David During Filming
I am more comfortable in front of an audience – whether I’m on stage or in a classroom – than I am in almost any social situation.
But my life of denial took its toll on my ability to perform. I feared being looked at, and, when I was the center of attention, I would dissociate from the scene. In 1994, I won first prize in a National Writers Association contest for my story “The Late Bus” and attended the awards ceremony. I remember being there, but I have no memory of the evening after the moment they called me to the dais to accept my certificate and check.
I dropped out of academia in part because of the increased anxiety I faced just walking into a classroom. I could work well with words and ideas, but not so well with people, and I ended up with a career as a copywriter.
In 1999, I took a job as the site writer for govWorks.com. One of the things that sold me on the job was the possibility of meeting DA Pennebaker, who was producing a documentary about the company (Startup.com). I had missed a chance to be in one of his previous films (Rockaby, a documentary about the premiere production of Samuel Beckett’s play of the same name), because I arrived at SUNY Buffalo to study Beckett a year too late.
You can see me in the periphery of Startup.com, but had it not been for my fear of being seen, I might have had a bravura moment in the film. I had a private meeting with the CEO, and as I waited to go into his office, the directors of the film, Jehane Noujaim and Chris Hegedus, asked if they could film our meeting.
I didn’t think twice before saying, “No.”
I was meeting with the CEO to complain about my situation. The company was mostly made up of investment bankers and idealists, and the web production team was tossed from one division of the organization to another as it grew. I ended up working for someone I didn’t respect, and I was trying to get out from under that person’s direction.
I was walking into a meeting where I felt I wouldn’t be able to control my emotions (I was right), and I could not have done it if I were being witnessed and filmed. I was deathly afraid of being vulnerable on camera. The illusion of invulnerability was part of my male persona, though on the inside I was an open wound.
By last year, I had gotten to the point where I couldn’t go out in public at all. I left home only to go to my job, to see my shrink, and to buy food. In May of 2008, I got laid off, and I was a shut-in until a few months ago, when the needlessly radical act of putting on women’s clothing gave me the ability to go out in public again.
These days, I am forcing myself to be vulnerable. I obligate myself to perform whether I think I can do it or not. I have sat for two portrait photographers in the past two months, and later this month I am being filmed for a documentary about people who got laid off from the advertising industry and went on to do something unique. My unique thing is changing my gender.
Samuel Beckett’s only film script has an epigraph from Bishop Berkeley: “Esse est percipi” (“To be is to be perceived”). The main character of Film (played by Buster Keaton) spends the entire movie in a fruitless quest to avoid being perceived by the camera. That’s what I have been doing for the past few decades, but I am no longer in hiding. Now that I have discovered my gender, I no longer doubt that I exist.
And I am ready for my closeup. -DAVID COHEN
