Photo by Michael Chess: White Sands, New Mexico

Photo by E. Pia Struzzieri

Tom Lin ’18 is too old to be a child prodigy.

But he’s young enough that the attention and praise he has received for his first novel, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, is extraordinary. To garner the critical acclaim it has—and to be selected a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and win the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction—is certainly not typical for a writer who only recently turned 26.

Sometimes compared to Cormac McCarthy’s work, Lin’s novel is a classic Western that features a Chinese American assassin as its protagonist. Lin started his book as a student at Pomona College, guided by professor and novelist Jonathan Lethem and advised by the late Professor Arden Reed. Lin says with all the accolades, he keeps “expecting to wake up” from what seems like a dream.

Now a Ph.D. student at UC Davis, Lin is working on a science fiction project while continuing his graduate work.

But every story, written or lived, has its beginning.

Lin grew up in New York and got his first car while at Pomona. Unsupervised at the wheel, he crisscrossed the Southern California landscape, most notably the Mojave Desert and Joshua Tree National Park. Lin had never seen anything like those places in his life. (Actually, he was corrected in a family text thread: He traveled to the West Coast when he 4. But college was the first time he was sentient in the Wild West, he says.)

Inspired by the scenery, Lin thought he should write a Western as a tribute. But it was a tribute with a twist. The main character would be Chinese American. For Lin, this wasn’t just a matter of preference; this was a matter of urgency, never mind history. The California public schools curriculum includes the history of Chinese laborers on the Transcontinental Railroad, but Lin’s East Coast curriculum had not.

“I was learning this new history, getting more involved in it, and it more and more would seem like a story that I had to tell,” he says. “I had to do it right as well.”

Doing it right was a challenge. Lin knew very little about traditional Westerns. What he did know were books by authors such as Cormac McCarthy, who subverted the genre.

“I think I got to know Westerns through this kind of meta-Western universe, which is interesting—to read around a thing but never actually encounter the thing,” Lin says.

He didn’t let that hinder him.

“The Western as a genre has a set of affordances and is so deeply ingrained in American culture,” he says. “It’s hard to get away from the skeletons of the Western even in stuff that wouldn’t appear to be Westerns, because we just love them so much as a country. And so paradoxically I felt quite well prepared to write a Western. I never felt that anything was lacking because I hadn’t read Westerns, because I felt as though I had been reading Westerns all my life in these other forms.”

Lin’s novel had humble beginnings; it started as homework. His work was a submission for a creative writing workshop with Lethem, the much-celebrated novelist and Pomona College’s Roy Edward Disney ’51 Professor of Creative Writing and Professor of English.

“My peers were very kind to me, because I turned in something that was way beyond the length cutoff for what you would give for a workshop,” Lin says. “It had a main character named Ming Tsu and it was a Western, but it was set in the present day. My thinking was that this was just a chapter, and I would go and work on it more. But at the end of it, Ming Tsu, he gets in his car and he says, ‘I’m going to drive across the country,’ because I was about to do that at the end of that year, just to go home. And I remember someone in the class during feedback they said, ‘Oh, it won’t take that long to drive across the country. I’ve done it in two days.’ And I almost out of spite put [Ming Tsu] on a horse to see how long it takes for him to get anywhere.”

Lin worked intermittently on the manuscript throughout his time at Pomona. He loved that his professors treated him as a peer. But he admits he didn’t complete the novel in college because he was “having too much fun. And of course, as soon as I graduated, that ceased to be a problem almost instantly.”

So Lin finished the book in the year that he took between college and grad school. Following that were a host of revisions and a return to his mentor Lethem. Although Lin had only taken the beginning fiction workshop with the professor, not the advanced workshop, Lethem offered an open door and critical eye for the young graduate’s manuscript. While Lin was prepared for feedback, he wasn’t prepared for Lethem’s “incredibly generous blurb,” he says.

“I was bowled over. That was something that I could then take when we were showing the manuscript to editors. That helped immeasurably. I don’t think any of this would have been possible without his generosity.”

Writing is often difficult for him, Lin says. Some of his productive days produce a grand total of 250 words. But because writing is so hard, he does a lot of research.

“That is much more satisfying and also there’s less hair-pulling and heartache involved,” he says. “I tend to think and imagine and ultimately write in short scenes, just bursts of description or action, and I produce what I consider to be fragments. And then when I want to start stitching the whole thing together, it becomes a process of bricks and mortar, rather than weaving out of whole cloth. But my writing process I think in a word is ‘slow.’”

Lin remembers that he would Google “famous writer, process,” to see if he was doing something wrong.

“There are these writers who wake up at 5 a.m. and they go for a run, and they take the kids to school, and then they write for eight hours and … I don’t know how you do that day after day.”

As an English major, Lin was trained in looking for sources first and then building an analysis.

“I think when it comes to writing fiction, it’s almost the exact same process except that at the end what I built isn’t an interpretation, but actually something that seems to attend to all of those issues that came up during research.”

Lin claims he is “slow.” That said, his first novel was published a mere three years out of college. But what seems like a rapid turnaround was actually a long-desired realization. He had always been writing in some form or fashion but wasn’t so sure he could make a living with words. It was akin to the “When I grow up, I want to be an astronaut” dream, he says. But he had been hyping this project to his friends, so it was finally self-imposed social pressure that brought him to the finish line.

Of course, writing isn’t really a race; it is a craft. While Lin typed, he kept history at the forefront of his mind as well as the concept of invisibility that Ralph Ellison brilliantly illuminated in Invisible Man. Chinese immigrants essentially built the Central Pacific Railroad line, but they faced both ugly racism and its manifestation in the Exclusion Act, the 1882 federal law that barred the immigration of Chinese laborers and required Chinese residents to carry special documents. As a result, Chinese immigrants were both hidden and hated.

