A feeling of liquefaction coursed through the middle of my body upon setting my eyes on her. A tremor graced my body spanning from shoulders to my lower half. In her, I presumed, I found my moment of confrontation. It was a spring night in 2021 when approximately 30 mates of the established writer, known as Luc Sante, got an electronic mail titled “a bombshell”. Earlier that month, Sante had acquired a novel mobile phone and experimented with an application that allowed switching of gender in face editing. The aftermath was “a portrait of a mid-aged woman from Hudson Valley: robust, healthy, and pure in lifestyle”. The time for her comrades to meet Lucy and for the sexagenarian analyst, historian, and autobiographer to unveil the hidden truths dating back to the Johnson period had come. ‘I Heard Her Call My Name’, a title picked from the Velvet Underground, illustrates the life of Lucy Sante marked by immigrant dislocation, counterculture beyond the 60s, relentless and creative literary activity. The longing for identity had only found solace in her seventh decade.
Sante’s glimpse on the Face App image revealed a life never lived, a life that was once impossible. Her life was not only a duel with history, but her family also; her parents, native of Belgium and adhering to the Catholic faith, struggled to adjust to life in New Jersey. They either ridiculed or repressed any signs of their child’s sexual or gender identity; the presence of a deceased sister, Marie-Luce, also cast a shadow.
On growing up, Sante relocated to New York and chose writing as a profession. Interestingly, it was a period when acceptance of gender fluidity or even a tinge of androgynous flamboyance was presumed. Sante embraced the trend of long hair that boomed with the hippie culture. She observed full-dressed performances of New York Dolls, presented herself at the origin of punk alongside Patti Smith and Television, and even enjoyed nightlife with her gay friends. However, she was secretly disappointed when they sneered at any drag queen who didn’t live up to the expectations of late-1970s fraternity life. Capitalising on her employment at the esteemed Strand Books on Broadway, Sante read extensively on the life of “transsexuals”, only to discard the evidence of her unusual interest afterwards.
Throughout the years, she nurtured an inventory of women whom she aspired to be: Françoise Hardy, Marianne Faithfull, Lauren Bacall, and eventually several girlfriends whom she tried to always portray as ‘Luc’. It’s with a sense of regret and wisdom that Sante reflects on the demands and deception of manhood, but it goes without saying that I Heard Her Call My Name is a narrative about femininity – ideation, illusion, enactment, and realism. Further, it’s about her suspicion that embodying it might be out of her reach. Sante updates her post-teen constellation to incorporate friends, previous romantic partners, and ordinary heroines. She agonizes over feeling undeserving of being counted amongst them. Does her age, baldness or baritone voice make her unworthy? As she navigates her transformation largely isolated from current trans communities, Sante experiences it more like stepping through a doorway rather than journeying along a scale or sequence. It appears as though this is an authorial, or at the very least, a critic’s worry: Am I being overly simplistic, primal, or antiquated in my self-perception?
Sante has devoted her professional life to being enlightened and refined, effortlessly navigating between avant-garde spaces both mainstream and obscure: a veritable scribe of deep cultural introspection. “I am city-bound, entrenched in reality,” she declares. Among her literary offerings are Low Life, a deep dive into the underbelly of vintage New York, and The Other Paris, exposing the city’s lesser-known working-class and artistic quarters. Her essay compilations, Kill All Your Darlings and Maybe the People Would Be the Times, explore subjects from Arthur Rimbaud and Georges Simenon, to Walker Evans and defunct subcultures such as punk and disco. Notable women (Sophie Calle, Patti Smith for instance), feature prominently, yet in I Heard Her Call My Name, Sante acknowledges what should have been self-evident from the start: her writing was essentially a means of immersing herself in an ultra-modern masculinity, albeit one that’s not entirely impermeable to gender fluidity within the spheres of art, literature and music, but purposefully dismisses its own involvement. Sante’s initial, enthralling style fades in the face of a simpler, yet more compelling voice.
Is it genuine, though? Is this her authentic voice? The Factory of Facts, Sante’s oddly detached family memoir from 1998, begins with a handful of mildly varying and increasingly ludicrous initial paragraphs: nine deceptive starts to her autobiography. The underlying point here suggests that there is not simply one, singular, absolute truth to tell – that there are always other lives that remain unexplored. We adapt to what we can, crafting an essence of authenticity, a convincing facade. As Lucy relates to Luc, “I handpicked my environment to serve as a complex code of cultural symbols.” Personal preference was paramount, even if it skewed towards the worn or the scruffy. She’s undergone a complete metamorphosis, yet remains undeniably herself: constantly searching for that perfect outfit, the ideal wig, the ultimate transition soundtrack encapsulated by the early, haunting melodies of Nico. “Wrap your woes in dreams, cast them all aside.”
Brian Dillon’s Affinities, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, is reportedly working on his next projects, Ambivalence (a rumination on education) and Gone to Earth (a tribute to Kate Bush).