Opinions shifted instantly. My father was now understood by the general American public to be a guy who drove his wife to suicide after leaving her for someone he paid for sex—a prostitute—and he was hated way more than he’d been even after he first left my birth mom. It was that simple (sort of).
When it came to Henry and Boyle, the reaction was more complicated. In the art world, the idea of sex as a marketable artform became the subject of a lot of art critics and their essays, and, over the next couple months, and way more mainstreamly than that, seventeen different gallerists were accused in the press of arranging Private Viewing–style performances by different artists/prostitutes for their clients. None of the gallerists would admit they had done so, and only a couple of the artists/prostitutes would—both of them, Cindy Todd-Waintree and Veronica Dann, openly said that they hoped that by admitting it, they would get more clients and higher rates—but it was widely accepted that it was happening.*7
It was also awkward and confusing for people to think about because there were calls in the press to prosecute the anonymous author of “Upscale Pimpology” and the accused gallerists for being pimps—which was even more punishable by law than paying for sex—but there were no calls for prosecuting the artists/prostitutes because it wasn’t illegal for them to solicit sex. In the end, no one ended up getting prosecuted, though, mostly because the people that the public seemed to want to see get prosecuted the most were the clients/viewer-participants, and no one could even figure out who they were, except for my dad, who insisted that all he had done was pay to go to a hotel room to see a monologue performed, and then fallen in love with the performer, who he was now in a relationship with, which no one could figure out any way to prove wasn’t the truth, and, on top of that, no one could even prove who the author of “Upscale Pimpology” was (there were rumors, but ArtForum’s editors refused to say) or catch any of the accused gallerists pimping.
It was all pretty new and very complicated. And for Henry, herself, it was even more complicated. Everyone had an opinion about her, and no two opinions seemed to match. The opinions were made up of answers of different intensities to different combinations of any or all of the following questions: Was Henry a prostitute? a radical? an artist? all three? If she was an artist, were all prostitutes artists, and if all prostitutes were artists, was that good or bad? Had she wrecked a home (the one I lived in) or salvaged a wrecked home or neither? Since everyone supposedly knew what FABRYTAYF was about (sex work) and since FABRYTAYF included a couple brief descriptions of her own personal experiences as a sex worker while she was a student, should people feel stupid or tricked or neither for being surprised that Private Viewing included/was/resembled sex work? Should people feel embarrassed because so few of them had read FABRYTAYF even though so many of them had bought it? Did the ones who tried to read it fail to understand it and so put it down because they were unintelligent, or because it was written for graduate students and professors? Was Henry a victim of my father because he paid her for sex once? If she was a victim of my father, did that mean she was weak? If she wasn’t a victim, did that mean she was a slut? A gold digger? What did people want to believe? And so on.
While all these opinions were getting formed and re-formed and argued about, Henry pretty much disappeared. She moved in with us, sold her apartment, and took a sabbatical. During the sabbatical she worked on two books. One of them was her second academic book, Lamborgina C(unt)ock, and the other one was her first memoir, My Procedures. The other thing she did during that time was have some surgeries done in Switzerland and Germany (one of my first memories, which is my only memory of that time, and maybe is fake—maybe it’s just something I heard about and only think I remember—was of eating an ice cream cone with my dad outside the clinic in Berlin, while Henry was being operated on—I think it was probably my first ice cream cone—which was definitely a positive memory, even though my dad seems nervous in it). The surgeons in Switzerland did cosmetic work on Henry’s penis, trimming it down into the shape of a large clitoris, but doing it so that it could still erect and be ejaculated out of, and the surgeons in Berlin modified the inside of her vagina by adding “variable contours” and a kind of vibrating motor to it that Henry, by using her Kegel muscles, could turn on and off whenever she wanted to.
This unpublic period lasted til the middle of 2001, when Lamborgina C(unt)ock was published. It was mostly a very misunderstood book, and Henry considered it a failure*8 because of that, but I disagree with her. Even though it’s true I don’t really get all of it—like FABRYTAYF, it’s written for people who have read a lot of philosophy and critical theory, which I’m not very well-read in at all—I don’t think it was a failure. I think it was just that people got caught up in this one tiny part of it, and that part distracted them. The book is mainly about what FABRYTAYF was about: how total sexual freedom, especially the freedom of men to buy sex, would mean more earning/spending power for women, which would mean more power for women in general and so greater equality for all and therefore a better society. The first part of the book talks about prostitution and sex in terms of art the way that FABRYTAYF talked about prostitution and sex in terms of Curios and the Cute Revolutions. The second part talks about “sexual/gender reassignment” procedures and therapies (not Henry’s personal ones, but in general) in terms of dosing Curios with formulae/PerFormulae and how both represent new forms of old desires, and how new forms of old desires scare some people and change them, and so also change society, sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse, and how you can’t ever tell whether it will be for the better or for the worse until many years have passed, and even then only maybe can you tell, and so that is why it is important to never make judgments on the goodness or badness of people’s new or strange desires out of fear, especially not out of fear of slippery slopes, because judgments of strange or new desires should only be based on who is or isn’t hurt or helped by the strange or new desires being had and fulfilled since that is what everyone can agree a good human would judge things based on.
Those first two parts of the book take up 150 pages combined, and then the third part takes up another 150 pages by itself, and that third part is about Henry’s personal experience of Private Viewing as a performer, and about how much less stressful and much more profitable and empowering it was for her than any other sex work she did when she was younger because she knew it was safe and that she was doing it because she wanted to and she felt she was totally in control. And she said that the same was true in comparison to being a graduate student and then a professor: she was much more empowered by being the performer of Private Viewing than she had ever been as a student at Berkeley or Columbia or an employee at NYU.
I think it’s a very good book, and that it wasn’t a failure at all, even though, like I said, I don’t fully understand it, but most people ignored everything I just described, anyway. Most people focused on one tiny part: a couple paragraphs in it from Henry’s Private Viewing monologue (see Appendix) that she included in the third section of the book, and where she says that none of the transgender people she met at college were very attractive, physically, and that their physical unattractiveness or the discomfort they felt about it made them hard for her to relate to, and that her physical beauty or the pleasure she got from it made her hard for them to relate to.