The Story

Photo From My License in 1996.

Actual Scan of My License in 1996. (Note: 'SEX: F')

These will be the single most important photos that I will ever post on this photoblog. I have kept this story to myself for some time now out of a sense of either shame or embarrassment, or out of fear of how people would perceive me because of it. That was very stupid of me, because my story is the story of the power of God to change an individual life and that is the most important story that we can tell. When critics of the faith sneer at us and challenge us to show them some kind of proof of our claims that there is a God in Heaven and that he is interested in the affairs of man and that he loves us and works in our lives and world for good, we have our stories to speak on his behalf. -Emilio Espinosa

The story of how we became awakened to God is not for us, it is for others.
—-

I was born Emilio Jose Espinosa. My father was the son of immigrant parents and my mother was an immigrant. I was their first child and only son. They would have a daughter, my only sibling, nearly four years later.

Growing up, we lived in Boyle Heights, a Latino neighborhood on the east side of Los Angeles. There were all the foods, customs, and Spanish that go along with being Mexican, as well as the GI Joe action figures, Star Wars toys, and early video games that were a part of growing up as a boy in America in the 1970s. My father’s job as an architect didn’t make us rich, but we never went without the essentials and we had enough nice things to make us all comfortable.

My parents were very protective of me from the very beginning. I was only allowed to play in our yard. I wasn’t even allowed to cross the fence to play with the neighbor kids. We would play right through the chain link fence, each of us in our own yard. Each day, after school, I was required to come straight home. I never visited with friends or went to do things with other kids. This led to me becoming very awkward socially.

Early on in my life my father worked two jobs while going to school. I saw him every day, but I didn’t see him enough to feel like he was really there. When he was there, he was still emotionally distant.

I remember my father in my early years as a tall, dark, quiet man who didn’t express most of his feelings except for anger. He wasn’t a bad man, nor abusive, but he did have a temper and we feared that part of him. When he was angry, he would yell and throw things. He wouldn’t hurt us, wouldn’t even lay a hand on us, but the tirades were frightening. Most times he would leave the house for a few hours until he calmed himself down, then he would return and the matter that had angered him would be left alone rather than risk angering him again.

We really left a lot of things alone. We never spoke about feelings (good or bad), fears, confusions, etc. We were certainly well loved and there was much happiness in our home, but lots of things went unsaid, mostly to avoid possibly upsetting my father. I ended up learning to internalize many things and I bonded much more deeply with my mother than my father.
—-

I remember being a very young boy, so young that I was still wearing “footie” pajamas. I was in the bathroom, and my mother had left a small pile of clothing by the tub. Something caught my curiosity about the clothes and I decided to try them on. This is the first memory I have of doing that.

When my sister was very little, my mother and my aunt would paint her fingernails. I wanted mine painted, too. They would tell me that little boys didn’t paint their fingernails. I would fuss and cry until they would give in and paint my nails for me and I would be delighted to see the shiny colors on them.

Sometimes, I would put on my mother’s shoes when I was playing in the house. It wasn’t an innocent thing. I can still remember what those shoes looked like and I wore them because I liked them. My parents didn’t know what to do about that.
—-

I had an incredible longing to wear women’s clothes all the time. I would pray to God before I went to bed each night that the next morning I could wake up as a little girl so that I could dress like one out in the open and all of the time and no one would say I was wrong. The prayer was never answered to my satisfaction, but that didn’t keep the urges from getting the better of me.

I ended up stealing clothes from female relatives, friends, and neighbors right into my adolescence. I honestly cannot remember a single time that I ever did a dishonest thing for any other purpose than to get my hands on some piece of women’s clothing. It was an absolute obsession for me, and I amassed a sizable collection that I kept in boxes in my closet, behind the drawers of my dresser, in secret hiding places in places around the house. When I got older, books about cross-dressing and about changing the male body (most of them being pornographic as that was what was most widely available) were added to the collection.

I snuck women’s things underneath my regular clothing a lot. I did it from the time I was in kindergarten where I would steal my sister’s frilly panties and then panic when I had to go to the bathroom and I feared someone would see them (I was never caught in school, thank goodness). I did it all through the years while I was growing up and through my adolescence. In high school, I went so far as to even wear lip gloss and mascara to school on a daily basis. Sometimes this wasn’t enough and I would put on some outfit and sneak out of the house for late night walks in our driveway. By the time I was old enough to enter the working world, there were lots of days when I’d wear skirts and heels out the door of my house and on the drive into work and then I’d change into regular jeans and men’s shoes before going in, then change back right there in the car for the drive home at the end of the day.