Reading newspapers from that time period, Lin learned of an epithet of the era that at first puzzled him.

“The train is coming around the tracks, and ‘John takes off his hat and whoops with joy’ or ‘John is driving ties,’ and I realized that is short for John Chinaman,” Lin says. “That is how everyone who even looked Asian in that time was referred to. And so that to me seemed like a double kind of elision. Not only were these human beings being compressed into a single identity, but then even that was moved into just John. The racial epithet is implied.”

Historical research for the novel was difficult because instead of being described as individuals in U.S. history, Chinese immigrants were described as masses—even an anonymous mass, as indicated by the name John. But Lin continued his deep dive into research and tried to write an individual back into that historical milieu, he says.

“I would be writing a character who people might choose not to see, who might subvert these racist power structures that were in almost everybody, harming him, and how he could actually capitalize on the underside of those power structures.”

Tom Lin’s novel is set during the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, depicted here shortly after its completion in 1869.

The racist power structures against Asian Americans have been around as long as Asians have been in America, Lin says. To write as an Asian American today is to provide a vital voice. And a voice that reveals the false perception of a monolithic Asian American diaspora as it gives utterance to specificity, solidarity and even the act of speech itself.

For example, Lin notes that his parents emigrated to the United States from Beijing. The Chinese Americans who emigrated here in the 1800s emigrated from the south of China.

“I often had thought if I were to go back in time and meet Ming or his parents, we would have nothing in common between the two of us,” he says. “We would be both Chinese but we wouldn’t speak the same language; we would be mutually unintelligible. And yet we would both be reduced to being Chinese American because we were Chinese in America. That we’re trying to show solidarity and agitate as this kind of fictitious group I think is something that we should never forget.”

Lin says the task of Asian American representation in literature is to show the full gamut of the Asian American experience. Not just the strife and struggles of immigrants. For Lin, those kinds of stories are for white consumption.

He recalls his first year at Pomona when Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Americanah, had come to give a talk.

“She was telling us about the danger of the single story,” Lin says. “And I think that’s extremely apt to describe what representation can do because it can add more stories, and it expands the field of possibility for what people of color can be in the white American imagination.”

For Lin, it wasn’t all about people of color or white Americans. Writing this story brought another satisfaction as well.

“It was just so cool and so satisfying to be working on this story and know that it was a kind of story that I never got a chance to read as a kid. I would have loved this as a kid.”

Artwork selection from Human Impact Stories: The Climate Crossroads exhibit curated by GiGi Buddie ’23.
Left to right, top to bottom: Severiana Domínguez González (Mexico) illustrated by Sino Ngwane (South Africa); Saraswati Dhruv (India) illustrated by Radja Ouslimane (Algeria); Gabriella Sakina (DRC) illustrated by Maryam Lethome (Kenya); Raquel Cunampio (Panama) illustrated by Astrid “Lotus” Caballeros (Guatemala).
See complete series at humanimpactsinstitute.org/climatecrossroads

On the other side of the Atlantic last November, Pomona College student GiGi Buddie ’23 stood behind a dais marked with the familiar United Nations logo and the words “UN Climate Change Conference UK 2021.” She was in Glasgow as a youth delegate to COP26 representing Human Impacts Institute, a nonprofit that uses art and culture to inspire environmental action.

The stage, and the microphone, were hers.

“I am Mescalero Apache and Tongva Indian,” Buddie began as she spoke at a joint event with the Bolivian delegation inside the Blue Zone, the vast area managed by the United Nations where negotiations and other events took place.

“I am a daughter, sister, student, artist, warrior and caretaker of this earth,” Buddie continued, the beaded earrings crafted for her by Chickasaw student Coco Percival ’21 dangling from her ears. “I am standing here before you on behalf of my ancestors who fought to give me life, give me a voice, give me a home and a community to remind me of my roots that extend deep into this earth. For it is because of my ancestors that I am here. It is because of them that I can see light in a world that seems to grow darker each passing year. They give me hope. They give me strength. It is because of them that I fight so hard here, though we must all confront the truth that this shouldn’t be a fight.

“There is no debate on human lives and history. There is no debate on the hurt and grief and the immense loss that my people have suffered. There is no debate on what’s right and wrong because colonial and capitalist morals are rooted in greed and corruption. There is no debate. There can only be what do we do now? How do we move forward more knowledgeably? How can we share the seats at a table with voices that know this earth?”

Buddie grew up as what is sometimes called an urban Indian, living with her family outside San Francisco. What she learned about her heritage came mainly from stories and rituals introduced by her mother, Kaia, and from visits to the annual Stanford Powwow, one of the largest such gatherings on the West Coast. At Pomona, Buddie’s understanding of the experiences of other native peoples has deepened with her involvement in the Indigenous Peer Mentoring Program on campus and lessons learned from local Tongva elders such as Barbara Drake and Julia Bogany before their recent passings.

Growing up in the Bay Area, GiGi Buddie often attended the Stanford Powwow (shown here), the largest student-organized powwow in the nation.

It is as a theatre major and environmental analysis student at Pomona that Buddie has found the place where her heritage melds with her talents and the urgent need for action in the face of climate change. She has become an environmental warrior whose chosen weapon is art, whether it is the spoken word, a poem, visual art or a performance onstage.

