Valentine Tremens: The Octuple Life of Zin Hitman

Friends,

What was it like to be trapped in the gender binary in the 1930s? I don’t even want to think about it.

But I did think about it when I read the biography of sci-fi author James Tiptree, aka Alice Bradley Sheldon. As a young girl—the only child of two wealthy socialites—Alice accompanied her parents on adventures all around the world, but they spent most of their time deep in the heart of Africa, where few American children dreamed of going. They explored and hunted in regions barely accessible by foot; they spent time in a cannibal village in the Congo; they slept in hammocks in the mouths of volcanoes.

Mary & Alice in Africa

Alice was always guarded like a rare jewel in Africa. She had big Congolese bodyguards, and was often left in their care while her parents hunted big game and did research on the tribal cultures. It was a dangerous place for a 6-yr-old white girl whose survival skills were pared in Chicago’s elite social circles. It was a unique set of environments that left young Alice feeling like some kind of valuable object—just another of her parents’ collectibles.

Alice knew her father would’ve rather had a son (like every father in America!). But her parents did the best they could for her. She went to good schools. She had several exciting careers. She joined the Army in the 30s and worked at the Pentagon during The War. She had an almost creepy-close relationship with her mother, but had difficulty connecting w/ other people her age. She was especially confused about men, women and dating.

Her life was not that of a “typical girl.” Even among the privileged debutantes of Chicago, Alice’s life resume was packed with hijinx so uncommon for a young woman, it was hard for her to find a man she felt was her equal. (She was also super-intelligent, like CIA-intelligent, a brilliant artist & writer, and very ambitious career-wise). She felt stifled playing the role of “the pretty & helpless object” which was the only role for women within the bounds of 1930s heteronormativity. 

She had an attraction to other girls in high school and college, but if she had trouble finding a man who was her equal, she was surely bored to tears by the way girls’ thinking was limited to love, marriage, babies, home. She would always try to rouse the wildness she knew must exist inside these poor unenlightened girls, but they never took the bait. They were content to have boyfriends, marry, & make babies.

After Tiptree's short story "The Girl Who Was Plugged In"

Much of her adult life was spent in the male dominated military, where she was well-respected and received lots of male attention (oh yeah, she was also good looking. Imagine that.) But she always resented having to pretend to “be less” so that her dates wouldn’t be intimidated.

Even in her childhood in Africa, Alice lamented being a girl. She knew that if she’d been a boy she would’ve been given her own gun & taken out on the hunts. Later, she knew that she would have a much higher rank in the military if she were a man. By age 30, she was pretty ate up about how being a woman had cost her things that would’ve been within reach if she had been born in a different body.

She spent a lot of time thinking & writing about bodies. Women’s bodies and the sovereignty that eludes them. She was very much like me in that she hated being a woman but fought hard for women to obtain the basic status of “human being.”

There were many times while I was reading this book that I reached for my phone because I wanted to call this person I was reading about who was so much like me (minus the trips to Africa & the wealthiness). Who felt as much like I did that her body was a loathesome birth defect that kept her from living up to her full potential.

Alice struggled with dating & relationships, with being considered an inferior version of an Army officer. With the question of motherhood—could she? should she? why did she feel nothing for children?

She was 36 (ancient in those days) when she finally met a man who was at least her intellectual equal, and they actually carved out a nice life. They retired and bought a chicken farm in New England. Her husband, Ting, stayed on at the CIA and Alice stayed home with the chickens and started writing. At first she wrote articles for magazines, like her mother did, but Alice wasn’t as successful as her mother at writing about “lady things.”

Because of course, that’s what the magazines wanted from her. LADY STUFF!!! Gardening. marriage advice. Blah blah blah. After several years, Alice began writing short stories. Speculaltive fiction, aka sci-fi.

Again, not many magazines wanted to publish fantastic stories by a …lady.  So one day at the grocery store, after seeing the name “Tiptree” on a jar of jam, Alice came up with a pseudonym. James Tiptree Jr was born in aisle 3.

We got to be bunny-parents for 3 days in March

Writing under a pseudonym gave Alice all the confidence she had lacked in her writing before. She submitted some of her new stories and they were immediately published. And not only that—everyone loved them. All the budding sci fi authors of the 1950s & 60s really loved Tiptree. All the publishers loved “him.”

Alice, like many housewives in that day, took dexedrine to keep her peppy & productive around the house. Dexedrine was also a great drug for writing crazy speculative space-age shit. Lots of writiers used it too. Writing on dexedrine was jet fuel to their synapses.

By the time she harnessed her identity as James Tiptree and had a reputation as a force in the sci fi world, Alice was about 50 years old. But this close-knit community had no idea, and everyone thought “he” was some young, hip author who had just materialized out of nowhere. A savant of sorts.

This was fine with Alice. She was thrilled with living this double life where she could be who she wanted and no one could “see” her and diminish her importance as a wordsmith. She struck up elaborate friendships with all the other sci fi authors of the time—Ellison, Dick, LeGuin, Heinlein, et al—they all corresponded by mail like we do now on Snapchat.

