Brauer Museum of Art

Twilight-mania ran rampant through my childhood. I borrowed my mother’s copy until she decided little girls shouldn’t read it, wore my New Moon prop look-alike bracelet with pride, and secretly watched Breaking Dawn – Part 1 at a friend's house after it had been deemed too raunchy for me to experience. I had been primed for a lifelong obsession with werewolves and vampires by the distinct and sure feeling of myself as “other”: an autistic, bisexual, and transgender childhood without the words to name it.

I knew that something about my body and social role was wrong, that something about my way of socializing and processing was different, and that these wrongs and differences were drastic, innate, and apparently unique. Deprived of the ability to see myself as I truly was— language, knowledge, and community withheld from me by an ableist and transphobic society— I came to my own conclusions. In early grade school, after sharing my lycanthropy with other students, a lunch aide forced me to publicly denounce my werewolf identity. The words she coerced me to spit out through tears were poison to my pride; I would learn to remain steadfast. Despite a later failed attempt at transmission to a friend in a bathroom stall— I found it difficult to bite hard enough, even with an eager volunteer— I soldiered on in my belief. In middle school I wore an imitation wolf tail clipped to the back of my skinny jeans, a public visual signifier. The constant barrage of tail pulling was no match for my father’s pliers and the easily fixable nature of jump rings. I would never deny myself again: “I’m a goddamn force of nature.”

Marie de France’s 12th century poem “Bisclavret” tells the story of a werewolf trapped in lupine form, maliciously kept from the one thing that can turn him human again. Drawing upon academic analysis of the poem’s queer desire, the historical artform of illuminated manuscript, and my experiences as a transgender man, WOLF-SICK is a prose adaptation of “Bisclavret” (as translated by Glyn S. Burgess & Keith Busby [1999] and David R. Slavitt [2019]) accompanied by original illustrations. Utilizing the bespoke nature of calligraphy and handsewn bookbinding with the mass-productive potential of block-printed illustration, WOLF-SICK combines the natural with the synthetic and the antiquated with the modern to reclaim a historical queer narrative.

One year on testosterone, I now possess an insatiable hunger, muscles thicken and shift beneath my skin, and a pelt has coated my body. The dream of transformation has become manifest.