In this special edition of The Wayfarer, Editor-at-Large, Frank Inzan Owen (he/him)  sits down in conversation with our Founder,  L.M. Browning (they/them), to discuss the topics of gender identity, facing Intergenerational trauma, and seeking awe in the high desert.

In late autumn of 2022, Browning hit the road and disappeared into the backcountry of Northern New Mexico. It was here they began sitting with some larger changes they felt brewing—changes around their pronouns, their gender identity, and their creative pursuits moving forward. Far Rider is the product of that time spent in the wild.

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A Contained Excerpt from Far Rider: Field Notes on Gender Identity, Facing Intergenerational Trauma, and Seeking Awe in the High Desert

Poet L.M. Browning in Conversation with Frank Inzan Owen with photography by Connor L. Wolfe 

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Frank: I’ve heard other people speak of how they had a sense along the way that they were nonbinary but they simply didn’t have the vocabulary for it; and, since they didn’t find themselves in a culture that has a wider understanding of gender, like, say, traditional Hawaiian, there also wasn’t that ground for self-understanding within the context they found themselves. Without an accommodating culture, without the ground of understanding, and without support, you must have had experiences that left you feeling like a “stranger in a strange world.”

Les: Like so many, I was a recipient of homophobic conditioning due to the time in which I was raised. As an 80s child, the gay community was on my radar from a young age due to my mother’s activism during the AIDS crisis during the early 90s. Though, throughout my childhood, I interacted with mainly gay men, there were no “lesbians”—no representation for me to see myself reflected back. 

Now, of course, as I got older, I understood there was one cis woman named Pam, who identified as “lesbian” but it was downplayed due to the fact that she was a teacher at a Catholic high school and it was known that, if she were to be “outed” she would lose her job­—period. Pam served the same school for decades and died unexpectedly a few years ago. She is remembered at that school as one of the true mentors—that teacher you remember; who saw you. Because of homophobia and the fear around the global pandemic of AIDS, the 80s were a terrifying time for those in the gay community. And because people like Pam had to hide their authentic selves, the members of the youth communities such as myself, weren’t able to witness her truth and feel doors within our own selves open. 

Frank: This really gets at the heart of the matter about representation. I can remember a very powerful argument made by the author Jerry Mander about Diné (Navajo) kids not seeing anyone who looked like them on TV. In that context, not seeing their culture ever represented in the mainstream set up an intrapsychic sense for many of them of being part of a “dead and gone” culture. Never seeing LGBTQIA+ people represented has the same potential effect.  Along your own way, did you know nonbinary/trans or lesbian folks? In other words, what was and wasn’t represented in your formative years?

Les:  There were several personalities represented in my childhood. Most of these were maladaptive  presences­—people who were caught in their own trauma cycle without the tools and/or capability to help themselves integrate their trauma and move forward and so passed on the pain they couldn’t process. 

During my childhood, I spent long stretches through the summers with different relations. Each year, I would go here or there while I was out of school. My mother was a single mother working a full-time job, so child care fell to relations willing to host me. I bounced around...so I was exposed to different viewpoints but most of them were not helpful in teaching me how to actually like myself. 

While spending time with the different generations of my family, there were a number of relations who openly used horrible slurs for different minority groups—the gay community among them. I grew up hearing these words and sensing their meaning, and subconsciously absorbing an inherited hatred of who I am. 

I mean, that’s how we learn to repress who we are—we sense the judgment, the rejection, the loss, the abandonment that would be suffered if we were to be who we authentically are. And so, the brain does its job—it keeps the organism moving forward and surviving and we repress those parts of ourselves that are undesirable. 

Frank:  So, what have you encountered yourself, now that you have come out as nonbinary?

Les: One of the most frequent responses I’ve gotten lately to those I’ve come out to as nonbinary who are my age or older is, “Imagine what it would have been like had we been born now—with the language there is now around sexual identity and gender identity.” And it is true, I think about it all the time and it is becoming clearer and clearer to me just how impacted I was by growing up as a deeply queer and nonbinary individual during a time when that wasn’t an option offered. 

More than once, I can recall gay slurs and hushed whispers when I would spend time with my wider relations. In my high school in the late 90s, when two girls went to prom together, the administration called the police.

“Nonbinary” really wasn’t widely used until rather recently. I couldn’t be “nonbinary” in the 80s so I was a “tomboy”, or worse, I was an “it.”

I can still remember taking the train into 30th Street [Philadelphia] one day; I was like 12 or 13, I think. A woman sitting in the seat across looked me over with a raised eye, then turned to my mother and bluntly asked, “Is it a boy or a girl?” Still today, I can remember how “othering” her comments felt. 

...I felt like...if I couldn’t be a “he” and I couldn’t pass for a “she” then it meant I would be an “it” ­—something unloveable, unrelatable...someone who was noticeably odd.

...There were daily reminders like that conditioning me to believe that my gender expression was wrong or weird.

Frank: I can imagine in going through the deep process you have, and coming to a point of congruent footing in yourself, that all sorts of other “Hindsight is 20/20” memories may continue to surface around your own levels of self-awareness along the way. What are some of your earliest memories in this regard?

Les: Going all the way back to Kindergarten—every event at school was the same nightmare of trying to find an outfit that would meet the social criteria for feminine dress clothes but didn’t make me feel like I was going against the grain of my soul. 

I mean, this intertwines throughout my entire life... There is a memory I can still recall being told. It is about when I was a small child­—I was 3 or 4. I wandered my way into the bathroom, climbed up to the sink, took my grandfather’s razor, and shaved my face like I had a beard. I shaved dry—no water and essentially took off the top layer of skin. I did this simply because I was compelled to do so—it just felt right.

