(no audio) (no audio) (no audio) - Some mysteries are never solved, but this week's guest says some, like the ones she writes about, can shed a light on profound questions of gender and identity and basic questions about how we treat each other as human beings.

She's Casey Parks this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(lively music) (lively music) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller.

- This week, we're joined by Casey Parks, a reporter for the Washington Post who covers gender and family issues.

She's also the author of a powerful new book, "Diary of a Misfit: A Memoir and a Mystery."

Casey, thank you so much for being with us today.

- Thank you all so much for having me.

- Congratulations on the book.

"Diary of a Misfit," is a powerful read, and just for the audience who maybe hasn't read it yet, why don't you give us a 30,000-foot overview?

- Oh gosh, this is my least good skill, if I can do this.

(Jim laughing) It's different, I think, cause it's kind of a dense book with a lot going on.

But essentially, soon after I came out of the closet as a lesbian 20 years ago, my grandma pulled me aside and told me that she had grown up across the street from a woman who lived as a man, and she told me this person had a lot of mysteries.

There was a kidnapping mystery, and then no one really knew what happened at the end of his life, and so she wanted me to go back to her hometown, which is a small, rural place in north Louisiana and see if I could find out about him.

- But it's also a personal telling of your story right?

You're woven into this as much as Roy, the person your grandmother told you about.

- Yes, much to my chagrin, it is also about me.

I kind of, in my regular job, mostly just write about other people and I'm much more comfortable with that, but the book kind of became a story about the making of itself, and as part of that, there's a lot about my own family, because for 10 years, every year, I would travel back down to rural Louisiana, and in doing so, I would spend a lot of time with my family.

And after I graduated college, I really kind of fled the South, mostly because I was gay and felt really persecuted down there and I had really lost touch with a lot of my family.

And so going back to report this story kind of threw us all together again, so the book is about all of that personal stuff that comes up while I'm reporting.

- So Casey, tell us about growing up in that environment, as somebody who was gay.

This was not an accepted more, one of the accepted social mores in this rural part of Louisiana.

- Well, when I was really young, I didn't know I was gay, and I didn't really know there were other places in the world, so you know, I'm just kind of living.

But once I realized I was gay, it was really hard, because one of the first things that happened is my pastor went in front of our entire church and essentially prayed that I would die.

The prayer he prayed was, "Lord, save her and take her."

And the idea is that I would ask for forgiveness for being gay, and then die immediately so I could go to heaven.

I was in college at the time, and the security guard at my school would often barge into my dorm room to try to catch me doing something gay, and he would slip me Christian tapes to try to tell me I was going to hell.

My mom would write me emails, telling me that thinking of me made her wanna throw up.

So it was really, I mean, it was very difficult.

- So you mentioned your mother.

When you came back from college and told her that you had kissed a girl, what was her reaction?

- Well, initially she was like, I actually told her on Easter Sunday in church, and I think like the stunning moment kind of threw her, and she wasn't... She didn't have a bad reaction in like the first 10 minutes.

I think it was only after it sunk into her that she started to tell me, you know, like, "You're going to hell."

She would say like, "When I think of you, I wanna throw up."

Eventually, though, we did come to some peace about that, and later on in life, she walked me down the aisle when I got married, but those initial few years, she really rejected me.

- So that first day, though, there's a scene that you write in the book, and it's... - Oh, you want me to tell that?

- Yeah, tell us about that.

Tell us about that scene with your mother, and then your grandmother comes in and your grandmother says something that is quite striking and I'm guessing very surprising.

- Oh, that was a couple months later.

Okay, my family is kind of crap, so I didn't know what all you could say on that here.

(Jim laughing) So after I told my mom, and she was having a pretty bad reaction to it, I decided to go home for the summer from college, and everything kind of came to a head on 4th of July, and one of my uncles had, we were having a barbecue dinner, and one of my uncles looked at me across the table and said, "Have you ever heard of Sodom and Gomorrah?"

And then he said, "God destroyed a whole nation to get rid of homosexuality.

What makes you think he wouldn't destroy you?"

And my mom ran to the bathroom and was crying, and I went into the bathroom with her, and I was at the time trying to say, like, "Okay, I won't be gay anymore," because I wanted my mom to love me, and I thought still at 18, maybe somehow I could undo this.

And I was in there trying to placate her, and all of a sudden, my grandma barged into the bathroom, and then she just basically said, you know, "Casey likes women and you need to get over it."

