Words Stephen Greco  Photography Guzman

Published in No 15

We aspire to become more ourselves every day, don’t we? It’s called growth, and we all have our own pace. For years, the writer Lucy Sante was “loaded down with rocks.” Now, she says, “I’ve thrown away all those rocks and I’m much, much, much, much lighter on the ground, in my person. It’s a wonderful thing.”

The byline “Luc Sante” was one that smart readers were always happy to find in the New York Review of Books and on the cover of books like Low Life (1991), Kill All Your Darlings (2007), and Maybe the People Would Be the Times (2020). The byline promised much — essays, profiles, and memoirs brimming with sharp observation and informed commentary, expressed in stylish but unstuffy writing — as does the byline “Lucy Sante,” which the writer has been using since transitioning to female in September 2021, at the age of 66.

Sante was born in Verviers, Belgium and migrated with her parents to suburban New Jersey in the early 1960s. Formerly married to the writer Melissa Holbrook Pierson, Sante was living with her then-partner, a woman, last year when she decided to transition. She said in a Vanity Fair piece that an inflection point came when she was playing with a selfie app on her phone: a long-denied feeling arose when she swapped the gender of a mug shot of herself as a man. “Something took over,” she wrote, “a wave of pure momentum that persists even now, on good days overriding my always-crippling self-consciousness… It converted insight into imperative.”

SG What’s it like to live as a trans in Ulster County? Are you OK to talk about that? 

LS I'm willing to talk about anything, really. That’s one of the fascinating side effects of all this — I have no secrets anymore. I can talk about anything. Being trans in Ulster County? Well, it's not the worst place. One of the last, really major hurdles for me was just walking around town. I've been here for a long time — this neighborhood — and it's probably the most diverse place I've ever lived, including any place I lived in New York City

SG And you no longer live with your partner? 

LS  I'm solo. I mean, she's actually visiting right now but my transition broke us up. We're very close friends, but that was the end of things. It wasn't so much that she didn't want to be with a woman. That wasn't it. It was rather that the premise on which our relationship had been founded no longer held up. At first, I heard it as, "You didn't come out to me, and therefore we went off on the wrong foot." I saw this as accusation of untruth, of dishonesty. But that's not it, either. It's just that she'd invested in a certain idea, a certain vision — the way one does with a lover, invariably. It's just embarrassing for both of us. And for me, I always feel inadequate. I still have that feeling, that… old baggage, "If only I'd been a little more this and a little more that, I could've held onto her."

SG So you and she remain close?

LS She’s a lifelong friend. There's nothing that's going to destroy our friendship. But it's difficult for both of us. She misses the old me. I mean, every once in a while, a picture will resurface or something. And she'll say, "Oh, I miss that dark, brooding guy."

SG Does finding a woman partner now, after your transition, figure into your expectations? 

LS I'd like it, yeah. [Laughter]

SG Can we talk about your writing? When I heard about your transition I wondered, as a writer and editor myself, “Will there be changes in her work?”

LS Yeah.

SG So let me ask you what kind of connections may exist between your transition and your voice as a writer. I realize that it's early days…

LS Sure. The simple answer is, I don't know. When I came out to my now erstwhile partner, literally one of the first things she asked me is, "Will you now start writing fiction?" I thought it was an interesting question.

SG And…? 

LS Well, I mean, probably not. Because my biggest problem is with story. I have very little sense of plot. I'm the kind of person who can leave a movie house and five minutes later not recall how the movie ended. But on the other hand, she had a point. Because one thing about being in the closet with this — being in total denial of this for most of my life — is that it put a big distance between me and other people. 

SG Has it?

LS I'm much more involved with other people [now], much more social, much more vulnerable, much more in need of human connection than I ever was before. And I have no doubt that this will have effects that will show up in my writing, sooner or later. I mean, it's hard to say, because it's still recent. I only began my transition about a year ago. Obviously, it's not going to affect my memory or a lot of my aesthetic. Although it's been the subject of inquiry for me — like, "How male am I, or was I ever?" And furthermore, "How male was my work at any point?" And I have to think, "Not very." My two greatest teachers were women — going back to the New York Review again: [legendary literary figures] Barbara Epstein and Elizabeth Hardwick. They both helped with the construction of my voice and my outlook and stuff. I mean, I brought in a lot of other stuff that didn't come from them, but they were decisive. And I'm writing "the trans book" right now. So, my energies are very focused on that. 

SG Do you refer to it like that because it's the book you need to write right now?

LS Well, it's a book that I have a contract to write right now. And I call it that because it's almost a cliché. "Oh yeah, I transitioned — so now it's time to write my trans book."

SG I can’t wait to read it. I've been lucky enough to know several people who have transitioned, and I'm always amazed by anybody who just gives themselves permission like that. Self-permission-givers are such heroes. I came out as gay in the '60s, and I can remember not knowing how to do it and realizing that nobody's going to teach me how to do it, so I'd better just make something up and take my shot. It strikes me that transition is an even bigger kind of dawning not just for individuals, but for society — a push beyond polar thinking that’s been around for millennia. Do you feel part of something that's that big?

LS I've been very lucky in a lot of ways. I'm hardly connected to the trans community, insofar as there is one. But I’ve been very lucky to meet young, recent Bard graduates who are trans. And that’s helped me through this past year in extraordinary ways. Made me feel like I did have a connection to others — that we were in this boat together. I mean, I had known, but not known. I'd known since I was in single digits, but at the same time I refused to recognize it. Transitioning was not something I'd ever planned. I really thought I was going to take it to my grave, for one thing. For another, the process has brought up a lot of things that I did not anticipate. For example, I decided that I'm not going to do anything about my [speaking] voice. Because it's my instrument. I've narrated movies, I've done all kinds of things with my voice. Furthermore, there's only so much you can do with your voice. People go through extensive training with voice coaches, or they even get their vocal cords shaved. I just decided to bypass the whole thing. And there are a few other things like that that make me think, actually, I'm not all that binary. None of us is.

