*8 She’s said this a few times in front of me throughout my life, and said it again when I interviewed her for this paper
*9 Camille Paglia, “Dominate and Protect.”
*10 2012 Guinness World Records.
Sources Consulted
Bartlett, John & Kaplan, Justin (eds.). Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 17th Edition (New York: Little, Brown, 2002), p. 721.
Boyle, Ronson. Procurer: My Life as a Gallerist (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002).
Glenday, Craig (ed.). 2012 Guinness World Records (New York: Bantam, 2012), p. 317.
Henry, Fondajane. Flesh-and-Bone Robots You Think Are Your Friends (New York: Semiotext(e), 1998).
___. Lamborgina C(unt)ock (New York: Random House, 2001).
___. My Procedures (New York: Random House, 2001).
___. My Process (New York: Random House, 2009).
Henry, Fondajane & Houellebecq, Michel. “Ad victis spolia (de la révolution sexuelle): Conversation entre Michel Houellebecq et Fondajane Henry.” [“To the Losers Go the Spoils of the Sexual Revolution: Michel Houellebecq in conversation with Fondajane Henry.”] Les Inrockuptibles (Paris, France), August 22–29, 2001, 21–33.
Paglia, Camille. “Dominate and Protect.” Harper’s, November 2000, 32–39.
Pellmore-Jason, Jr., Jonny. Hundreds of exchanges and conversations that I, Jonny Pellmore-Jason, Jr., have had with Fondajane Henry and Jonny Pellmore-Jason from around the time I learned to speak full sentences (summer, 2000) til just a couple hours ago (February 2013), and a few that I’ve had with Ronson Boyle in the past few weeks (January 2013).
Wolfe, Tom. “The Man Behind the Woman Behind the Man Behind the Woman: A Profile of Jonboat and Fondajane on the Eve of Their Fifth Wedding Anniversary.” Vanity Fair, December 2006, 27–47.
Appendix
“The Story of a New Name”
(Monologue from Private Viewing by Fondajane Henry)
excerpted from Lamborgina C(unt)ock by Fondajane Henry
(used by permission of Fondajane Henry)
To begin with, I want you to be as comfortable as possible. Private Viewing can last anywhere from just a few minutes to sixteen hours. It ends when you leave the suite, or at noon tomorrow—whichever comes first. Feel free to stand, sit, or lie anywhere you like, in any state of dress or undress that you’d like. If you’d rather we move to another part of the suite, just say so, and we’ll go there. There’s a full bar in the living room, a refrigerator full of beer in the kitchen, and a nice variety of finger foods on the dining room table, which you probably noticed when you arrived. In that PillowNest on the night table, there are half a dozen Curios, none of them younger than two years old. In the night table’s top drawer, you’ll find thirty varieties of formulae, liquid and pellet. Everything I just mentioned is included in the cost of the performance. If you’d like more or other foods, drinks, Curios, or varieties of formulae, I’ll be happy to ask Ronson to have someone bring them to us from anywhere in the city, but you’ll have to pay for that separately.
What Ronson won’t do is get you any illegal drugs. He’s a gallerist—not a criminal. If you’re on illegal drugs right now, that’s fine with me, but please keep it to yourself. If you’ve brought illegal drugs and plan on using them here, please do so discreetly. If I know about them, the performance will have to stop.
Through that door over there is a bathroom. If you have to use it at any point, for any reason, please go ahead and do so. I’ll wait. Also, you can smoke cigarettes here if you want—I’m what my mother used to call a “social smoker,” and I don’t mind. In fact, if you light one up, odds are I’ll ask to bum one.
Now, while you’re getting comfortable, I’m going to tell you about how I came to be me. Feel free, at any point, to interrupt. You can tell me about yourself—unless it has to do with your being on illegal drugs—and I’ll listen, openly and happily, until you’re through. You can ask me anything you want about myself, and I’ll tell you honestly. Also you can ask me to do anything you want with your or my body inside this suite—anything except for illegal drugs—and I’ll probably say yes. I’m not easy to offend, so even if I say no to something you request, it’s highly unlikely that I’ll hold your having asked against you. If you want to just start touching me sexually, that’s fine too. I would, however, advise that you wait a little while and hear my story. I really think intimacy will improve the quality of any orgasms we have together, and thus the overall quality of the performance. Some people like to come early and quickly before settling in, though—I know. So it’s up to you. Either way, I’ll gladly cause you to have at least one of the best orgasms of your life, if not two or three or four—however many you can manage before the end of the performance. You wouldn’t have been offered admission if that weren’t something I wanted.
* * *
—
I was born in 1976, in Houston, Texas, with what the doctors called “ambiguous genitalia.” Probably for that reason, I was immediately given up for adoption. I’ll never know for sure, I guess, because I don’t know who my birth parents are. But the couple who adopted me, David and Christine Henry, of Austin, Texas, were older—in their early fifties. Theirs was the second marriage for each of them, and each, in their previous marriage, had lost a daughter. David’s daughter had died of Gaucher disease—she’d been three years old. Christine’s daughter had died of leukemia—she’d been seven years old. The fact that both of them had lost daughters in their previous marriages was not as strange as it might sound at first. They’d met one another in a support group for divorced parents who’d lost children to childhood terminal illness. What was a little strange, was that both of their daughters had been named Dolores.
* * *
—
My parents had to make some decisions when they adopted me. Their first decision was to gender me female. They might have—as you’ll see for yourself, soon enough—gone either way, but they’d both wanted a daughter. Not hard to understand, I don’t think. The holes in their hearts were little-girl-shaped holes.
The second decision they had to make was medical. They could have elected to subject me to a series of “gender-corrective” measures—surgeries and, later, hormones—but, even though the doctors strongly suggested they do that, my parents, having spent so much time watching children suffer in hospitals, were firmly of the belief that any sort of medical rigmarole doctors deemed “elective” for anyone, and especially for children, should never be elected.