After several years of publishing works under her pseudonym, people started to wonder about Tiptree’s identity. They all had met at writer’s conferences, sci fi conventions, Nebula award ceremonies. Of course, Tiptree was always invited to these events but he always declined. Year after year after year. Even the year “he” won the Nebula, he avoided the ceremony & they mailed it to him.

It got to the point where people were trying to find him. Stalking him. Trying to put a face to the name. He had become such a compelling & mysterious figure. Rumors started that he had some highly classified government job — that’s actually how Tiptree kept his followers at a distance, told them his career wouldn’t allow for much socializing. And at one point young Harlan Ellison got wind of Alice’s parents’ address in Chicago, from some careless comment Tiptree made in his correspondence. 

It was Ellison who did the detective work that led him to the home of Alice & Ting Sheldon one day, about 10 years in to Tiptree’s masquerade. Ellison and his friend rang the doorbell & Alice answered and when they asked for Tiptree she pretended she had no idea what they were talking about. But the word was out. The rumors were spreading that James Tiptree was a 50-year-old housewife on a New England chicken farm.

Bunny Farm w spider

Being found out was devastating to Alice. She loved her secret identity—the authority and relevance that never would’ve been been granted to an “Alice Sheldon.” She had a difficult “coming out” to all her sci fi pen pals, and though they all claimed it didn’t matter, that she would always be Tiptree to them—it did matter. The love & respect dwindled away slowly, the letters between them stopped, Alice could not be Alice with the people for whom she had been Tiptree.

And therefore she decided that she simply…couldn’t be. It wasn’t immediately after the Tiptree leak, but a few years later, depressed and robbed of all sense of belonging to the group that once held her in such high esteem, she proposed a murder/suicide pact to her husband. Ting was not in favor if the plan, but he was quite a bit older, losing his sight and becoming feeble. So—tragically—Alice carried out the plan without his consent. 

One night as he slept, she shot him in the head, then called a friend and told him to come right over, that he would find both of them dead, and she shot herself.  A terrible end to a brilliant mind, no matter how tormented by its own dysphoric perceptions.

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The story of Tiptree stuck with me for weeks, months after I read it. Shit, it’s still sticking to me. Another person who felt just as I felt, was damaged so hard by the gender binary that exists to box us in, to keep us separate & unequal, to define us as breeding machines, to label us “superior” & “inferior.”  

Most people don’t think about their gender anymore than they do about the color of the sky. Oh, it’s blue? Okay. That’s what it is. No need to question why the sky isn’t chartreuse. Most people don’t question the gender they’re “assigned” or the “role” that goes with it.

And that was always disappointing to me—I couldn’t relate to girls who were giggly & happy & cared so much about being pretty & having long hair & fingernails & which boy was cute. I was always like, let’s overthrow the regime!! And they were like, not now I’m playing with my little ponies!

I guess the 70s & 80s were not much better than the 30s & 40s. Anyway, I’ve always been terrible at communicating my issues with gender—

I’m too emotionally attached to the dilemma. I rant & spit upon myself like garbage. It scares people. But Alice at least came from a loving family who did everything to support her in her ambitions. And I think in those days, it was such a silent epidemic, absolutely nowhere to seek advice for gender dysphoria. Only destructive Freudian platitudes to turn to. It wasn’t as if she had any other way to communicate it except through sci fi, where all things are possible.

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“Women never seem to be zesty connoisseurs—Life not there for my savoring. But if women don’t sit around talking about wine, whiskey, cars or horses, What do they deal in? Are they alive?”  ~ Alice Sheldon (1972)

“Funny about that thrill; finally realized what it comes from: Subconsciously, a conviction that the really good writers aren’t human. That the works are messages in bottles from the writer’s world. You know? So when Sturgeon or Bunch or somebody turns out to be an actual Terran primate using—of all things—the U.S. mails, with zip number for god’s sake—I get about the same kick the Ozma people would if one of the pulsars began to rap out binary Yeats.”  

~ James Tiptree, to Phillip Dick after receiving complimentary correspondence from him (1969)

“The distasteful proof that my sexuality is bound up with masochistic fantasies of helplessness depressed me profoundly. I am not a man, I am not the do-er, the penetrator. And Tiptree was “magical” manhood, his pen my prick. I had through him all the power & prestige of masculinity. I was—though an aging intellectual—of those who own the world. How I loathe being a woman. Wanting to be done to…?

Tiptree’s “death” has made me face what I never really went into with Bob Harper—my self-hate as a woman. And my view of the world as structured by raw power… I want power. I want to be listened to. And I’ll never have it. I’m stuck with this perverse second-rate body; my life.”  ~ Alice’s journal entry in response to a report of child sexual abuse in the newspaper (1977)

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Your old pals Cody & Hillary from Singlewood. We watched a show called '13 Reasons Why' this weekend. It was disturbing and PROBLEMATIC and I may write about it here…in the Octopus Diary

I hope you enjoy the Tiptree Art. It’s hard for me to be creative these days. I feel worried & anxious much of the time. But I am going to do something different—

I’m going to keep painting the same thing over & over. I will paint the African landscape & the girl who was plugged in many times over the year. And we’ll see what subtle variations (or not so subtle) arise…

ARISE!!!!!