The Testosterone Files by Max Wolf Valerio
Max Wolf Valerio crafts a raw, gripping, and poetic account of life before, during, and after injecting testosterone. Valerio's detailed observations about a lesbian transitioning from female to a heterosexual male highlights the physical and emotional differences between women and men, and alternately challenges and confirms readers' assumptions about gender. Valerio presents his story in three parts: the height of his transition, in which he witnesses his own increased energy and sex drive while struggling with gaining confidence in his male self and bearing witness to his own demise as a woman life before testosterone, when as Anita, a self-identified lesbian out for fourteen years, he confronts startling moments of awareness of a deeper, earlier dream of who he really is and life after testosterone, when the experience of living in the world as a man is at once a homecoming and a confirmation that male behaviour is at least partly rooted in biology. The Testosterone Files addresses the most fundamental issues of transitioning, from buying men's underwear to choosing a male name, as well as the profound subjects of male privilege, physical power, and existing as a male who was once distrustful and critical of men's intentions. Valerio's honest and forthcoming opinions on gender, identity, and self-perception comprise the core of this intensely personal and absorbing narrative which grapples with the tough and complex issues that emerge in a world whose assumptions about gender binaries are being increasingly challenged as more people openly self-define across the gender spectrum.
Valerio, Max Wolf: - Max Wolf Valerio is an iconoclastic poet and writer, and a long-transitioned man of transsexual history. He identifies primarily as an individual although his ancestry is Northern European, American Indian (Blackfoot Confederacy- Blood/Kainai band) on his mother's side, and his father is Hispano from Northern New Mexico and descended from the Conversos and crypto-Jews of the Sephardic diaspora following the Expulsion. A chapbook Animal Magnetism (eg press) appeared in 1984. He read and performed his poems to music and in featured readings in San Francisco throughout the 70s and 80s at places like Intersection for the Arts, CoLab, Valencia Tool and Die, the San Francisco Art Institute, and The Marshall Weber Gallery (now ATA). Recent poetry includes: Exile: Vision Quest at the Edge of Identity--a long poem set to ambient music and excerpted in Yellow Medicine Review and made possible by a Native American Arts and Cultural Traditions Grants (NAACT) from the San Francisco Arts Commission; a collaboration with photographer and painter Dana Smith, Mission Mile Trilogy +1; poems in the anthology TROUBLING THE LINE: TRANS AND GENDERQUEER POETRY AND POETICS (Nightboat Books, 2013). His memoir, The Testosterone Files (Seal Press, 2006) was a Lambda Finalist for 2006. His latest book of poetry is THE CRIMINAL: THE INVISIBILITY OF PARALLEL FORCES (EOAGH Books, 2019).
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781580051736 |
| ISBN 10 | 1580051731 |
| Title | The Testosterone Files |
| Author | Max Wolf Valerio |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Seal Press |
| Year published | 2006-05-04 |
| Number of pages | 352 |
| Prizes | Commended for Lambda Literary Awards (Transgender) 2006 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |