Tom Bliss:

Charlie, so great to sit down with you

Charley Burton:

Absolutely, pleasure.

Tom Bliss:

Awesome. We always start with the same question. If you could please say and spell your name.

Charley Burton:

Sure. My name is Charley Burton:, c-h-a-r-l-e-y b-u-r-t-o-n.

Tom Bliss:

Great. Can you tell me when and where you were born?

Charley Burton:

I was born in Charlottesville, Virginia on May 27th, 1960.

Juan Raymundo Ramos:

Yes. And one thing I want to point out, Charley, is as much as possible,

Juan Raymundo Ramos:

don't move your chair left and right.

Charley Burton:

Gotcha.

Tom Bliss:

Good, thanks. Okay. If you can tell me what Charlottesville was like in the time when you were born.

Charley Burton:

It was in the sixties so we can imagine what the sixties was like. Charlottesville is a mid-Atlantic state, but still considered a southern state. There were white and colored water fountains. There were places that we couldn't go. We had to sit in the

Charley Burton:

balcony of movies. I mean, I don't remember it being incredibly horrible, but I just know that it was different.

Tom Bliss:

I know Charlottesville was one of the last to have protests against segregated restaurants.

Charley Burton:

That's correct.

Tom Bliss:

[inaudible] do you remember the protests at all?

Charley Burton:

I do not remember the protests though that they had in Charlottesville back in the sixties. I've read about it. But I guess that

Charley Burton:

that wasn't a distinct memory for me.

Tom Bliss:

And what were your earliest memories of your parents and your family?

Charley Burton:

My earliest memory of my parents were that they worked a lot. My mother was a very go-getter. I mean, she had a limited education. Both of them did, but they were brilliant people. But I just remember my parents did a lot of stuff.

Charley Burton:

They were farmers. They owned the farm. They were farmers. They were custodians. She was a maid. She had a little catering business, so they did a lot to be able to put the food on a table and provide clothing for the three of us.

Tom Bliss:

Can you tell me about what happened when your mother, Leona was born?

Charley Burton:

My mother was born and we're not quite sure possibly

Charley Burton:

who her father was. The story that I remember is that she was raised by her grandparents because her mother did not want her. There's the story that my mother tells of that her mother, as an infant, my mother being an infant, tried to take her life because I guess my grandmother didn't want to raise a child. My mother never saw my grandmother again until

Charley Burton:

my sister was maybe 11 or 12 years old. Their relationship was very strained. I never really knew my grandparents.

Tom Bliss:

And you tell a story about your parents meeting on the land.

Charley Burton:

Exactly. The land that the house that I live on was the place for the Negro League Baseball. Baseball was huge back in those days. Each little town had their own

Charley Burton:

black baseball league. And for black people, that was the form of entertainment for them on Sunday afternoons after church, where I live and where my cousin owns his house in this property, it was the baseball field. The property that I'm on was a piece of flat land, so the women would set their tables up and they would be -- My sister tells a story of there's fried chicken and potato salad, just the whole nine yards during these baseball games. Still,

Charley Burton:

on my property, is a fire pit that was made outta concrete that they would fry the hamburgers and hotdog on. So my father being a very fit athletic man, my mother saw this man, she was very light-skinned. She passed for white. She saw this tall, muscular, dark man hit this baseball so far that they couldn't find it in the woods. He's running around the bases. My mother was best friends with

Charley Burton:

a woman named Mary. And so she turns to Mary and says, "Who is that man?" And Mary says, "That's my brother, Charlie." Without skipping a beat, she told Mary, who is now my Aunt Mary, "I'm going to be your best friend, but I'm gonna be your sister-in-law." The tale that my mother tells is that my father got back up three more times, and batter struck out because she had flirted with him. And his mind was all over the place. He does not recall that story. He says he hit another home run, but a year later they were married.

Charley Burton:

They met on this property that I live on now.

Tom Bliss:

Love that. Your mother, you had a great story about her and how she made sure that the kids had school books.

Charley Burton:

Yeah. The kids in the neighborhood, the black kids, went to a one room little shack that was from first grade to sixth grade, sixth or seventh grade. All of them was housed in one room. My mother

Charley Burton:

was one of the janitors of the local white school that had brand new books. She would go in and manipulate the order when they were ordering new books in the summer for the white kids and get extra books and steal those books, and take those new books to the black kids, because what the black kids had was the hand-me-downs of what the white kids had. She said that she was determined that the kids in the neighborhood was gonna get the same exposure to books as the white kids did. I don't know if she ever got caught.

Charley Burton:

She was pretty much a feared woman in this neighborhood by blacks and whites. Because she just never -- She was very activist and she fought for what she believed in. I don't know if she ever got caught with the books but my sister says she would just have boxes of books in this car and she'd drop 'em off to 'em so they could read new books like the other kids did.

Tom Bliss:

You're in the process of forming your identity.

Tom Bliss:

You're wanting to dress like a boy. Before we talk about that, how did what you were learning, especially from your mother, about racism, how did that impact you as a child?

Charley Burton:

You have to understand, as a child, I was embarrassed of my parents because they were older. My other friends didn't have as older parents as I did. Looking back today, I see such a valuable education that they both gave us. But

Charley Burton:

I can remember early on the battle of this clothing. The biggest thought that I had was when my sister got married, was around 1968, I believe, and I had to be a flower girl. There's this whole thing of ordering the dress, getting the dress made. I was horrified. I was horrified. The day of the wedding, the bridesmaids had to hold me down so that

Charley Burton:

I wouldn't run out in this dress and get dirty. I remember getting to the wedding and they said that I just took my bouquet or my little basket of flowers and dumped them in the aisle and just kind of walked down. I just remember that battle between my mother and I of this dress. If I had my diggers about it, I would be, as the picture of my book, on the cover, the dirty baseball captain, nasty white soiled kids,

Charley Burton:

the shorts, t-shirt, and a sugar daddy. That was life for me. But I do remember that it was just a battle all the time of the dress, and playing with Barbie dolls, which I would cut the hair off of 'em so they'd look kind of butch looking, you know? My mother would fuss about having to pay for these dolls, and I was destroying them. I did anything with dolls, anything to kind of butch it up. They would fit into my world.

Tom Bliss:

In your book, you have a story that someone said they were gonna take you to the hospital and so on.

Charley Burton:

Yeah, probably still eight or nine years old in the car with my mother. And we drive by the University of Virginia Hospital, and she says, I'm so sick of fighting with you. I think you want one of those things like the little boys have in your legs, so I'm just gonna drop you off at this hospital, somebody else can take care of you and raise you,

Charley Burton:

and you can get that thing between your legs. Two things happened that day: there was this elation that it could happen, and then it was the fear of being abandoned. I went for the fear to be abandoned and just kind of stifled feeling like I was probably until about 12 years of age. When at 12, the whole gender thing was starting again for whatever reason. That was the

Charley Burton:

first time I tried to make an attempt on my life. It was Halloween, of all days. I ate this huge box of plant food poisoning and hoping to die. I got really sick. But it was because I was by then in middle school, what they call middle school now. It was this constant struggle of, I didn't want to hang around the girls, but I knew I had to. Boys didn't really want me hanging around them. And so here I am, just kind of

Charley Burton:

stuck in this middle, all by myself. I just wanted so much to just wear boys' clothing. It was, again, like eight now, 12, that struggle.

Tom Bliss:

I'm muting myself. Why don't we continue with that story and then we can go back in earlier childhood too. So at 12, it's Halloween.

Charley Burton:

Yep.

Tom Bliss:

You probably thought about it, but you're attempting suicide. Can you tell me the steps all the way going to the ER?

Charley Burton:

Back then you could walk yourself to the school bus. That particular morning, it wasn't that very far of a walk I walked, I was left at the house cause my mother had to get to work early. I had plotted this the night before, that I would wait till she leaves.

Charley Burton:

I knew where the plant food was, which my mother was a huge person with flowers. I had read the back of the box a few days before that. It was very planned. Very sorry to plant pun, but I had it all planned, all already in my mind. I got up that morning, I stole the box and put it in my bedroom. I proceeded to get dressed for school. What was going on in my mind was that I could

Charley Burton:

possibly succeed and I'd be happy. I wouldn't have to worry about what it was like to wear clothes and not be a part of the clique in school. Because by that age, it's very clique-ish. All I wanted to do was wear sweatshirts, sneakers and just hang out with guys. And nobody wanted me in that group. I had really no one to really connect with. I ate this plant food poisoning, and I kept

Charley Burton:

eating it and eating it. I got on the bus and probably about halfway through the trip my ears started ringing. I'm clammy. I'm thinking, oh, hell, I'm going to die right here on the bus. But I didn't. I got to school. I made it to the first class, first period class, and I started getting sick. I threw up in the classroom. They thought I had the flu. I get in the bathroom, I'm continuing to throw up this green stuff.

Charley Burton:

Guidance counselor comes in, wants to know what's going on. I blurt to the guidance counselor that I'd eaten plant food poisoning off in a rescue squad, off to the ER. I just remember them pumping my stomach. And that first time they pumped my stomach, it was almost like a blackout. It was almost like I had drank alcohol and it was when I was blacking out. I loved that feeling. I think that's what made me an addict.

Charley Burton:

I loved that blacking out. I just remember the doctors. I could hear the conversation with the doctors outside the door with my mother was that I was too young to be put in a mental unit. They didn't have mental units for kids that age. I was too young to be in a mental unit, but I needed to see a psychiatrist. Of course, my mother didn't want to hear anything of that. There was nothing wrong. All I know, we got in the car, we never spoke about it.

Charley Burton:

Never talked about it. She told the doctor that I thought it was Kool-Aid and made a mistake and ate that and I like to eat powdered Kool-Aid. That was probably what I was doing, and that I didn't mean to do any of this. I thought it was Kool-Aid instead of plant food poisoning. That's when I learned the behaviors of stuff that I did all the way through my teenage years. No matter how significant, how horrible they were, we never talked about them.

Tom Bliss:

My heart just breaks for that 12 year old.

Charley Burton:

Yeah.

Tom Bliss:

Raised in the Baptist Religion? What was that like?