All the emotions were always mixed up for me about all of this. On the one hand there was a great satisfaction and deep sense of comfort whenever I wore those clothes. On the other hand there was always a torturous confusion about why I was so compelled to wear the clothes of a woman in spite of being male. Sometimes I would go through hours of preparation to get everything just right just to end up tearing everything off in a fit of disgust with myself, crying and filled with self-hatred and angry that I’d allowed myself to fall into the behavior again. In time, though, the memory of the bad feelings would fade and the desire to dress up again would overtake me once more. This went on for the whole of my life.
—-

While I always did my best to hide my activities, I did get caught from time to time. The circumstances usually involved my parents discovering the clothing I had hidden away, or someone came home unexpectedly while I was dressing up, or I wore something at night that I fell asleep in and I was caught in the morning. At those times, my mother’s first question was “Are you ‘funny’?” which was her way of asking if I was gay. She would try to shame me by threatening to buy me all girl’s clothing and make me go to school that way. Terribly, I really wished that she would do just that and finally let me be myself instead of being trapped and tortured by the confusion of it all. In the end, however, there would be much yelling and then I would return whatever I had taken and then the matter would be left alone like always.

All in all, however, neither of my parents ever really held my cross-dressing against me. They didn’t understand it, and they certainly didn’t want to see me doing it, but they didn’t condemn me for it either. For the most part, my father believed that the whole cross-dressing issue was really just some kind of a phase that I was going through, and he even described it that way to me. He told me that he didn’t understand why I was doing it, but that he figured it was a part of growing up. The bigger issue to both my parents seemed to be that that I was stealing the clothes.

As I got older, my father took it that my cross-dressing must be some means for me to express myself and my individuality. He would tell my mother that my generation was different from theirs and that there weren’t the same stigmas about these things that they had had. They never actually approved of what I did, but they had bigger concerns about my safety and about being sure that I wasn’t stealing or hurting others in the process of what I was doing. I just really wanted the whole thing to go away and to be a normal man with normal desires and a normal life, but that never seemed to happen and I never pursued the issue very far with my parents.
—-

I didn’t have many friends growing up. I was into computers and video games, science fiction and fantasy, and a lot of other “nerdy” interests. The few friends I did have were “nerds,” “geeks,” and “brainiacs” like me. I wasn’t at all physical, let alone athletic. I didn’t play sports, and didn’t even really like sports, mostly because I was very uncoordinated and very timid, and partly because I actually feared that sports would put too much muscle on me and I would not like how I looked in women’s clothes. The cool kids and the jocks made fun of me and I retreated even farther into myself.

In the end, I didn’t ever really find a way to bond with the other guys. I was already treated like less-than-a-man for being a “nerd”. The other guys called me and my few friends “fags”. I never felt that I could afford to let anyone close to me. I couldn’t risk anyone finding out my weird desires. I kept everyone, even the few friends I did have, at a distance from me. Most of my nights in high school were spent alone in a makeshift computer lab my father built for me in our garage. I would stay in there for days on end without sleep and just write programs on my computer or play games and listen to music and escape everything.

Girls were another matter altogether. While I was attracted to wearing girls clothes, I did not have a desire for men, I like girls. I didn’t feel that I was much of a man, though. I was a recluse and a “nerd”, and I was trying to hide this terrible flaw in my sexuality. I convinced myself that I was completely unattractive and that no one would ever want me. Growing up, I did have crushes on a few girls that I did try and pursue, but I was mostly treated as a nuisance because I wasn’t “cool”. In my teen years I did have two girlfriends but neither was more than just excited hormones and neither relationship lasted more than a few weeks. These were the only relationships I had with girls in my entire life up through high school.