The work that took her to COP26 with Human Impacts Institute was the multimedia exhibit she curated as an intern, Human Impact Stories: The Climate Crossroads, highlighting 10 Indigenous women and youth from around the world who are environmental activists.

On display at Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts and later inside the COP26 Blue Zone, the exhibit featured oversized prints of the activists’ portraits—each created by an Indigenous or Afro-descendant artist—along with the stories of their work and the ways of life they seek to protect.

Brazil’s Watatakalu Yawalapiti, founder of the Xingu Women’s Movement, works to increase Indigenous women’s political voices in battling such issues as deforestation in the Amazon region. Indonesian teenager Kynan Tegar fights with a camera, using film and storytelling to show the effects of environmental changes on his Dayak Iban people of Borneo. Vehia Wheeler, cofounder of Sustainable Oceania Solutions Mo’orea, is an academic, consultant and activist working to teach youth in Oceania to combine ancestral knowledge with STEM methods to protect the environment.

Buddie collaborated with Tara DePorte, the founder and executive director of Human Impacts Institute, to select the featured activists from nominations from around the world, focusing on the Southern Hemisphere. Buddie then identified Indigenous artists to commission for the striking, colorful portraits that drew people into the exhibit. She also interviewed the featured leaders—sometimes requiring a translator—and wrote brief biographies to accompany transcripts of the interviews, all of which are available at the Human Impacts Institute website.

The point was to amplify their work and their voices, so that others trying to find solutions to climate change recognize that many Indigenous people already are experiencing effects from environmental change—and that the wisdom of their elders provides ideas to combat it that aren’t being heard.

“Indigenous communities usually have very close ties to nature, living with the land rather than on the land, taking advantage of what is there and always giving back,” Buddie says, noting that such practices as using controlled burns to prevent wildfires have been practiced by native peoples for thousands of years. “The sad part is that the climate crisis most often affects Indigenous communities and minority communities in greater ways than it does in more wealthy communities. They’re the first impacted and hardest hit.”

During her time in Scotland, Buddie experienced both exhilaration and frustration.

“Everything was so new and overwhelming, mostly in a good way,” she says. “When we got the exhibit all set up and the video was playing, the music was on and people started to trickle in, I just realized: It’s real; we’re here. All the work that we’ve done, it’s here at COP26.”

Listening to those who visited gave
her a sense of meaning.

“I got a lot of, ‘This was eye-opening. I didn’t know this,’” she says.

Her varied work in the Indigenous climate movement has expanded during her time at Pomona. As a first-year student, she took an acting course with Prof. Giovanni Ortega that introduced her to This Is a River, a play being written by Pomona Theatre Prof. James Taylor and Isabelle Rogers ’20. That summer, Buddie joined them on a research expedition to Borneo, the play’s setting, where she was stunned to see how deforestation, palm oil plantations and the building of dams affected the Indigenous people who make their homes along the Baram River.

Her efforts to convey the urgency of climate change through art have included work with the nonprofit The Arctic Cycle and its Climate Change Theatre Action project, a worldwide series of performances of short climate change plays that Buddie has been part of on Pomona’s campus. Last fall, she acted as producer for the Pomona event and brought in speaker Chantal Bilodeau, the Arctic Cycle’s founding artistic director, now one of Buddie’s mentors.

A play, Buddie has come to believe, is a perfect way to reach people.

“You quite literally have a stage,” she says. “I think what’s so beautiful about theatre and other forms of art, visual and performing, is that anything that has to do with scientific jargon or academia can be so scary,” she says. “However, when you take the science of it and put the issue into a play, you’re making it more accessible and you’re creating an environment where people can absorb and interact with this material in a way that they’re able to connect with and understand. It’s also a way to tug at the heartstrings a little bit. When you see the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] Report, it’s scary. But taking it and putting it into art creates an avenue where anybody can come to it, and it can be accessible. That’s really powerful.”

Ortega, the theatre professor who traveled with the Borneo research group, praises Buddie’s acting in roles in campus productions including 2019’s Metamorphoses and Circle Mirror Transformation last fall.

GiGi Buddie, right, performs in Metamorphoses in 2019
Photo by Ian Poveda ’21

“Not only is she very keen on these issues, she’s also a phenomenal actress,” Ortega says. “But I think what’s really important about her is the amount of empathy that she carries, as a person who identifies as Indigenous and someone who cares about the environment. She’s more passionate than ever, and that was really evident when she came back from COP26. You could tell that this is a fire that’s inside of her, because this generation is just really exhausted with the pace that we are going regarding environmental change.”

Inside the Blue Zone in Glasgow, Buddie caught glimpses of activists such as Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio. Yet at the same time, she felt a simmering resentment toward world leaders and corporations she feels aren’t acting quickly enough to address climate change.

“It was so painful and eye-opening to sit there knowing that these world leaders were not truly listening, or if they were listening, it was some scheme to make themselves look better by saying, ‘We’re listening,’” she says. “They’re saying that they’re throwing coins in a wishing well for how we want the planet to change. I’m thinking, ‘You have the power. You are the power that makes the change. Do it.’”

It was, after all, COP26, meaning that the Conference of the Parties, the decision-making body responsible for the implementation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate, had met 25 times before, since 1995. António Guterres, the U.N. Secretary General, opened COP26 by saying the top priority must be to limit the rise in global temperatures since pre-industrial times to just 1.5 degrees Celsius. Already, the world has warmed 1.1 degrees.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and U.S. President Joe Biden were accused of nodding off because of photos such as this.

“I think that especially at this climate summit, it was just so real and in your face that we don’t have time,” Buddie says. “Like Joe Biden and Boris Johnson falling asleep in the middle of negotiations. The entire world is watching you. The entire world is listening. And that’s what you do?”

