In search of her father's girlhood

Noelle Howey, author of "Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods -- My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine," discusses sexuality, angora and life with a transgender parent.

By Amy Benfer

July 3, 2002 | It sounds like the punch line to some joke buried in our collective consciousness: Noelle Howey's distant dad, Dick, was one. Until he became dickless.

Except it's not a joke. Or even fiction. And it's certainly nothing to get upset about. "This isn't a tragedy," writes Howey, in her memoir, "Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods -- My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine." "It's just non-fiction."

Howey's memoir is filled with details so apt that, were it fiction, you'd accuse her of being heavy-handed. Her father, Richard Howey, called Dick, was a cold, heavy-drinking father, who spent his time out of the house acting for a local drama club. He loved to watch prison movies. (Says Howey, "I mean, there's no way you could script that. My father feels like he's in prison. Get it?")

And while 12-year-old Noelle was upstairs dressing up in blue eye shadow, Lip Smacker and a secret gold teddy (which, strangely enough, she finds stowed in her father's drawer), Dick was in his basement workroom with his secret stash of Ruby Red Max Factor lipstick, padded bra and a "green hausfrau number."

Happily enough, this is not "The Crying Game" or "Boys Don't Cry" or any other version of the tragic coming-out story. As Howey puts it: "Drag à la Hollywood is often just that. A drag." Instead of tearing the family apart, Dick's transformation into Christine ultimately pulled them all closer together.

Not that it started out that way. Noelle's mother, Dinah, the daughter of a radical Communist and sexual revolutionary, had known that Dick was a cross-dresser since high school, when he confessed that he liked to wear angora sweaters. And she married him. By the time Noelle was 14, her parents decided it was time for her to be let in on the family secret -- though, at the time, it was more like an invitation to join them both in the closet, as they insisted that no one could know.

Eventually, coming out became a family affair. Dinah and Dick divorced when Dick decided to live as a woman. (In another coincidence too good to be fiction, Dick and Dinah were at one time both dating men named Michael.) And when Dick became Christine, her daughter and her ex-wife threw her a coming-out party in their hometown of Cleveland, Ohio -- a fact that was noted derisively by Lois Wyse, a columnist for none other than Good Housekeeping.

"After you've lived your life as this boring, suburban family in Ohio," says Howey, "it's really strange to find that suddenly you're being mocked in Good Housekeeping. You have to ask: How did this happen to us? How did we become amusing fodder for women's magazines?"

If anything, the joke is on Wyse: It's hard to imagine any memoir of recent years that better exemplifies "family values" -- in the form of openness, love and the sharing of intimacies. While many memoirists are derided, or even sued, by angry family members after publication, Howey's parents openly shared their pasts with their daughter, so much that the sections of her book that take place during her parents' childhoods in the '50s and '60s have the same depth of detail and observation as those sections devoted to her own childhood in the '80s and her young adulthood in the '90s.

Howey, who is 29, is also the editor of the anthology "Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing Up With Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Parents." After spending seven years in New York, she now lives in Minneapolis with her husband and her 5-month-old daughter. (And where, according to Howey, her book has so far been strangely ignored -- an advertisement for a local reading described it as a memoir of "growing up in Ohio.")

Howey spoke to Salon about her literary collaboration with her parents, the politics of memoir and the general ordinariness of living with a transgender parent. (And yes, the shifting gender pronouns are Howey's; although in her book her pronouns tend to match up with "Dick" or "Christine," in this interview she shifted back and forth with a fairly random -- and impressive -- fluidity.)

I was sort of stunned by how much you ended up knowing about your parents' sex lives. Not only that, but how candid you were about your own.

I didn't do it to be icky or sensationalistic. The reason that it's in there is because, well, when your father changes genders and becomes a woman, the first thing everyone wants to know is: Did she keep it? Did she lop it off? What did she do with the penis? That's the No. 1 question. And often, it's all about the genitalia for a lot of people. It shouldn't be, but that's how it gets boiled down into one easy, bite-size chunk.

Next page: Telling my dad where my mother lost her virginity