What the heart wants
They stayed together through years
of turmoil and change, bound
by love — and a secret.
By Lane DeGregory, Times Staff Writer
Published June 24, 2007
VERO BEACH - He moved into the rented bungalow last fall. Put the birds' cages in the front window, just as his wife would have wanted.
Charlie Bonn Kemp is 77. He'd never had to set up house by himself. His wife always did that.
The place still seems empty, several months after he moved in. You'll have to excuse him, he says. He's just beginning to be able to unpack.
"These last few days, since I started, have been the most painful of my life, " he sighs, sinking into his worn recliner. "Going through all these pictures, all her stuff . . ."
"That's all that's left of her, up there in that oak box." He points to the top of his refrigerator. "I didn't want to face it. So I've just been sitting here, playing with the birds, thinking back."
He fishes a wooden frame from the cardboard box next to his chair. "That's her, the last photo I have of her, " he says. An elderly woman in a red straw hat is waving to the camera. Her blue eyes are bright. She looks tired, but happy.
"All those years, " Charlie says softly. "All those years I kept her secret."
- - -
He is nobody you know, just an old man who is all alone except for his cockatiels. But he has a story to tell, and he just wants somebody to listen. He can see the end now and he wants the world to know the truth. Thirty years of lying is enough, Charlie says.
You have to understand: There are lots of different kinds of love.
Charlie, the youngest of four children, grew up in Baltimore during the Depression. His dad died from TB before he started school.
He was a skinny kid. At 7, he saw a magazine called Strength and Health and knew what he wanted to be: that muscle-bound Adonis on the cover.
But Charlie was sickly, always battling allergies and asthma. While his older brothers and sister played outside, he spent days alone in bed.
One day he confessed to his parish priest: He'd sinned. His mom said he'd go blind.
No, the priest assured Charlie. "Good Father Peck - that was his real name, " Charlie says. "He introduced me to the gay lifestyle."
Charlie moved to Cleveland when he was 21, started selling Studebakers. Rented a room in the YMCA.
"This is me, " Charlie says, pulling a black-and-white photo from the box. It shows an emaciated young man, standing in the surf, wearing a white bathing suit. He has cropped hair, a long nose. He's not smiling.
"I hated my body, " Charlie says. He'd had emphysema, both lungs had collapsed. "I was 6 foot 1 and weighed 109 pounds."
On Jan. 9, 1952 - "Of course I remember the date, " Charlie says. "It was a weeknight, snowing like hell" - he saw a tall, good-looking guy and followed him into a gay bar called Paul's. Inside, someone else caught his eye: a shorter guy, 5 feet 7, who looked about his age. This guy was wearing a white T-shirt and tight Levi's. Charlie surveyed the stranger's broad shoulders, strong chest, sculpted waist.
He bought the guy a beer and asked, "So, have you ever done any bodybuilding?"
The guy said no, he was in the Army. He'd just come back from Korea. The soldier bought another round.
He told Charlie his name was Lee Damron. They drank until last call, when Charlie realized he'd spent all his cash. He needed $2 for his room at the YMCA.
Lee gave him the money and said, "But only if I can come with you."
- - -
"This is Lee, " Charlie says. The faded snapshot shows a young man, 21, dressed in Army boots and starched khakis. He has heavy eyebrows, a wide mouth. He's not smiling.
Charlie touches the face in the photo. "Such a beautiful boy."
After that first night at the Y, they were almost always together. Another picture shows the two of them at 25, their arms around each other's waists, wearing black pants and matching sweatshirts. Standing in front of a white picket fence. Smiling.
They bought a house together in Towson, Md., near Charlie's mom. Charlie sold cars. Lee painted numbers on watches. Charlie cut the yard. Lee cooked chipped beef. To neighbors and co-workers, they passed themselves off as cousins.
But their seemingly happy domestic life had its complications. Every night, Charlie drank himself to sleep. And twice in two years, Lee gulped handfuls of sleeping pills, trying to kill himself.
