I’m a huge huge Comeback fan. I literally watch it so much that throughout the course of shooting this season they’ve had to tell me to stop saying my lines like Valerie Cherish. Like, ‘You’re line’s sounding a little Valerie Cherish can you just take it down a notch,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, right. Sorry sorry sorry.’ Sometimes we’ll actually rehearse our lines as Valerie Cherish while we’re rehearsing a scene. We are all obsessed with the show.”

Friends of a transgender woman who died suddenly in October were shocked to see their friend presented as a man in an open casket during her funeral service reports The Miami Herald. Jennifer Gable, born Geoff Gable, died suddenly on her shift with Wells Fargo as a customer service coordinator; an aneurysm is suspected of killing the otherwise healthy woman. Gable’s friends attended the funeral, but upon seeing Gable’s body in the casket they found themselves disgusted with what had been done to Gable’s body.

“I am disgusted. A great and dear friend’s mom went to the funeral today. It was not closed casket. They cut her hair, suit on. How can they bury her as Geoff when she legally changed her name. So very sad. Jen you will be missed and people who know you know that you are at peace.”Said Gable’s friend, Stacy Dee Hudson, in a post on Facebook:

Gable’s obituary explicitly referred to her as male, even though Gable legally changed her name to Jennifer long before her death. Meghan Stabler, a board member of the Human Rights Campaign and member of HRC’s National Business Council, expressed disdain for the lack of respect given to Gable’s body and identity.

Said Stabler:

“No mention of the woman she knew she was and had lived as for several years. Just erosion of her identity and an old photograph of how the father perceived her to be.

“She had done what she needed to do legally to be seen as her authentic self. Her father erased her identity either though ignorance or arrogance, but who knows what the parent was going through?”

Stabler met Gable online after she reached out to her for advice on how to proceed with the transition process. Mike Parke of Magic Valley Funeral Home and Crematory in Twin Falls said Gable’s death certificate listed her as male and buried her accordingly.

Said Parke:

“The death certificate says Geoffrey AKA Jennifer Gable. The last few years she lived as Jennifer. They buried him as Geoff. A tormented situation for all those involved.”

BY GARTH GREENWELL

Disorientation afflicts nearly all of the characters in Shelly Oria’s nimble and disarmingly moving debut collection of stories. Many of them are (like Oria herself) Israeli immigrants in New York City, navigating multiple cultures and languages; others find themselves in worlds where the usual rules (of weather, say, or time) break down; all of them are bewildered by desire.

The narrator of the title story has come to the United States after finishing her military service, because “staying in Tel Aviv meant starting my life,” and “It’s a scary thing, starting your life.” As is true throughout the collection, Oria is excellent in detailing how the texture of daily life differs in the two countries: “When I first moved to New York, I kept opening my purse every time I entered a building, before realizing that there was no security guard. And every time I felt relieved, and every time I felt orphaned, and every time I felt surprised at both.”

The book’s title comes from her attempt to keep score of the advantages and disadvantages of her two cities. She never gets very far: “I forget to keep track, and I have to start counting all over again every time.” She meditates on the strangeness of Central Park, “the idea of having a designated area for greenery”: “Tel Aviv isn’t carefully planned like that—trees often choose their own location, and most streets stretch in unpredictable directions, creating a pattern of impulse.”

What’s true of the streets of Tel Aviv is also true of the magnetic men and (more often) women that Oria’s protagonists can’t fully know or possess, and many of the stories are haunted by infidelity. In “This Way I Don’t Have to Be,” a woman is addicted to sleeping with married men. She watches them during sex for the moment they imagine the possibilities they’ve left unlived, when “their entire lives turn to air,” an unsettled state of longing we sense the narrator craves for herself.

In “None the Wiser,” a sly, acid, wonderful story about jealousy and age and grief, a woman’s own desires gradually become clear as she gossips about her neighbors. And in one of the collection’s standout stories, “The Disneyland of Albany,” Avner, an Israeli artist who has left his family behind to seek his career in America, discovers his wife’s infidelity from stray remarks his young daughter makes during a visit.

In the collection’s final story, which might also be its finest, “Phonetic Masterpieces of Absurdity,” the book’s preoccupation with erotic disappointment combines powerfully with one of Oria’s other major themes, the tragedies and absurdities of ongoing conflict in the Middle East—a conflict that her characters can never fully escape, at home or abroad.

CONTINUED, AFTER THE JUMP…

The story’s protagonist, Nadine, is interviewed and photographed by Mia, an artist whose current project involves photographing sex workers. Over the course of Mia’s visits, Nadine is surprised to find herself more and more entranced by Mia, even as she’s bored by her questions: “All of Mia’s questions are the same question. Something something sex worker something something choice something. Nadine always pauses before she answers. It appears as if she is thinking hard, she knows that. But the pause is the time when she says with no sound, Ask me something real.”