What she wants most desperately and is trying to encourage through art is for people to listen, and to act.

“Which, seeing it at COP, everywhere you looked, it was just people pretending to listen.”

In April 1952, an unusual ad appeared in the classified section of the music and entertainment magazine Billboard. “Female impersonator magazine in preparation; articles and pictures needed from amateurs and professionals,” the ad read. It included an address in Long Beach, California, where readers could send their submissions.

A month later, a small set of subscribers received a 26-page, mimeographed magazine in the mail, called Transvestia: Journal of the American Society for Equality in Dress. The magazine was unlike anything else in circulation at the time. Transvestia self-consciously positioned itself as a publication by and for people who cross-dressed. “Perusal of this publication is primarily intended for complete as well as partial transvestites,” the first issue declared. Transvestia, the editors wrote, was designed so its readers could “obtain at least a modicum of mental security and adjustment” about their identities. Even Alfred Kinsey, the famed sexologist, wrote in to offer his support for the publication.

The small group of California women who co-founded Transvestia included a Pomona College graduate, Virginia Prince ’35, who helped launch the magazine alongside Joanne Thornton and the trans activist Louise Lawrence. Though Prince worked as a chemist at the time, she would eventually take over Transvestia and lead it through its decades-long run. Prince would go on to become one of the most prominent early activists in the trans community, publishing multiple books on her life and frequently appearing on television and radio shows in the 1960s and ’70s. But that foray into activism began, in many ways, with the 1952 magazine.

When the first issue of Transvestia appeared, the U.S. had little by way of a queer movement. An organization called the Mattachine Society had sprung up in 1950, but it was focused mainly on the needs of gay men. Aside from a few informal social groups, no organization existed for people who had a more varied experience of gender—meaning people who cross-dressed, people who lived as a gender other than the one they’d been assigned at birth, and so on. The term “transsexual,” a precursor to the modern label of “transgender,” was not coined in English until 1949.

Prince sparked a more nuanced conversation about gender identity in an era when that dialogue was almost entirely taboo, yet her legacy today remains complicated. Throughout her life, she rebuffed large swaths of trans people, dismissing those who opted for gender-affirmation surgeries as well as those who slept with members of the same sex. Anyone whose relationships would be seen as gay, she wanted to keep at a distance.

A complete collection of Transvestia magazine issues is held by the University of Victoria’s Transgender Archives.

Prince was born in 1912 to a prominent Los Angeles family. Her father, Charles LeRoy Lowman, came from a long line of doctors. From birth, the world perceived Prince as a boy. But Prince quickly took a more nuanced view of her gender. Though she later pinpointed the beginning of her cross-dressing to when she was 12, Prince said she couldn’t remember all of the reasons she started wearing women’s clothes. “All I know was that by the age of 16 it was full blown,” she wrote in 1979 in the 100th issue of Transvestia, which can be found in the collection of the University of Victoria’s Transgender Archive. (A collection of Prince’s personal papers is archived at Cal State Northridge.) The teenager dressed mostly in stolen moments, saying that “by the time I was 18 I had accumulated a small wardrobe” of women’s clothes, “and when I could assure myself that my parents were going to be away long enough I would go into the garage and dress there and then sneak out.”

Prince enrolled at Pomona in 1931, joined a fraternity and dressed in coat and tie for class photos in the Metate yearbook. After graduating with a degree in chemistry, Prince—still going by the name Lowman—moved to San Francisco to pursue a Ph.D. in pharmacology. There, working as a medical researcher, Prince visited libraries across San Francisco in a professional capacity and on the side began combing through medical papers on trans people, eager to understand more about others who cross-dressed. At one point, Prince attended a psychiatric conference at which Barbara Ann Richards, a trans woman who received press coverage in 1941 after petitioning to have her name legally changed, described her relationship to gender. Prince was floored. Though the two had never met, Prince recognized Richards from their time at Pomona—the two had been in the same first-year class, both dressing as men at the time. Seeing Richards “had reached into my head where I kept all of my secrets and then revealed them to the world,” Prince said later. “I blushed deeply and became very nervous.” But Prince couldn’t get enough. “At the end of that session they announced that next week they would present another transvestite,” she wrote later. “Naturally you couldn’t have kept me away.”

In the early 1940s, Prince met Louise Lawrence, a trans organizer who was embarking on a speaking tour at medical schools across the country. Through Lawrence, Prince became connected with other people in the community. In the late 1940s, when Prince moved back to Southern California, she started meeting in a friend’s apartment with a small group of other people who were perceived as men but who lived, at least part-time, as women. That “ratty little place in Long Beach,” as Prince described it later, “became a mecca for all the TVs [transvestites] who knew about it.” Together, the women would create the first incarnation of Transvestia.

The original run of Transvestia fizzled out quickly, however. Only two editions were published in 1952. The third wouldn’t reach subscribers’ homes until May 1960. By that point, Prince was the magazine’s sole publisher and editor, a title that she held on top of her multiple business ventures.

A born entrepreneur, Prince launched a pet care wholesaler she called Cardinal Laboratories, which manufactured and sold beauty products to pet salons. Later, she created a chemical lab called Westwood Laboratories. The money she earned from the ventures helped subsidize her forays into activism. When Transvestia re-launched, Prince had only 25 subscribers, paying $4 each. The original co-founders were no longer involved in the publication. But Prince was determined to make it work.

