The British Marvel Annuals 75 ~ 78 A Pictorial Flashback.



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KISS SHOWS BREAK ATTENDANCE and MERCHANDISE RECORDS

(LIVENATION/KISS PRESS RELEASE)

ROCK ICONS KISS START THEIR 2010 NORTH AMERICAN TOUR, THE HOTTEST SHOW ON EARTH, WITH RECORD-BREAKING TICKET AND MERCHANDISE SALES

(LOS ANGELES) July 26, 2010 - Planning to see rock icons KISS (www.KISSonline.com) this summer during their 2010 North American tour, The Hottest Show on Earth? Plan on buying tickets in advance. This weekend, the legendary rockers started their 32-city tour with record-breaking crowds in Cheyenne, WY, and Minot (Bismarck area), ND. KISS is also the first rock act to completely sell out the grandstands in Minot (more than 15,000 people) - they broke Taylor Swift's 2009 gross merchandise sales record in both cities, and KISS gave back by donating more than $30,000 from their ticket sales to Wounded Warrior Care Project, a non-profit veterans organization.

"We know that times are tough for The KISS Army of fans and that's why we're giving back," said KISS bassist and co-founder Gene Simmons. "We're committed to giving our fans the biggest, baddest, most over-the-top show for their hard-earned money."

"While we give our fans the greatest show ever, we also want to help guarantee that our country's brave men and women who return from fighting overseas receive the medical care that they have sacrificed for and is owed to them. While our government is tied up in bureaucracy, the KISS Army has taken up the cause. We're donating $1 from every ticket sold to the Wounded Warrior Care Project," added KISS rhythm guitarist and co-founder Paul Stanley.

Throughout their 37-year career, KISS has sold 80 million albums, played for millions of people and become an integral part of American "Rock and Roll All Nite" as well as hits that they haven't played in the US in years.

The Hottest Show on Earth tour, produced by Live Nation, will trek through a mix of arenas and amphitheatres throughout North America. Tickets for shows produced by Live Nation are now on sale and, in order to help fans in a tough economy, the band is offering a special ticket promotion. For Live Nation amphitheatres that have a lawn, up to four kids aged fourteen or under can get in free with the purchase of one adult ticket. **

There is no other band in the vast history of rock music that has mesmerized generations of music fans in the same way as this revolutionary and iconic quartet that continues to acquire generations of new fans year after year.

For complete ticket and tour information visit www.KISSonline.com and www.LiveNation.com.

downthetubes.net news blog: Comic fans rally to help Leeds-based OK Comics store from closure

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downthetubes.net news blog: Comic fans rally to help Leeds-based OK Comics store from closure

To My Friend Russell

Russell passed away on Friday 13th June 2008 in Poole hospital. I miss him.

Time Is Meant To Heal

(adapted/edited from a poem by
Kim Thompson)

You meant so much to all of us
You were special and that's no lie
You brightened up the darkest day
And even the grey-est sky

Many tears I have seen and cried
They have all poured out like rain
I know that you are happy now
'Cause you're no longer in pain.

Two years on I remember you
And what you used to say
You made each of us smile
And live to the fullest each day

They say in time it gets easier
I wonder if it's true
Because even after all this time
I still don’t have a clue

I was not ready to say goodbye
The disease just over took
So on this day we remember you
I take a second look

Our friendship is forever
Until death, did us part
Although you're away in body
You’re always in my heart

Original version © Kim Thompson

Thor Movie Interview and Footage

From "Entertainment Tonight". The signs are good looks cool so far.

D.B.T.= Real Hope for the Anxious, Depressive and Self Harming Individual

Having lived with clinical depression for many years I can vouch for this system of therapy as it was offered to me and accepted years ago. The methodology has allowed me to maintain a helpful outlook of and fairly effective interaction with the world outside my front door. If I had not been offered the treatment I feel I may well not have survived to spread the word.