Charley Burton:

Raised in a Baptist church. You had to go, until I got to an age raised in a Baptist, Southern Baptist church. That was the hub of everything. The hub of everything. That's vacation Bible school. There's Sunday school, there's church meetings. There's bible study -- Everything, the whole nine yards.

Charley Burton:

My parents were very active in the church. As a teenager, I had to sit and hear that you'll burn in hell if you're gay. Years later, fast forward, back here, probably less than 10 years ago when the community found out I was trans. By that point, I'm not even going to that church. They even wrote by bylaws to make sure the pastor was protected and could talk about trans people as well.

Charley Burton:

Where, as a teenager, I was never shunned, as I got older, you just knew you weren't accepted. It wasn't a place that I needed to be. And once again, bunch of cousins, as I said, we were raised around here. I always felt like I was standing outside and looking in and just never a part of.

Tom Bliss:

Let's talk about what happened from three to six years old.

Charley Burton:

All I know, at three, there was this man that was my uncle, and he was doing stuff to me that I didn't think was right. It hurt. I knew I wasn't supposed to take my clothes off in front of people, and that's what was happening.

Charley Burton:

Or ironically enough, a lot of this stuff happened at a creek down below my house, which was the exact same place where we got baptized. I couldn't understand. All I know, that the reason I had to stay with him was because I didn't know how to behave at the house that my mother cleaned. They had to find someone to take care of me, because my father worked at the school both during the day and the evening. She worked domestic during the day, and would go to the school because

Charley Burton:

she was on the payroll at the school as well, and they would clean the school. She used to take me to work, and something happened. I think I broke something. She felt like I needed to stay at home with this uncle. This is where my mother and I had -- It destroyed years of that relationship. Was that about four or five? I went in the kitchen and I said, "Uncle Willie's doing stuff to me that hurts, and I don't think it's right."

Charley Burton:

And her response was, I don't know what to do for you. I've gotta go to work. You know? And so, again, that was this thing, the beginning of when bad things happen, you just don't talk about it. I didn't talk about it, and it continued knowing now what I discovered after doing many years of therapy and EMDR was that I dissociated, and I made up characters

Charley Burton:

in my head while things was happening. Thank God for recovery. Thank God for people who saw that and helped me get the right therapy and the help that I needed. Because I believe if I had not gotten the help that I did, I would've still lived in this state and would've been destructive. I just know one day, my father's a farmer, we're down feeding the pigs, and I just said to him, I think Uncle Willie's doing

Charley Burton:

things to me that doesn't feel right, and all I know, the next morning my father woke me up and said, you're going to school with me. And I never dealt with this man again. The next time that I had any dealings with this man, he was murdered. He was murdered. And I was coming home with my mother. I was now 16, and I was coming home with my mother, and they stopped her along the road and said her uncle had been murdered

Charley Burton:

by this man. And what he had did was this young kid was hitchhiking, young boy was hitchhiking, and he took him in his trailer, and made an attempt, sexual attempt on this young boy, even at that later age that he was at that point. And the guy just pulled his butcher's knife out and stabbed him in his heart and killed him. That day, I felt relieved. I remember I refused to go to the funeral. And that

Charley Burton:

conversation again, was never talked about. Thank God, I started talking about it in therapy after many years. I mean, I was sober by the time. Not that I didn't shut it out, I was following that pattern of don't ask, don't tell. In my first year of sobriety, I worked hard with that and had the EMDR

Charley Burton:

and was relieved of that. Thank God. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Tom Bliss:

Yeah. It's amazing, when we can use the tools of recovery, what can happen.

Charley Burton:

Absolutely.

Tom Bliss:

Were you diagnosed with a dissociative disorder?

Charley Burton:

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Tom Bliss:

You write about it in such a compelling way in your book, can you just talk about how these

Tom Bliss:

parts of you helped you survive?

Charley Burton:

Sure. There were different parts. There were different names, different people, different characters, as you will. That took on what I couldn't take so you had that strong character that came in and was literally like that superman that took the brunt of everything that was going on. You had that drunken character, the promiscuous character who went out and did stuff

Charley Burton:

on the limb. I have no idea. It's nothing about the grace of my power greater than me, that I'm alive at the situations that I put myself in before I had EMDR. Each character, each being, did something to -- Almost like a cocoon of safety. It was like each character did something to wrap me up and protect me from whatever I was doing. It wasn't until I got sober that

Charley Burton:

I started feeling these same characters going on. And I'm like, am I losing my mind? I thought getting sober, I was gonna have a life. But I had not ever dealt with any of the stuff sober or drunk. I was going to therapists a lot, but I was lying. I lied about my drug addiction. I lied about everything. I don't even know why I spent money going to therapy. I know I was hospitalized a total of probably 70+ times

Charley Burton:

in and out from ages 17 until I was probably in my fifties when I got sober. Many of them were suicide attempts. A lot of them had to do with just when I would dissociate. It was almost, again, the same thing as blacking out. When I took my first drink, I blacked out immediately. That blacking out was like an addiction. But what I've learned

Charley Burton:

from working in my therapy that blacking out was the same thing as me dissociating -- I was just taking myself from -- It's when you dissociate from me, it's almost like I'm just stepping outside of what this shell has been created. I'm something entirely different. I might be that Superman character that's protecting that child inside. It's always protecting that child who's always protecting that little Charlotte. That's what each one of these characters did, was

Charley Burton:

some form of protection. Some of the characters were harmful, others were safe. But when I felt like the harmful ones were coming in, the safety ones would step up. That'd be that battle in between. All the stuff that's going on in my head, and now all of a sudden I'm taking the one bit of fuel that I've been putting in all these years with drugs and the alcohol, and now all of a sudden I don't have that tool to help me continue. Then that's when

Charley Burton:

my sponsor, who I've had for the 16 years, who I owe my life to, stepped up and said, I can help you get recovered. I can lay out the tools for your steps on how to get recovery, but you need a little more than recovery, my friend, and I'm going to help you find that. That's when we found this person who was specialized in EMDR. I finally realized I'm not crazy. I just had characters put to protect me.

Tom Bliss:

Yeah. I think society too, back in the seventies and eighties, that was the movie Sybil. Like the first thing was to have these multiple personalities. Today, it's actually seen as a good thing. It's becoming a leading part of -- Parts therapy, it's called.

Charley Burton:

Exactly. Yes.

Tom Bliss:

Yeah. Also, in your early experience with your uncle I think he had you drink bourbon.

Tom Bliss:

What was that association? What was that like? And if you can introduce the story. Yeah,

Charley Burton:

Yeah. My uncle would have me drink, I guess, to -- I don't know. My thinking is that he was just an evil man. He was just evil. I mean, you were going to do whatever you want to do to me whether you put alcohol in me or not. I mean, I can't fight you. The first time I had bourbon was

Charley Burton:

three, four. I remember just how it burned. It just burned. If I had kept that feeling, I would've never probably become an alcoholic because I thought it hurt. This hurts just as much as the stuff you're doing to me physically. It's hurting, physically, hurting my throat. It was burning. It made me feel like I was -- I just had nothing, no control.

Charley Burton:

He didn't gimme alcohol a lot. But enough. But I do remember when I started drinking at 12. When I started drinking at 12, I never stopped until I walked in the room almost 17 years ago. I had something every day, every day, whether it be a drug, most of the time it was drinking. When I got to my really worst points, I was drinking moonshine,

Charley Burton:

which is you're talking 180 proof liquor sometimes. I had a reputation in my neighborhood and around town is the big partier. Because at that point, I had arrived, like the book they talk about in the book, I had arrived. People were accepting me because now I'm going to be the one that's gonna be the life of the party. I'm funny, people like being around me. They like being around me because I had drugs and I could buy alcohol at 16 years of age. That's what I see now.

Charley Burton:

I felt like in order to be able to fit in, I had to drink. When I hit that first drink of bourbon at three or four, and that burning, I remember my next drunk was -- I was 12 trying to prove to my cousins that I could drink. I drank something called two bottles of black bear wine and passed out in the closet and was literally a mess. Literally and figuratively, I was a mess.

Charley Burton:

Again, I got picked up by my mom, slammed in the bathtub, washed up, never talked about it again. The next day, everyone's telling me what I did, and it takes me right back to three years of age of when I had that drink. I don't remember anything that happened. I have to back up to say, maybe he did what he did, so he wanted me not to remember what he was doing to me, because it worked. I remember that same feeling at 12

Charley Burton:

when I had that wine. I was like, this is where I need to be. I drank as much as I could whenever I could. I would say it worked. As crazy as sound being an alcoholic in my teenage years probably saved my life.

Tom Bliss:

I understand that.

Tom Bliss:

The drink at 12 years old, was this before or after the suicide attempt?

Charley Burton:

This was during the same year. So this was in the summer at a family gathering. We'll say July or August. And then October that year was my first suicide attempt.

Tom Bliss:

And then same year you met your friend, Taylor.

Charley Burton:

Taylor was a friend of mine in school. Father was a doctor, and she could get

Charley Burton:

the prescriptions. I remember the first time she said, Hey, you wanna go off to the bathroom and try something? Sure. What is it? We're supposed to be in a Spanish class? I was like, yep, let's do it. She had like she was like this flower child, and she had these six beers and this big satchel and pulled out this bottle. She said, I can get plenty of these. Every day we would go right before Spanish class and we'd down about three beers a piece

Charley Burton:

and pop the valiums. That was the start of our day, because Spanish class was second period, and that's how we did it, every day, it was beers and valium. Then Taylor disappeared. Taylor disappeared. She hitchhiked, she ran away from home and she hitchhiked to Florida. We don't know if she stepped in front of this 18 wheel or if she stumbled in front of it, but all I know is

Charley Burton:

I went to school one day and friends were crying, and I'm thinking, why are they crying for Taylor? Ain't nobody like her anyway but me. Then I found out that she was dead. Again, I was like, I remember kids asking me, was I gonna have any feeling about it? No tears, no nothing, it was just, oh, pissed off because now my Valium supplies cut off. I was just like, okay, well,

Charley Burton:

I don't have to worry about that. I can just steal alcohol from home. Which my parents didn't have a lot of it, but they had some. Whatever they had, I'd steal. Then I got in with another bad crew. Things just escalated. We know how alcohol and drugs do, it escalated. It went from pot. Pot was, for me, just something to smoke to get up and get moving for the next day. I liked it, but bourbon was my drug of choice.