"I never thought of leaving him, " Charlie says. "He was always there for me."
After they'd been together five years, Lee told Charlie he had always dreamed of being a hairdresser.
He didn't tell Charlie what he really wanted.
- - -
Even after Lee reached his goal and started work in a beauty shop, he was miserable. He'd curl up on the couch, listening to Judy Garland albums.
"We had several gay men who worked at the shop. They were different than Lee, though, " says Adeline Ford, who worked with Lee for eight years. "Those guys didn't hang out with us. But Lee loved being with the girls."
One Halloween, Lee's co-workers asked him to come with them to the Hairdresser's Ball. Lee bought a white sleeveless cocktail dress, a strand of pearls and clip-on pearl earrings.
Sitting in his recliner in Vero Beach, the old man pulls another picture from the box. "This is Lee, " Charlie says. The picture shows a broad-shouldered brunette, 27, wearing eye shadow and stiletto heels. Looking self-satisfied.
"When I saw what Lee was wearing, I told him there's no way I'd take him to that ball, " Charlie says. "I guess he made a good-looking broad. But I had no interest in that. I don't like women. I kept thinking: What an awful waste of a man."
- - -
Years into their relationship, Charlie still admired Lee's physique - and hated his own. He was sick of doctors telling him not to exercise.
So he joined a gym. Traded his bourbon for weight-gain shakes. Worked out three hours a day.
By age 40, he had become the man he had always wanted to be: Mr. America. Charlie still has pictures that show him off as a muscle-bound man with pumped pecs.
"Do you want to see my trophies?" he asks, sliding aside the cardboard box. "They're a little battered from the hurricanes."
Charlie and the woman he eventually married lost their home to Hurricane Andrew. Years later, they lost another to Hurricane Charley. Each time they evacuated, they took their birds, their photos and Charlie's trophies.
The brass letters are scratched, but the words are still legible: Award for the Most Outstanding Physical Achievement in the United States. One is dated 1970, the other 1972.
- - -
Lee tried to kill himself again.
In 1975, he downed another bottle of sleeping pills. After Charlie drove him to the hospital, Lee finally admitted what had been plaguing him his whole life.
"I hate my body, " Lee said.
That beautiful body?
"It's never felt right, " Lee said.
He told Charlie he had always known he was supposed to be someone else: a woman.
- - -
What would you do?
What if you loved a person for 23 years and it turned out he wasn't who you thought he was? What if he wanted to change the very thing that drew you to him in the first place?
What if you knew he would rather die than remain the person you had fallen in love with?
Lee told Charlie he'd known all along, ever since he was a boy. But back then, sex-change surgery wasn't possible, as far as he knew.
Then, in 1952 - a few months after Lee met Charlie - George Jorgensen's transformation to Christine Jorgensen made the front pages and created new possibilities for people like Lee. From then on, Lee said, he knew he had to have the operation.
He had never told Charlie, he said, "Because I was afraid you'd leave me."
Charlie knew how it felt to hate his own body, to want to change it. But this?
"I didn't understand how any man could want to do that, " he says. "But I saw how miserable Lee was. I wanted him to be happy." His voice breaks. "I loved him."
Charlie looks up to the box on the refrigerator. He wipes his eyes. Switches pronouns.
"To this day, I love her."
- - -
Lee lived as a woman for two years after that. He went through intensive counseling and passed 41 psychological screenings. Finally, he was accepted for gender reassignment surgery at Johns Hopkins University Hospital. Just before the scheduled date, the school stopped the controversial procedures.
It took months, but Lee finally found a hospital in Long Island, N.Y., that would perform the surgery. The bill: $2, 500. On Dec. 6, 1976, Lee received a "Certification of Sexual Reassignment."
The next day, she got a facelift.
"She was one tough broad, " Charlie says.
He took care of her while she recovered, helped her apply for a new birth certificate, took her out to dinner.