To hide my various insecurities about girls, I tried to cultivate an image as a party boy, a DJ, and a promoter (although I wasn’t ever really much more than a “wannabe”). I used the access I gained to hide behind the scenes of parties and dances so that people would think I was “working” the party and not question me about not being with a girl or not being in the crowd. It was all still terrible though, because I could see all these guys meeting and having a really great time with all these girls. I wanted to have those kinds of good times too but I couldn’t because even though I wanted to be with the girls, I wanted to be like the girls, too. In the end, I tried to convince myself that I didn’t need the girls because I was a DJ and I was ultimately in control of the parties and everyone there was happy and having a good time only because of me. Then, after the party, I would drive myself home and go back to my little computer lab alone and hide there until Monday when school or work would start again.
—-

Each year, right around my birthday or New Year’s, I would sit down alone in my room and make a deal with myself to stop the cross-dressing. I would argue to myself that I was getting older and couldn’t be doing these kinds of things anymore. I would get determined to start the new year or the next year of my life free from this stupid activity. Sometimes I would go through a whole ritual of dressing up “one last time” to say good-bye to that part of my life forever swearing before God and heaven that this was absolutely the very very last time ever. Sometimes I’d go a few days, maybe a month, once even for six months, but it never worked forever, and when it didn’t work I would give up even trying to stop until the next milestone came along where I’d try it again only to fail again. I even tried it on the night before I left for boot camp in the Navy, and it didn’t work then either.
—-

I joined the Navy for a lot of different reasons. I was 19-years old, living with my parents, and I didn’t really have anything going on in my life. I had decided that I didn’t want to go to college because I hated school. I had worked a few jobs, but had not found anything satisfying mostly because I had no education or training in anything. I didn’t really join because I thought it would “cure” me of anything, though.

The first year or so there changed my life profoundly. Being on my own, away from home for the first time, I began to explore the world and who I was in it. I had long before rejected the Catholic faith I grew up with. It had a lot to do with my own dissatisfaction with the Catholic church; it was too ritualistic and didn’t give me the sense of really getting to know God. Plus, the years of religious training in the Catholic high school I attended left the church looking like a bunch of hypocrites without a firm basis for the authority they claimed to me. However, being in the military, I knew that death was a real possibility and I wanted to have some clear sense of peace that I would be alright should I die in the service of my country. A friend in my boot camp company who was always very cheerful in spite of all of the hellish things they put us through caught my attention. I asked him how he could be that way and he said it was because of his religion. He was a Mormon and he introduced me to the church. I converted about three months later.

Not long after my conversion, I met a girl at church when I was in technical training and we hit it off so well that we decided to get engaged. Poor discipline eventually led to me getting kicked out of technical training, however, and cooling hormones dissolved the engagement. The first Gulf War (Desert Shield/Desert Storm) saved my Naval career, though, and it transformed me further. Thus, for a time I really and truly forgot who and what I’d been before and I was able to leave it all behind.

After the war and the engagement were both over, there was another woman. I’d known her for a couple of years and I had always been attracted to her. We were good friends and I wanted her to be something more. I saw her on the eve of my last deployment and I intended to express my feelings for her before leaving. I never had the slightest chance of expressing anything before she surprised me with the news that she was going to be getting married to a mutual friend of ours very soon. I left home heartbroken and transformed once again.

I determined that this would be the very last failure in my life. I had cursed the strange desires that had haunted me for as long as I could consciously remember. I had left discarded the weak, “nerdy” persona, and the fake “party boy” persona, I’d “manned up” and gone around the world and even fought a war. I had loved a woman enough to be crushed by that love. I had done everything I could to be a man, to earn what I thought a man should have, to live as I thought a man should live, and it had all failed. I was alone and hurt with nothing to show for myself and nothing to look forward to. I was insanely suicidal and longed to die in combat so I could at least go out a hero. Failing to find a way into the real crossfire, I began to look at my cross-dressing in a different light. I began to believe that my cross-dressing hadn’t ever been just some strange desire that haunted me, but that it had been a sign that I was never meant to be a man at all. I began to believe that the reason I had failed at being like other men was that I was not one of them. A new thought began to become a part of my internal conversation, “When I become a woman, it will all be better.”

My last deployment put me in places where people did horrible things to themselves and with each other. I knew that transsexuals existed, I had admired them for many years. I had had books, and magazines, and videotapes of them. I knew that there were ways for men to change their bodies to be like women’s and I had fantasized about it over and over again. In the places we went, I found these transsexuals. Many of them were “she-males” who dressed and acted like women, even sexually, but who were also still partly male. I went with them and I gave myself over to them, embracing them and their lusts in the hope of finding the path to my true self through them. I came home with a twisted mind and a twisted agenda to put this male body and the pitiful, miserable, worthless life it had lived aside and transform myself into something beautiful that would be wanted, that others would want to love, and that could control the world around itself rather than be controlled by strange desires.
—-

Coming home meant really starting life on my own for the first time ever. I stayed with my parents for a while, but soon moved out to a little house by myself. I made good money and had few expenses. It wasn’t long before the freedom made it possible for me to be able to earnestly pursue my goal to begin my life anew as a woman.

I spent thousands on women’s clothing from week to week, filling up my closets and throwing out all of my male clothes. Sometimes, I wouldn’t even be able to pay the rent a couple of days after payday because I’d splurged on so much clothing, shoes, and make-up. I let my hair grow out and got my ears pierced. Within a year of moving out of my parent’s home, I had begun taking female hormones, and shortly thereafter I changed my name and legally became a woman on my way to having a sex-change operation.

Me At A Party In 1996.

I had made new friends through local support groups and social groups for transgendered people. These were mostly other men like me who were either cross-dressers or transsexuals and we would get together to talk about our lives and our issues and to generally enjoy the company of like-minded individuals. I had also made new friends through the internet. In those days, there were chat rooms on IRC (an early “chat” system) just for people like me. These people provided me companionship, gave me a sense of inclusion, and were all too happy to encourage me to go for the dream of becoming a woman. I was young, lonely, and desperately wanted to get on with a better life than the one I’d had, and I embraced it all with wild abandon.

Where, as a man, I’d been awkward and plain, as a woman I became confident and fashionable. I cultivated a philosophy that I would only have the best as a woman. After all, my greatest desire in all of this was to be lovable at last, and to be lovable I had to be the most beautiful woman I could possibly be. Every outfit was a designer brand, every ounce of make-up was quality, every shoe was the finest construction. My hair and nails were done by personal beauticians. I was put together properly from the ground up. I used to joke that I was the best woman because I came custom-made.

It wasn’t all as easy as buying good things and wearing them well, though. At first, there were some serious trials. My first many times out in public, there were lots of stares and laughs and lots of name-calling, mostly because I hadn’t really figured out the delicate nuances of being female like walking with a proper sway in my hips or not wearing anything too dressy just to go buy groceries. One day while out shopping, I was spit on in the middle of the mall and called a “faggot” and no one did anything but stare at me as I stood there, makeup running from the saliva. As I got better at “being a woman” these kinds of incidents happened less often, but then there were other dangers. Once, while walking down the street to my doctor’s office, a man came out of an alley, obviously drunk. He took a good long look at me and then he grabbed my chest. I dropped my ladylike illusion long enough to cuss him out and he let me go and walked away laughing. I felt as violated as if he had gotten hold of me and raped me. He had literally violated my body, taken hold of me in a way that no man should ever take any woman and I was and have been deeply shaken by this for many years. I would have preferred being spit on again to being molested like this.

But, there were also lots of really great times. I remember lots of wonderful women who became my friends. There were lots of ladies who were store clerks at the places where I shopped for clothes and make-up and other essentials who I would explain myself to in order to get the best help with what I needed. These ladies all became close friends who treated me special and we would often sit around and chat for hours on end about all kinds of things. Sometimes we’d talk about the challenge of being me and living my life, but mostly we’d just talk about fashions, the news, or some hot piece of gossip. I remember a young man I met who befriended me and who would take me out places. We never were more than simply friends, but he gave me confidence in myself at that time and we had a lot of fun going places together. And, of course, there were the other transgenders in my life who all showed me love and acceptance and gave me encouragement. One of those transgendered friends was even the one who finally convinced me to give my life over to Christ.
—-

I did have lots of sexual encounters with different people, mostly “she-male” prostitutes as well as with a friend from one of the support groups I attended. But I only really had one actual romantic relationship after I began my transition. It was with a male transvestite

Me At Another Party In 1996. Night I Met My Then Boyfriend.

that I met at one of the social groups I frequented. He and his wife were swingers, though she was the more active of the two. He would sit at the patio or by the refreshments table at the house that hosted the group and I would join him and we would just talk. In time talking led to other things and we ended up living together part time – him, his wife, and me.

We had a wild affair. Sometimes we’d go out as girls, sometimes as a couple (where I was always the girlfriend as I was living as a woman full-time), and even as guys (when I was too lazy to get myself all fixed up). There were some really fun times as we were actually very good friends, but there was also a lot of tension from the crazy, mixed up way we lived. Though they were married, his wife had no problem with me and we were also very close. He, however, became jealous of my friendship with his wife, even though nothing more was going on, and he threw me out of their house. I was seeing a psychiatrist at the time to help me deal with all the issues of my transition. I had been telling him about my relationship with this man and of what had happened when he kicked me out of his house because I felt truly heartbroken about the whole situation. I remember the psychiatrist listening to my story and then telling me that his professional opinion was that I was an emotionally battered woman.

I tried to reconcile with my boyfriend, but it just turned into a bigger fight. I ended up leaving the house and driving back to my own house distraught and crying. I was speeding all the way and could barely see through my tears. I would get near overpasses and I wanted to drive right into them and I screamed at myself not to do it. I wanted to die so badly, but I had also worked so hard to get to where I was that I didn’t want to die and let it all have been a waste. Somehow I got home and I managed to call my psychiatrist. I had a needle that I used for injecting hormones and I wanted to fill it with air and inject it into my veins to kill myself with an aneurism. The psychiatrist convinced me to check myself into a local emergency room. I went to the nearest hospital and I was checked into a mental ward under suicide watch for 72 hours. It was 3 days of humiliation having to explain why I was a male but needed to be treated as a female. It was also there where I received both a mammogram and a prostate exam because the doctors weren’t sure what tests really applied to me. I finally calmed down enough to be reasonable and they let me go when the 72 hours were overr. I left that hospital more determined than ever to get this transition done with.
—-

My Employee ID From 1996.

I had told my father about my desire to change my sex in an awkward exchange on the night of the 4th of July in 1995. I hadn’t really been able to find the right words and I wasn’t really sure that he’d really understood me. All he’d said then was that he loved me and that we were always going to be a family no matter what. By June of 1996, I had been on female hormones for about 3 months, my name and sex had been legally changed. I had shoulder-length hair, 1/2-inch long acrylic nails painted blood-red, pierced ears, trimmed eyebrows, and my face and body were beginning to change. I didn’t even own or wear any men’s clothing, wearing unisex-looking clothing whenever I still had to look kind of male (but even that illusion was beginning to wear very thin).

What friends I had had disowned me. My father tried to keep the family all together, but the tension was too much. After I visited the house one afternoon fully dressed and acting the woman I believed myself to be, my father tried to attempt suicide but was kept from going through with it by my mother and sister. My sister refused to even be in the same room with me from that point on. My mother just cried and cried. Between the dissolution of my family and the trauma of the relationship with my married partner, I had really come to a point of no return in my transition.

I quit my job, got rid of my house, and I told my family that I was leaving. My father made sure to take care that I would be safe and have everything I needed to make the trip. He traded me his brand new SUV for my old pick-up truck and bought me new tires and got it all tuned up for the trip. He gave me money for gas and a phone-card to call home to let them know when I’d gotten to my destination safely. He gave me a big hug and a kiss and I left the driveway of our home for what I really thought would be the last time.
—-

Before leaving home, I had been a regular attendee at the Mormon church in my area. While I didn’t believe that God approved of my life and my choices, I wasn’t ever really sure what God actually thought of me. I remember telling my boyfriend that I actually believed that our being happy together was God blessing us; it couldn’t be wrong if we were happy. I remember believing that if the male body could be changed by female hormones into being more like a female’s body, then it must be a part of God’s plan; God wouldn’t allow something to happen if he really didn’t want it to. I even got scriptural about it in my own way and claimed that the Bible said that what is loosed on Earth is also loosed in Heaven and God wouldn’t allow transsexuality on Earth without allowing it in Heaven and that nothing bad is in Heaven so transsexuality on Earth could not be bad.

After beginning my transition and having been at the Mormon church for a few months, I decided it was time to have a talk with my bishop (the leader in a Mormon church) and to try and find out where I fit in with God and where I fit in in the church. Our meeting was actually very nice and the bishop seemed genuinely interested in helping me. Not really knowing much about this kind of situation, he actually called the church headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, right then and there and asked them about the churches views and policies on my kind of situation. What he told me didn’t clear anything up, though. Apparently, the church did not condone what I was doing, but only while I was doing it. I was told that if I chose to go through with the sex-change, that I would first have to face a tribunal of sorts that would then excommunicate me from the church. Then, after I’d had the surgery and been declared “fully female”, I would be welcome to re-join the church as my new sex and take my rightful place amongst the women of the church. This only confused me more about God’s thoughts towards me rather than encouraging me about a future with him in his church. Rather than facing the tribunal and an excommunication, I simply stopped attending church altogether being convinced that while I still wanted God in my life, he was probably not very interested in being in it.
—-

I left my home in California as Synthia Michelle Espinosa, legally female. I would have that name and sex as my legal name and sex for nearly two more years. Some friends of mine from the internet had been living together in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and they invited me to join them. I drove alone from Los Angeles to Tulsa to meet these people whom I’d never even seen in a place I’d never been to live a life I had never imagined.

