SANDY STONE

MUSICIAN

Sandy Stone by unknown, early 1970s. Courtesy: Sandy Stone/MJV Productions, LLC. 

I never heard of Sandy Stone before three weeks ago. I saw a video trailer for her upcoming documentary on Instagram and knew I needed to reach out. I commented on the post, “Can someone help me interview Sandy?” and Marjorie Vecchio, the documentary’s director, reached out to facilitate an introduction.

Sandy’s life bridges music, activism, and theory. In the late 1960s, she worked at the Record Plant in New York, working with major artists and even collaborating with Jimi Hendrix. Known for her technical skill and honesty in a chaotic scene, she quickly earned the trust of musicians.

Perhaps Sandy is best known musically (she is also an academic) for her 1970s work with Olivia Records, a lesbian collective that produced indie records. It was a revolutionary experiment in women’s self-determination, separatism, and art as a tool for liberation. According to Olivia’s cofounder, Judy Dlugacz, Olivia records sold over 2,000,000 copies across the 40 albums they produced.

From reshaping sound in the studio to reshaping ideas in the classroom, Sandy’s career reflects a commitment to challenging norms and building new cultural possibilities.

— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project

“I have to stop and think about where I was born because I give different places for different circumstances. Usually it's ‘I was born in New York.’ I was actually born in Jersey City in the first maternity hospital in the United States. My birth story is part of my artistic practice. I like to distract as much as I can. 

I don't think my life can be read as a linear progression. I’m always getting complaints from historians that they can't make any sense out of my life because they can't construct a linear timeline, which is fine. I don't want a linear timeline because we don't live our lives in linear timelines. We live our lives in small stories, and they don't always fit together linearly, and that goes right back to my origin.

As soon as I was born, we left Jersey and lived in New York. We lived in New York and a couple of other towns on the Jersey side. We were about even with 37th Street, and you could see the Empire State Building. I recognized the diversity in New York, but I had a lot on my plate and didn't have much time to notice it.

First of all, I was a quote ‘special child.’ I didn't fit into the educational system, partly because my parents kept moving us to areas that didn't allow grade skipping. Then I would find myself in a situation where I knew all the work, but I would get bored and fall out, which would lead to my grades going to shit, and everybody would get very upset for their own reasons. 

Eventually, my parents worked out a way to deal with this. We moved to an area that had a cheap private school. They put me on that for a year, and when I came out—the private school didn't obey the unbent rules of the public school system, so they put me in private school a year ahead, so that when I came out of private school, I was a year ahead. Then I went back into the public school system, where I fit in better.

I was the most intelligent repeat offender. Not that I repeat offended that much, but I didn't fit in. I knew too many answers. I didn't know how to hide it. I didn't learn how to mask it all for a long time, and that really messed up my education. 

I was definitely inquisitive. One of the deals we came to was that I would stop asking questions because they were inappropriate for my class level and just muddied things up. In the 1940s and 1950s, you did not want to be brighter than your classmates. It not only didn't work in class, but it also got you beaten up every day during lunch period. I had my share of that. I didn't have to be gay. I should have a T-shirt that says, ‘You don't have to be gay or trans to get beaten up.’

My business with being trans started around the age of five. I had no language for it. All I knew was that I felt like a little girl. I wanted to play with little girls. I fantasized about an island called Girl Island. Girl Island was populated entirely with little girls, and when I looked down, I was a little girl too, but we did things that little girls in the 1940s didn't do. We swam raging rivers, climbed high mountains, and tracked down animals, learning instead of killing them, how to talk to them. We built canoes out of whatever was handy. That was my little kid fantasy, but I had no language at all for it. 

Beyond that, however, my father was an attorney, and among the numerous books in his library was Psychopathia Sexualis and a book called The Sexual Question by Forel. So, at a very early age, around six or five, I was precocious and could read. The legend was that I could read before I could walk. I'm not sure about that, but there are all kinds of stories about my reading. 

I got my hands on Psychopathia Sexualis, and I read it at that time. In that edition, all the juicy parts were in Latin. So I had to learn Latin to be able to read them. Fortunately, my dad had a Latin dictionary, so I read that, I went back to Psychopathia Sexualis, and figured it out. The Sexual Question was like the same thing, except it presented several legal cases of people who had committed sex crimes. I'm eating this stuff up. I'm this little kid. 

Is that what I am? I’m not going to go out and commit sex crimes on people, you know? The answer was no, but that was the language I had for anything to do with the queer world, until Christine Jorgensen, which was 1952. That introduced the word ‘transsexual’ to me. Now, I have language. Christine Jorgensen was about as different from me as you can possibly imagine: tall, thin, blonde, lights, high heels, makeup. She was prone to making remarks like, ‘Of course, I'm glad to be back in the country. What normal American woman wouldn't be?’ I thought it was cheeky.

I was not facing who I was. I was supportive of gay liberation, but I did not identify myself as gay, even though I kept being hit on by gay men. I didn't read the signals. I didn't understand what was happening at the time, and when I got into rock and roll recording, almost every guy was hitting on me, and I had no idea why. And why was that? I was radiating. I was radiating transness, which they interpreted as gay.

I went back to New York after college and couch surfed. Eventually, I opened the phone book, threw a dart, and it landed on the Record Plant. So, I went to the Record Plant, which was just getting started, a hot new recording studio I knew nothing about, and I walked in and said, ‘I'm the greatest recording engineer in the world.’ 

