I don't-- especially when you can see their teeth in your rear-view mirror. [audience chuckles] Please welcome Janice Josephine Carney. Come on.
[cheers and applause]
Janice: [00:38:31] My birth certificate said my name was John Joseph and I was male. That was my problem. As an infant, my mother had me in gowns that had long, curly hair. I was my mother's daughter. I was her Josephine. As a young child, I enjoyed wearing my sister's clothes and I preferred dresses. My games were hopscotch, jacks, skipping rope. [giggles] I did not like playing with the little toy soldiers or playing with the guns. That was not me. As I got older and my father, sisters and brothers had seen me dressing up, it was beaten into me that was not a good thing. And as I got a little bit more older, I learned in school, from teachers and from church that was not a good thing. So, I hid it pretty much by middle school and high school. I had a dark secret.
I knew I was not John, and I knew I was not a boy, but I had to hide it. So, 1968, I took a draft physical. Then in 1969, when I was graduating high school, I heard the news. I was classified 1A. I was fit for military duty. As shocking as it was, there was nobody more surprised than me. [audience chuckles] Nobody. And I talked to my grandmother a little bit. My grandmother was from Nova Scotia and was French Canadian, spoke mostly French. As a child, she always let me dress the way I want and be me. She wanted me to go up to Canada. But I went and I decided to confront my father. I never got into the gender stuff, but [scoffs] I told him I was thinking about going to Canada, that I was trying to avoid the draft.
And my father was a typical World War II Irish guy. And he went off the deep end and telling me, "Don't ever let us step foot in his house again. You know, sodomite. If you can't go off the wall and just the whole Archie Bunker thing." Before there was even an Archie Bunker on TV. [audience chuckles] He was there. The very next morning, I went out, we took the T down to downtown Boston, Cambridge, actually. And I went into a recruiter's office and I enlisted into the army to get into the medical corps so I could avoid the infantry. July of '70 to July of '71, I was in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne. I spent some time up along the Laotian border on a firebase.
I could talk a lot about that, what it's like being on a firebase that's under attack and surviving an ambush, but the biggest thing was coming home, landing in Seattle. And I ended up back in Boston. And almost immediately I was back in full femme, hitting the clubs. I was 21 now, so I can get into the good clubs. And I was dressing up again. The army didn't change nothing, as if I was my gender and who I was. But the struggle was still there. Wanting to fit in, wanting to be-- wanting to be normal. There were periods around this time frame where the army doctors had said I had psychotic war neurosis. This is before the term posttraumatic stress disorder was used.
I was under a lot of different medications. We were trying to treat it with pills. Pills to help you sleep, pills to help you wake up, pills for anxiety, pills for depression. And I tried. I wanted so much to fit in. So, I got married, which was the thing to do. I had three children. I worked five years at a hardhat job at shipyard in Quincy, Mass. Then I got a civil service safe, secure job, the post office. But the image at the time of Vietnam veterans all being the enemy. And if you put Vietnam veterans on a job application, you wasn't going to get the job. There was a lot of shame in being a Vietnam veteran. And I got involved with a veteran support group and I got to meet a bunch of really-- what would become my closest friends, the only friends.
It brought back my pride as a veteran, and I started wearing a Vietnam Veterans hat and being proud of who I was. But in the end, I just was this miserable drunk with the home life. I ended up finally all of this with a suicide attempt. I tried before, but this time I ended up in a hospital and transferred to the Boston VA Hospital. And a woman from my church who was our big AA champion came in to visit me in the hospital and brought a friend. His name was Pat. Pat, I think in the long run, may have saved my life. He got me to a year of sobriety and sanity, a whole year, the longest I'd gone out drinking probably since around middle school. And there was this clarity and this sense of who I was and I--
We were sitting, he was on his mail route one day. I was meeting him at lunch and something called a four-step inventory in the program where you really look at yourself and try to answer questions. And the two questions we were working on was, "Do I still feel like drinking? Do I still feel suicidal?" And I was, "Yep, yep, both of those still there." "What can you do to-- what can you do to stop those, the cravings or to stop the suicidal thoughts?" As we were sitting there, it was to the end of the winter, the nice warm sunny day. And two young girls came in and they had really nice summer dresses. And I'm kind of glaring at them. They're all excited. They're not all bundled up for winter and they're comfortable with giggling.
So, I says to Pat, "If I could just wear a nice summer dress like that, I think I'd be happy and I wouldn't feel--" And Pat took a bite out of his sandwich, sip of his coffee, and says, "Go buy a dress. What's your problem?" [audience laughter and applause] My AA sponsor. And didn't bat an eye. And I was expecting a total shock and kind of, "Okay.” He says, “Go buy a dress.” We solved this crisis over. [audience laughter] And but it started-- By that time, my marriage was falling apart and I really was trying to be who I always knew I was. So, I went out, I got my ears pierced and I stopped wearing clip-on earrings and just dressing up and painting my nails, shaved my legs, let my hair grow down shoulder length, and I was just out being me.
The problem was, well, still the birth certificate. But I was going to this veterans group getting more and more effeminate. And these people who had brought me back and all that pride, the Vietnam veteran had got me to where I was suddenly turned on me. "Are you queer? You're a faggot. Are you going to get your dick cut off? Are you going to get one of those gender realignments?" And this was the talk in the support group with the facilities there. Another part around this time was the VA had a program where you can get a free personal computer. The idea was that with the computer you could send emails and connect with other Vietnam veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder and stuff. But the first thing I did was I googled transgender. This new word that was kicking around.
It was no longer just LGB, lesbian, gay and bi, I also knew was this transgender. What it actually meant was confusing to a lot of people, even to me. But I found out that was me. But the biggest thing I found other transgender Vietnam veterans across the country. But I liked to simplify it. I weaved myself a cocoon and I came out the beautiful woman I always wanted to be. And it's poetic, but it's a lot more complex than that. A lot more complex. But I did it. I really, truly did it. In the end, I had a letter from Dr. Biber that said legally I was female. I fit the criteria. Can I say the V word? We adults here? They had a vagina. [audience applause] And I had legally changed my name to Janice Josephine.
So, I had this beautiful morning when I went into the Cambridge City Hall, armed with my paperwork, and I was presented with a new birth certificate that said I was Janice Josephine Carney, female. [applause] One last thing. I am-- I can never be my father's son, but I am my mother's daughter. I am my mother's Josephine. Okay, thank you.
[cheers and applause]
Peter: [00:48:43] Ladies and gentlemen, Janice Josephine Carney.
[soft melodious music playing]
Jay: [00:48:49] Janice Josephine Carney lives in Largo, Florida, and is the author of several books, including a memoir about her time in Vietnam. To see a picture of her as a young man in uniform and then later as a woman at the Vietnam Memorial, visit themoth.org.
That's it for The Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time. And that's the story from The Moth.
[Uncanny Valley theme music by The Drift playing]
Your host this hour was Peter Aguero. The stories in the show were directed by Jenifer Hixson, Maggie Cino and Meg Bowles. The rest of The Moth's directorial staff includes Catherine Burns, Sarah Haberman, and Sarah Austin Jenness with production support from Whitney Jones and Kirsty Bennett. Moth stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. This Moth event was recorded live in Iowa City by Iowa Public Radio. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Freddie Price and the As Is Brass Band. You can find out more about all the music we play at our website, themoth.org.
The Moth is produced for radio by me, Jay Allison at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, with help from Viki Merrick. This hour was produced with funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. The Moth Radio Hour is presented by the Public Radio Exchange, prx.org. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.