For those people who knew about it, Transvestia quickly became a lifeline. Not only did it feature advice on how to dress, how to talk to partners about gender, and how to find others in the community, but it also teemed with personal stories of people who gravitated toward genders other than the ones they’d been assigned at birth. The publication featured a rotating cast of “cover stars”—a group that either identified as femme cross-dressers or as trans women—who sent in photos of themselves, plus short essays describing their experiences. The cover star from Issue No. 8, an Australian woman named Kate Cummings, wrote of her gratitude to Transvestia. “When it arrived I was overwhelmed by the potential wealth of transvestite material available to me by subscribing,” she said.

Transvestia didn’t reach a wide audience. Prince once claimed it never surpassed 1,000 subscribers, and only a few newsstands seemed to stock it. Ms. Bob Davis, a longtime researcher and the founder of the Louise Lawrence Transgender Archive in Vallejo, California, said that she once saw issues of Transvestia on a stand at a leftist bookstore in Philadelphia. But few other retail stores stocked Transvestia.

Transvestia had other problems—namely, its membership restrictions. In the early days, Transvestia featured a broad spectrum of gender minorities. Cover stars would talk about sleeping with partners of multiple genders, and some of those underwent gender transitions of their own. But as the publication evolved, it became more restrictive.

In 1961, Prince created an organization of her own: First it was called the Hose & Heels Club, then Foundation for Personality Expression, then eventually Tri-Ess, for Society for the Second Self. Yet in all the organization’s incarnations, Prince limited membership to people like her: heterosexual-identified people who cross-dressed. Anyone else, including gay or bisexual people as well as any trans person who had undergone gender-affirmation surgery, was barred from joining. New members had to apply to be accepted, and on the group’s application, Prince asked questions about their sexual and surgical histories. (Tri-Ess still exists today, and its website identifies it specifically as a “group for heterosexual crossdressers.”)

Dallas Denny, a trans writer and activist, remembers writing a letter to Tri-Ess in the 1970s after seeing representatives from the group on TV. “I told them I understood I was not eligible to be a member but that I had been searching for community for my entire life unsuccessfully, and would you please put me in touch with someone who knows about transsexualism so I can get some support?” she says. A few weeks later, she received a handwritten letter from Virginia Prince, which ended up “explaining to me I could never be a female,” Denny says. “It just devastated me.”

Still, according to Davis, the Louise Lawrence archivist, some people who had undergone gender-affirmation surgeries did join Tri-Ess; they simply lied about their histories. In the 1970s especially, Prince’s organization was “pretty much the only game in town,” Davis says. “Certainly the only national organization and the one that was easiest to find information about.” Davis adds that, though other trans organizations existed at the time, they weren’t as large or well known—meaning some trans people had every reason to lie to get into Tri-Ess.

By the 1960s, Prince herself began living full-time as a woman, as she would continue to do until her death in 2009. She published a series of books, first The Transvestite and His Wife (1967) and then How To Be a Woman Though Male (1971), which doubled down on her opposition to gender-affirmation surgery. After Transvestia found some stability, Prince began bundling a selection of news about cross-dressing and gender identity in what she called her TV Clipsheet.

Even so, she kept her distance from trans people who opted for a surgical transition.

In 1959, Prince received a letter in the mail that would change her life. A pen pal sent her a photo of two women having sex with the caption “Me and You.” Prince replied with a detailed description of her own fantasies for the woman. Inspectors for the U.S. Postal Service, which at the time was actively prosecuting people who sent sexual content through the mail, flagged the letter. Weeks later, they showed up to the lab where Prince worked with an ultimatum: They wanted to charge her with obscenity, a federal crime, but they would drop it if she agreed to stop printing Transvestia. Prince refused. “She told him yes, she wrote that letter,” says Denny, who interviewed Prince in the 1990s. “They came back and arrested her in her place of business and led her out in handcuffs.”

Prince was charged with a felony. At trial in Los Angeles Superior Court in February 1961, Prince pled guilty to a smaller charge and was given five years of probation. Though prosecutors pressed to have the judge ban Transvestia altogether, Prince convinced the judge that the magazine wasn’t obscene.

“That gives me ambivalent feelings about her because, while she kept me out of the community for 10 years with her needlessly restrictive membership policies, she also took a big one for the community in not giving in to the postal authorities,” Denny says.

Prince, in that way, was a person of contradiction. Both her magazine and her organization made space for a more nuanced conversation about gender identity and presentation in the U.S. Prince stood up for people like her even when it meant facing the vicissitudes of the U.S. legal system, which was especially cruel to queer people. At the same time, Prince didn’t want to open up her new organization to a full spectrum of trans people.

“Virginia was the person who had a vision of expanding the community coast to coast, and indeed beyond,” Davis says, noting Prince’s influence in early trans groups in Europe.

Trans publications and zines didn’t explode in number until the 1980s and 1990s—until then, community members had to rely on only a miniscule subset of media to find others like them. Transvestia was usually the most prominent among them. That progress is more evident today, as trans people grace the cover of magazines like TIME and are the creators of TV shows like HBO’s Sort Of.

For all Transvestia’s flaws, “it brought so many people together,” Davis says. “It gave so many people the idea of, they’re not alone.” For Prince, too, it offered a path to embrace who she was. “In trying to help you, my readers, I have learned and grown myself,” she wrote in her farewell issue of Transvestia. After decades of activism, “I am now a whole person, completely self accepting and at ease.”

Suffering in silence with no hint or clue to the world, 21-year-old Will Taylor aka “Scooty” died by suicide in March of 2017, just a few months short of graduating from Santa Clara University.

