Singer Cidny Bullens traces a journey toward transitioning in his new memoir
In 1971, North Shore native Cindy Bullens, who had just moved to New York City, went to the library to see if there was any information that might help a young woman who felt like she was living in the wrong body. Bullens, a student and budding singer, found an address for a Tulane University research program and was sent a packet of information about sex-change operations. Ultimately Bullens decided that the timing for surgery was impossible: She had neither the money nor the support network.
The intervening decades would see Bullens make a mark on the music industry by touring extensively with Elton John, appearing on the “Grease” soundtrack, earning a pair of Grammy nominations, and, more recently, becoming a noted Nashville songwriter and a third of the Americana trio the Refugees. Bullens also suffered professional and personal tumult during those years: Getting dropped by major labels, battling substance abuse, going through a divorce, quitting music more than once, and grieving the loss of a daughter, Jessie, who died from Hodgkin’s disease at the age of 11.
In 2012, four decades after receiving that sex-change brochure, Bullens, 73, announced that he had transitioned and was now Cidny Bullens. Now he has published a memoir, “TransElectric: My Life as a Cosmic Rock Star,” an engrossing read thanks to both Bullens’s unique history and his penchant for storytelling and introspection. This week Bullens kicks off a series of local readings and performances with an event at Jabberwocky Books in Newburyport, just a few miles from his childhood home of West Newbury.
“Now it’s a bedroom community, but when I was growing up it was a farming town,” says Bullens from his Nashville home. “It was small and rural and perfect for me.” Bullens says his parents were “Eisenhower Republicans” whose collection of jazz and gospel records kindled his love of music. A 1966 Rolling Stones show at the Manning Bowl in Lynn sealed the deal — even though the chaotic night ended with police tear-gassing the audience.
Bullens spent long stretches in Los Angeles and New York, then lived in Maine for 30 years — he still has a home on the island of North Haven (population 417). After a 1989 MCA album failed to make a dent, Bullens imagined — not for the first time — his music career was over. After Jessie’s death in 1996, Bullens wrote a series of songs that were “so private and so personal that no one else heard them — they were for me as part of the process of grieving.”
Eventually the songs reached the public as the album “Somewhere Between Heaven and Earth,” which touched such a chord that Bullens was often invited to perform the songs for grieving parents. “I feel that all of my cumulative knowledge about the act of songwriting came together, along with my truth at the time, and combined to make those songs not only personal but also universal,” says Bullens.
When Bullens transitioned he wasn’t sure what it would mean for the future of the Refugees, originally an all-female trio when Bullens started the group in 2007 with Wendy Waldman and Deborah Holland. But after a hiatus, the group just released “California,” a collection of West Coast classics by the likes of the Beach Boys and the Byrds. “They just accepted me,” says Bullens. “We just did our first Refugees gigs in 10 years, and it’s not like anything has changed. It’s just us! Vocally my voice has changed, but together we still have the magic.”
In 2020 Bullens self-released a powerful collection of originals called “Walkin’ Through This World.” Later this year the album will be reissued as “Little Pieces” by the indie label Kill Rock Stars, with a newly recorded single, “Not With You,” that features Beth Nielsen Chapman (out Aug. 1).
The new release of the record was set in motion when Bullens met Kill Rock Stars’ honcho Slim Moon at a Nashville concert held in protest of the state’s newly passed laws aimed at the LGBTQ community. “The physical transition was easy. Now my body feels right,” says Bullens. “But what you couldn’t have predicted 10 years ago was the hate and vitriol that has descended upon the trans community because of the political climate that we’re in now. And that is really difficult.”
There are days, Bullens admits, where such pressures make him want to leave public life yet again and just live out his life in quiet North Haven. “Then I look around and I realize that I’m out, I’m proud, and what am I going to do about it? How can I be of service now? Well right now I have a book called ‘TransElectric,’ and a record coming out, so I can’t hide. I am me.”
“I lived a whole human life, and then transitioned,” says Bullens, who is now a grandparent. “If that can change a mind or a thought about what being trans is, then I’ve contributed something.”