The writer Lucy Sante always tried to keep a safe distance from herself and her own desires.
Until, at 66, she broke free.
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But Sante never wrote much about her feelings.
Her guard was always up, an observer.
Certainly, it inspired many readers to admire Santes unsentimental erudition and seek to emulate it.
She was a little miserable.
But the sort of quote-wheedling intimacy arbitrage of celebrity biography was never really her talent or interest.
She fed more in every image of myself I possessed, beginning at about age 12.
The first person she told, after her therapist, was Lipson.
And I was like, Oh, who is that?
She showed me another and another, Lipson tells me.
She had to show me five or six pictures and tell me that they were her.
She thought the whole story would become apparent, but I didnt know who they were.
To me, they were just a bunch of pictures of people I didnt know.
There are many reasons why I repressed my lifelong desire to be a woman.
It was, first of all, impossible, Sante writes in the book.
My parents would have called a priest and had me committed to some monastery,lettre de cachetstyle.
And the culture was far from prepared, of course.
I knew about Christine Jorgensen when I was fairly young, but she seemed to be an isolated case.
Mostly what you came across were aggressively vile jokes from Vegas comedians and the occasional titillating tabloid story.
Now, though, Sante plunged headlong into her coming out.
The reintroduction of Luc as Lucy would be a bit of a shock to many of her friends.
Could she come out without risking everything she had built?
Then there were the practicalities, how she should dress and walk and wear her hair.
Other than some Bard students, she didnt know many trans people to model herself on.
Yet her friends immediately noticed how much more unfettered Lucy seemed.
She always had, as Luc, a dark side and moody side, says Jarmusch.
But she has been relieved of something a light is spilling out.
I cant remember Luc smiling in a photograph, says Pinckney.
But Lucy does, and that, I think, is the story.
Inside Santes house, the walls are crowded with paintings, collages, and flea-market gleanings.
There are shelves of books and painted signs and folk-art figurines and lots of spooky old black-and-white photography.
This is a Basquiat its a collage that incorporates a photo-booth self-portrait one of the color-Xerox postcards he made.
Its been disputed but not successfully.
I am pretty sure he only made one each and destroyed the original.
You could still, at the time, buy a house for under a hundred thousand dollars.
More so than for many writers, Santes is a syllabus self.
To read her is to know she has done more interesting reading than you have.
Shes not overtly social, says Jarmusch.
And yet she is an anthropologist of social phenomena.
She has written all of her books on it.
Sante has always seen herself as an outsider.
When she was still in grade school, the family had immigrated to New Jersey.
She wasnt much for sports, but she ransacked her local public library in New Providence.
Her intellect clearly stood out.
Regis, an all-boys school, was not known for producing artists, she writes in her new memoir.
(She herself has never been sexually attracted to men.)
After school, she began to explore downtown, which was then in its hippie denouement.
She continued her reading:Thomas PynchonsV.
Upon graduating, she got a full scholarship to Columbia University.
There, she and Pinckney briefly ran the literary magazine.
I really thought that would be my life.
Her friends were filmmakers, photographers, and musicians.
It used to be like it was high school.
Their tastes were also scavenged.
We loved crime novels and film noir and Dadaism and William Burroughs, Jarmusch continues.
Also: Brecht, reggae, Walter Abish, Walter Benjamin, Blaise Cendrars, and Algerian wine.
We were all interested in shifting personae, says Jarmusch.
They were young smart people with strong opinions.
We had knock-down, drag-out fights about who liked what and why, says Pinckney.
I fuck with my emotions the way a stunt driver fucks with his body.
By the time she was 30, in 1984, she had quit to write.
But something was always off.
The life Sante found herself in seemed chosen for her, somehow not as shed intended it to be.
Some of this dislocation was apparently frustrated ambition.
Jim Jarmusch, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Nan Goldin.
And I thought,Im fucked, they did it, I didnt, bye, see you later.
Later,Gangs of New Yorkhired her as a historical consultant to get the olde-tyme mayhem just right.
Her fascination with the urban gothic has continued.
Its publication, and success, coincided with the couples leaving the East Village.
Sante and Pierson met and married in 1992, the year afterLow Lifewas published.
Sante credits Pierson with moving them upstate.
Pierson felt they were just being practical.
The couple had Raphael in 1999 and shifted their lives fully upstate.
But Sante was restless.
She met Lipson in 2007 in an invitation-only Google group called the Hermenautic Circle.
(Lipson didnt know who Sante was I had never heard of her before, she says.
I was living outside that cultural stratum, which I think was refreshing to her.)
It was limited to 100 members.
They got to know each other just as Santes marriage was falling apart.
Sante and Lipson started dating.
Their life was quiet; Sante still claims to have almost no friends in Kingston.
Sante, as someone of obscure, cosmopolitan enthusiasms, seemed to fit in fine.
I start out as a fanboy, says Hagan.
Low Life,that is required reading in my universe.
(She later reassured him about their friendship.)
She was always the second key in.
It just becomes about upchuck or something.
None of those alternate lives involve her being a girl.
One was about the development of a sensibility.
And this is the wizard behind the curtain.
Still, suddenly, things in our past made sense.
There would always be that sort of gender cliche.
Lucy would go inside with us and clean up.
Lucys gentleness suddenly it made sense that she was female.
Jarmusch is entirely supportive but seems to be still intellectualizing it.
Lucy has always been uncovering ghosts and duality and masking and style of presentation, he says.
In an aesthetic sense, she has always been more attracted to deception than desire.
Then he pauses, considering: I dont even know what that means.
In the end, her coming out broke up her relationship with Lipson.
Apparently, I was in this lesbian relationship, Lipson says wryly.
But seeing how much happier Sante was made it easier to get used to.
I dont have the imagination to see it.
So I have to take her word for it that it is there.
Santes son, Raphael, who graduated from Bard in May, didnt seem much bothered by it.
Hes known trans kids since he was 11, she says.
However, Luc was more real than Lucy thinks.
Nobody loved Luc as an abstraction.
That was a very real person.
By the time she did, it was the fall of 2021 and she had already started transitioning.
So strange to be someone lifelike but too early.
Now she is convinced it was actually about transitioning.
Its in her house in Kingston (where it is getting late; weve been speaking for hours).
Not that, she quickly adds, Bard was a terrible place to work.
But she will soon turn 70.
It was time to turn that page.
The younger ones are going to be literal-minded.
Theyre going to be cops.
They will transform it into the cliche you were avoiding to begin with.
The lemming scrum of competitive consumer behavior has never interested her.
I still have to call her.
A star is born a star.
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