There was tension from the very start. While we were all transgendered, I was considerably more successful at looking and playing the part of a female than any of them were. I had also been on hormones for about 6 months by the time I met them and the results were fairly dramatic. There was an instant jealousy and immediate accusations that I thought I was somehow better than them. We managed to work out a basic living arrangement, however.

There were five of us living together, four transgenders and a woman who was the girlfriend of one of them. Everyone in the house was supposed to get a job and share their income to help support the house. This worked okay until two of the others lost their jobs (both for being found out as males posing as women). I got a job right away and our other roommate got a job as a male at a fast food place. The sudden imbalance only led to more tensions, however. The ones without work were always suspicious of those of us with work and they accused us of hiding money and talking behind their backs and of plotting ways to hurt them. They would use all of that to justify spying on us and then use what they found to make more accusations. I had a personal diary that I was keeping as part of the requirements for a sex-change. The others found it and read it secretly, then, one night, in the middle of a terrible argument, they brought up everything they’d read and mocked me and made even more accusations about things I’d said about them. They kept tabs on everything we did. If I wasn’t back from work when I was supposed to be there would be long interrogations and even more accusations. They went so far as to go to the place where I worked to see if I was really there working and not doing something behind their backs, and then afterwards they sent me to try and spy on our other working roommate and I got the cops called on me and I only just barely escaped being found out as a transsexual.

There were some good times with those roommates, too, though. We often played UNO around the living room and it was always fun. Sometimes some ladies who were friends of my roommates would come over and play with us. I don’t know that they knew that we were transgenders but they never treated us as anything but women, and I really liked that. One night, it was raining terribly outside. We all went out into the parking lot and played in the rain, getting absolutely soaked and having a wonderful time. I shared as many of my makeup tricks as the others wanted to learn and I shared my hormones with them to help them “catch up” in their transitions. And we also weathered hate from others towards us collectively, like the next-door neighbors who were a couple of “macho” “red-necks” who looked at us with disgust whenever they saw us, and whispered mean things at us. One night I made the mistake of leaving the windows rolled down on my car and they rigged a lawn sprinkler to spray right into my windows soaking the whole interior and ruining it. We never did retaliate against those who hurt us, though, too afraid of the consequences, but we did hurt together when they hurt any of us.

The job I had was with a small market research company in a local mall. No one knew that I had been male. I applied and was hired the next day. I met dozens of people each day and did interviews with them and I was never treated as anything but a woman there. It was a very happy place for me and I loved being “one of the girls” and the office provided me with a greatly needed escape from the tensions of the house. I made great friends there, both men and women, and I was quite often the “belle of the ball” both for my style and for being a “California Girl”.

On one unusual day, my supervisor called me in to her office for a “little chat”. She had me take a seat and then started in with a hugely apologetic tone explaining to me that she was very sorry that she had to talk to me about this and that her sister was a large woman and that sometimes this happens to large women and again how terribly sorry she was that I had to go through this. Then she came to the point and told me that “someone” had seen “something” and had said that they thought I might really have been a man. It was never made clear to me just what the “something” was and I didn’t really want to know who the “someone” was, nor was the supervisor willing to tell me. She apologized some more and commented on just how ridiculous the accusation was and that she had already talked to the person about it and straightened them out, and then I stopped her. I stopped her and I thanked her for all of her concern and for defending my honor. Then I told her that I felt that it was only fair that if she was going to defend me that she should know fully well just what she was defending. Then I came clean with her that I was indeed a male, but that I had been in transition to become a woman for almost a year on my way to having a proper sex-change operation. I assured her that my legal status was as a female and that this was how I identified internally. She responded that she was a Christian and therefore could not approve of my choices, but that it wasn’t really her business what I was doing so long as I was a good employee which I had been. She assured me that I would continue to be treated as I had always been and that I would be defended as any other woman in the office. This was sufficient for me, but the woman’s comment about being a Christian stayed with me.
—-

I had not really given God much thought since leaving the Mormon church. I still claimed Mormonism as my faith, but felt it was merely an administrative matter, something to fill in when you were asked what church you belonged to. In my heart, I still had a desire for something beyond me to hang my hopes on, something to give the spiritual part of my life definition.

