A playwright reading based on the life of a Wyoming man who openly crossdressed will tour the Cowboy State. "A Sissy in Wyoming" focuses on Larry Goodwin's life based on oral interviews conducted by the University of Wyoming American Heritage Center with his wife, Vickie Jones Goodwin. Wyoming Public Radio's Kamila Kudelska spoke with Vickie, the American Heritage Center's Archivist Leslie Waggener, and Gregory Hinton, who wrote and reads the play. Vickie starts out talking about her late husband.
Vickie Jones Goodwin: As he told it when he was very young he started experimenting with wearing female attire. But he was very comfortable with it. I guess a lot of young men experiment and, you know, move on, but he didn't. It brought him a kind of comfort. So as he got older, he got frustrated with having to hide this part of himself. He had a bit of an inferiority complex. And I was always telling him what a good person he was, and that he needed to know that he was a good person. And he said, 'If I'm a good person, then I should be able to present myself the way I am.' And so he began, I guess, becoming more and more public around the early 90s. And then to a point where he was just "out there." He stuck to his guns, you know, people were always calling him names. At some point, some woman said, 'Well, you're just a sissy.' And he decided that he would adopt that name. And so he adopted the name of Sissy. He said, 'Okay, that's who I am.' And he asked people to start calling him that and introduced himself that way to new friends.
Kamila Kudelska: So Leslie, when you interviewed Vickie, I wonder if maybe you could talk about a couple of things that stood out for you when you guys were talking?
Leslie Waggener: One thing that really struck me was Vickie talking about how much he (Sissy) struggled with loving himself. He would say to himself and cry, 'You are a good person, you are a good person,' and I remember you saying how difficult that was for him. And literally, he had tears in his eyes when he did that. And I just, that just was heart wrenching to me, because he was such a good person. And also, I think what struck me was Vickie, she just took…you didn't take everything in stride, but you sure seem to. And you're just, there's a word that Greg and I have used, is it b-e-a-t-i-f-i-c, is it that word?
Gregory Hinton: It's beatific.
LW: Thank you. Vickie is beatific.
GH: I stole that from one of our friends.
LW: And Sissy had the perfect partner. When he was attracted to Vicki, I think it was not only because she was physically beautiful, but there was something about her that he needed. And she brought something to his life that maybe he didn't even know that he needed.
KK: Gregory, how did you take those oral interviews and how did you manage to take what sounds like so many great stories in both Vickie and Sissy's life and make it into a play?
GH: I just chose to kind of do it in a linear fashion. We open with Sissy repeating to himself, 'I'm a good person, I'm a good person, I'm a good person.' And he's basically working in his garage and he's putting his tools away and he's just kind of reminiscing about his life growing up in Wyoming. He hid his cross dressing, but coming up, he became a bull rider and he adopted a lot of the traditional masculine traits and ended up volunteering to go to Guam in the service and so it just kind of evolves and you get an eye into what he's thinking.
KK: And then I guess if we can kind of touch upon the difficulties of being Sissy in Wyoming. So I just wonder how maybe the example of Sissy and this play plays a significance in that acceptance maybe in the state?
GH: Sissy might have been out in front throwing the football with his son, wearing a dress and tennis shoes or whatever, and a truck pulls up, a guy jumps out and beats the crap out of him in front of his son, and gets away. Vickie and Sissy, always, because they were social people, they like to go out. They had a lot of friends and they had supportive friends, but they'd like to go out to dinner. But there's a piece in the play, Sissy, he's always looking over his shoulder and whispering to Vickie, 'There's a guy over in the corner who's looking at us, I'm keeping an eye on him', or Did you see those two? They've been following us for two blocks.' I mean, he had, it wasn't paranoia, it was just, he was watchful. Because anything could go and they're good people, and that's what Wyoming is made up of. I think that that's a core Wyoming value is, live and let live. And that's what I guess we're gonna test on our Cowboy State tour of "A Sissy in Wyoming."
VJG: For example, like Greg said, he would notice when somebody is following us. And we were in Laramie, we had gone down there for some kind of an event, and so we're in Laramie, and there used to be a Whole Foods store. We were down there, and we're going through the food store, and Sissy said, 'See that? There's a policeman back there.' Like, well, you know, there was a big event going on, a big fall thing going on out in the street, and I didn't think anything about it. And so we're getting ready to go around the corner and this policeman, as soon as we get around the corner, away from the crowd, stops him and says, 'I need some ID,' and Sissy had been very strong member of the ACLU and he said, 'I'm not giving you my ID.' And anyway, he was, in fact, being followed. I just kind of read it off. The combination of that was that the police officer put his finger, you know, shook his finger in Sissy's face and Sissy, he pushed his finger away, and was arrested for assaulting a police officer. So, you know, I mean, Laramie, at some points, was one of our more challenging cities. And so when the tutu parties were done in Laramie, it was gratifying for Sissy to be out there on the street with all these people supporting him. And for all of Laramie to come together.
