The Past: Don't Look Back
"This isn’t rock that affirms a person’s life, and isn’t rock that questions a person’s actions. This is rock that questions a person’s identity, a person’s existence."
Hello, my chilling Charleses, Charlies, and Charlottes... Miss Dee Jay here, for Trans Pirate Radio. I think it's time to talk about where this little soiree got its start.
This all started, oh... about thirty years ago, give or take a month or so, on a highway in the middle of nowhere.
I was driving on the road back to college after Thanksgiving in 1995… yes, I am that old... and things had gone very wrong. Up until a few months previously, my academic career had been stellar: honor student, excellent grades. But something that summer had gone very wrong. It felt like hitting a wall; to understand how sudden it was, in one class, I’d made a 98 on the first exam… and, by the end of the summer, I had failed the course.
The autumn wasn’t any better. Something had broken in me that summer, something I couldn’t identify, and something I couldn’t fix. Whatever had gotten me this far wasn’t there anymore. Either it had been damaged somehow, burned out… or it was just gone entirely. And I had no clue how to go forward.
I’d always been the eccentrically-smart one. I was the odd genius in the room. When I was asked to demonstrate the Doppler Effect, I ran around the room screaming. I was the one who participated in math and science competitions and trivia contests. That was the role I had carved out for myself. That was now shattered.
If I wasn’t the brain, if I wasn’t the smart one… who was I?
As I drove on this road to nowhere, a song cut through the airwaves and into my skull. I blinked; it was a song from a band I was familiar with and liked a lot, but I somehow hadn’t gotten around to hearing this one. New lyrics from a familiar voice, and new composition from a musical genius.
“If I said what’s on my mind
You’d turn and walk away
Disappearing way back in your dreams
It’s so hard to be unkind
So easy just to say
That everything is just the way it seems.”
And then, if that wasn’t cutting enough, the end of the first verse cut in:
“You look up at me
And somewhere in your mind you see
A man I’ll never be…”
At this point, as I’m driving on this lonely road, I started crying. I so rarely cry, even now, and so I didn’t know why I was crying. All I knew is that I couldn’t be the man that my family wanted me to be. I just couldn’t. It wasn’t working, I was failing, I was a failure and I would never be that person they wanted me to be.
For those unfamiliar with the song, just listen. And just imagine what a trans woman, even someone who hadn’t figured out her transness, would think of this.
"A Man I'll Never Be", from Boston's album, Don't Look Back (1978). Music and lyrics by Tom Scholz.
Up until that time, when it came to the band Boston, I had listened to their breathtaking debut, their 1986 album Third Stage, and their at-the-time-recent release Walk On - absolute banger albums, all of them. I hadn’t gotten around to listening to the one in between, the Don’t Look Back album from 1978… which is why this one surprised me so. “A Man I’ll Never Be” is a seeming contradiction for the band and for the album. It is easily one of Boston’s softest and most introspective songs in comparison to the rest of its discography; moreover, its lyrics contradict several other parts of the Don’t Look Back album, most notably the title track and “Feelin’ Satisfied”. This is, put simply, as far from driving, masculine hard rock as Boston gets. This is existentialist rock; the sort of rock that demands the question, “Who am I?”, with an answer that may not be a good one, with an answer that may be very different than expected. It is very much like the scene in the movie Barbie, where the title character asks, "Do you ever think about dying?" - a jarring and challenging question in the middle of what is, at least on the surface, a party. As a result, it never quite fit into the rest of Boston’s discography, not the hard rock of “More Than A Feeling” or “Don’t Look Back”, nor even a power ballad like “Amanda”.
This isn’t rock that affirms a person’s life, and isn’t rock that questions a person’s actions. This is rock that questions a person’s identity, a person’s existence.
And, frankly, any trans woman would have the same doubts as expressed in the song - maybe not with the same intentions as the band, but certainly with the same words and feelings. While I hadn’t figured it out quite yet, the hints were most certainly there. And those hints had me thinking I was a freak of some kind. Frankly, psychology in the 90s had a lot of growing up to do; it was a creation largely of white, straight, cisgender men, and thus was dominated by the thoughts and perspectives of white, straight, cisgender men. Those people controlled the narrative of what it meant to be trans, and had so many of us, myself included, thinking we were wrong somehow… defective.
The feelings, the rumblings, the dreams would all coalesce about 18 months later. Something happened I couldn’t deny, something I couldn’t make an excuse for. I broke, and I couldn’t fix myself until I found the right road home.
Through that journey, “A Man I’ll Never Be” became my favorite Boston song, because it described my life so well. As the song goes, “You’ll never know just how hard I tried.” I tried. My goodness, I tried.
But I never was that man.
And never will be.
And it almost killed me to try.
The song became an anthem of sorts. When living as male hurt too much, “A Man I’ll Never Be” became catharsis, existential pain excised through Tom Scholz's musical genius and Brad Delp's golden voice. It was the song I could listen to and feel the wrongness, process the wrongness. As I went through my undergrad and my engineering career... as I went through grad school and into my current line of work... the song helped keep me going, keep me alive until I could make right what once went wrong.
When I first listened to “A Man I’ll Never Be” post-transition, I burst out in laughter at the absurdity of it all. Now, it fills me with a strange nostalgia for a time passed. With this song from the album Don’t Look Back, I do look back. The song helped guide me home; it helped me process what I couldn’t address until I could become the Woman I Was Meant To Be.
Life has a soundtrack. For trans people like myself, that soundtrack might look a little different, have songs that maybe wouldn't be found on a cis person's playlist. The purpose of Trans Pirate Radio is to explore that soundtrack.
And for me as a trans woman? "A Man I'll Never Be" is Side 1, Track 1.
We visited the Ghost of Christmas Past on this little jaunt into the Transgender Jukebox. Next week, as Christmas approaches, we'll dive a little closer to now, and deal with a song that is explicitly trans, one I didn't find out about until only a week or so ago.
Until then, be well, take care, and keep on dancing through the fire.
