Before I continue exploring the music that shaped my life, I feel compelled to share two formative events—moments that forever altered my path. These are not stories about music, but without them, the soundtrack of my life would sound very different.
During fifth grade, I began suffering from unexplained stomach pains. The episodes were severe enough to excuse me from physical education, leaving me on the sidelines while my classmates played. No one seemed to know what was wrong.
Then, on the first Friday of October in sixth grade, something changed. In the middle of class, I broke down in tears. Mr. Calhoun, my teacher, gently suggested I head home. I made the one-mile walk through Rosalia, Washington, passing the local doctor’s office—where I’d been told so many times, “We’re not sure what’s causing this.” Across the street, a man named Ray Boltman spotted me. He owned the service station and knew my dad from the high school. Ray rushed to call him. “Fred, your son has appendicitis. Get him to the hospital. Now.”
The 33-mile drive to Spokane led to an admission at Deaconess Hospital. The doctors insisted it wasn’t appendicitis, but said exploratory surgery was necessary to rule out anything serious. What they found shocked them: it was appendicitis—severely inflamed and dangerously out of place, located several inches from where it should have been. Surgery was just the beginning. I remained feverish, spiking triple-digit temperatures, and underwent two more operations in the weeks that followed.
After nearly a month, I was sent home. I was thrilled to return to my grandparents’ house. But within days, I was back in the hospital. Years later, my mother told me that when I was discharged that first time, the doctors had given up hope. They sent me home not because I was better—but because they thought I should spend my final days surrounded by family.
But I survived. And two years later, I faced another challenge. In woodshop class, while reaching for a scrap of wood on a still-spinning table saw, I badly injured my hand. My fingers were shattered—three were nearly lost—but surgeons managed to save them. At the time, I was trying to learn piano and trumpet. With my hand in a sling and months of healing ahead, those dreams faded.
These were traumatic events, both for me and for my family. But they aren’t the full picture. To understand who I was becoming, you have to go further back.
I was born in early summer 1953, a year after my older brother. My parents had hoped for a daughter to “complete” the family. I know they were happy I was born healthy—but by the time I was three, I was already hearing stories about how much they had wanted a girl. My mother and grandmother told the story often enough that it shaped how I saw myself.
I grew up believing I’d disappointed them—believing that if only I’d been born a girl, life would have been better for everyone. I’m not saying I was unloved. But I do think I spent much of my childhood trying to earn a kind of love I wasn’t sure I deserved.
One of my favorite songs back then was from our church hymnal: Jesus Loves Me, This I Know. I sang it with the kind of fierce joy only a child who is desperate to feel truly loved can offer.
Somewhere around fourth or fifth grade, I heard a story that would quietly shift my entire identity. A classmate had been caught wearing his sister’s clothes. The story was whispered like scandal—but to me, it sparked a deep, immediate truth: I want to do that, too. Not as a game. Not as a joke. I knew instantly that dressing in my sister’s clothes would bring me a kind of happiness I didn’t yet have the words for. And just as instantly, I knew it was something I’d have to keep secret.
When I was released from the hospital after the appendicitis, it was late November. Because of my slow recovery, the decision was made that I wouldn’t return to school until January. I would be home alone for most of that time.
For me, this was a gift.
It meant freedom. It meant privacy. It meant I could dress up—really dress up—and explore what that meant for me, alone in the safety of my home.
I know now that I began crossdressing before the surgery, sometime earlier that year. But it was in those quiet weeks after the hospital that my desire was able to fully bloom. Between the medical trauma and the emotional weight I carried, mine was not the childhood of an average boy. And while I’ll share more about how these early challenges shaped me in the posts ahead, I’ll say this:
The real soundtrack of my life may not have begun the day JFK died.
It may have started the day I first wanted to wear a dress.
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