Nadine wants to communicate a more nuanced idea of her relationships with her clients, the way even this transactional sex can be the occasion, however compromised, of authentic communication: “One thing she wishes she could explain to Mia: she doesn’t mind the moans. Or more honestly, though this embarrasses her: the moans are her favorite part. When seeing a client for the first time, that is what she’s curious about, and she waits for that one moment, when the animal in him speaks to her.”

Nadine is changed by meeting Mia, not least by falling in love with her. (It seems to be the first time Nadine has been so strongly attracted to a woman.) And Mia is changed as well. Her encounters with Nadine—including the only physical contact between them, a brief, unguarded massage—allow her to return both to Israel and to another series of photographs, this one of members of the Israeli military.

“It’s so normal in Israel, Mia says, the idea of the military, of everyone being part of that military, a country of soldiers. Eighteen-year-old kids getting M16s, being trained, and no one sees how f–ked up it is. It’s, like, ‘What choice do we have,’ ‘we’re surrounded by enemies,’ all that stuff. And for years I’ve been wanting to shout: But can you still see? Necessary or not, can you look at it?”

This is a rare moment of vulnerability for the distant photographer. (Earlier in the story Nadine wonders, “How can you get to know someone who reaches for the camera every time she feels something? You cannot.”) Talking with Nadine shakes something free in Mia, and allows her to return to her other, more difficult project. The story’s final scene, which takes place months later, affirms the depth of the connection they’ve formed, even as it denies them the kind of relationship they both long for.

Oria’s characters are often stripped of the usual, prefabricated categories of identity: “I think, Who is this person?” the narrator of the title story wonders, “That me who isn’t Israeli and isn’t American, isn’t gay and isn’t straight–who is she?” This disorientation makes them profoundly vulnerable, able to ask with a sometimes devastating bluntness the most dangerous questions: “I think: This is what there is, this is my life. I think: Do I want it or not?”  

In Oria’s excellent collection, these questions result in stories that are heartbreaking, inventive, and almost miraculously alive to the subtleties of feeling.

Previous reviews…
Colm Tóibín’s ‘Nora Webster’
Saeed Jones’s ‘Prelude to Bruise’
Michael Carroll’s ‘Little Reef and Other Stories’
Francine Prose’s ‘Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932’

Garth Greenwell is the author of Mitko, which won the 2010 Miami University Press Novella Prize and was a finalist for both the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award and a Lambda Award. His new novel, What Belongs to You, is forthcoming from Faber/FSG in 2015. He lives in Iowa City, where he is an Arts Fellow at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Connect with him on Facebook and Twitter.

Before Melissa Etheridge, before Ellen, before Rosie, there was k.d. lang. The Canadian singer-songwriter with one of the most moving voices on the planet kicked open the closet door in 1992 when she appeared on the cover of The Advocate.

“I am very proud to be part of the evolution of the integration of gays in society. It is certainly something I didn’t do alone but I am proud to be a part of it,” she told Gay Calgary Magazine in 2008. “This woman in Toronto, Debbie Pearson, came up with the term ‘dykon’ which I think is hilarious. If I helped people have a more open, healthy relationship with their parents or friends, or more importantly themselves that makes me really happy. Anything I can do to help people feel more comfortable and confidant in who they are, that is great.”

Her coming out kicked off a lot of media exposure in the early ‘90s, including the now iconic Vanity Fair cover featuring lang in a barbershop chair receiving a straight-razor shave from Cindy Crawford. The shot, by photographer Herb Ritts, as well as a rumored fling with Madonna, helped turn lang into a household name and launch her album Ingénue’s commercial success.

Check out some of our favorite ‘dykonic’ k.d. lang performances, AFTER THE JUMP …

Lang’s first introduction to international audiences came courtesy her performance at the 1988 Winter Olympics opening ceremonies in Calgary. Heavily influenced by country singers, especially Patsy Cline, lang grew up in Alberta and said she knew from a very early age that she was gay. ‘I never even gave it a second thought,” she told The Daily Mail in 2008. “I wasn’t scared to act on it. I just did it and I didn’t feel like I was the only person in the world who felt that way.”

Her most well-known track, “Constant Craving,” peaked at No. 38 on the Billboard Hot 100, No. 2 on the Billboard adult contemporary chart and earned lang a Grammy Award in 1993.

She’s also well-known for her androgynous style. She described her experience in an interview with The Guardian in 2008: “I like going through the world kind of ambiguous … Being androgynous changes the sexual playing field too, because a lot of gay guys flirt with me, a lot of straight women flirt with me.” She played up her femininity in her campy video for “Miss Chatelaine,” above.

Lang leapt at the chance to record “Sing It Loud,” written by Joe Pisapia, who co-produced her album of the same name. “For me to sing that would be such an anthem for people who feel slightly left of center,” she told the Huffington Post in 2011. “You know, I kind of represent a different section of humanity, and I just thought it was a good song to support that.”

You may have caught k.d. lang’s gorgeous rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” during the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games. While her ability to belt a beautiful ballad hasn’t changed, she has seen a change for the LGBT community. “I think the gay community has grown up and evolved,” she said to Curve Magazine. “I think society is more open about sexual orientation in general.”

What are your favorite k.d. lang performances?