"L. Timmel Duchamp - De Secretis Mulierum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duchamp L Timmel)

especially favored him. For it surely must have seemed a miracle to him that
his
deception escaped detection.

I made an admiring observation to this effect to Teddy Warner the night of the
afternoon we discovered the "ugly but fascinating truth" (as I once heard
Judith
Lauer, the prominent medievalist, characterize it). The man just didn't see
it,
though, and snapped at me that if I couldn't appreciate the fact that the
whole
project had been thrown into jeopardy, that this second "impossibly
devastating
revelation" was "simply catastrophic," I should at the very least keep my
silly
facetiousness to myself.

What he meant, of course, was that I should keep my mouth shut and give him
"some empathy for chrissake" (which is the second or third most important
thing
graduate-student lovers are for). (Lovers? Rather, I should say, sporadic
sexual
partners. Did he think of me as his lover? Probably not. Probably he used [in
the privacy of his own thoughts] something jazzed up, like "mistress," or
tacky,
like "girlfriend." To which I even [or especially] all these years later say:
YUCK.)

I've often entertained the disloyal suspicion that if the PSD Lab hadn't been
packed with an international spread of luminaries, Teddy would have tried to
hush up this second revelation of "mistaken gender identity" (a term that had
already been coined by some fool in an article in Past and Present and not
only
stuck, but along with the more economical "gender-disguise," made it into the
popular vernacular by way of the New York Review of Books' series of pop
essays
on Past-scan Device issues). Though his spouse Marissa was present at this
grand
soiree, I happened to be at Teddy's side (along with the three PSD groupies
he'd
picked up from Princeton, Yale, and Harvard since that first PSD venture--
peeking in on Leonardo-- came down). Like everyone else, I had my eyes glued
to
the stage [which the physicists called "the holo-tank"). Cameras were poised
and
ready to shoot from all sides. And as all of us historians waited, Marissa and
her colleagues, seated at their keyboards, mice, and monitors, played (it
seemed) at being SF-movie scientists. Then, suddenly, there he was, Thomas
Aquinas, at mass, on December 6, 1273 (or so we all hoped, since the
ostensible