I can also recall another story... You know, we all have those handfuls of stories that we are told over and over again—it’s like our own personal cosmology. Well, it was that memory. Anyway, every year, on my birthday, I would hear the story from some relative or another about how my mother knew she was having a baby girl—even before the doctors told her the sex of her child. It’s a seemingly loving enough story but in retrospect, it pretty much locked my female identity into place and directly tied it to my place in my family. I’ve had to force myself to re-evaluate such second-hand narratives as I integrate my authentic self, but it is scarier than you think it might be because you’re essentially questioning the foundational beliefs you hold about yourself.

[Pause.] ...there are honestly, so many examples.

I never went to prom or homecoming because wearing a dress, make-up, etc. always felt violating–a betrayal of self–and not comforting to those gender norms wasn’t an option if I wanted to participate. 

I didn’t even go to my high school graduation because I wasn’t allowed to wear pants. On the day of the graduation rehearsal, the administration told me that I couldn’t wear a pair of black dress pants with a button-down shirt to my graduation because it was “inappropriate for a girl to wear pants at a formal event” and I had to “represent myself and my teachers who had gotten me to this day, well.” 

...That day, I took my diploma, hugged my favorite art teacher (because I survived school in the art department), and I left­—

In retrospect, I felt myself coming up against some larger socially agreed upon set of morals. I knew something was wrong but I didn’t have a larger comprehension to understand that I was encountering social and structural violence against people who didn’t fit in with the heteronormative world. I was being suppressed into anti-feminist gender roles—wherein–literally–only men could wear the pants. [Laughs]  

Frank: I get it, and every instance of attempted entrainment leads to an added layer of the culture (around you at the time) trying to reinforce a structure that goes against your spirit. I’m suddenly thinking of those First Nations people forced into boarding schools, forced to wear the clothes of the oppressor culture, not allowed to speak their own language. A completely different context, but the mechanics of oppression are the same wherever they appear.

Les: Every single time I had to put on a dress, or a skirt, or put my hair up, or wear make-up, or style my hair–-I would be in tears. Inwardly, I was going against some core part of myself. Then, on the outside, I was facing consistent bullying at school.

Beyond the people in my neighborhood, I had what we all did: TV, media, literature, or the absence thereof. There was few-to-no lesbians in the mainstream other than Ellen, who essentially lost everything by coming out and was publicly rejected. 

In the 90s, all I knew about lesbians was that it rhymed with Leslie. I knew this because I was often bullied with the grating rhymes during middle school—(you know, just late enough in my childhood for it to leave a scar but too early to know what it all meant). [Laughs.]   

It was decades of such behavior—hundreds of examples—during the most formative years of my life. It takes a toll. In my case, the toll was deep repression—I repressed I was queer, I repressed I was nonbinary, I repressed that I wasn’t attracted sexually to men—I repressed that I had needs—I repressed everything. 

Flash forward to age 30 and I’m still repressing, (I’m still not conscious that I’m queer let alone nonbinary/transgender) and I had begun reaching to alcohol and drugs to dull the distress of being in my own mind/body. I’d become a compilation of maladaptive coping mechanisms rather than anything resembling my authentic self. 

Frank: So, you have really been on a journey from self-hate to self-love, moving from repression to self-acceptance, self-befriendment, and sovereignty. I really feel the magnitude of this and the fact that your individual journey has implications in terms of the collective. What is your sense of the link between your own shifts and the future-culture?

Les: Completely. When you are raised to hate what you are and society conditions you to hate who you are, you will become an active oppressor of your own becoming. Because you’re being given the unspoken-but-very real ultimatum between becoming and belonging. 

I believe all the generations prior to this current generation (for whom this is already the norm) —I believe we are being given an opportunity. Now that our journey of social healing and education has progressed to the point that it has, (wherein we have more inclusive language around gender and sexual identity) the opportunity is being given for each individual to return to the foundational gender question and (re)define it for themselves. 

The breakdown of heteronormative narratives and the introduction of more expansive language, allow each of us to find those nonbinary/transgender parts of ourselves that were tolerated and othered, bring them forward, integrate them, and reemerge with a more authentic expression of self. 

Continue Reading Far Rider

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CONNOR L. WOLFE (they/them), TEDx Speaker and founder of Wayfarer Magazine, author of Drive Through the Night and numerous other works under the pen name, L.M. Browning. Connor’s hybrid of introspective travel writing and visual art focuses on the alchemizing of trauma through active awe-seeking and a re-wilding of one’s life and self. 

Wolfe serves on the State of Connecticut’s/NAMI’s Lived Experience Committee and received national certification as a Peer Facilitator for Survivor of Suicide Attempt Groups through the Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services Foundation in Los Angeles. Connor is a vocal advocate for the CPTSD community and new Psilocybin therapies for treatment of severe cases. They are a graduate of Harvard University and a longtime student of vipassana meditation and koryu bujutsu. 

Living primarily on the road, in their overlanding-rigged obsidian-black Subaru Forester, (affectionally called, Pearl) Connor and their coydog, Kiva, divide their time between Northern New Mexico and Wayfarer Farm in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. 

FRANK INZAN OWEN (he/him) is a Wayfarer of a Nature-oriented spiritual path shaped by the seasons, mountains-and-forests meditation, methods of “inner archaeology” and dreaming-while-awake, and “practice-hints” found in the lives and verses of various Wayfaring poets of the Far East. The author of three books of poetry published by Homebound Publications, The School of Soft-Attention, The Temple of Warm Harmony, and Stirrup of the Sun & Moon, when not tending an organic vegetable garden or hillwalking, he facilitates a form of Jungian-informed inner work he calls contemplative soulwork through his organization, The School of Soft-Attention (schoolofsoftattention.com), and curates The Poet’s Dreamingbody podcast and Substack (thepoetsdreamingbody.com).

Wild Silence Travelogue is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.