SG Lucy, can you say more about this knowing and not knowing? You talk about the “omertà” that you were observing. Where did it come from? How was it policed? What did it feel like? 

LS When I began to feel like maybe I was more inclined to another gender, I was very young and had absolutely no information whatsoever. And in fact, for a long time I thought I was the only person in the history of the world who'd ever felt this way. My parents were culturally conservative, members of the European working class, and they both left school in their early teens to go to work. They really did not understand much about the United States, and I was very isolated — an immigrant kid without an immigrant community. And as far as how I policed this omertà, well, it was total lockdown. It crippled me socially because I couldn't ever open up to anybody. I wasn't even thinking, "Well if I expose myself, I might expose things I don't want to have exposed." The fact is that it was so deep that I didn't even think about what I was protecting.

SG So you didn't have some particular fear in mind. "My parents will reject me.” “God will hate me." 

LS No. My biggest fear was that I would be shunned by women. Women have always been of central importance — as lovers, but also as friends. I thought, not only will no woman ever be attracted to me, but they'll also just be … I don't want to say “horrified,” but … they'll be contemptuous of my presumption in pretending to be one of them.

SG Have you found this fear to be justified? 

LS The part about them being contemptuous of my presumption hasn't happened at all. In fact, they've been incredibly supportive. My oldest women friends — even going back to high school — have rallied. And that's been wonderfully encouraging.

SG To what degree, Lucy, do outward issues like necklines and hair styles occupy you? In your work you’ve always been attentive to the signs and codes of the visual world. Has arriving at a new look proved fun for you, or a chore, or …? 

LS Oh, totally — that's been fantastic. First of all, the hair, because I started losing my hair when I was seventeen. It was the bane of my life. 

SG [Laughter]

LS I think I might have a little hair fetish, honestly. When I started transitioning, I probably went through fifteen wigs. And one day I had the revelation: "White." Everybody thinks it's blonde, by the way, but it's white. 

SG The look is pretty awesome! 

LS Love it. And clothes! I've always been obsessed with clothes as a guy, and I had a very, very, very quick learning curve there. My first purchase was from the female impersonator store. I wasn't sure if the sizes would work. I always took men's large, and now, as it turned out, I take a women's medium. It suits me perfectly. And within months I was buying Japanese designers on eBay. Now I've relaxed, and just buy the occasional t-shirt or something.

SG So what would the fashion editor call your style? Intellectual?

LS Bohemian. 

SG Let me ask you this: Do you have role models in this journey?

LS Well, I don't need role models the way a young person would, I suspect. I tremendously admire all trans women. I've been reading April Ashley's autobiography, and she's fantastic. She just died recently, like a few months ago. She's British and she transitioned in the '50s. Worked as a fashion model — stealth — in the early '60s.

SG Wow. 

LS She was finally outed during her divorce trial. She'd married the son of an earl or something. She was amazing. And in terms of the classics, there's [French showgirl] Bambi, and [French actress and entertainer] Coccinelle, who is remarkable. And then I am very heartened by the young. I've been just vacuuming up all kinds of trans literature, and there's a lot of interesting people these days. There's a woman named Andrea Long Chu, whose writing I really like. There's another writer named Imogen Binnie, whose novel Nevada is kind of legendary. And my main role model is my young friend Leor who I refer to as "my trans mom." She’s twenty-five years old and came out when she was seventeen. She transitioned during her time as a student at Bard and is absolutely, the most confident and straight-ahead person — somebody I can talk to like a peer, even though there's forty-three years difference between us. And I'm eager to meet more people. I'm all eyes and ears. 

SG What brings you to the city these days?

LS The fact is that most of my friends are still in the city. And gigs. Cultural events, not so much. I've become very lax about attendance at things. Museum shows come and go, and I realize, "Oh my God, I forgot." 

SG Is that because of COVID? Or a certain stage of one’s life?

LS It's a certain stage in life. I was such a culture vulture when I was young. I travelled through Europe on a Eurail Pass, and what I mostly did was go to museums in every single city. But that was when I was twenty. And I mean, I'm still interested in taking things in, obviously. But not with quite the same avidity as back then, where everything was a transformative experience. After a certain point, even the greatest things don't make as much of an impression as maybe lesser things did when you were young. 

SG That's an interesting point. And what about the returning to favorite places?

LS Well, one of these transformative experiences was going to the Louvre with my mother when I was eight — and that absolutely changed my life. The sensation of vertigo I got walking into the room with Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, and those huge paintings by Delacroix and David — they were so much bigger than I was! I was afraid of falling into them. At the same time, I wanted to. But the last time I went to the Louvre was over twenty years ago. You can't do it anymore. There's just too many damn people. 

Learn more st lucysante.com

The “trans book” that Lucy Sante is working on is for Penguin, and it will come out, says the author, “about a year after I finish it.”

Nineteen Reservoirs On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City by Lucy Sante, published by The Experiment, launched August ’22.

Stephen Greco’s novel, Such Good Friends, based on the friendship between Truman Capote and Lee Radziwill, will be published by Kensington in May 2023.

Guzman are regular contributors to UD and are represented by veronique-peres-domergue.net @lesguzman.