Kasey, Will and Michael Taylor

For big sister Kasey Taylor ’15, the shock and pain were nearly unbearable. His death left her dumbfounded. A two-week leave of absence from her job at a Los Angeles art gallery was not enough time to process his death nor her complex emotions that ranged from grief to abandonment.

“He and I had been so close,” she says. “Even though I know he didn’t choose to leave anyone in his life, it was hard for me not to feel that way—to feel I had been left.”

In the months after her brother’s death, Taylor sought solace and connection with some of her longtime high school friends. Together, they shared their frustrations about the stigma surrounding mental health.

“To be openly honest, since the age of 16 I had been struggling with mental health issues of my own. I had always felt a lot of shame about that, and because of that shame, I didn’t want to talk to other people,” says Taylor. “What I had seen at work with Will’s situation were similar forces. He didn’t share with anyone that he was going through anything, how he was feeling—however he was feeling—I don’t know. His death came as a huge shock to his family and friends.”

If that shame weren’t so present, if Will had spoken to someone, perhaps things might have turned out differently, she can’t help but think.

Born in Santa Monica, Taylor is the oldest of three children. Will came two years later, and soon after the family moved to the Seattle area. Their youngest brother Michael was born when Taylor was 6.

“Growing up, with Will and I being so close in age, we spent a lot of time together,” she says. “We would play at the beach club; we did a lot of Rollerblading with the neighborhood children and during the winter did a lot of skiing.”

As a freshman in high school, Taylor met with some older students who were off to Pomona College and offered nothing but praise for the school, she says. “I knew I wanted to be challenged academically and I didn’t necessarily want to stay in Washington state. I was looking at liberal arts colleges in the sunshine, or where I could ski. When I visited Pomona, the campus blew me away. It was so beautiful and the people I interacted with were friendly, seemed generally upbeat with a laid-back attitude.”

At Pomona, Taylor did some intellectual exploring. Going in as an economics major, she took two econ courses right off the bat—and soon realized they were not a fit for her. She considered sociology and eventually landed in some media studies classes that resonated with her and led her to settle on the major. All the while as she tried on different majors, Taylor continued her minor in art, which served as a baseline to her then and to this day.

Yet even while she thrived academically, Taylor was dealing silently with an eating disorder. After calling Monsour Counseling and Psychological Services (MCAPS), the mental health resource for the seven Claremont Colleges, she was given an appointment with a date that was one week out, not unreasonable for a non-emergency appointment. But by the time her appointment rolled around, Taylor had already talked herself out of going.

Taylor tried once more during her time at Pomona, but the same scenario played out a year later. She got an appointment, but once again lost her resolve. “I told myself I could deal with my mental health issues on my own; I just needed to try harder,” she says.

The impetus to seek help was there, but the moment of willingness to can fade for any number of reasons, including such barriers as health insurance issues, finding an open appointment, or not wanting to be seen entering a building others recognize as a mental healthcare or counseling facility—the exact sort of stigma Taylor wants to erase.

After graduating, Taylor traveled for a few months before settling into her new job as an assistant director at an art gallery in Los Angeles. She’d been working there for more than a year and was living in Santa Monica when on a Saturday morning—March 4, 2017—she received the devastating news about Will.

After sharing her grief and frustrations with her friends, Taylor knew she wanted to do something to honor her brother’s memory. Thinking beyond a one-time fundraiser, she was searching for longer-term impact.

On March 4, 2018, one year after Will died, The Scooty Fund was founded in honor of Will Taylor by his sister and a friend, Tara Nielson. “Scooty,” as Will was called, had been known for his quickness up and down the basketball court during his time at Mercer Island High School.

In the beginning, The Scooty Fund focused on raising money for hands-on crisis resources such as those provided by Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services in Los Angeles, an organization that has operated free programs for suicide prevention, substance use disorders and other mental health issues since the 1940s. The Scooty Fund helped support the center’s training for teachers and administrators to learn how to better help young people going through mental health crises. In less than four years, The Scooty Fund has raised more than $260,000 and has expanded its funding to support research related to suicide among young people, beginning with a two-year University of Washington study that seeks to analyze different personality characteristics and environmental factors to determine their impact on suicide ideation and attempts in adolescence through early adulthood.

Social media has been a big focus from the start to reach The Scooty Fund’s target demographic: young people. Every Wednesday, The Scooty Fund Instagram account is “taken over” by a Wellness Warrior who shares their story about dealing with mental health in an open and transparent manner while also engaging in real-time with followers.

By partnering with other organizations, The Scooty Fund has also led panel presentation events for high school students as well as college and graduate students. Taylor shares her story in hopes that it resonates and connects with others suffering in silence.

“[The goal] is to help young adults better cope with issues, or better support their friends in crisis. To be better equipped to deal with mental health issues when they arise,” says Taylor, whose media studies background from Pomona College gave her the foundation to see how culture plays a huge part in how someone deals—or doesn’t deal—with mental health.

“My upbringing in Seattle included a pretty intense achievement pressure. I’ve spoken to researchers who study this, and it seems that achievement pressure is only increasing for children growing up now,” she says. “Getting into colleges is increasingly competitive and many parents are packing their children’s schedules so they have all the boxes checked. Social media adds to that pressure—we see our peers having ‘great lives’ and we compare that to our own lives and feel lacking.”

There’s no real break, she adds. When someone goes home, they are still inundated in their own rooms and their own spaces, often through social media. A relief from this pressure is imperative,  Taylor believes, and she says she senses some movement in the right direction.

