My Pals Sissy and Greg: The Angst of Social Rebellion Out West
Not long ago, my friend Gregory Hinton sent me a copy of his newest play.
The tour de force power of its subject matter made me feel like crying.
The work details the trials and triumphs of Larry Sissy Goodwin, a Wyoming native who for much of his life dressed as a woman in perhaps a state best known for its rodeos and ranch hands, a place oozing with fragile machismo.
In 2013, as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, I wrote a front-page piece about what I referred to as this Crossdresser in the Cowboy State.
The story detailed how Sissy was not gay — he was married with two children — but how he was nonetheless mocked and physically beaten for his habit of dressing in those girlish things that caught his eye.
“Sissy was the first pejorative slur effeminate boys of my generation probably heard as we came up in the fifties and sixties,” Greg wrote me. “And it stung.”
It was certainly true for Sissy. He appropriated the word as his own after hearing it one-too-many times as a middle-aged man.
Larry didn’t shy away from being a Sissy.
He owned it.
And it cost him dearly.
I wrote about Sissy because, in my eyes, he was more man, more human, than all those small-hearted roughnecks who bloodied and belittled him.
And here is the sheer beauty of being a journalist free to write about this emerging new spirit of the American West.
I could highlight those this taking this brave stand to be different.
I interviewed modern rebels, pathfinders who included the mother of murdered gay icon Matthew Shepard, and the two lesbians who fled harassment in Denver to open an independent bookstore in the middle of Wyoming’s nowhere.
And then came Greg.
In 2015, I wrote a front-page profile of another social outsider with the sheer guts to speak out. Greg is a gay scholar. And like Sissy, he paid a price for his otherness.
The son of a veteran newspaper editor, Greg uses his novels, plays and scholarship to shed new light on the historical role gays and lesbians played — and continue to play — in the Rocky Mountain states and beyond.
We met in Cody, Wyo., where he grew up. We attended a rodeo at the World Famous Cody Stampede, and toured The Buffalo Bill Center of the West which Greg calls the “Louvre of Western Museums.”
As Greg spoke about his “magical rural western childhood,” he wrestled with the question that has driven his work and intellectual curiosity: Can gay men and women, driven away from their home generations ago, ever return to this emerging new American West?
Greg, who now lives in Hollywood with his longtime partner, soon became a friend and regular house guest.
He prized my eye for finding and telling stories that championed people whose sexual and sartorial preferences made them social outcasts.
I valued his intellect and passion, brilliance and quiet, self-deprecating style.
Greg had read my story about Sissy long before we ever met. We were both gobsmacked by that level of chutzpah.
When Sissy died of brain cancer last March, Greg set into motion his plan to honor such courage by penning a play he hoped would be seen across the West, at museums and universities, and in small towns where gays must continue to hide.
He interviewed Vickie, Sissy’s longtime spouse, as part of his research for his stage narrative about a man who dared to be different, and the woman who loved and supported him.
The play, entitled A Sissy in Wyoming, begins:
PART ONE: THE HONEY LOCUST
(O.S.) I am a good person. I am a good person. I am a good person. I am a good person…
A SPOT:
ON SISSY, his face bloodied, as he tends to his wounds with a cloth. His ruffled blouse is torn, and his knees, exposed beneath his tennis skirt, are skinned.
SISSY: I am a good person. I am a good person. I am a good person, (as he blots his knees. ) I am a good person. I am a good person. I am a good person.
(A deep breath)
Better.
(SISSY exits to refrain of Jim Reeves singing “WELCOME TO MY WORLD.”)
As I read, I could actually hear Sissy, this brave strong-willed man, saying these words, bucking himself up in a moment of self-doubt.
And that’s when the emotions came.
How do you capture the outsized spirits of two men who never met in life, social revolutionaries who furthered the cause of cultural enlightenment in our time?
In 2013, I spent several days with Sissy in and around Casper, Wyo. Months before, I’d been on the campus of a local community college researching a story about laid-off oil workers continuing their education, when one advised me, “Go talk to my instructor Sissy up at the industrial arts building.”
I expected to find a woman, but instead met a man I later described in my story, walking through an area mall, as “a linebacker-sized figure in a pink skirt, lacy yellow blouse and five-o’clock shadow; a gold lamé purseslung over his shoulder and a white bow affixed to his receding gray hair.
The story told how the one-time rodeo rider and military veteran had for decades endured a profoundly hostile environment, how a stranger once drove up to his house and kicked in his front teeth. People called him a queer and a pervert. He was booted from countless stores, hotels and restaurants, all because of the way he dressed.
His stalwarts included Vickie and the couple’s two children.
With Vickie’s help, Sissy worked to accept himself. Each morning, standing at a mirror, often weeping, he repeated a mantra: “I am a good person.”