And then my grandma just kind of stormed out and was like, "It's time to eat."

You know, my grandma at that time was in her late sixties.

This was 2002.

There was not a lot of acceptance of gay people at the time, and I certainly didn't expect someone from an older generation would be accepting of it.

But my grandmother just was like, "People have different preferences.

You know, that's it."

And that I think really made the rest of my life possible.

You know, just sometimes having one person in your life who accepts you and doesn't ask you like, "Why are you this way?"

or like, "What's wrong with you?"

It was just like, "This is the way the world is.

"Let's move on with our lives."

- Where did that acceptance come from in your grandmother?

It obviously was a surprise to you.

- Well, later that day, she pulled me to the to the little table she kept in her kitchen, and she told me about Roy, who's the person my book is about.

And she said like, "This person that I lived across the street from was biologically female, but lived his whole life as a man."

And she told me he had been one of the most important people in her life.

My grandmother was a sharecropper, and she had grown up like really out in the sticks, and when she first moved to Delhi, which is where my book takes place, she felt incredibly lonely, and the first person to extend any kindness to her was Roy.

And so to her, he was just a wonderful person, and anything else about his life didn't matter.

And I think knowing him, she met him when she was 12, 13, 14, and I think knowing him set her on a path to just accept people who were different from her, and so by the time she met me, or by the time we had this conversation like 50 years later, it was just ingrained in her to accept people.

- So the person that we're talking about is Roy Delois Hudgens, and am I pronouncing that right, Hudgens?

- Yeah, and I think you're the first person who has pronounced it right.

- [G. Wayne] He's good at that.

- I wanna make sure that we honor Roy in his totality.

When your grandmother sent you on this mission to try to find out who Roy was, what did you know?

- Well, the first thing my grandmother told me is that Roy, when my grandmother was a little girl, Roy lived with a couple named Jewel and John Ellis, and everyone in town assumed that Jewel and John were Roy's parents, even though they looked pretty different.

Jewel, for instance, was Native American.

She was six foot tall, really dark complected, and Roy was only five foot tall and very fair skinned, and my grandma told me that on Jewel's deathbed, she called for my grandmother's mother, so my great grandma, Rita May.

And Jewel was in a bathtub full of alcohol, trying to save herself with this rubbing alcohol, and she pulled my great grandma down into the bathtub, and said, "Rita May, Roy is as much a woman as you or I ever was."

And then she supposedly told my great grandma that back in the day, back in the 1920s, she was living in Arkansas, and Roy lived down the street and was named Delois, and Roy's real parents abused him, and so Jewel decided to kidnap Delois and escaped to Louisiana and renamed him Roy.

And so my grandmother, you know, she spun this yarn, and she really wanted to know who Roy's real parents were.

Was there anyone who was searching for Delois, or what was their journey like?

I mean, how do you, back in the 1920s, how does a person get from Arkansas to Louisiana?

And you know, it's interesting.

The book kind of explores whether or not that story is true, because the people in Delhi all had different versions of of how Delois became Roy, and so when I initially started off, I assumed my grandmother's story was true.

So the first thing I thought I'll do is I'll go to newspapers and see if there's an article that's like, "Baby girl kidnapped," and it turns out to be very hard to find that article.

- So we talked about this just before we started taping, and I said to you as I started reading this, I found myself sort of grappling with the issue of pronouns, and whether or not Roy thought of himself as trans, and if he would have had a preference in his pronouns.

And we talked about sort of the modernity of that concept, but for the benefit of our audience, where did you come down on this issue of Roy's pronouns and what he may or may not have wanted?

- Well, yeah, like as you said, declaring one's pronouns was not as normal of a practice back in the time when Roy lived.

There were certainly people who were assigned female at birth who lived as males, you know, for hundreds of years.

Like I live in Oregon, and there was a person, Allen Hart, who had a hysterectomy and lived as a man, starting back in 1910 here.

So this identity is not a new concept, but the way it's expressed is a little more modern, but.

Everyone in town who knew Roy called Roy she, but to me, well, I first learned about him from my grandma, who used he, so I kind of just started off by using he, because that's how my grandma talked about him.

But the more I dug into his life, the more I felt like, for Roy, being seen as a female was excruciating.

He told lots of people in town, you know, like, "For me to put on a dress would be just like your husband to put on a dress."