“I’ve seen a shift toward speaking about mental health and wellness more often, but the onus is still on the individual who is suffering,” she says. “There’s a lot of verbiage like ‘go to therapy,’ ‘go for a walk.’ I think it’s important for people to engage in their own wellness but when clinical mental health issues are present, we need an emphasis on how [people close to them] can reach out to someone they are concerned about.”

Normalizing these topics of discussion and having more peer-to-peer conversations can create room for people who are struggling to ask for support, explains Taylor. “It creates a space to discuss the topic.”

But how do we change achievement culture? “Through educating people—young adults—about not just taking care of yourself but taking care of their peers and friends,” Taylor says.

The Scooty Fund counts on 30 volunteers to help run things behind the scenes. Both of the co-founders are working full-time jobs and also going to graduate school. Taylor, who lives in Sun Valley, Idaho, is an art advisor for a consulting firm—an interior designer who selects artwork for luxury hospitality projects and corporate buildings—and is working on her master’s degree in marriage and family therapy.

With a full social media team in place, The Scooty Fund’s Instagram account has grown, their Wellness Warrior take-overs are a hit, and the overall feedback is positive:

“Seriously though. Thank you. The page honestly saved me when I was at rock bottom about a month ago. What you started is honestly making such a major impact on so many people whether you see it or not. So thank you.”

With a new podcast, “Scoot with Kasey Taylor,” launched in September 2021, The Scooty Fund is now also sharing expertise from people working in different mental health spaces, including researchers, founders of organizations, journalists, coaches and others.

“I can’t say enough positive things about the volunteers in our organization. They are really the people  doing the work, and who are motivated to get these projects completed and out there,” Taylor says. The podcast has been a labor of love for all involved, with a team of eight spending countless hours to produce the first 12 episodes.

More is in the works for the future, including an app for young adults to journal their feelings day by day, with mental health educational content provided as well.

Over the past three years, Taylor has poured many hours into The Scooty Fund. As its president, she has led its growth and with her co-founder, brought together a strong team that is passionate about educating and connecting with young people to destigmatize mental health. Taylor hopes to see The Scooty Fund continue to grow and reach more young people, but she’d also like to take a step back from her leadership role. She plans to focus her energies on building a strong infrastructure that would allow The Scooty Fund to thrive as she shifts careers—she wants to practice therapy and bring mental health discussions into the workplace. The Scooty Fund’s slogan that “together there is a WILL and a WAY” is one she will always take to heart.

Connect with The Scooty Fund

Instagram: @thescootyfund

Email: hello@scootyfund.org

The Scoot with Kasey Taylor Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, iHeart Radio, Amazon, Spotify and wherever you listen to podcasts.

As an alumna working at the College, students often ask me, “How has the campus changed since you were a student?” Without hesitation, I always answer, “The Coop Fountain is completely different.”

Smith Campus Center didn’t exist when I was a student (construction began the fall after I graduated); the Coop Fountain was a standalone building. If a contemporary of mine from 1993-97 were to return to campus for the first time today, the Fountain would be unrecognizable to them.

I started wondering, “What was the Coop Fountain like in the generations that came before me?” With the help of Sean Stanley, the College’s archivist, I discovered a long history of the Fountain reinventing itself every 10 to 20 years, in an effort to meet students’ evolving needs in a world that has changed despite the seemingly insular bubble of campus.

First, I needed to know, where does the name “The Coop” come from? Is it a reference to where Cecil Sagehen roosts? Sadly, it is not. The Coop finds its origins in the Student Cooperative Store, established during World War I as an army canteen for Pomona’s Student Army Training Corps. After the war, the Coop continued to sell merchandise and served as a place to rendezvous between classes and as a clearinghouse for used books.

In 1929, a student union building was proposed by both the administration and students, but the Depression put those plans on hold. By 1936, economic conditions were improving, and the desire and need for a building to house student activities and to serve as a social center were strong. The increased use of cars had led to a fragmentation of the college community as students traveled long distances to hotel and club ballrooms off campus for diversion. Many students at the College were involved in car accidents during this era of open cars. A student union containing a ballroom and gathering spaces seemed like a non-negotiable.

The first student union was erected in 1937. Enough funds were raised to build the main building and the west wing, and a soda fountain and sandwich facility were part of this new gathering space. The building was unnamed until 1948, at which point it was named Edmunds Union. “For most, however, the union would always be ‘the Coop,’” according to the book, Pomona College: Reflections on a Campus.

After World War II, in 1950, construction began on the east wing. The soda fountain and restaurant moved to this new addition, which provided larger facilities to serve 100 people. A covered patio was added, providing an outdoor dining area. During this era, students would roll a juke box onto the patio for Wednesday and Friday night dances, and the Fountain furnished the nickels to play the records. Men would play bridge at the Fountain, and shouts of “fourth for bridge?” were a common refrain.

“It was like our local soda fountain,” Louann Jensen ’55 says. “I would always go through there going to class to see who was there, see who was hanging out. It was the social center because the boys were in one campus up north and we were down south. We didn’t see boys except in classes, so it was a place to intermix.” She adds, “I had one friend who worked there, and I always envied her for working there.”

By the late ’60s, however, the facilities were deemed “unsatisfactory for today’s concerned generation” by a committee appointed to work on the improvement of the student union. While the building served the needs and interests of students in the ’40s and ’50s who were “more interested in dances and intercollegiate activities,” a press release stated, “students today are more involved in social and academic issues.”

The renovations to the student union, completed in 1970, enlarged the Fountain considerably once again and included an outdoor deck facing Stover Walk to the south instead of College Way. A game room with Ping-Pong and pool tables was added just off the restaurant. A full-time manager was brought on to supervise the Fountain, to hire and train student workers and to purchase food. Hours were extended, with the Fountain open from 9 a.m. to midnight Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. to midnight on Saturday, and, for the first time, on Sunday too.