Tom Bliss:

It sounded like you had some bullying when you were young.

Charley Burton:

Oh, sure. Yeah. I mean, I thought that for a while my name was Bull Dagger. I was bullied because I was fat. I was bullied because I was different. I was bullied because I looked like I wanted to be a boy. I was bullied because I didn't want to be with girls. There was always something.

Charley Burton:

And I was just used to it. I mean, that was the given. That was just the given.

Tom Bliss:

So things really seemed to change when you found sports?

Charley Burton:

Yes. Yes. When I found sports it was like I had a purpose. I was still drinking, but not a lot. I would say during my years of about 16 to probably --

Charley Burton:

About two years, 16, with close to 17, 18, I was good. I would drink on weekends. I was playing volleyball. Despite my size, I was a hell of an athlete. I was great in volleyball and a hell of a shot put thrower. I threw the shot, put in track and field, and I played volleyball in the fall and track and field and spring. Then during the winter months, I was really getting myself prepared for

Charley Burton:

the shopper. I did a little bit of winter track. But that again was a piece of a saving of life. I really got into something. I excelled well. Volleyball was okay, but track was my love because, again, that's throwing the shot put is an isolated sport. Your points count as a whole. But I'm off over there by myself, practicing with the shot put.

Charley Burton:

Everybody else is doing the running events, I'm over here doing the shot put all on my own. But my contribution to winning was going towards the points on the team. And so I was a state champion, I was a regional champion, and I did well. My record stayed for a while until it was broken, probably 10 or 12 years ago. It was really good. I had an opportunity to go on the scholarship to college.

Charley Burton:

I thought that that was going to be my ticket of getting out this little small town. But I had a car accident my senior year, which messed my leg up. We weren't sure whether I was gonna participate in the shot put. I think I could have, but I was in the hospital for a little while, and then I had to stay home and recuperate for this leg.

Charley Burton:

I got addicted to pain pills and I started drinking again and all over again. Here goes the same thing of this addiction. Then for the first time, I experienced my first real deep debilitating depression behind this accident. I'm trying to cure this depression with drugs and alcohol. I'm just going deeper and deeper and deeper.

Charley Burton:

Again, at about 17, I made yet my next serious suicide attempt. That one landed me in the hospital. I remember it was cold and I was standing at the 7-Eleven, and this man pulled up and he asked me if he could buy me something to drink, and I said, yes. Then he said,

Charley Burton:

well, come on and ride with me. I'll ride along with you. And so I can get in this man's car, it's this older white man, and we go back up into this woods. He rapes me and then he brings me back and he drops me off at my car. It was almost like the dissociative stuff started coming right back when he was raping me. I get back to my car, he's fitting me

Charley Burton:

in places and I should have reported it, but it was like, I deserve it. Then my thought was, well, at least I got something to drink behind him. I didn't report it. I just started getting more depressed, more depressed. I was going to class when I wanted to. I was drinking. I was drugging. Then I made an attempt and I ended up in this private hospital. Because my parents had decent insurance by working for the

Charley Burton:

school system. I ended up in this private hospital. I remember them talking to my parents and telling my parents that I was confused about who I was, that they did some psychological testing and asked me to draw these stick people, and my stick people resembled men and boys. Therefore, they had something they would be able to help me get back into my feminine self, and it's called ECT.

Charley Burton:

At 17, I had about 6-8, maybe 10 weeks of ECT. This was supposed to cure me from thinking I was a boy. I would love to see those physicians and psychiatrists today and tell 'em that their ECT didn't work. They let me out just in time to graduate. But the one thing that happened was that the school that I was going to go to

Charley Burton:

still wanted to keep the scholarship open. I thought, well, I'll get out of this area. I'll go to school. I didn't even stay in school two months because I couldn't think. I couldn't think. Nothing was clear. I'm just drinking. That just started this whole vicious cycle of get a job,

Charley Burton:

get depressed, take some pills, stomach pumps in a hospital, go back out, get a job. It was just that whole -- And that went on for close to 25 years. I never held down a real job, fighting my whole gender thing. I ballooned up to 500 pounds. It's just that whole vicious cycle of life that all stemmed from being at that creek.

Charley Burton:

Fighting those demons. Some were demons, some were friendly and I'm in that whole constant battle of this dissociative stuff.

Tom Bliss:

Follow up a little with that psychiatric, your first psychiatric [inaudible]. Did you want to be changed and to be happy with being a female?

Charley Burton:

No, I wasn't happy being a female. I didn't know what to do to be a male. All I know is in my neighborhood, this is what I saw trans people look like. They were the men who people who worked at -- The hospital was the biggest employer for everybody, especially black people as attendance, CNAs, transportation people. That was a huge employer here in Charlottesville.

Charley Burton:

All I know is that these funny people, that they would get off a bus in the evening from work at the hospital or work wherever. They were always called sissy and faggots because they switched and they had feminine ways to 'em. A lot of them lived on the bad side of town, this old rundown hotel that they now had made ran down apartments.

Charley Burton:

They would get off the bus and looking like men. But about 9 or 10 o'clock at night, they would come out and hit the streets and they'd be in wigs, dresses, high heel shoes. Some were beaten, some had boyfriends, some they were tricking, they were doing whatever they were doing, but they were the bad people. My thought was,

Charley Burton:

I've always been so bad all the time, if I'm one of them in reverse, I don't want to be that, because I've always been called all these names. I don't wanna be called names anymore. At 17 when I heard that word, that was something going on with my gender. Again, my thinking is, well, I don't want to be that, because I don't have that many friends to begin with now.

Charley Burton:

It kind of seems like I won't have anybody and I'll have to hang with those people that live in those bad apartments. I don't want to live like that. And my parents are probably not going to accept me. This is all the stuff that's going on in my head because I clumped one group together. When the psychiatrist sat me down and said, "Do you want to be a boy?" I just said, "I want to be dead." I think that was the most

Charley Burton:

truthful thing that I could say. Because I didn't know. I didn't know what gender was. It would take 30 more years for me to understand what trans was all about. 30 years! 30 years for me to finally look and say, this is who I am. I fought it all that time. Aside from that man raping me, my uncle, I'd never been with men, have no desire to be with men sexually.

Charley Burton:

That right there made me think all my cousins are boy crazy. My mother would say, your cousins are boy crazy, but you're not. I was like, okay, so the only thing I know to be is just not crazy about anything. But I still had that yearning for women. I would sneak around and sleep with women but I would never admit. I finally admitted that I was gay and I had a semi-successful relationship that didn't last long. But

Charley Burton:

I was never comfortable in any kind of relationship because I didn't know who I was.

Tom Bliss:

Can you describe for our viewers what ECT is and how that impacted you?

Charley Burton:

Yeah. If anybody back in the day has seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, that's exactly what it is. That's exactly what it is. It's nothing. I don't know if it's gotten better in years, thank God.

Charley Burton:

I don't know. I just know that they would put me in a van at this private hospital. I'd go over, they'd put me in a gown. They would lay me in this room. They would come in and put something in my mouth so that I wouldn't, I guess, bite my tongue. Put the straps on my legs, I had straps on my hands. There would be this electric shock,

Charley Burton:

is basically what it is. It's just shocking your body. I remember I would lay in this [inaudible], I'd roll back in this other room and I'd lay there for a while. They'd wake me up and ask me if I want some juice. A lot of times I'd throw it up. The private van would come back and pick me up and I would sleep all afternoon. I just remember just sleeping. My body was just -- It was just depleted

Charley Burton:

and I would sleep. Eventually by about the second day, I'd get my appetite back and that's it. I remember waking up. There was so much that I didn't remember this whole thing. I just remember I would kind of heal from it for a while. Then a week or maybe a day, I don't know, a couple days later, because time seemed like nothing. It'd go all over again.

Charley Burton:

And we did this. I don't even know if it was once a week or twice a week. The hospital stay after that was a blur. I just remember my parents coming back saying they were going to allow me to graduate. I got discharged from that hospital three days before I graduated. I remember when my mother came and picked me up. I remember going in this hospital and there were no trees on this huge

Charley Burton:

pear tree, Bradford pear tree that my parents had in the front yard. I remember when I left, there was no leaves, no balloons on this tree. The grass was dead. I just remember coming back home and I had my head down. I remember looking up and it was almost like there was a rebirth of life. The trees were blooming, they were green, so It had to be spring. The Bradford pear trees was white. They were so

Charley Burton:

full of these white, beautiful, beautiful blossoms. The grass, my father had cut it and it was so green. He had just cut the grass. Remember getting out the car, smelling the grass. For just a split second, I felt like I had life back in me again. And that maybe everything was going to be okay now. I remember graduating. That summer again was just a blur of drunkenness.

Charley Burton:

I thought for one brief moment when I stepped out and smelled that grass that maybe, just maybe, I could live life okay. I won't drink. I'll go to school. I describe my life the way a crack addict is when they smoke crack the first time when you smoke crack the first time you think it's the most wonderful thing you've ever had in your life.

Charley Burton:

The trees are green, the birds are chirping. That's how you get addicted, because you're chasing that same initial high for the rest of many people's lives. Unless you're gracious and thankful and blessed enough to get off of it. That's what it was like that day. I got that high of 'I'm going to live my life okay.' It wasn't three weeks later that I was right back in that [inaudible] of just this whole

Charley Burton:

addictive life. And I went for that for 30 years.

Tom Bliss:

What was your relationship to healthcare at this time? Did you trust?