Pictured: Marsha M. Linehan

Marsha Linehan is a Professor of Psychology, Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral
Sciences at the University of Washington and Director of the Behavioral Research and Therapy
Clinics, a consortium of research projects developing new treatments and evaluating their
efficacy for severely disordered and multi-diagnostic populations. Her primary research is in the
application of behavioral models to suicidal behaviors, drug abuse, and borderline personality
disorder. She is also working to develop effective models for transferring efficacious treatments from the research academy to the clinical community.
She has received several awards recognizing her clinical and research contributions, including
the Louis I. Dublin Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Field of Suicide and the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology, American Psychological Association, as well as awards for Distinguished Research in Suicide (American Foundation of Suicide Prevention), Distinguished Contributions to the Practice of Psychology (American Association of Applied and Preventive Psychology), Distinguished Contributions for Clinical Activities, (Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy), and Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Clinical Psychology (Society of Clinical Psychology, American
Psychological Association). She is the past-president of the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy, a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychopathological Association and a diplomat of the American Board of Behavioral Psychology.
The treatment she has developed combines the technology of change derived from behavioral science with the radical acceptance, or “technology of acceptance,” derived from both eastern zen practices and western contemplative spirituality. The practice of mindfulness, willingness, and radical acceptance form an important part of her treatment approach.
She has written three books, including two treatment manuals: Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder and Skills Training Manual for Treating Borderline Personality Disorder. She serves on a number of editorial boards, and has published extensively in scientific journals.
She is founder of Marie Institute of Behavioral Technology, a non-profit organization that owns the company she founded, Behavioral Tech LLC, a behavioral technology transfer group. With them she is actively involved in developing effective models for transferring efficacious treatments from the research academy to the clinical community.

Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is a therapeutic methodology developed by Marsha M. Linehan, a psychology researcher at the University of Washington, to treat persons with borderline personality disorder (BPD). DBT combines standard cognitive-behavioral techniques for emotion regulation and reality-testing with concepts of mindful awareness, distress tolerance, and acceptance largely derived from Buddhist meditative practice. DBT is the first therapy that has been experimentally demonstrated to be effective for treating BPD. Research indicates that DBT is also effective in treating patients who represent varied symptoms and behaviors associated with spectrum mood disorders, including self-injury.
Linehan created DBT in response to her observation of therapist burnout after repudiating patients’ motivation to cooperate in successful treatment. Her first core insight was to recognize that the chronically suicidal patients she studied had been raised in profoundly invalidating environments and required a climate of unconditional acceptance (not Carl Rogers’ humanistically "positive" version, but Thich Nhat Hanh’s metaphysically neutral one) in which to develop a successful therapeutic alliance. Her second insight concerned the need for a commensurate commitment from patients to (be willing to) change—subject to their skillfulness in the present moment—based on 'radical acceptance' of their dire level of emotional dysfunction.
DBT strives to avoid having the client/patient see the therapist as an adversary rather than an ally in the treatment of psychological issues. Accordingly, in DBT the therapist aims to accept and validate the client’s feelings at any given time while nonetheless informing the client that some feelings and behaviors are maladaptive, and showing them better alternatives.
Linehan united commitment to the core conditions of acceptance and change through the Hegelian principle of dialectical progress, in which thesis + antithesis → synthesis, and proceeded to assemble a modular array of skills for emotional self-regulation, drawn from Western (e.g., cognitive behavioral therapy and an interpersonal variant, “assertiveness training”) and Eastern (e.g., Buddhist mindfulness meditation) psychological traditions. Arguably her signal contribution was to elide the adversarial paradigm implicit in the hierarchical modernist therapeutic alliance, using the deconstructive spirit of Hegel and the Buddha to substitute a postmodern alliance based on intersubjective tough love.
All DBT involves two components:

1. An individual component in which the therapist and patient discuss issues that come up during the week, recorded on diary cards, and follow a treatment target hierarchy. Self-injurious and suicidal behaviors take first priority, followed by therapy interfering behaviors. Then there are quality of life issues and finally working towards improving one's life generally. During the individual therapy, the therapist and patient work towards improving skill use. Often, a skills group is discussed and obstacles to acting skillfully are addressed.
2. The group, which ordinarily meets once weekly for two to two-and-a-half hours, learns to use specific skills that are broken down into four modules: core mindfulness skills, interpersonal effectiveness skills, emotion regulation skills, and distress tolerance skills.

Neither component is used by itself; the individual component is considered necessary to keep suicidal urges or uncontrolled emotional issues from disrupting group sessions, while the group sessions teach the skills unique to DBT, and also provide practice with regulating emotions and behavior in a social context.