And people who knew him could see that.
One day, the young men in his classes all wore pink shirts and pink ribbons in their hair as a salute to their brave instructor. Because Sissy began to make a difference in how macho Wyoming treated those who were different.
A band called Annie and the Vets, musicians whom Sissy came to call friends, played a song in his honor, and the refrain always made him smile: “A cowboy in a party dress just ain’t right.”
But for Sissy it was.
When he died, at age 73, his obituary included a line that went, “He was passionate about building a peaceful world. Here people are judged on their character — not by the clothes they wear, not by the color of their skin, not by where they originated, not by who they love.”
No matter how much comfort she offered, Vickie knew how much Sissy suffered.
“He felt so alone, as you know, out there in the world, he felt so alone,” she said. “He wanted other people to know so they wouldn’t feel alone, because he learned there were a lot of people that felt like he did, that there was something wrong with them, that they weren’t good people. And so he wanted those people to understand that there were other people like him.”
Sissy described himself as “a Gender Enhanced Male (GEM); that is, I cross-dress.”
Friends knew him as something else.
“He is by far the bravest person I’ve ever known in my life,” one said at his funeral. “He was just who the hell he was.”
Greg Hinton understands. Because, like Sissy, he is just who the hell he is.
Now 67, Hinton came out as gay while a college student in Boulder, Colo. A backlash, including physical threats, fostered a harsh realization: Like legions of others, he would have to leave the small-town West for gay enclaves in West Hollywood or San Francisco.
In 1991, an HIV diagnosis brought new direction to the longtime Hollywood producer and screenwriter. He wrote three novels about the gay experience in the West and celebrated his editor father, George Clifford “Kip” Hinton, in “Waiting for a Chinook,” a play about a journalist who comes home to seek out his father’s writings.
In 2009, at the Autry Museum of the West, Greg spearheaded a move to display the two shirts, symbols of repressed love, worn by gay cowboys in Ang Lee’s movie “Brokeback Mountain.” He’s the creator of Out West, a national program using lectures, plays, film and gallery exhibitions to showcase LGBT history and culture.
In Cody, he took a deep breath and described what it meant to be home.
“When I was young, I always had a mountain range over my shoulder,” he said. “I still come back looking for lost dignity.”
It was time for others to come home, too, he said.
“All of this beauty,” he said, gesturing toward the towering Absaroka Mountains. “We just can’t relinquish that to people troubled by our very being.”
That was something Sissy understood all too well.
Along with a copy of his latest play, Greg sent me a chatty update of what he called, “all things Sissy in Wyoming.”
With Greg’s gentle prodding, the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming conducted fifteen hours of oral history with Sissy’s widow, Vickie.
It was from those interviews, he said, along with the plethora of Sissy’s writings, interviews, correspondence and awards, that he crafted his play.
As well, Greg’s pal Andy Couch, a highly-regarded Oklahoma curator who recently became the new director of Casper’s Nicolaysen Art Museum, has announced plans for a program and exhibition of Sissy’s dresses and personal effects.
“For Andy, who relocated to Casper, to take on a major exhibition of a cross dresser — in Wyoming — as his opening salvo, speaks volumes about his vision, his courage and keen sense of the changing norms of popular culture in the rural Rocky Mountain states,” Greg wrote.
But there is so far yet to go.
Before Sissy’s story ran in the LA Times, top editors debated whether the newspaper wanted to “celebrate” such behavior with a front-page story. They weren’t sure they wanted to post online a video about his life and battles.
This was in so-called liberal LA, not cowpoke Wyoming.
And just the other day, Greg tweeted about new T-shirt being sold at a bar in Cheyenne, Wyo., that carries a violent and homophobic message — “In Wyoming, We Have Cure AIDS: We Shoot F****n F****ts— that has been rebuked by the state officials and activists.
As a result, there seems no better time for Greg to come forward with Sissy’s story of bravery and tolerance in the face of ignorance and hatred.
And Greg’s insights nail Sissy’s courage and self-doubt to their core.
At the end of the play, Sissy’s character speaks directly to the audience:
“I wish I could be like Vickie. No matter what she is doing there is invariably a smile on her face. She gets so much pleasure in life. For me, to live, it’s always been a matter of self-survival. To pretend otherwise was death, which Vickie and our children have understood. So you see, I’m a lucky, lucky — guy.
(Sissy holds up an imaginary mirror.)
I am a good person. I am a good person. I am a good person.
(Sissy turns to us)
I am a self-defined “Gender Enhanced Male.” Vickie agrees. I’m her GEM.
LIGHTS DOWN:
CURTAIN
Two Men. Two battles. Two personal heroes.
Both have evoked in me tears of joy.