Charley Burton:

No, I didn't trust anybody. I didn't trust anybody. I mean, these people had put shock for me. I went to a place that was supposed to help me, and you came out and ripped me of memories. I would go to places

Charley Burton:

to try to get help and I wasn't getting any help. What I realized, I wasn't really helping myself either. And so you hit these white coats, these psychiatrists -- I remember one psychiatrist set me down with me. He said, you are going to live a very pathetic life. He said, the best thing we can do for you is keep you on Thorazine. You can go to the clubhouse with everyone else, which is a place in Charlottesville where people with severe mental disorders

Charley Burton:

go in, they gather and they do arts and crafts. He said I'm gonna write up that you go to the clubhouse. I'm gonna put you on mental disability where you can get some money, and that's the best you're going to have in life. And he used one word that stuck with me until I walked in the rooms of AA. He said, you're a very unfortunate soul. It wasn't until I walked in AA on May 22nd, 2006, and they read how it works. And in how it works,

Charley Burton:

it says the unfortunate. I remember thinking to myself, I'm getting sober. I'm getting sober because I heard that about 30 years ago. I'm not going to continue to live unfortunate. At that point, I trusted nothing that had MD behind it at all. I wouldn't go to the doctors when I needed to. The only reason I was going to psychiatrist because, as crazy as it sound, I love that feeling of being drugged to the max off of Thorazine.

Charley Burton:

I did Thorazine. I would just shuffle around through life and I would abuse Thorazine. I love that. If I've got to exist, then I'm going to exist none, and that's exactly what Thine did for me.

Tom Bliss:

A lot of pain. When you're 17, the first time you were institutionalized,

Tom Bliss:

you had developed a friendship with a volleyball player and you found a person to confide in.

Charley Burton:

My mother

Tom Bliss:

Yeah. Can you tell me what --?

Charley Burton:

I'm convinced that the home life that I had wasn't good, and I'm seeking families that look fun. We didn't have it back in the day, but

Charley Burton:

I was seeking the Huxtable type family environment, which isn't true. Friends were on the volleyball team together, hanging out at her house, and started getting really friendly with her mom, didn't realize she was as screwed up as she was too, and I started spending more time when her kids weren't around.

Charley Burton:

She was giving me a lot of attention. Still, I'm not even in that mindset of this is anything else. She started giving me alcohol. She would say, I'd rather give it to you, and you go out here in the street and get it. At least I know you're safe. And alcohol became coke and things got crazy and we slept with each other and

Charley Burton:

we started this, whatever this was, I don't even know what it was. It was extremely sick, is what it was. Because looking back now, she was no different than the predator that met me at the 7-Eleven and the predator that I called my uncle. She's all in that same category. I'm 17 years old, the same age as your daughter, you know?

Charley Burton:

And so none of that first sexual encounter that wasn't rape, was what this was. It was sick and it was pathetic. It was sad. I don't know, it just went on way too long. Then one day, I kind of said, , I don't want this. I don't want this.

Charley Burton:

I don't want this. It was like a couple weeks later, again, like Taylor, I get the news and I'm like, is everybody that I kind of have feelings for die. Should I even get myself involved in anything?

Charley Burton:

And so again, all it took was one little blip, the next thing I know, I'm right back in this associative disorder again. I'm stumbling around the streets. At that point, when she went down, when Kate went down, I got hooked on acid. It was like whenever something of a catastrophe

Charley Burton:

happened in my life, I had to boost it just a little bit more with something just a little more dangerous. Looking back now, I think these were many attempts at killing myself. I'll just eat window panes of acid every day. Eventually, I'm either gonna lose my mind or put me away, or I die. Again, when I heard the news about her, there was no tears. It was just,

Charley Burton:

okay, well, my money supply's been cut off, because she was giving me money. My drug supply with the coke is gonna be cut off, but that doesn't matter. I don't really like coke anyway, I just do it because I was doing her. I can just go back to drinking, it'll be okay, but, oh, wait a minute now it's this stuff called acid that I can get sugar cubes, I can get on pieces of paper, and guess what? I'll just do that and drink and I'll be okay. And again, I was right back into that,

Charley Burton:

do well, hit it. Do well, hit it. And that's just the story of my life.

Tom Bliss:

It sounded like she was the first person, before all that started happening, who you had really opened your heart to and told the truth and confided in. How did that affect you?

Charley Burton:

Then that's when I realized it's time to shut people up. It's time to just

Charley Burton:

shut it down. If I had to be made to go see a psychiatrist, I'd give 'em what they want and I'd shut it down. I'd give 'em what I think they want to hear, and then I'll let it go. All I want to do is get outta you is I would go in and say. They would say, well, what do you think you need, Thorazine, Haldol, all the heavy hitters? That's what I want from you. These are the things I want

Charley Burton:

from you to get help. It's not gonna help me. I'm not gonna trust you. I trust this woman and look what she did with me. How am I going to trust you sitting behind a desk with a coat on? All I want is, what Taylor used to get to me. Just write something on a pad, gimme the piece of paper, and let me go get what I need to get. So I became very cold. I became very cold, distant, and cut off from the world.

Tom Bliss:

When you first found

Tom Bliss:

her and found an open ear, what was it like to confide in someone for the first time?

Charley Burton:

It was --

Tom Bliss:

And can you include the question in your answer?

Charley Burton:

When I first started confiding in her, at first I thought it was a mistake, and then I saw the response that I got. The response that I got from her was

Charley Burton:

very caring; I can't believe this is happening to you. And maybe all of it was genuine, but it was very genuine. She wanted nothing in return, but just to be there for me. I don't know if that was her aim to begin with, or if the motive was to end up being my lover, but that first day, that first day at her table,

Charley Burton:

just talking to her and just telling her about my uncle and I told her stuff like there are times I think I'm superman, and isn't that weird? There are times I think I'm listening. I'm like, but I don't hear these voices. I kept telling her, I said, but I really was. Then I remember one day I talked to her and I told her, I said, I'm hearing voices.

Charley Burton:

Now, any given parent would've said, well, let me go take you somewhere to get you some help. But after that third confessional that we had, she got up, she went to a bar and she said, you need a drink and I'd rather you drink here and you can go downstairs and sleep it off, then you going

Charley Burton:

outta the street. She became my professional pusher. She was the safe pusher. She was the person that supplied me with the drug and was safe. I thought she really cares, because that's what she wants. Then when she's got me really drunk and I wake up and she's there in this bed with me, there was a part of

Charley Burton:

me that said, Hmm, might be not right. But all my life, this is how people has expressed that they care for me. I will just be whatever you need for me to be.

Tom Bliss:

You've been through a lot.

Charley Burton:

But here's the thing, Bliss, that I always want people to know and see. When I wrote my book, I want the person at the end to know, damn, this dude survived. That's the reason I wrote this. First of all, for a therapeutic reason, I never dreamed that it would ever be in a book. But once I

Charley Burton:

got into this with Margot, it was just important for it to be that, yeah, all this stuff happened, but you two can go through this and at the end it'll be okay.

Tom Bliss:

Yeah, I was crying reading your book. I couldn't believe how powerful your recovery was.

Charley Burton:

Thank you.

Tom Bliss:

Before we get to the AA story just a couple things. I wanna talk about constants also your suicide attempts. I know some of those involve firearms. How did you get a firearm? What was your thinking around that?

Charley Burton:

It was this little local store and the guy started selling guns. Back then,

Charley Burton:

you didn't have to fill out anything. You just buy a gun. I remember I bought the gun. It was a 38., and I knew exactly where I was buying it for. First, I was drinking, and ended up at this hotel about 30 miles from me.

Charley Burton:

I went to the hotel and first they're questioning me as to why am I getting a hotel at 30 miles away? It was kind of rainy and I just kind of talked junk and they gave me the room. It was pouring down, raining. I don't know, it's like this was the first time it was like I sit in this damn hotel for what seemed like hours and hours

Charley Burton:

and the dissociation stuff kicked back in and really hearing voices. I'm drunk, I'm high. I remember, I don't even think it was near my head. I think it slipped from behind my head. Damn gun went off and went into the walls of the hotel. Then, of course, there's the police, there's all this,

Charley Burton:

I'm being rushed to the ER, and I'm TDO, what that means is a temporary detain order put on me. I have to see the judge be able to get out, so that was the first time with that, with the gun. Then my parents took the gun away from me, but they didn't get rid of it so I remember finding it again and again, it was a day of -- I don't know. It was like any other day at that point,

Charley Burton:

just a day of disappointment, a day that I didn't see any happiness or any hope, any dreams. I go down the woods, do it again, didn't go off. Then it got to the point, and where a lot of people found this very hard to believe. I would get up every morning. I don't care if the sun was shining,

Charley Burton:

if it was raining, if the night before I'd had a blast at a party, I'd just get up every morning where most people would go and stand in the mirror and start brushing their teeth. I would stand and just pull. [inaudible]. Wouldn't go off, put it in the drawer and start my day. I did this for months. Finally, one day I was like, well, you know what? I guess you don't want me to die.

Charley Burton:

I've gotta try another way. If it wasn't that, oh, you're trying to give me hope. It was, oh, this must not be the way you want me to go. Then I would do pills. I had this huge fascination with, I wanted to die by a bullet, and I wanted to die by a bullet. I wanted to die by a bullet by my own hand. You would think

Charley Burton:

there was fear when I would do that every morning, but there was none, just no fear, none. I will tell you, today, I don't own a gun. I will tell you today, when someone tells me that they're suicidal and they want to harm themself, I take it very seriously. Because a lot of people want to say, oh, they're just saying this because they want to get attention. No, no. I didn't want attention, I just wanted

Charley Burton:

to die. And I really wasn't telling anybody because I was the king of secrets. I could keep it. I got rid of the gun. I got rid of the gun. It would be 16 years later, I bought another. That's another part of --

Charley Burton:

We'll talk about the start of my transition. I purchased another gun, and I'd gotten rid of that one and didn't have gun for close to 20 years. Then almost 16, 17 years later, I go right back to it. This is when Constance walked out. Now, we had met each other online.

Charley Burton:

She lived two and a half hours away from me, two and a half, almost three hours away from me down the beach. I think we are much better at friends than we were to be a couple. I was too broken to be in a relationship, but here was this just incredibly beautiful, smart, funny woman. We had good times,

Charley Burton:

and I think we moved in this house too quickly. We move in. I'm identifying now as a butch lesbian. She's feminine woman, she's femme. We moved in this really nice house. She sinks a lot of money into it from the sale of her house. She had to work, commute back and forth and would stay at a friend's house in Chesapeake

Charley Burton:

during the week, until she could get transferred closer. I would stay at the house. She raised German Shepherds. I would stay and take care of the dogs. She moved in permanently that Thanksgiving and the following year she's gone. She left. I was sober, didn't drink. Was I close to it? I don't even

Charley Burton:

really think so. No. I was so grounded in my recovery. I was hurt. I was depressed, I was hurt. I had stopped going to meeting. I might have been close to a drink, but I'd stopped. I just kind of closed myself off in this house that we had gotten together and she had just walked away from it. She said, I can't deal with this anymore. What she couldn't deal with was, there was this battle going on

Charley Burton:

inside me of my gender. So, intimately, things was cut, because I didn't know what I was going, well, I didn't know who I was. Then I couldn't find a job. I'm this big butch lesbian, and people don't know whether I'm a guy or a girl. I just couldn't land the job. I just couldn't land a decent job. There's that macho stuff that I have because she's

Charley Burton:

the breadwinner, and I'm lucky to work 20 hours a week. I had a cleaning service, and that was going really well. I was working another job. It was a great job. He closed the business down and life just seemed to just stop. And it just wasn't my anger at her, my anger at me. It was just explosive. I'm sober and I've got the nerve to be going to meetings,

Charley Burton:

spurting out spirituality, and going home, being a monster. I come in one day and she had cardboard boxes and said, I can't deal with this single, and so she left. I started battling, who am I? Then that's when life really started kicking in. I decided it was time to go to therapy, and it was time to fess up and be real.

Charley Burton:

I'm give him the therapy and I'm working my ass off in therapy. I wake up one Sunday and I'm like, I need to write all day. I just need to write all day. I remember getting a little bit of breakfast, and I remember sitting, and I'm just writing. I'm long hand writing in this journal, just writing and writing and writing. Then I realized I need to give this journal to my therapist. I called my therapist up, Jen, and I said, look, I got something I need you to read. Can I drop it off at the

Charley Burton:

receptionist desk? I know my appointment's not until Thursday. I drop it off that Monday evening, Jen's calling, saying, you need to come in tomorrow. I go in and she said, do you realize what you've written? I said, I think so. She said the last four pages of this, 30 some pages that you've written over the weekend is telling me that you think you're a man.

Charley Burton:

This is telling me that we need to explore your gender. She said, I don't even know. This is UVA Hospital. She said, I don't even know where to go because we don't have anything here to offer you, but I can tell you what, I am not gonna leave you hanging. That was when the relationship with hospitals got better. She connected me with a great nurse practitioner that I had close to 13 years. We started looking at things. I mean, there was nobody that

Charley Burton:

looked like me in Charlottesville that was transitioning. I'm driving two hours to Richmond, one hour there, one hour back, couple of nights a week for these support groups and their young white boys. And here, I said, 50 years of age and black. I'm like, I don't have anything in common with them. But then I had to think about, I'm in Charlottesville AA where they're white lawyers,

Charley Burton:

white doctors, white people. There's four of us that are black. I have more in common with them than I do the people out in the street. Because we have a common language called the language of the heart. It's all about giving me recovery. I gotta think the same way with these group of guys in order to get what I need to get. I remember Constance and I had just stopped all contact, but I don't know if she saw something. She opened back up me on

Charley Burton:

Facebook or something. But she saw, and we started kind of chatting back and forth together about some things. By then she's with someone else. I remember I said to her, I think I'm trans. I'll back up a little bit. When I started meeting Constance, she was big into the MCC church in Chesapeake. I'd go to the MCC church, and there was all kinds of people. There was gay people, there was butches,

Charley Burton:

there was femmes, there were trans women, there were trans men. I'm fixated on this one guy. I'm like, when I try to go up and talk to him, I can't talk to him. I'm stuttering, I'm sweaty. I get back in the car at Constance and I'd be laying there dead the night beside her thinking, what is wrong with me? Why am I so attracted to this guy? I've never been attracted to men. Why am I so attracted to this guy?

Charley Burton:

I remember Constance telling me he was in the Navy, and then he came there as a woman and he had transition and how much his life had just really opened up and he was such a different person. I realized it wasn't a sexual attraction. It was a like-minded attraction that I had, that I wanted what he had because I was trans. But I pushed it back. I pushed it back, and I said to Constance, I'm transitioning.

Charley Burton:

I'm in the process of changing my name. I'm working with Jen and she's gonna write a letter in a few months. We talked about it a little bit. About four or five months later, I've started and that depression hit. I woke up that morning and I'm five years sober. And I've started

Charley Burton:

this path of transitioning. I've got 200 and some dollars in the bank account. That 200 and some dollars is supposed to go to the light bill. Then I have no more money for at least another week. My familiar thing is that I'm eating ramen noodles all the time. That's all I could afford. I said, the hell with it, if I'm dead,

Charley Burton:

I don't have to pay the light bill. I went to the pawn shop and I bought a gun, and I came back home and I just kept saying to myself, do not stop, with this last 30 bucks that you have in your pocket, and buy anything to drink. You have got to show those white people in AA that you didn't go out drunk, that you went outta here sober. It was so important to me

Charley Burton:

that the people in AA knew I died sober. I get back to my house, this house is absolutely gorgeous. I'm standing in this beautiful kitchen and I'm getting the towels all straight. I'm hoping that my sister, who lives next door to me won't find me. But the kids I'm renting the basement apartment to will, so I crack their door and I crack that one so that they will be able to come up and find me instead of my family.

Charley Burton:

I've got the gun all ready, and the freaking doorbell rings. I put the gun down, I open the door and it's the mailman. He has this package, this big envelope for me. He hands it to me and he tells me, I've asked him years later, he said, you were looking so crazy, I thought you were on that stuff. I just went on back down those steps and I left. I remember I recognized it was Constance handwriting. I opened up this package

Charley Burton:

and it's about all this information about this organization called Black Trans Man Incorporated. It has this guy's number on it, and then Carter Brown. And I call Carter. I read all this stuff and I finally was like, there are black men like me. Well, I'll sit here and read this stuff. Then after that, I gotta put this stuff back in the envelope. Because I got something to do, I need to kill myself. I then decide, well, maybe there's his guy's number.

Charley Burton:

Maybe I'll call him. Now, knowing Carter, the way I know him now, Carter rarely answers his cell phone. But Carter answered his cell phone that day and we talked, and at the end of the conversation, I said to him, "Dude, man, I was thinking about killing myself today." And Carter says, "Well, didn't you say you were in AA? Maybe you need to go to a meeting." I packaged the gun back up and I took it back to the pawn shop, and I paid

Charley Burton:

my light bill, my light stayed on. I went to a meeting. For the first time, people in Charlottesville AA saw even more of a rawness in me, because I shared it. Didn't share that I thought I was -- They already knew something was going on with me with the whole transition thing. I was due to tell my story so that I could tell people what was going on in two weeks. I shared that I felt like killing myself.

Charley Burton:

Of course, the people in AA around me made sure they took me out to coffee. They took me to dinner, they checked on me. I just started going back to meetings. I often talk about the love of forgiveness. Constance and I are good friends now. She's married, she lives in Princeton. She goes to Princeton. We both knew that we weren't made for each other romantically, but that was so much

Charley Burton:

love still there that she loved me enough to package that stuff up and send to me. But now she had no control on when that stuff was gonna land. That was my higher power that landed that package in this mail man's hand, who normally would not even make an effort to bring an envelope that he could stuff in the mailbox to my door, but he walked it to my door. If it had been in that mailbox out of him and dead Constance hadn't sent it, I would probably be dead, so

Charley Burton:

I can't take that intervention of my higher power lightly. I just realized from that point on, I made a vow to myself that if I get to this level of depression again, I need to know how to pick up the phone and ask for help. But I will tell you, I'm off of all medicines except for some stuff that I'm taking for a health scare right now. I've not had this level of depression ever again,

Charley Burton:

because I continue to transition and I continue to get comfortable. I am exactly where I need to be. I don't say that God made a mistake. I don't talk about dead naming. I lived for 50 years as Charlotte, and that served whatever it needed to serve. But the next years of my life I'm living as Charley. It is deserving and it is treating me very well.

Tom Bliss:

You got tears, man. Those recovery guide shots are just [inaudible], and the support you get. I do want to talk about your transition. I'd love for you to explain T and STP and some of the technical terms for our audience. But I also want to know, before we get there, how'd you get

Tom Bliss:

into the rooms?

Charley Burton:

Listen, I don't know. Back in the day when AOL had their chat rooms, there was a chat room on AOL, it was called Golden Gals. [inaudible], it's for people older, women older. We were from all over, but we were just this niche of a family. I still know a couple or

Charley Burton:

a person that -- her partner passed -- lived in Tennessee. I've been to their house. I love both of 'em dearly, her partner left. Now there's another couple that lives a couple of hours away from me. All these people all became friends by this AOL chat room. We'd chat half the night. We would have events where we'd meet in person. One of the people from out of the chat rooms was my friend Moe.

Charley Burton:

And Moe transitioned, I had no clue, after Moe started transitioning, what that even meant. I just knew I love Moe. All of a sudden now he's this dude, he's this guy. We're talking, and I think Moe probably kind of picked up on sometimes I'm talking to you on the phone, you are a little more out of it than usual. He says to me, "Hey buddy, do you have a drinking problem?" And I said, "Well, I like to drink. I don't know how much of a problem it is." He's like, "Well,

Charley Burton:

you're not holding down too much of a job." "Well, that's just the way I am. I'm happy go-lucky," I said. As drinking got worse, Moe says to me, "I'd like for you to meet my friend Sherry, and I'll introduce you in your call." Sherry called me. Sherry was huge in the New York butch and femme scene. She started talking to me about AA and she said, "Look, I'm gonna help you. I want you to get that book called Alcoholics Anonymous." I said,

Charley Burton:

"Well, that's funny." I already have one. Because somebody, somewhere along the line in my years, felt I needed it. I pulled it out of the shelf, way back in the closet and I pulled it out. We started reading the book. Back then you couldn't get online and find meetings. You'd have to call the hotline. She called the hotline. She would tell me about meetings. I would lie to her and tell her that I'd been,

Charley Burton:

and I'd lie to her and tell her that I was reading the book. One day she said, oh, like, okay, we've got time to read the book. Let's go to chapter five. I want you to read chapter five. I didn't even have a clue what chapter five was. I'm way back in the back, getting ready to start reading a story. She says to me, you haven't been reading this book and you're still drinking and you're still a liar. I just can't deal with you. The weekend before May 22nd

Charley Burton:

was probably one of the worst alcoholic drunks that I've had in many, many years. It landed me back, again, in the ER. My stomach pumped Friday night. My stomach was pumped on Saturday midday, then my stomach was pumped again Saturday night, Sunday morning. I'm slick because I'm not going to get my stomach pumped at the same hospital.