Contents 1 The four modules 1.1 Mindfulness 1.2 Interpersonal effectiveness 1.3 Emotion regulation 1.4 Distress tolerance

The four modules

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is one of the core concepts behind all elements of DBT. Mindfulness is the capacity to pay attention, nonjudgmentally, to the present moment. Mindfulness is all about living in the moment, experiencing one's emotions and senses fully, yet with perspective. It is considered a foundation for the other skills taught in DBT, because it helps individuals accept and tolerate the powerful emotions they may feel when challenging their habits or exposing themselves to upsetting situations. The concept of mindfulness and the meditative exercises used to teach it are derived from traditional Buddhist practice, though the version taught in DBT does not involve any religious or metaphysical concepts.

Interpersonal effectiveness

Interpersonal response patterns taught in DBT skills training are very similar to those taught in many assertiveness and interpersonal problem-solving classes. They include effective strategies for asking for what one needs, saying no, and coping with interpersonal conflict.
Individuals with borderline personality disorder frequently possess good interpersonal skills in a general sense. The problems arise in the application of these skills to specific situations. An individual may be able to describe effective behavioral sequences when discussing another person encountering a problematic situation, but may be completely incapable of generating or carrying out a similar behavioral sequence when analyzing his or her own situation.
The interpersonal effectiveness module focuses on situations where the objective is to change something (e.g., requesting that someone do something) or to resist changes someone else is trying to make (e.g., saying no). The skills taught are intended to maximize the chances that a person’s goals in a specific situation will be met, while at the same time not damaging either the relationship or the person’s self-respect.

Emotion regulation

Individuals with borderline personality disorder and suicidal individuals are frequently emotionally intense and changeable. They can be angry, intensely frustrated, depressed, or anxious. This suggests that these clients might benefit from help in learning to regulate their emotions. Dialectical behavior therapy skills for emotion regulation include:

• Identifying and labeling emotions
• Identifying obstacles to changing emotions
• Reducing vulnerability to emotion mind
• Increasing positive emotional events
• Increasing mindfulness to current emotions
• Taking opposite action
• Applying distress tolerance techniques

Distress tolerance

Many current approaches to mental health treatment focus on changing distressing events and circumstances. They have paid little attention to accepting, finding meaning for, and tolerating distress. This task has generally been tackled by psychodynamic, psychoanalytic, gestalt, or narrative therapies, along with religious and spiritual communities and leaders. Dialectical behavior therapy emphasizes learning to bear pain skillfully.
Distress tolerance skills constitute a natural development from mindfulness skills. They have to do with the ability to accept, in a non-evaluative and nonjudgmental fashion, both oneself and the current situation. Although this is a nonjudgmental stance, this does not mean that it is one of approval or resignation. The goal is to become capable of calmly recognizing negative situations and their impact, rather than becoming overwhelmed or hiding from them. This allows individuals to make wise decisions about whether and how to take action, rather than falling into the intense, desperate, and often destructive emotional reactions that are part of borderline personality disorder.
Skills for acceptance include radical acceptance, turning the mind toward acceptance, and distinguishing between "willingness" (acting skillfully, from a realistic understanding of the present situation) and "willfulness" (trying to impose one's will regardless of reality). Participants also learn four crisis survival skills, to help deal with immediate emotional responses that may seem overwhelming: distracting oneself, self-soothing, improving the moment, and thinking of pros and cons.

IT WORKS!

Jeffrey Catherine Jones: The Movie

In his four decades as a painter and graphic artist, Jeffrey Jones has followed a unique path—one which began in the lowbrow realms of pulp novels and comic books in the early 1970s. In those lean years of economic stagnation and artistic experimentation, Jones and other pop culture visionaries helped to light the fuse for the creative explosion in American comics that would bring the world such classics as Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The Sandman, 300 and Love and Rockets. In this new documentary, a host of comics industry pioneers shares their memories of this vital time with a focus on Jones and his work, which continues to inspire fellow artists and fans alike.

The documentary features not only comic book artists but other comics industry professionals as well. Jones’s life and work are the highlights, but the effects of art—on an individual, on society, and as a business—are also discussed. How important and influential is art? Can it really save a person’s life, as its practitioners claim? How did it evolve from pure decoration to a commercial commodity? All of these questions will be examined as we explore the world of Jeffrey Jones.

The story of art is, in the end, the story of artists, and the whole can also be seen



Jeffrey Catherine Jones (edited autobiography)
Born, January 10, 1944, Atlanta, Georgia

I believe in Atlanta, Georgia in the year 1947. That was before I met my father. I was three and he seemed a myth. My dad, I was told, was
somewhere in a place called Germany, busy dropping bombs on people. I didn't believe in him.

