User:AlexR

Just when Konrad Adenauer left this world, I arrived. On my birthday, Hair had its premiere, but nothing of that reached the small Eifel village in Germany, where I grew up. That was a place where decent people lived, not some long-haired terrorists, who wanted to bomb all decent people out of this world! Which is why all long-haired guys belonged, for reasons of security and order, into working camps, anyway — and that was the liberal position. And that was the reason I asked myself rather early in my life whether I really belonged there. My whole bunch of relatives asked themselves the very same question, too. Especially since all attempts to make me into a proper girl seemed not too successful, either. They were right about that. They had no idea, just how right they were. Should have listened to me, I've always said so!

In the same year when half a million people protested in Bonn against the brilliant idea of both NATO and the Soviet Union to station cruise missiles in Germany whose main targets were in Germany, I moved, together with my mother, to Cologne, and with that into a somewhat more liberal environment. (For those who don't know quite so much about cruise missiles supposed to drop on my head, that was the year of the Falkland war, too.) Anyway, living in Cologne, I met strange people with long hair - at school! I started to listen to strange music - Stones! I encountered strange political opinions and made a brief excursion into communism. The strangest thing however was my brilliant idea that a lot of my problems came from being not feminine enough. The phase that followed looked, in retrospect, a lot like Drag. But nobody can say I didn't try!

While in the USSR Glasnost and Perestroika began, I got my own freedom, namely from school (and, Ms. Teacher: I never missed it - not for a second!), and I got my own flat, too.

In the following years I was a student of philosophy, science of religion and English literature. I spent a lot of time, though, studying music by listening to a couple of very good local bands, and studying social sciences by observing and interacting with people at a local pub. At that point, I was still trying to suppress my constantly growing discomfort with myself and the rest of the world by attempting to become my own ideal of femaleness. A goal I reached about the same time Yugoslavia began to break up. Because when I reached it, I realised that I had been on the wrong road all along, and my life began to break up, too.

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Wikipedia