Charley Burton:

I'm a ER jumper. I'm going from ER to ER because somewhere you go from ER to ER, you might be able to land drugs a lot quicker. I knew that if I complained that my back hurt, that's a lot easier way to get pain pills because they can't really prove a back ache. I end back up at the UVA ER Saturday night, Sunday morning, and I go in, not tell 'em I got bad

Charley Burton:

back pain, but I'm scared. I'm scared now because I've had a seizure, which I've never had. I had a seizure earlier. I got back up and started drinking. Then I started throwing up and it's just foam and blood and I'm fearing. I get a friend to take me to the emergency room. I get in the emergency room and I'm in there about seven or eight hours. At the end of about that six hour, doctor walks in and he says,

Charley Burton:

my goodness, you sick little puppy. You have kidney stones, so we're gonna give you the strainer. He said, "What pain pill work for you?" And I was like, how about some oxycodone? And he was like, absolutely, I'll write you that prescription. Because back then they were still writing prescriptions. He wrote me the prescription and I had to call a friend to pick me up. That's when I had that moment of clarity. It's May, it's spring,

Charley Burton:

it's a crisp, beautiful morning. I walk out of this emergency room. It's about 5:30, 6 o'clock in the morning, the sun's coming up over top of the parking deck. I look at this prescription and I tear it up and I throw it in the trash can. My friend picks me up, I'm still sick as I can be. I go home, I can't even make it up the stairs. I'm laying on the sofa and I'm sleeping. I had a fairly decent job at that point, which I was barely hanging onto,

Charley Burton:

selling office supplies for a major supply company. Most of my accounts were the government, so I traveled a lot. I called in sick Monday and Tuesday, and I remember that Tuesday I go over to visit a friend who had had a hysterectomy that I'd worked with at the school. And we're sitting down on her deck and I said, "Lynn, I gotta do something. I gotta do something. This drinking is killing me." I said, I feel like I'm 90 years old,

Charley Burton:

I'm now drinking and every time I drink, I'm throwing up blood. It's just not good. She was like, what are you going to do? I was like, I don't know. She said, sounds like you might need inpatient. I'm like, no, I'm not going to do that. Out of the blue that Wednesday morning, I'm getting dressed for work and my cell phone rings and it's Sherry. She says, look, I've been praying for you. I've been talking about my sponsor about you, and I want to try to help you one more time.

Charley Burton:

At 12 o'clock, [inaudible], today. Do you know where the Holy Comforter church is? I was like, yeah, I know it's downtown. She said, "Well, they have a meeting at 12 o'clock in the church basement. I'm gonna call you at 11:30. Can you leave?" I was like, yeah, I can leave. I get up, I tell the little ladies in my work and I'm going out to do some out the field stuff. I get to the church, phone rings, sure enough is Sherry, she said, "Where are you?" I said, "I'm in the front door to church." And she said, "For some reason, I believe you."

Charley Burton:

She said, "Go down. I want you to stay. I'm gonna stay on the phone because I'm gonna believe you even more. Because there's a sound before the meeting that I'll recognize and know you're telling me the truth." Had no idea what she meant by that. But I know today there is a distinct sound before an AA meeting starts. There's a chatter, there's laughter, there are people drinking coffee. It's the meeting before the meeting. I get down

Charley Burton:

in the basement. There's six white men, one white woman, okay? I get down there and I'm just angry as I can be. Now I'm angry. When I get down, get right to the steps, Sherry said, "You're in the meeting. I don't ever want to hear from you again. Don't call me. Don't write me. I'm done with you." And it went click. Now I'm standing there like, well, what the hell, you want me to come to the meeting?

Charley Burton:

I go in and I heard those words, I heard Fifth Step. I heard there are those who are unfortunate and I realize this is important, I gotta pick up this white chip. This thing means something. I picked up the white chip. I went over to these six white men and I said, well, "Why don't you be my sponsor?" And

Charley Burton:

they were like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. Men can't sponsor women. They called this woman over, her name was Gloria, and she had about five years sobriety. If I wanted what she had, here's the book. I said, well, I already have it. She said, here's a smaller one for you. Your answers are in the first 164 pages. She said, in the first 164 pages is the answer to you being recovered. At some point in your life, you can be in recovery, you can be

Charley Burton:

recovering, or you can be recovered. It's your choice. She said, I'm not a doctor, although I am one. I'm not your doctor. I'm not your lawyer. I'm not your social worker. I am your recovery coach. I am your temporary sponsor until you find one that will suit you better. But for now, you called me at nine o'clock tonight. I go back to work and I was like, I'm gonna show this bitch up. I'm sure there are some discrepancies in this book. It doesn't pertain to me.

Charley Burton:

I read first 164 pages. I made notes. I called her at nine o'clock that night and I said, "I've got some problems with this book." She said, "The problem is not the book. The problem is you. You just continue to read that book and your problems will lessen." She said, "Do you have time tomorrow to meet me? Because we're gonna meet once a week and we're going to go through this book, and then we're gonna start something called the steps immediately. You're going to work these steps. When you finish working these steps, if you do what

Charley Burton:

this book suggests, your life will change." That's on a Wednesday. The next night, James Brown is due to be in town on the mall. I pick up the phone and I call her and I said, look, ma'am, I said, whatever your name is, I forgot what your name is, but Gloria, whatever. I said it is six o'clock. I know there's a 7:30 meeting that you told me I need to go to, but Godfather hits the stage at eight o'clock. I doubt if I ever

Charley Burton:

see James Brown ever again in life. I'm sure my friends are gonna be down there and I'm sure they're going to be drinking. But I just wanna let -- I'll come to the noon meeting tomorrow and if I have drank, I will pick up another one of those white chips. She said, how many minutes of drinking do you think you're going to do? I said, not much. Because I'm in this program now, so probably about 20 minutes of drinking and I'm all good. And she said, well, I hope I see you tomorrow, because what if your last 20 minutes is your last 20 minutes

Charley Burton:

of drinking? I said, what do you mean? She said, "Well, you've had a few days now where you haven't had this stuff in you. You need to go to detox, you need to go to a rehab, probably." Because she said, "Just looking at you as a physician, you're going to detox horribly because you've got too much stuff in your system." She said, "Well, I was going to address that with you if we met." But she said, if you just stop for a few days, could be detrimental if you start back. And it could mean death."

Charley Burton:

I didn't see Godfather. I went to the seven 30 meeting and I started going to two, three meetings a day, every day. For the first 9-10 months of my sobriety, I read the first 164 pages every night. I would go to sleep sometime and I'd wake back up in the middle of the night because my sleeping was off because of the drinking. I'd start back reading all over again. I did what she told me to do. I worked the steps. I made coffee,

Charley Burton:

I talked to people. I wrote my number and book, even though I didn't have anything to give to anybody. These old white men took me under their wing. I remember I tried to go -- This is Charlottesville now, my sponsor tried to take me to a popular outpatient rehab. I had great insurance. He said I didn't fit who was in their meetings. I didn't fit the mold of what needed to be

Charley Burton:

in recovery. Both of us, my sponsor and I, said that this is because you're black and this is Charlottesville. I stayed sober outta spite a lot because I would go in meetings and people wouldn't want me to sit beside 'em, they wouldn't wanna sit beside me. But I just kept going. I kept going because I wanted what they had, whether they didn't like me because of the color of my skin. I thought it was gonna be a problem

Charley Burton:

when I transitioned, I would say the AA community embraced me a lot quicker than my family, some of my family. My immediate family has been fantastic. Other family members, not so much, but the community of AA. I mean, I remember this one guy, he died just here recently with 57, 58 years sobriety. He was responsible for bringing AA to the CIA in DC. This man would take me under his wing and put me in his car for the first three or four months and

Charley Burton:

take me to his doctor so I could get B12 shots because I was suffering that badly from detoxing. This is the kind of stuff that some of those people in AA did. They embraced me. But there were others who didn't understand the whole transition thing. But I don't think they were praising enough to tell me to my face. They accepted, but they didn't accept. And today AA has saved my life. AA not only saved my life, AA allowed me to get a footing on life

Charley Burton:

that I could get the therapy that I needed. That I am a solid guy, and I'm a productive member of society. When I was not a productive member of society before, if anything, society ran away from me because they needed to run away from me. But today I'm a taxpayer. I live in a house. I have a decent job. I will say that is a plus for transitioning, because before, whereas I was a female, I could never land the job in my profession.

Charley Burton:

Now I'm at the top of the heap of my job. One of the biggest accomplishments in my life is that I was speaking at a panel about a year and a half ago, medical students, one of the medical students asked me if I had any regrets in life. I said, yeah, I regret I didn't get sober sooner. I regret that I didn't transition sooner. I regret that I haven't found love in my life. I regret that I didn't finish school.

Charley Burton:

In a private chat box, she typed back to me and she said, "You can take care of a couple of those things. You got sober no matter what age it was. You're a good looking man. Somebody's gonna fall in love and you're gonna fall in love with somebody else again. Oh, and by the way, Morehouse is now accepting online classes and accepting trans men. And me, I think you look like you are a Morehouse man." I applied to Morehouse College

Charley Burton:

and they called me, my advisor, and she said, Mr. Burton, I don't know if we can get you in because your grades from high school and community college are horrible. She said, they're just bad. She said, your community college is a 2.0. She said, high school, you barely graduate. Can you tell me why? And I said, I can tell you why. She said, well, do you think you can write that down? And I'm laughing, thinking myself, oh honey, I can write a letter to you.