Gary Kellgren, the owner, looked me up and down—yeah, right. Then he said, ‘Can you fix anything?’ I said, ‘Sure, I can fix anything.’ He took me back in the control room, and sure enough, there was a 12-track recorder back there that was not working. I'd never seen one before in my life. He said, ‘Can you fix this?’ I walked over to it—this is one of those very weird events in my life. It's not the only one, but here it is: I put my hands on the machine, literally, and I did something that was kind of the equivalent of saying, ‘In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, heal. Heal.’ The machine started to run, and Gary said, ‘You're hired.’ So now I'm the only maintenance person at the Record Plant in New York, and I'm in the middle of the biggest rock and roll recording scene in the city. Then I just had to learn how to roll with it and not die, and pick up as much information as I could about how to actually do it. 

I slept in the basement of the record plant. Jimi Hendrix was keeping his road stuff down there, and there were a bunch of his capes, so I piled them up and I slept on his capes. It was very soft. I'd get up in the morning before anybody else arrived, and go upstairs and wash in the bathroom, and then when other people started to come, I'd be on the job.

I then moved to San Francisco and lived in the Tenderloin, where there were a lot of queens. 

There may have been a trans community there, but I didn't know how to get in touch with it, and when I finally found the Transexual Counseling Unit, that got no better. The Transsexual Counseling Unit was run by a psychotic, criminal trans woman named Janice Maxwell, who was sane enough to do the job most of the time, until she would assault somebody and go to jail for a while. Eventually, she got the unit closed down by dealing cocaine out of the office.

Sandy Stone by unknown, mid-1970s. Courtesy: Sandy Stone/MJV Productions, LLC.

I had a long beard and long hair, and I was wearing a denim shirt, jeans, and engineer's boots. I cultivated a deep, resonant voice. I went in, and Janice said, ‘Well, what can I do for you?’ I say, ‘I think I'm transsexual.’ She takes me up the block, and we go into one of the houses in the Tenderloin. The interior is lit entirely by red light bulbs. We descend a flight of stairs into a room where people are sitting around, either doing nothing or looking as though they are sewing or knitting. When I looked more closely, I noticed that they were all trans and that they had fallen out of transitioning, and because they fell out of that world, they were unemployable. They're there either because they don’t have enough skills or because they are physically unpresentable. 

Some of them started on electrolysis with some fly-by-night, cheap person, and now their faces look like the surface of the moon. It was bad, and it was both uncomfortable and unpleasant. I said, ‘Why aren't you helping these people?’ Jan said, ‘Nobody can help these people.’ I said, ‘Well, why are you showing me all this?’ Jan said, ‘because I want to show you what you're going to become’—a nice introduction to being helped along the path of trans. That was my experience in the Tenderloin with trans people. 

Elliot Blackstone was a cop who ran the program—he had actually started it—and he took me aside and said, ‘Look, the Tenderloin is not for you. Go across town to the Center for Special Problems, and they can help you.’ Oh, it was not better over there, but I went. It was weird over there, too, but it was weird in a completely different way.

The Center for Special Problems was run by a trans woman named Angela Keyes Douglas, who believed that she was the only true Benjaminian—he wrote The Transsexual Phenomenon in 1966—transsexual in the United States. She's lived under three or four different names and has been utterly crazy under all of them, causing a lot of trouble for people, including me. Although I eventually escaped, she decided, when she laid eyes on me, that no matter what I said, I couldn't be trans. I had to be a closeted gay guy who wouldn't own up to it. So she would set up scenarios that were designed to trip me up into revealing that I was really a gay guy. 

One of my favorites was the first day I came in. We had a very brief initial conversation, and then she said, ‘So you think you are transsexual? Take off all your clothes.’ It was like a line from a Mel Brooks movie. I took off all my clothes. In comes this guy with an upper body development that's hard to believe. He's built like an inverted triangle. He's oiled, and his head is shaved. He looked like an ad for weightlifting, and he smiled at me, and Angela said, ‘You lie down.’ They have a massage table there. This big guy comes over, and he begins to rub my back. I love having my back rubbed. It’s like I'm in heaven. This guy is just rubbing and rubbing. After a while, Angela says in this strange voice, she says, ‘How does it feel?’ And I said, ‘It feels great.’

The guy goes out, I get dressed, and she decides maybe I'm transsexual and they will give me hormones—but this is the Center for Special Problems, which deals primarily with drug addiction. So the way they give me hormones is, first of all, it's Diethylstilbestrol, which is a horrible chemical. It’s only vaguely related to a hormone. Its only physical effect is that it turns your nipples black, and it has other unpleasant side effects, and because they're a drug addiction house, primarily, you have to show up physically. They give you one pill in a paper cup, then they give you a paper cup of water. You have to go in front of them, then they look at you very carefully to make sure you swallow it. You have to come back and do this every time you get one of these. Fortunately, that did not last very long, because I had a horrible automobile accident shortly thereafter, and I had to stop.

Later, when I was with Olivia Records, we would discuss trans issues and how they defended feminism. Because of all the pressure we were under from outside, from transphobes, we talked about it. I got asked about giving up my male privilege, and about how one was able to give up male privilege. My response to that was, ‘You don't consciously give up male privilege.’ Male privilege gives you up because, socially speaking, you're like a sponge, and you gradually soak up the patriarchy; you soak up hatred of women. You soak up being second place like a sponge. You don't notice it. It just happens to you if you're trans. The way you know you've become a real woman is when your sponge has soaked up everything. So you have finally internalized all that oppression. When it acts within you the way it does within everybody else, you get your woman's badge. I didn't know if I was actually eligible for my woman's badge, because I could still talk about it, but the Olivia Records collective thought I was eligible for my woman’s badge.”