I Am My Own Wife: The Real Story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf Book

Touching and compassionate! I came across Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (1928-2002) after reading the entire oeuvre of Quentin Crisp. Like Crisp, Mahlsdorf was a true "queer pioneer" (eck, that word)'a person who was bullied, bashed and brutalized merely for being herself, not to mention lived through the historical vicissitudes of her era (WWII and fascism, and later, the Cold War and socialism), only coming into her own as a male-to-female transvestite toward the end of her life and, as it were, the end of the twentieth century. As the founder, superintendent and restorer of the Gründerzeit Museum in Berlin, Mahlsdorf is both uniquely empathetic and thundering rational. She continues to give sanctuary to young people struggling with their sexual identities even after the museum is trashed by neo-Nazis. She says she doesn't feel the need for a sex reassignment surgery because it can't confer any more psychic or spiritual closure than living as a woman already does. I laughed, cried, then watched Rosa von Praunheim's brilliant documentary of the same name.

Both Mahlsdorf and Praunheim are followers of the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, a German physician, gay rights activist and early advocate of the "third sex" (his book Transvestites is given to the teenage Mahlsdorf, then going by the name Lothar Berfelde, by his lesbian aunt Louise, who lives as a man on her own estate). Incidentally, Praunheim himself was a friend and colleague of the artist David Wojnarowicz, the subject of Cynthia Carr's beautiful book Fire in the Belly. It elicits the warmest feeling knowing that the best people are connected.