After dealing with the bureaucracy of the Mormon church, I was also convinced that God himself was nothing but empty bureaucracy and therefore I must be far too unimportant to matter. After, I had never really mattered to anyone else, had I? I certainly didn’t matter to my roommates who treated me like a friend at one turn and then bombarded me with hateful accusations at the next. I hadn’t mattered to my boyfriend who had thought that an innocent friendship with his wife meant that I was as loose with my affections as they were. I didn’t matter enough to the friends I’d had before I transitioned to make them stay and support me and want me to be happy. I had mattered to my parents once, but they’d been over-protective, my father was distant and no one ever faced anything openly; they hadn’t even done anything to keep me from leaving and actually helped me leave. I hadn’t mattered to the girl I’d once been engaged to or the girl I wanted to be engaged to later. I hadn’t mattered to the kids in high school and grade school who only called me names and left me out of their fun and games. Becoming a woman was my way to re-make myself so that I would finally matter to someone, anyone, but it wasn’t really working out and I felt that even if I had once mattered to God, he too didn’t care about me anymore.

But, I remembered what my supervisor had said about being a Christian and how she didn’t condone my decisions but that she also wasn’t going to judge me for them. I wondered just how that worked and I believed that if this woman could have an attitude like that towards me and my transsexuality, then she might just know something about what God thought about me. I began to ask questions.

I began by asking the big questions from the start. I asked about cross-dressing and transsexuality. She presented me with two pages of scripture addresses that I looked up and for the very first time in my life I saw that God’s Word actually had something to say about me and my life, even as a transsexual in a modern world. Of course, I didn’t like what was being said about me, but at least I finally had some real answers to ponder. When I didn’t understand a scripture, I’d ask my supervisor about them and then be presented with another page or two of more scriptures.

Things continued that way all through that summer, me working as Synthia and learning about God’s thoughts on my life with my supervisor’s guidance.
—-

Tulsa is a city with a large Christian population and “religious” conversations were common. In fact, it wasn’t uncommon to hear people on the street saying, “Praise the Lord!” and “Hallelujah!” as if saying “Hello!” and “Cool!” One day, there was a conversation going on in the office about God’s will. I don’t really remember all of it, except that my supervisor turned to me at one point and asked me in front of the whole office, “Synthia, why don’t you ever do what God tells you to do?” It took me just a moment to remember a line from a song that said, “I still believe in God, but God no longer believes in me.” That line had summed up for me all the feelings I had about God, and the whole world with him, being too distant and too busy to care about me in spite of the longing in my heart to know him. She pulled out her Bible and flipped to a page and handed it to me and made me read it out loud there in the office. And I read, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” It was from the letter from the Apostle Paul to the church in Rome, chapter 8, verses 38 and 39. I read it already knowing that the Word of God could actually say something about me, to me, even as I was and so long after it was written. I’d been reading lots of scriptures that told me about what God didn’t approve of and why and I’d believed even more that he didn’t really care about me, yet here was the same God telling me something I had never even considered. God was telling me that he loved me.

I looked down at myself, in my pretty clothes and all made up to be a beautiful woman when God had not made me this way and I asked how God could possibly love me when I was so far from what he said I was supposed to be. That day I learned the difference between being right with God and being loved by God. I learned that while I was not in any way doing the kinds of things that God would want me to be doing, I was still his child. I learned that children don’t always do what parents want them to, but that doesn’t stop parents from loving or caring about them. I remembered my father giving me a new car and taking care of all my needs for the trip to Tulsa even though he knew that I was going there to live the life of a woman, his son, wearing dresses and makeup and perfume and maybe meeting men and surrendering myself to them as a woman. I was so definitely not being what my father had wanted me to be, but he loved me enough to worry about me getting there safely above all else.

