In One Person - John Irving and Sexuality

“We are formed by what we desire. In less than a minute of excited, secretive longing, I desired to become a writer and to have sex with Miss Frost—not necessarily in that order.” —from In One Person John Irving’s 2012 book.

Miss Frost’s hands. Mrs. Hadley’s hands. Can’t think of an author, screenwriter or playwright who depicts the range of humankind in a simple description of a person's hands as John Irving.   This isn’t a book I can’t put down, it’s more like a book I must put down… to consider the art of the sentences… the construct of the people.

I know heterosexuals. I know gay men and gay women. Here and there I’ve attended La Cage kinda variety shows and been amazed by cross-dressing entertainers. We picnicked dressed in Gay Nineties attire in Lincoln Park ringside to the first Gay Pride Parade in Chicago. Volunteering with homeless youth at the corners of Belmont and Broadway, weekly I talked with several transgender teens. And throughout a term of a writing class, a man with a strong masculine name transformed… his hair from white-walls to chin length, his skin from spikey beard to soft, his voice from deep and dark to light and airy, introduced himself one evening with a name gentle and feminine. As a girl riding my bike to school, playing baseball and basketball, I found pride, strength and differential in being a “Tom Boy”. In college, newly born birth control, selling at $.99 a pack allowed sexual freedom. During those years, curvy child-bearing hip models made way for a boy hair and boy hip Twiggy. Of my friends who chose office careers rather than to stay home with children, few took a husband's last name when they married. While every ladies magazine at the time pondered, can we have it all? We did it anyway. Fashion for working women included manly suits, wing tip high heels, neckties and bow ties. I wore them… with lipstick, eyeliner, perfume and pretty underwear… expanding my masculine, maintaining my hold of feminine. Or, so I thought.

Feminine and masculine… All in One Person questions the definitions, allows possibility, challenges my beliefs, offers me ways to think about differences and honors the idea that people include both with limitless expressions of their sexuality.

Connecting the dots…  All in One Person may be fiction, but Irving’s very imagining validates my belief of being multidimensional… it honors a whole self and allows me to honor the possibility of others and their whole selves.