In the mid-forties Atlanta was beginning to build itself into a place that I'd never again recognize. What I remember were ancient buildings,
ancient trees, and a drumming sound that "the South Shall Rise again."

There remain impressions along with false memories with which I've been storied. I was born into the great southern house of my grandfather,
resplendent with ivy-carpeted yards, privet taller than he and clay tennis courts, dry and powdery, spreading quietly behind gardens of Victorian
wildness. I remember garages of mystery: red painted wooden buildings with doors that never opened. Five cars wide, they spread across a gray
cracked pavement where I learned, first with stroller, then with uncertain feet, to walk.

My grandmother moved in and out of rooms like a shadow, leaving a glimpsed but not always certain presence. In the earlier part of this century
she had been an outspoken suffragette, marching and rallying womankind to awaken. Now she rarely spoke.

Memory: My great grandmother, tiny and sick and silent, dying in a great bed in a room somewhere in the back of the house. I was born right-
handed. When she died her death bed fell and broke my right collar bone. In a sling now I could only use my left hand. I am now partially
left-handed.

Memory: My great, great aunt, Ottoline, downstairs, secluded in a lace and sun filled room. She was the matriarch, 96 years old -- born just two
years after the great California gold rush. She spoke to me once of gold -- she had held a nugget, smooth and heavy in her hand, but had never
seen its brilliance because she was blind. Ottie had never seen anything. She had been born without sight. A large and kind woman who
occasionally, with the help of crutches that seemed to grow from her upper body, struggled out into the backyard. She also in 96 years had never
walked alone, nor run nor reached out toward the sun.

The grounds that spread about the house were green and lush and smelled of age and invention. My grandfather, Dunkie, we all called him was a
retired mechanical drawing teacher at Georgia Tech (‘Yellow Jackets' as a team -- "Georgia Tech, a rambling wreck and a hell of an engineer”) or
so I always heard. Above that mysterious row of garages, in a kind of attic, was a lengthy space he always called "the laboratory". Here he heaved
strange objects, built and rebuilt and at times cried, "Eureka!" as if he had invented or reinvented something.

When first I saw my father I must have been about three. Back from Germany, he telephoned, and expectantly my mother and I awaited his
appearance. When he knocked on the door there was a rush of big and little feet. My mother opened the door to the man she loved and said,
"Jeffrey, this is your dad." I was speechless, for he just stood there on the porch, moving not an inch -- huge, about ten feet tall, perfectly
straight, in full pressed uniform with bars and medals dripping from his chest. I don't remember what was said. I didn't know who this man was,
but I did know right then and there that I would be always defenceless against him.

-My life describes the stories of boys and men for thousands of years: boys who were beaten by their fathers, boys whose capacity for love and
trust was crippled almost at birth. Men, whose best hope for contact with other human beings lay in detachment, as if life were over. It's how we
keep, in turn, from destroying our own children and terrorizing the women who have the misfortune to love us, how we absent ourselves from the
tradition of male violence, how we decline the seduction of revenge. ___AFFLICTION

Ponce de Leon Avenue in the '40s, the street which ran before our house, was a wonder to a small boy. While I sat in rocking chairs along the
planked front porch, great overweight Dodges and Buicks chugged their way up the hill which led to Peachtree Street and the Fox theater (the 4th
largest in the world.) It was a city block of turkish domes, gilded with that precious metal mined in Delonega in the north. I sat there often
watching movies like "Gone With the Wind" on a screen that rivaled the sky. High across a hemispheric ceiling there were omnipresent stars and
clouds moving slowly and silently real. The lobby was carpeted and vast, narrowing to a golden stairway that led me to the show.

When I was young my passion was art, eventually comic book and fantasy art. I've seen a lot of people lose their childhood passions, not only for
art but also for life--just getting squeezed. I don't have any answers. My passion was and is my art. However, there was a time when I became
aware that I might be losing it. Having used my ability to draw to buy approval from my childhood peers, I entered the real world with my "cash"
in my pocket. I wanted to be published so badly that in the beginning I took on a lot of work that I hated. Ah, but maybe a million people would
see it and love me. I lived in fear. What happened? I found that the more I went to the drawing board or the easel to do work I hated, the less I
wanted to go there. I was losing my joy, and I found eventually that my joy was more important than approval. I began to get "difficult to deal
with" and began to lose jobs. I became determined to, well, not so much "have it my way", but to do work I loved. It's not so easy to pursue, or
even know what your heart's desire may be. We as human beings have different stories but we're all the same in that we identify the same feelings
in each and every one of us. Fear is probably the most basic. All else is built upon fear. Hate grows out of fear, envy out of fear. But I think that
basically fear is certainly self-centred. It is the fear of not getting what I want or of losing something I have that keeps me out of the perfection
of the present moment and suddenly living in the future. I have no control over the universe, of events yet to happen. Each and every moment,
if I need to, I must remind myself that right now everything is ok. Right now I am alive, and have in my life those things that remind me to stay
alive. I am loved, and more importantly I have the ability to love. There is an acceptance of events beyond me that I must have in order to
ground me and allow me to let go. What is the very best thing that can happen to me next? I don't know-but I always know what I want to
happen, and there I dare not go. So I ask myself some hard questions and I find, if I am fearless, and want what I have, the rest is a grand
adventure.