Charley Burton:

I wrote a heartfelt, honest letter about what my life was like, and I got accepted. Right now, I'm almost finished. I've carried a 4.0 average the entire time. My classmates of 140 know me. They know that I'm trans. They know that I'm an older guy. They accept me. I've been voted Morehouse man of the month in March last year by my peers.

Charley Burton:

Life is good, you know? Everything that happened to me 50 years prior, I do not regret. It had to happen in order to get me where I am today.

Tom Bliss:

Can you tell our audience what's the importance of Morehouse College?

Charley Burton:

Morehouse College is an all-male historically black college university,

Charley Burton:

HBCU. It's all male. It is the college that Martin Luther King graduated from and Spike Lee and Samuel O. Jackson. It is a brotherhood that is unspeakable even for the guys online. It develops solid men, it's the purpose and the mission of Morehouse.

Charley Burton:

I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, it has made a tremendous difference in my life. I still advocate, I still do all I can for the trans community, but I'm leaning my life now towards becoming stealth as much as I can because when I wake up in the morning, I'm a black man and I'm a proud black man

Charley Burton:

that just happens to have a trans experience. Another one of those things that was on my bullet list, would I fall in love again dating this wonderful woman? If I know anything about women, she's straight, she's cis, all she knows is she digs this guy. It is so healthy and so real that I never thought I would have that.

Charley Burton:

She reminds me that there was something that I had that she's attracted to as well as I'm attracted to her. What she sees is a very confident black man. I don't want to say that she's taken me away from my trans world or whatever. It's a new world that I'm living in that is so comfortable. It's what I'm destined to be. I don't say God made a mistake with me being born a female.

Charley Burton:

I just say, God decided I needed to walk the path that I needed to walk to become a male. That's where I am today.

Tom Bliss:

Again, tears. Just the power of recovery and fulfilling your potential. I'm gonna pass that to Adriana very soon. We don't [inaudible] time, so we might need to get a little quicker answers.

Charley Burton:

Yep. You got it.

Tom Bliss:

You mentioned T shots. And so

Tom Bliss:

if you could just explain to [crosstalk].

Charley Burton:

Sure. Yeah, yeah. I've been taking testosterone now for -- It's a hormone replacement therapy. I've been taken testosterone now for 12 years. I think it's done its job. That was fear. That was fear because of the level of anger that I had right before I transitioned with the whole thing with the split and the break with Constance. This was one of the reasons she walked, was because of

Charley Burton:

this anger. That was this fear that testosterone might increase this whole anger. Because you gotta think you're putting some stuff in your body that's changing your whole mood. It's changing your whole makeup of who you are. Quite the opposite, quite the opposite of what was feared. It calmed me and it made me embrace my life. Like I never have, it was exactly

Charley Burton:

what I needed. Right now, I've got some health stuff going on, whereas back in December, evidently I had a heart attack that no one knew I had. I'm great. I'm doing great. This is the first time, other than all the psychiatric medications that I used to take years ago, this is the first bit of medicine I've ever had to take for medical stuff. But where we're finding, for elders, for people my age with the elders, is that

Charley Burton:

we don't know what testosterone is doing for people my age who's been on it -- I mean, there are other guys that are my age or older that's been on testosterone longer, but I'm in that group even though I'm one of the newbies compared to them, but I'm in that age group. There's this age group of us that we don't know what testosterone would do in the long run. Not saying that it did anything to cause the heart attack, my physician is right on it. We talked about earlier the

Charley Burton:

relationship with healthcare, it is much better because healthcare providers and professionals want to learn more about us. I've kind of dropped my testosterone down a little bit just to make sure everything's good with my heart. But I won't be stopping it. What has testosterone done for me? Well, it's really helped with the great beard that I'm growing. But other than that, testosterone

Charley Burton:

was exactly the -- I don't even wanna call it a drug, I call it my lifeline. Testosterone has become my lifeline to become the person that I am. If I had to stop it for health reasons today, I absolutely would. But I don't need to at this particular point. What I fear about gay testosterone and I'll just be an advocate here again, for a minute, is that I think young men today jump on

Charley Burton:

this juice too quickly. You gotta get to know yourself in stages. That's exactly what I did. I worked with that therapist for six or eight months before she wrote that letter. She wrote the letter and I held onto it for another ... It was a year that I had to name change and I was moving. That was tough. That was tough trying to move as a male with no top surgery, trying to move as a male with no testosterone. But I did it. I did it because I knew

Charley Burton:

Charlie's makeup emotionally and I wanted to make sure that I was strong to be able to handle this whole change in my life.

Tom Bliss:

After so many years of adverse interactions with healthcare professionals. Can you tell me your transitioning all the way up to gender reassignment surgery?

Charley Burton:

Again, what I first had was a really good therapist

Charley Burton:

that was connected to the UVA hospital, which was fantastic. What happened was that I was able to connect with a great nurse practitioner. She was my lifeline. She was my lifeline because I wasn't going to get pap smears. I wasn't going to get mammograms.

Charley Burton:

She said, you know what? I'm just going to take this out on my own and I'm going to go ahead and do your pap smears for you until you feel safe to go to a gynecologist. One of the negative things that happened was as I started wanting to take care of my body and do preventative healthcare, that was the mammogram. Before I had my top surgery, I'm a big guy, I was heavy chested. I go in to do this mammogram late in the afternoon by roundabout this time,

Charley Burton:

and it's in this women's center. I go in, I get registered, they already know me, I'm sitting down and in about 20 minutes I stand up and there are three university security guards and a police officer coming my way. There were two women that were sitting in the lobby and they said, there's this big black man in there that's intimidating us. He's been sitting here lurking around for about 30 minutes. First, I said to him, well, men get mammograms.

Charley Burton:

They weren't buying that one. At this point, the receptionist is out there trying to explain to him that everything's cool, and they're saying to the receptionist but he's done something to these two women right here. The receptionist's, like, I've not seen Mr. Burton get up. As a matter of fact, Mr. Burton's just sitting there playing on his phone. The next thing that had to happen was I had to come out and the response was, oh, he's one of those, and they walked away. It was then that advocacy kicked in.

Charley Burton:

I remember going back to Regan, my nurse practitioner, and telling her the story and she was livid. And so she said, what can we do about this? I said, I need to get loud. I need to get loud and I need to speak up for other people. That was the jump kick for my advocacy in Charlottesville, Virginia. It started out negative with me again, retreating back in not wanting to go to other specialty clinics if I needed to go,

Charley Burton:

but Regan cocooned me, just like those characters, and she made sure that if I need an appointment, that appointment was first thing in the morning or the last thing in the afternoon. It's bad that we have to do that. But if that's the protective layer that I have to not have a negative experience, then that's what I needed to do. I got on their advisory board and I started giving them these stories of what happened. The end result, now, we have a trans

Charley Burton:

clinic that's a GP. I had to go to her when I first started figuring out what was going on with this weight gain fluid. There are measures that are being done because people have spoken up and physicians are listening. They now have a top-notch top surgeon. I've taken a negative experience and now

Charley Burton:

it has gotten into a very positive experience as everything I go with. But I'd still say that's not enough and that's not enough because they're gonna treat me okay, because Charlie's got a big mouth and Charlie has connections, but what about the other person? That's why it's important for me to have been the advocate in the healthcare industry the way that I have been, because everybody deserves the treatment that I get now. Charlie just shouldn't get good treatment because we're afraid Charlie's gonna report us to the top-notch people,

Charley Burton:

everyone should be able to get this treatment so that nobody needs to be reported to anybody.

Tom Bliss:

I'm gonna pass it to Adriana.

Charley Burton:

Okay.

Adriana Wolf

Okay. You're a motivational speaker and incredibly vocal activist.

Charley Burton:

Yes.

Adriana Wolf

How does this feel like a radical form of telling your story that perhaps subverts the idea of don't ask, don't tell that you were taught as a child?

Charley Burton:

Because we need voices. The reason for me to be able to do what I do, for me to be able to speak up, for me to be able to be the motivational speaker that I'm doing, because if I don't do it, who will? That's the way I look at it. I look at, as I say in my book, my story's not unique.

Charley Burton:

I'm not first trans guy or trans person or LGBTQ or straight ally that has not been abused as a child. None of what has happened to me ... The only thing that is different is I wrote about it. The only thing that's different is that I talk about it. It's important that I speak to organizations and especially allies that I no longer keep stuff to myself. I no longer do that

Charley Burton:

don't ask, don't tell. If you ask me, I'm gonna tell you. I don't run around with a 'T' on my head or saying, look at me, I'm a trans man. What I do is that I step up and I say, if you don't have your voice, let me be the voice for you until you can find it. Some people find it, and others live their life without even finding their voice at all. But for them to know there's somebody there is important.

Adriana Wolf

Okay. Then what would you say to someone who

Adriana Wolf

says it's too late for them to change in any aspect of their life?

Charley Burton:

It's never too late. It's never too late. I watched my mother change. I watched my mother change the last three years of her life to be a very kind, loving, understanding woman. I watched my mother change as a wonderful grandmother. I always said

Charley Burton:

I might have been just way too much for her. Because she was a great mother to my older siblings. But that might have been just not -- I've watched her become a beautiful grandmother, and she became my best friend for the last few years of her life. This is somebody who I hated with a passion because I blamed her for everything that happened in my life. When I stopped that blame and she started

Charley Burton:

understanding was when we both started changing. There's never too late to change. I mean, never.

Adriana Wolf

Okay. Then my next question, have you felt, since transitioning, that you've been able to regain control over your life? Do you feel like control was definitely something that you've kind of like worked with and maybe like worked against over time?

Adriana Wolf

Even the story of the loaded gun every morning, do you feel like you were almost like leaving it up to fate or like up to some outside power, whether your life was going to keep on going?