Hopes were high to “reestablish the Coop as the center of campus activity, not only recreational but intellectual as well,” a letter from the committee to faculty and staff proclaimed. The Fountain had lost much of its popularity during remodeling and in competition with The Hub at Claremont McKenna College. To bring back business, the service would be faster at peak periods and the menu would be more appealing, including healthier foods such as a hamburger that was entirely “vegetable-derived.”

Apparently, those hopes weren’t realized. In 1979, The Student Life published an article with the headline, “Is the Coop Alive?” According to the article, three years prior, “people didn’t know about the place,” “the empty tables required a wipe down about once every three weeks” and it was “soundless as a catacomb sanctuary.”

The Fountain had been run by an outside food service contractor, but in 1976 two students struck a deal to take it over. They brought in pinball machines and video games, dimmed the lights and cranked up the music. They expanded the menu to include more grill items, and the Fountain staff thought up new ideas for a wide variety of shakes. The Fountain had “become a social center, a recreation area, and a superior restaurant” according to Dave Bennett ’80, a student manager, in the TSL article. “Students have a better idea of what students want. They order things that will sell,” according to the staff manager of the student union in another TSL article published in 1980.

The Coop’s courtyard restaurant offered table service, pictured here in 1983

The attitude of innovation continued during this era of student management. During the ’80s, the Fountain opened The Courtyard Restaurant, with waitstaff and a limited menu, for lunch and dinner. The staff also experimented with iced coffee, brewing it in the morning and combining it with ice cream to create the Coop’s famous coffee shakes. Lian Dolan ’87, who worked at the Fountain from 1983-86, says, “We started buying gourmet coffees. We’d make super strong coffee in the morning and then pour it over ice. We cared deeply about the coffee.” Through the ’80s and ’90s, popular menu items as recalled by alumni were shakes, curly fries, mozzarella sticks and quesadillas loaded with lettuce, tomatoes, sprouts and salsa.

While I was a student, one could use two meal swipes each week at the Fountain. The two I relied on were the grilled turkey sandwich meal, which included a side of chips and salsa, and the “meal” of curly fries and a shake. My go-to shake was the Orange Caesar, a riff on the Orange Julius, made with vanilla ice cream and orange juice.

The ever-changing menu displays favorites of another era, including the Orange Caesar shake

Physically, the Fountain was “grungy” and “dingy,” according to people who were around during that time. I couldn’t quite remember what it looked like and failed to turn up any photos from those pre-cellphone days, but fortuitously Chris McCamic ’97 had filmed a movie for his senior project, calling it Tales from the Coop. His campy horror film provided a time capsule of the final days of the Fountain. Indeed, the space was a bit run-down and in need of updating.

In the fall of 1997, the existing student center was demolished; all that was spared was the ballroom. When President Peter Stanley arrived in 1991, he had professed his desire for a new center which would bring together the entire college community. No longer would it be a student union; the new building would be the Smith Campus Center, serving students, faculty, administrators and staff.

Two years later, the Coop Fountain took on a shiny new form with chic metal café tables inside the looming campus center. As different as it was in appearance, however, it retained largely the same menu of burgers, sandwiches, fries and shakes. It turned out, though, that students weren’t inhabiting the new campus center. So, seven years after its completion, the building—and the Fountain—got a facelift to the tune of $9.7 million. The Coop Fountain was furnished with booths and sofas, and its white walls were painted red. The game room, which had been placed upstairs, rejoined the restaurant downstairs. An additional room with glass doors was added to the Fountain, doubling its size and connecting it to Sixth Street via a north patio.

Since its founding, the Fountain had been financed by student funds, but it almost never turned a profit. At best, the Coop Store would make enough profit to cover the restaurant’s deficit. Over the last decade, the combined shortfall from the Fountain and Store hovered around $100,000 each year, according to Associate Dean of Student Life Ellie Ash-Balá, who oversees the Student Senate as the director of the Smith Campus Center. Faced with losses that cut into the ability to fund clubs and other activities, the Student Senate made the difficult decision in Spring 2021 to turn the Fountain over to dining services.

Beginning this fall, the Coop Fountain has once again been reinvented. While there are still burgers, curly fries and shakes on the menu, options have been updated to include items such as a Middle Eastern sweet potato wrap, vegan Korean fried chicken and a chopped-salmon sesame noodle salad.

Students still have the opportunity to work at the Fountain, alongside dining services staff. Faith Henderson ’25, a first-year student, enjoys meeting people as she takes orders as well as engaging with the campus dining workers. Fredrick Omondi ’25 loves the social aspects of working there—meeting people, interacting with the chefs and fellow student workers—as well as the satisfaction of serving people. He especially appreciates being able to choose his own hours. Additionally, a Coop Committee has formed to give student input on the Fountain and to “maintain the service, culture and traditions associated with the Coop Fountain,” according to Adeena Liang ’23, who served as vice president of finance for the Associated Students of Pomona College (ASPC) during the 2020-21 academic year and continues to serve in that role this year.

One Monday afternoon, I ventured over to the Coop Fountain to try a shake to see how it compared to the ones I remembered. It turned out I didn’t really remember what the old shakes tasted like. In my mind, they had been sublime, but without really remembering, I decided to enjoy the strawberry shake for what it was.

The Fountain now serves strawberry, chocolate and vanilla shakes, but no more Orange Caesars.

The Coop Fountain Over the Years