And he told people that he had been sent to earth a man that was trapped into a woman's body, and you know, that kind of language is not language people would use today, but that's what he told people.

So I don't know that he ever heard the word transgender or maybe back in the day, there were other words that were used, but everything that he, the way that he talked about himself to people is very much the way that trans people talk about themselves now, and I felt like if he had had this option to say, "I am he," that he would have.

I mean, he went every single week to get his hair cut into a crew cut.

He took pains to appear masculine with his clothes and some other things.

So I think that he really wanted to be seen and respected as a man, and so that's why I decided to use he in the book.

- So you begin what I would call a quest, and it went on for years, leading to the book that we're talking about today, a documentary movie.

Besides what you had heard at the beginning, what else did you have to go on?

For example, were there any photographs of Roy?

- Initially I had nothing except my grandma's story, so I almost didn't even know if this was a real person, and it took me quite a few years to actually go start the story, and in that time, kind of the only thing I had was this story, but then I tried to look through all the newspapers, and one of the first things I found was his obituary, which was exciting in that it showed that he was real, that my grandma hadn't just made this up, because I don't know how much y'all know about Southerners, but we're really kind of famous for making stuff up and exaggerating.

And so I didn't know how my grandma just spun this.

So seeing his obituary was kind of my first thing, and then somehow, my mom found his best friend.

I mean, my mom grew up in this town.

It's very small.

I think back in the day, there was 1,000 people.

Maybe there's closer to 3,000 now.

And so my mother found his best friend and set up my first interview for me, which is pretty unorthodox for a journalist.

I don't usually have my mom set up interviews for me.

- [Jim] But it worked.

(Jim and G. Wayne laughing) - For the project, and the best friend had a couple of pictures of Roy, but they were all pictures of Roy late in life, so in his sixties or seventies.

It took, oh gosh, it wasn't until 2014 that I was able to track down pictures of Roy as a young person, like dating back to when he was 12, I mean, 11.

And even then, you know, he's dressed as a boy, he has his hair slicked back, he has on a button-down shirt.

And eventually I came to get probably maybe 20 to 30 photos of Roy over the years, and the first one I saw was just so exciting, you know, 'cause I'd had this person in my mind for so long, and to actually see him felt really exciting.

- So you found his obituary, and I'm guessing that took a lot of work just to find that.

Were you able to find his grave, his tombstone?

- Yeah, so pretty much everyone in Delhi is buried in the same cemetery, and on the first reporting trip I took with my mom, just a guy in town who knew Roy was like, "Well, I'll take you to show you where he's buried."

And it's interesting.

Roy was very poor.

He mowed lawns for a living, and when we got to the cemetery, his tombstone was really nice.

It had both names on there.

It said Roy Delois Hudgens.

It was marble and had some praying hands etched onto it.

And for years, I didn't know, how did he get this tombstone, because he didn't seem to have left anyone behind, and I eventually found that his church, the Church of Christ took up a collection and paid for him to have this nice tombstone.

And you know, at first I thought he was just buried out there by himself, but many years later, I found that there were two rudimentary tombstones just made out of concrete that someone carved into for for Jewel and John Ellis, and I found that Roy had made those tombstones himself and had just like used a screwdriver or something to carve into the concrete.

- So reading an obituary, seeing photographs, and hearing stories is one thing, a powerful one thing but finding and seeing his grave is a different thing.

What was your reaction the first time you walked in there and saw where Roy lay?

- Oh, it was overwhelming because I was thinking like, you know, six feet below me is the person, what remains of the person who knows the answers to everything I wanna find.

You know, it's interesting, I think cremation is so much more popular now so people don't have those places where you can go and talk to someone, but over the years, every trip, I would go back to that tombstone and kind of talk to Roy, and ask, you know, "Is it okay that I'm doing this story," or "What do you think?"

And I don't know that I necessarily heard him or anything, but it just felt like this is where you are and where I can come commune with you, I guess.

- Yeah.

The title of the book is "Diary of a Misfit," and you ultimately learn that Roy has kept a diary, and there are some passages of it that you include in the book, and I found them very moving because they revealed a profound loneliness and a sadness that Roy had lived with throughout his life.

How did you find the diary in the first place, and what did you make of it?

- Well, on my very first trip, someone told me that Roy kept a diary every day of his life, and that his neighbor had taken them all, and I wrote to the neighbor this kind of obsequious letter that was like, "I'm making a documentary about Roy, and these diaries would really help, and you're the only person who can help me," and the neighbor initially wrote me back one sentence that just said, "Leave this story alone," and that was really scary and intriguing to me, 'cause I was like, why don't they want me to see these?