Charley Burton:

The lack of control that I had, there is no question in my mind. If I had not found something to help me gain that control, I would've been dead. I would've been dead either by my hand or more than likely, probably by overdosing.

Charley Burton:

Being able to gain that control, being able to recognize -- I had to recognize that this thing is called lack of control. In AA, we talk about lack of power is our dilemma. I was lacking of power over my life, which was creating just

Charley Burton:

chaos. I mean, I can't describe the chaos that I used to live in, just the drama and chaos all the time. My sponsor would remind me that drama is so dishonest, when I realized how dishonest my life was with the drama and the lying and the out of control behavior. I mean, I used to go to restaurants and snort salt and pepper just to get a rush,

Charley Burton:

but it wasn't so much just to get that rush. But it was to get the attention on me, so you wouldn't think I was something else. That's just lack of control. And once I gained that control, once I gained that understanding in life, it's been so much better.

Adriana Wolf

Great. Thank you. Okay. I'm gonna turn it back to Bliss.

Charley Burton:

Sure.

Tom Bliss:

Thank you Adriana. Charlie, we're wrapping up. Is there anything that you haven't shared that you feel is important to be part of your oral history?

Charley Burton:

Yeah, I was just thinking about this. For any guys that are out there waiting to get top surgery or surgeries, I share the story. I think it was last year, we had that gas crisis where everybody was running around putting gas in plastic bags on here on the east coast. There was something about, I don't know what it was, but nobody could get gas. I'm actually taking a training class at a transgender training institute

Charley Burton:

all week long, so I'm not anywhere even near where social media's going. At one point they said, look, we're gonna take a two hour break. I, of course, pick up my phone and I'm seeing all this stuff. I pick up the phone and I call one of my cousins, and I was like, what the heck is going on? What are you talking about? You better go get gas at the Wawa now, or you're not gonna get in. She was like, where have you been? I said, I've been in a class all day. She said, oh, there's this gas shortage and they're saying, if you don't get gas there, you might not get gas for like another

Charley Burton:

two weeks. My car was in the shop getting a repair, and I called the mechanic and the mechanic said, yeah, your car's ready. I jump up, I go next door and I ask my brother, I'm like, Hey, can you run me over to pick my car up? And he said, yes. So I'm thinking, I stopped dead in my tracks in the yard, and I said, I've gotta run upstairs and put a binder on and put a T-shirt on and I gotta come back down. I walk in my kitchen and I just --

Charley Burton:

That was May, I'd had my surgery that March, and I run in the kitchen and I stopped dead in my tracks. It was that moment that I realized, Charlie, you're just like any other guy. I went upstairs and the only thing I needed to do was just change the T-shirt. I just did laundry. I had these T-shirts folded, and I put this t-shirt over my head and I could smell the freshness.

Charley Burton:

I felt that cotton hitting against my bare skin. And again, I realized, there's yet another point in my life that I'm exactly in the body that I need to be in. It's hard to describe, but I just want to share with young guys that if you are out there and you don't have a home, you don't have a place to lay your head, you don't have money. It's gonna work out.

Charley Burton:

All you gotta do is open your mouth. My mother used to always say, a closed mouth will never get fed. It's so important to get therapy and it's so important to get in touch with who you are so that you can experience that cotton shirt going over your head. I'm telling you, my life is good, and I want everybody else to have just as good a life. You deserve just as good a life as I do.

Tom Bliss:

Beautiful. I have four questions.

Tom Bliss:

They're meant to be kind of light.

Charley Burton:

Okay.

Tom Bliss:

Kind of quick answers. But we'll see.

Charley Burton:

Okay. okay.

Tom Bliss:

If you could tell your 15 year old self anything, what would it be?

Charley Burton:

If I could tell my 15 year old self anything, I would tell them, you just gotta hang on. It's going to be okay. Trust me. It's going to be okay.

Tom Bliss:

Do you think there's such a thing as a queer superpower?

Tom Bliss:

And if so, what would yours be?

Charley Burton:

My queer superpower. There is a queer superpower, and I think that queer superpower is a collection of all the people who have been before us. The Marsha P. Johnsons, the Sylvia Rivera's. I think our queer superpowers are the young people who are out here today being their true, authentic selves. I think we're a collection of superpowers and

Charley Burton:

we just happen to be queer. We happen to be pan, we happen to be bi, we happen to be trans, we happen to be straight, whatever we are. I think there's a collection of us, that we give each other power when we see goodness happening in our lives.

Tom Bliss:

Why do you think it's important to tell your story?

Charley Burton:

It's important to tell my story because 10 years from now when I'm not here, or 20 years

Charley Burton:

from now when I'm not here, and there's this archive because this young allies or this young trans kids in school, and they're like, you know what? I need to pull this archive up to read about trans people who are suicidal, black trans men, trans men who live in the South. There's a record. Not even a record, there's an answer.

Charley Burton:

It's almost like Google Scholar when you're in school. You use Google Scholar or Google, there's always an answer to something all the time. I feel like it's important that we have these archives. I feel it's important that we continue to tell our story so that the kid that's standing in the mirror with that gun to his head knows that he doesn't have to stand in that mirror with the gun to their head. That there's something out there that they can do that will give them an answer. Here's an answer.

Charley Burton:

Here's proof that if this dude can make it through everything, this dude is made through, so can I.

Tom Bliss:

Thank you. Oh, you pretty much answered my fourth question . We'll have a bio for you, we'll mention all of the good tidings that you've had. You were named Outstanding Virginian, 2021 by Equality Virginia. You were appointed by the Governor of Virginia to the Virginia LGBTQ+ Advisory Council,

Charley Burton:

you serve now on the Board of Equality.

Charley Burton:

Well, I'm off of that now. Only board that I'm on is the LGBTQ advisory board for UVA and I'm the board chair for PFLAG.

Tom Bliss:

Amazing. I mean, just so much abundance. We have a couple minutes. There's one story that we skipped over that [inaudible] want to get. You eventually were the national Director of Black Transmen.

Charley Burton:

Yes.

Tom Bliss:

There's a 2012 Charlottesville Pride Festival. You worked a booth, was your [inaudible] out, and you also met Sage Smith?

Charley Burton:

Yes.

Tom Bliss:

Can you tell me about that?

Charley Burton:

Oh, wow. Yes, yes. Of course I'm the only booth that's black at the Charlottesville pride. And Constance is with me, even though we're not together, she came up for the pride. She's sitting there and this young girl comes first with

Charley Burton:

about three girls, and she walks up and she says to me, I didn't even realize there were other black trans people in Charlottesville. And I'm like, yeah, I live here in Charlottesville. She picks up a few things off the table and she leaves and then she comes back and she has about three more girls with her. She says, well how can I be a part of your group? I said, well, this is black trans men, but I can give you my card and get in touch with me. Maybe we can get something set up here.

Charley Burton:

She talks about how she wants to get out of the city and just really be a performer. She's struggling, but she's loving where she's at, and she's got a supportive grandma, so she leaves again and she comes back this fourth time and she becks right there, and she's pointing to Constance, she said, that woman right there, I was like, yeah.

Charley Burton:

She said, is she one of us? I said, oh, no, no, no, no, no. I said, she's straight. I said, well, she's a lesbian. She said, I want to look like her. I really do want to look like her. That woman is beautiful. Constance hears the conversation. And Constance, with the loving spirit that she had, took her side and talked to her about MAC makeup and talked to her about how to apply makeup and gave her one of her makeups there, something.

Charley Burton:

I remember that was September. There was something so special about this kid. The night of the transgender day of Remembrance, that same year, I'm getting dressed, I'm driving down to Richmond and Constance and I are gonna go to the Transgender Day of Remembrance ceremony in Richmond. I've rushed home, I've for me this time to come from around the table. I come from around the table and she said, that woman taken a shower, I'm getting dressed,

Charley Burton:

and this newsflash comes on about this missing kid. But they had missed -- They dead named, a whole nine yards. They had a picture of a male. But it was something about those eyes that I kept seeing those eyes. I was like, I've seen those eyes before. But they're saying, this person is named Dashad Smith, but that wasn't the young girl's name or anybody's name. Where have I seen those eyes before?

Charley Burton:

And so we go to the Transgender Day of Remembrance and I come back and a couple of days later they said this person sometimes dresses as a girl. Here's the other picture. I stopped dead in my traps. I thought, that's Sage. That's the young girl that I just met a couple of months ago. I think about, I mean, I even helped with a lot of fundraising for her. I wrote letters

Charley Burton:

to the newspaper about how they needed to stop. She's a trans girl, you need to not saying that she dresses as a man, give her the respect. It was then that I realized the plight of trans women, most trans women, black trans women, are poor. They don't have the money that white trans women have to get surgeries. And I just think about this poor soul of what she went through.

Charley Burton:

I mean, I know Sage is not alive, not now. I wish we could find something. Her grandmother died grieving that she never saw Sage again, or know what happened to Sage. And I think about, my God, what could Sage Smith be doing right now? Because there was something magical about her. There was something so special. The reason she just kept coming back to that table, how hungry she

Charley Burton:

was in Charlottesville to see, even though I was a trans man, that there was somebody black that was doing something with an organization. Then to connect with Constance, who told her, you know what baby, no matter how much makeup you put on, you still gonna look beautiful. There's this picture that they have of Sage in front of the drag stage with these drag women. How beautiful she looked

Charley Burton:

right after Constance had worked with her at that booth, with that makeup on. I think about what difference that made for her, just that split second that day. I'm so glad that I was there. And then what happened was that was that Saturday, and they put an article in the paper about the trans men and me being a part of this organization, and I lost my job

Charley Burton:

two days later for being at that booth. I would lose my job all over again. If those few moments, those few hours made that much of a difference that I know it did for Sage, it was well worth losing the job because that was what I was there for. I wasn't there to show Charlottesville there was a black trans organization, I was there that day for Sage Smith. And that's powerful.

Tom Bliss:

Thank you. I mean, this is the world that we live in. Trans people need equal acceptance and rights. Especially black trans women, need to stop being killed. Yeah. Thank you, Charlie, for all you've done.

Charley Burton:

Oh, thank you. Thank you.