In 1951 or so, I, a six year old squirt, peered way up at a circular comic rack in a drug store and spied Kubert's TOR 3D comic. I had no idea there
was a Kubert back then, but I know that I suddenly wanted to draw comics, to create heroes (maybe to protect me from my parents and other
bullies in the neighborhood). I grew, I drew, I took art history and saw what painters had done with visions. Now I wanted to paint (to protect
myself from the bullies in life). I drew comics for fanzines starting around 1964 and did my first professional comic job for Witzend in 1966,
though it was published years later. I went "underground": Last Gasp comics, SCREW Magazine, The East Village Other, while fighting with
publishers all the while in New York. Comics are "real art" to me. The combination of words and pictures is a literal, vastly unexplored territory.
The only other combination of words and pictures at the time was illustration, which I quickly came to believe as immoral (even though I was a
part-time illustrator).

It was the fall of 1956. I was about 13, I guess, when my father decided to get rid of the stump. I had seen him staring at it for two seasons. A pine
tree had come down in our backyard. In 1956 there were no neighborhood backhoes and no chainsaws; there was, however, dynamite at the local
hardware store. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The first thing my father decided to do to get rid of the offending stump was to burn it out.
Gallons of kerosene and weeks of smoldering wood later we were left with a large black lump in the backyard. I could see my father wrestling with
himself. This stump had become the enemy, but Dad had been in WWII. There was only one answer, explosives. Ah, those were the days, the
innocent '50s, before "politics" and before terrorists-dynamite to be had by millions at the neighborhood shopping center. I had purchased the
fuse, by the foot, a number of times myself, for launching my homemade rockets, but I guess you had to be 21 to buy the dynamite. Daddy came
home with a brown paper bag, with a telltale fuse licking our air. He was smiling. Mama was scared. My father had told us a story many times,
from his Air Force days in England, when driving a Jeep along a runway a bomb had fallen out of the belly of a plane. The Jeep was destroyed but
my Dad just brushed himself off as he arose from a ditch. Now it was dynamite. I don't mean to make this a shaggy dog story but let's just say that
my father survived, the neighborhood survived, and our house had only three windows blown out.

It was 1961 and a friend and I, on a summer trip, found ourselves in Blue Valley, NC-named for it's abundance of amethyst crystals. We were
rockhounds. Give me a chalcedony ridge upon which to throw steel or even hematite, limonite or magnetite and I'll give you fire. That was a
season of plenty. One mineral led to the next and we eventually came to rest at a creek where we panned for gold and rhodolite (found only here
in all the world, washed down from the oldest mountains on Earth-erosion for the keeper).

Cherokee, NC was the base-a town of pride and history, also as the selling place of trinkets in an effort to survive the new world. There were
rivers of shale and slate in the valleys, dikes unearthed by water, risen from the remote geologic past. It was heaven in 1961. I still have a garage
full of treasures, from beryl to ruby.

I was married in 1966 to my college sweetheart, Mary Louise Alexander. We lived in Georgia for a while with three cats, Aeschelus, Medea and
Petronius the Arbiter. I remained in school, mostly because of the draft - "Weezie" worked for the phone company. One day we arrived home -
we left one window partly open so the cats could get in and out. I opened the door to find about fifteen cats sitting in the living room, apparently
having a group discussion. All fled. We moved to New York City in February of 1967 and our wonderful daughter, Julianna, was born in July of
that year.