Why do they want me to leave this story alone?

And so the next time I went down, I went to their trailer to talk to them about it, and you know, they basically said, "No, we're never showing you these."

And that went on for 10 years.

Every single trip, I would go down, I would go back to visit them, and they would say, "No, we're not showing them to you," and it would kind of, you know, we built a rapport over the years.

Like on one of the trips, the neighbor, whose name is Mark, he told me, "I'm not gonna show them to you.

All I'll say is, on the front, they say Diary of a Misfit," and then another time he'd say, "Well, you know, Roy just wrote about the weather," or another time he'd say, "Everyone told me that Roy rode an adult tricycle."

And the neighbor was like, "Well, I'm not gonna show you the journals, but I have his old tricycle.

I'll show you the tricycle," or, "I'll show you some of Roy's old records."

So we were kind of inching forward, like I could tell the neighbor was trying to help me, but did not wanna show me the journals.

And it wasn't until 2019, and again, you know, the first trip I went on was 2009.

So 10 years later, I showed back up to his trailer and asked him again, and I don't know if he was like, "If I don't do this, she's gonna keep showing up at my trailer until I die," (Jim laughing) or if he just saw that I was really serious.

I think the book expresses a lot of skepticism about them, 'cause I was trying to stay true to how I felt in the moment, but I ultimately came away feeling like his neighbors really wanted to protect him, and you know, they didn't know me when I showed up.

They didn't wanna just be like, "Sure, stranger, here's the secrets of someone's life."

They really cared about Roy.

They lived next to him for 30 years, and they felt like they were going to protect his legacy, and I think maybe it took 10 years for them to see I wasn't trying to make a mockery of Roy.

I really wanted to know who he was.

And when we ultimately read the journals together, I think we all came away feeling like Roy really did want to be known, and he wanted his story left behind for people to to know what it was like to live that way in a small town.

- What does that say about where we are today as a society?

- What does them showing me the journals tell us about that?

- No, no, the story itself and Roy's identity, and the way he, I can't tell if he was hiding himself, because so many people did know what his story was, but he was living in a part of the country at a time when being trans could not be easy, just as there are parts of the country now where it's still not easy to be trans or gay.

Is there something that the book is saying to us about these broader issues for American society here in 2022?

- Yeah, you know, I think it was both easier and harder for him, I think.

He did not have a community, so that meant he had a very lonely life, but he also did not live in a time where there was an organized resistance to transgender people.

I think because it wasn't that well known of a thing, he was allowed to live in town and have people just get to know him.

Like everyone in town kind of thought, "Hmm!

Well, this is not...

This is different.

You know, I don't know anyone else who lives this way," but they also felt like he was a Christian.

He's a good person.

He mows our lawn.

We are able to love him as him.

Whereas today, transgender identity has been turned into a political talking point, and you have pretty well-funded groups that write up model legislation for states or they go testifying.

This is what my job is now, is covering these issues.

And so you have a lot of states that are considering laws to ban transitioning, even Florida's considering banning minors from transitioning, and that even extends to just social transition, like having a haircut, probably like the haircut I have, or wearing kind of boyish clothes, and there just wasn't that opposition when he was around.

So he was able to kind of exist without his identity meaning something global, whereas now I think people think each trans person is representing something larger than just themselves.

- So Casey, we have about a minute left.

If you could sit down now with him and have a conversation, what do you think you two would talk about?

- [Jim] That's a great question.

- Well, you know, I have questions that I wanna ask, you know, like, did he ever hear of this kidnapping mystery or what did his mother tell him?

Did he ever have a crush on anybody?

I mean, 'cause as far as I know, he didn't ever date or anything, but those are all kind of selfish, I guess.

So I think I would also just wanna tell him you are not alone.

He really thought of himself as a misfit, so I think I would just wanna tell him there are other people like you, and your story is going to mean a lot to people.

I get emails, probably like 10 emails every single day from people who feel moved and seen by his story, so I think I just wanna tell him you're not a misfit.

- Casey, it is a powerful work.

The book is "Diary of a Misfit."

She's Casey Parks.

Casey, thank you for being with us.

- [Casey] Yeah, thanks.

- That's all the time we have this week, but if you want to know more about "Story in the Public Square" you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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