Transgender musician, teacher tells story
Connelly Akstens’ memoir discusses her gender journey
Connelly Akstens’ recent memoir, “Without Shame: Learning to Be Me” tells many stories: That of an ambivalent college athlete, assaying both basketball and rugby at Worcester, Mass.’s College of the Holy Cross, truly succeeding at neither. That of a confident Adirondack fishing guide, who lived in the mountains for 30 years and could tie a meticulous Ausable Wulff dry fly as easily as telling you where, when and why the trout were going to hit. And that of a skilled fingerpicker, playing deft guitar inspired by '60s folk haunts like Harvard Square’s notorious Club 47 and at Saratoga Springs’ legendary Caffe Lena, from the mid-'70s to more current days.
That Akstens, nearly 75, did these things as a man, under her given name of Tom, while certainly not hidden, is not the primary focus of the book. As might be expected of a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, “Without Shame,” (264 pages, Potowomut Press, $27.99) rather, is the tale of a life well-lived, well-told.
Born in Beantown, in 1947, Akstens recalls “mysterious” surgeries as a youth, at Boston Children’s Hospital, to “correct,” she assumed, what was then thought of as an “intersex” individual. Now, living, since age 55, as “me,” with her wife Susanne, in the Ocean State, Akstens, who will read passages from the book at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 15, at Greenwich Free Library, has had no additional surgeries, but, as a teacher, mentors fellow transgender folk in navigating their own dysphoria through memoir writing — stating, in the first words of the book’s preface, “For most of my life, I’ve lived in the shadow of shame.” She also does outreach at SpeakOUT Boston and other conferences while still making time to press fingers to strings.
Like other contemporary memoirs with local roots — say music industry mogul and University at Albany graduate Josh Rosenthal’s “The Record Store of the Mind” or Saratoga Springs’ GE Capital/ Seagram’s former publicist John Oliver’s “I Know This Looks Bad: Errors and Graces in a Louche Life” — “Without Shame” is not the standard autobiography of a famous person. Akstens is not Dwight D. Eisenhower, Zora Neale Hurston or Caitlyn Jenner; hence no need to note every chronological touch point and track down every family member.
Instead, it is episodic, anecdotal by nature, with vignettes from on the field, off the coast and in the classroom.
One particularly bright reminiscence, from 20 years ago, delineates Akstens' first awkward, but ultimately rewarding, visit to an ersatz transgender convention in Manchester, N.H., with a Holiday Inn stay playing backdrop to what, instead, largely turned out to be a gathering of men dressing as women and still, in most respects, men.
Elsewhere are chapters on mundane but fascinating topics like “Eateries and Dives,” “Concerts,” “Snapshots” and where, once upon a time, to find live folk music throughout the Northeast (“Where Real Music Was Played”) — from New Paltz to Montreal. Each of these, scattered throughout the book and sometimes followed by other collections of the same, are broken up subtopically.
Akstens also makes vivid memories of writing and recording with Big Trout Radio in historic Woodstock, where music seems to be as persistent as the leafy trees, bright sunshine and Catskill mountain air.
BTR, a trio with Akstens joining famed guitarist Artie Traum and Adirondack singer/storyteller Christopher Shaw (long now a presence in Averill Park), made music throughout the region, but also toured nationally, bringing big fish stories and jazzy progressions across the land.
What makes this particular stew work is the sheer quality of Akstens’ writing, which flows naturally, never overexerting itself or overstaying its welcome. Each chapter is pithy, but none lasts more than a few pages. There is not, in “Without Shame,” the jabbing, jarring rhythm of a collection of social media entries, but the pace, instead, of one of Shaw’s well-worn yarns.
To be sure, Akstens, who has taught Shakespeare, the Enlightenment, the Reformation and more at Siena College, does allude
to her gender dysphoria frequently, and to the multitudinous ways — some mild, some major — that it interrupted her life, as a child, as a young adult and as a senior.
She never glosses over the trouble, but follows it.
One night, her first year in the Adirondacks, Armagnac in hand, Akstens saw something frightening. An older neighbor, versed in such disturbances, called it, in a slurring North Country drawl, a ‘haint.’ A clearer, more scientific mind — “the font of all obscure knowledge” — dubbed the rarity "ball lightning." All three agreed its presence was unsettling, perhaps even more so in the dark stillness of the mountains.
Younger people today may find it easier to shift gears; to explore the fluid avenues between gender, byways that, in the past, we didn’t even know existed.
Authors — pioneers — like Akstens help lead the way. They throw the ball of lightning in the air, and in that eerie, primordial glow, we can glimpse the road ahead.