This Body I Wore: A Memoir

“[An] achingly beautiful memoir.” —Manuel Betancourt, The New York Times Book Review Long before Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time, far removed from drag and ballroom culture, there were countless trans women living and dying as men, most of whom didn’t even know they were trans. In This Body I Wore, the award-winning poet and essayist Diana Goetsch chronicles her long journey to coming out, a path that runs parallel to the emergence of the trans community over the past several decades. She brings us into her childhood, her time as a dynamic and beloved teacher at New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, and her plunge into the city’s crossdressing subculture in the 1980s and ’90s. Goetsch has written not a transition memoir, but rather a full account of a trans life, one both unusually public and closeted. All too often trans lives are reduced to before-and-after photos, but what if that before photo lasted fifty years?