"This is us, " Charlie says, pulling a color photo from the box. A middle-aged man in a gray suit jacket, 46. A handsome woman wearing gold hoops and a fox fur, leaning lovingly on the man's shoulder. They look so happy.
"Believe me, " Charlie says, "it was no fairy tale."
- - -
Lee was elated to be a woman and passed well in her new gender. The trouble was, Charlie wasn't attracted to women. He loved Lee, yes. But he no longer wanted to have sex with him. Her.
Charlie went on the road driving semitrailer trucks, logging 100, 000 miles a year. He brags that he had a boyfriend at every exit. On weekends, he'd come home to Towson to be with Lee.
Lee's parents had died when he was young, so he had grown up among strangers, in foster families. "Home meant everything to her, " Charlie says. "Growing up, she never had one." So Lee would cook a roast, they'd play with their birds, Charlie would tell his wife about the guys he met at truck stops. She didn't like it, he says. But she didn't leave.
On May 13, 1978 - "Of course I remember the date, " Charlie says - he and Lee flew to Vegas, with Charlie's latest boyfriend. They left Lee alone right away, to lift weights. Hours later, Charlie called Lee.
"Meet me in an hour at the Little Chapel of the Flowers, " he told her. "That is, if you want to get married."
Ask Charlie about this and he laughs. Why would he marry Lee if he didn't want to be with her as a woman? Why would he marry her when he brought his boyfriends along on their vacations? "My boyfriend was our best man, " Charlie says. "And it wasn't about sex with Lee anymore. It was about getting married."
But why? "Even more than a hairdresser, she said she'd always wanted to be a housewife, " Charlie says.
"I couldn't give her everything she wanted. But at least I could give her that."
- - -
Lee smelled like hair spray and Chanel No. 5. She loved sundresses and heels, shopped mostly at the Salvation Army. The only place she'd splurge was at Victoria's Secret, though she seldom had anyone to model for.
As far as Charlie knows, Lee had only one lover after her operation. She had a short fling with the guy who lived next door. "The surgery was done so well, " Charlie says. "Old Dave, he never suspected a thing."
Charlie and Lee moved to Florida in 1981. In 2000 - at age 70 - Charlie finally came off the road. "Only because Lee needed me, " he says. She was starting to forget things and was having trouble breathing. So Charlie took a job close to home, selling Hondas. After more than 20 years of marriage, he was with her every night.
His co-workers thought he was the most devoted husband, and that he and Lee were the sweetest old couple. Nobody had any idea.
"I sold cars with Charlie, socialized all the time with him and his wife, " says Bill Beck, who never suspected Lee had been a man. "Lee was a lovely person, all classy. She was still pretty - even as she aged. I never saw much emotional response from Charlie toward her. But you could tell she adored him."
- - -
Charlie says he cared for Lee at home as long as he could. She had Alzheimer's and lung cancer and grew too weak to walk. In 2005, Charlie checked her into a VA medical facility in Port Charlotte. He slept on the floor beside her.
Lee died Feb. 15, 2006.
"In the end, " Charlie says, "she forgot she'd ever been a boy."
- - -
He packs the photos away - 54 years of memories. Then he stands and crosses to the refrigerator, takes down the oak box. "I'm going to have her ashes mixed with mine, then spread over Archie's grave in West Virginia, " Charlie says. "Archie was our parrot, our first kid."
He passes the days fussing over the cockatiels - Sandy, E.T. and Mama. He and Lee raised boxer puppies for a while. But "Dogs die, " Charlie says. He nods to his flock. "These little fellas will outlive me.
"Did you know that you can't tell the sex of a cockatiel?" Charlie asks. "The only way you know is if they lay an egg."
Sometimes, he says, he feels bad about how he treated Lee. He should have spent more time with her, less with other men.
"I never had any interest in women. But I loved Lee, " Charlie says. He wipes his cheek.
"I guess I loved her for being him."
Lane DeGregory can be reached at degregory@sptimes.com or 727 893-8825. To contact Charlie Kemp, write to P.O. Box 690103, Vero Beach, FL 32969-0103.