Early one morning, I mean before sunrise, I walked into the Studio I shared at that time with Kaluta, Windsor-Smith and Wrightson. It must have
been sometime in 1978, I think, because by that time Michael and I had all but moved into the Studio, visiting our apartments occasionally only
to pick up the mail. We would cross paths about this time of day because I slept at night and Michael slept... well in 1978 he was a very important
sleeper. On this memorable morning, as I opened the big horizontal steel lock on the big steel door, I found Michael crouched behind his drawing
table, now swung into a vertical position, with a BB gun. A pistol. "Welcome to 'Desolation Row" he said as he peered with one eye over the top of
the table. I have to back up a month to say what led up to this seeming desperate situation. From the time we moved into the Studio in June of
1976, Michael came some months later, we heard scurrying noises in the quiet hours of the night. Mice. Well, at first some of us thought they
were cute and some of us didn't. By the time the mice added chewing on artwork, stacks of posters and electrical cords to their scurrying, (one
mouse was discovered stiff and dead with it's teeth still clamped to an extension cord) we all decided they weren't cute anymore. But we being
peaceful children of the sixties, "death to the mice" was not an immediate option. It was decided that the answer was 'Have a Heart' traps that
would capture them alive. Then what? Well Michael and I acquired an aquarium to house the mice in, sort of like pets. We couldn't find
authentic 'Have a Heart' traps but got some pirated copies at the local hardware store. Needless to say these didn't always work properly. Some
mice would get caught, some would get away and a few we would find dead or almost dead with a trap door pinning their rear ends halfway out
into the room. The mice we caught Michael and I would put into the aquarium and feed peanut butter. One midnight when we decided the
aquarium was full enough, Michael and I took it down the elevator from our 12th floor aerie to the lobby and out into the night. Across the street
we went, feeling for all the world like saviors of mice, to an empty parking lot. Buildings rose tall and dark on all sides of us and I guess we
wondered where the mice would end up. But that would be somebody else's problem. As we tipped over the aquarium with a stick, all the mice
swarmed out into the night. Yes, swarmed. They moved as a herd, a dark mass, back across the street and back into our building. Michael had
been sitting for hours behind his drawing board with his pistol, a BB gun, watching as a mouse would creep along the far wall beneath the
radiators. "The BBs don't really kill them", he explained. "They just get stunned." "What do you do with them", I asked. "I put them in a paper
bag and drop them out the 12th floor window", he smiled.

After a few years in NYC a friend of mine, a great artist, much older than me, the late Roy G. Krenkel, told me that I was the Master of the
Meaningless Gesture. Well, I do this in my art because I don't want to tell anyone anything. I want the people to bring themselves to the work, based on their own experience.

From about the age of 4 or 5 I knew I wanted to be a girl. Maybe I was born with a kind of gender
inversion-- some call it a birth defect. I know nothing of these things. I do know that my identification has always been with females-- in books,
movies, art and life. My best friends have always been female and I have always been exclusively physically attracted to females. So, along
comes puberty. Whoa! We were all confused, I know, but within that maelstrom was my desire for, and the desire to be, a girl. Until the age of 12
I knew nothing regarding sexual matters. I saw boys with girls. That's what I saw. In the south, in the '50s there were no gays and no lesbians,
and certainly no one like me. So I became secretive. In my own mind I became ashamed, guilty and worthless-- this was the road I started down
so long ago. After many years of therapy, and many years of trying to drink away the shame, I arrived, ziiiiiiiiiiiiiiip in the year 1998. In August
of that year I decided to stop the denial and start living as a woman. In October I finally obtained the name of and saw the leading expert on the
subject-- the New York endocrinologist who wrote and rewrote the book. After extensive tests, both mental and physical, I started hormonal
gender re-assignment therapy. It's been about ten years now, but back in May blood tests showed that I had become medically female.
The process continues. Hair and androgens are tenacious. As my doctor put it, "I will induce menopause in you so you can enter puberty again.
This time as a female." My development is just that. People have been unimaginably supportive, and slowly that shame is passing away. My wife, Maryellen, has been my backbone through all of this. I've never known such acceptance and love. People have also said to me how brave I must
be. If I understand courage to be self- possession and resolution in the face of fear, then there is certainly no bravery here. I had no choice really. There is certainly no fear of being female. Is it the fear of castration or the loss of testosterone-- that wall of defence around the precious
y chromosome-the fear they speak of? Who knows men? And I WAS one for 55 years!

Do I have a handle on it? Not on your life. I make it up as I go along. Love is daily and unafraid. I have lost and I have gained and I thank God
for all that is left.

Sources:
 MaCab Films
Jeffrey Jones-Art