I read the scripture again, quietly, and then I knew that God truly loved me. It became so clear to me in that moment that the cross-dressing, the sexual encounters, the hormones, the life as a woman, as well as every other crazy, stupid, lazy, uncaring, illegal, or downright evil thing I had ever done could not and would not and, indeed, had not ever made God look upon me with anything but love. Finally, I knew that I had always mattered to someone, I had mattered to him. I had always mattered and would always matter to him. All longing I had had in my heart to know him, it was in his heart towards me as well. He wanted to know me and for me to know that he loved me and always had. I found my father in that scripture, my true father, my perfect father, my loving father, right there in those words on that page that I read that day in the little market-research office in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

A few nights later, my supervisor and I were alone in the office when she asked me if I would pray with her. I had always prayed, even when I wasn’t sure God was listening. It was a habit from my Catholic upbringing and talking to God had helped me deal with the loneliness on the long road when I left home as well as to cope at night after the battles with my roommates in our apartment. I said that I would pray with her if she liked and then she asked me to repeat what she prayed. I said her little prayer with her, and we asked God to forgive me and to take care of me and told him that I wanted to know him and try to be something better if I could.
—-

The following Sunday, still living as Synthia, because there really was no way for me to not live as her, I was invited to a church service by my supervisor and I agreed to go. Having been raised Catholic and only ever attended Mormon churches apart from the Catholic ones, I didn’t know what to make of a Pentecostal assembly. I remember that the music was very upbeat and fun and that I was very confused about the fact that they sold chewing gum in their church bookstore (it seemed almost sacrilegious to me). The pastor spoke about his idea of what Heaven might be like and explained that it was so wonderful that no matter what we imagined about it, it would be even better than that. I remember that he finished up by asking everyone to take a moment to think about some things. He said that there were people in the church that evening who had never even heard of God and he asked them to raise their hands. Then he said that some people had known God but didn’t have a relationship with him anymore. I really felt like that was me. I had grown up with the Catholic faith, gone to Catholic schools, and even though I left Catholicism I had still remained in a church and would have stayed in one if they hadn’t gone all bureaucratic and confusing on me. I raised my hand when he asked. Then he asked all of us who’d raised our hands to come up to where he was standing and I went up. He said a prayer and touched each of us on our heads then he asked us to go with some people to another room to pray a bit more for just a minute. Men were paired up with men, and I was paired up with a woman.

In the other room, we got to sit down on some couches and everyone spoke in soft tones. The first thing that the lady asked me when we sat down was what my name was. It took me a little while of thinking and then I said that that was a very good question because I had once been Emilio Espinosa, but now I was Synthia, and that I didn’t know which one was truly me anymore. She didn’t so much as bat an eye but instead she told me about King David in the Bible. She told me how King David was a tender-hearted man. She told me that I was a tender-hearted man, too, and that I mistook that for not being manly so I discarded the manly and hid in the womanly. The womanly allowed me to express the softness of spirit and heart that was within me without being judged as unmanly. But, King David had a tender heart too and he was alright being a man that way. She told me that it was okay to be who I was, just not as a woman, because God had both given me that tender heart as well as the body, spirit, and life of a man. She prayed over me and I walked away knowing that everything that made Synthia so much more preferable to me than Emilio could be in Emilio and I would finally be complete.

I made up my mind that night to return home.
—-

Leaving my roommates was not easy. As soon as I announced that I was going to be leaving soon, the accusations began being fired at me. There was everything from claims that I had only come there to use them, to claims that I intended to hurt them after I left, to claims that I somehow owed them for them letting me stay with them. When I explained that I was going to go back to my life as a male, they jeered and mocked me saying that I had been a failure as a male before and I was being a failure as a woman now and that nothing would ever work out in my life. After more argument, I just came out and told them that I’d “found God” and that I needed to do this to “get right.” They mocked me even more telling me there was no God. Feeling helplessly cornered, I just bowed my head and said, “I hear voices. And I think it’s God and I’m going to do whatever they tell me, so even if I stay, you have me and the voices in my head to deal with.” Somehow, this finally convinced them to let the matter go at last.

As I was packing up my things over the next couple of days, one of the roommates came into my room and began to tell me a story of when she had still been living as a male. She had been without work for some time and had actually been praying to God to help her get a job. She said that she prayed and prayed and that nothing came through, so one day she got herself up and went to a construction site and just started cleaning the scraps of lumber, piling them up in a scrap heap. She said that she did this for a few days, just showing up at the construction site and cleaning up the scraps. Finally, a foreman noticed her doing this and asked her if she needed a job and then hired her. She told me that prayer hadn’t worked, that it had been her own hard work that had gotten her the job and that she stopped believing in God right then and there.

This one roommate was so convinced that there was no God and that God was a hurtful delusion that one time I randomly switched the television to a Christian channel and paused to hear what they were saying and she shrieked and ripped the remote control out of my hand and screamed at me that there was never to be any Christian television, books, or music in the house. Shortly after that incident but long before I had started to learn about God, the roommates told me that they’d had another roommate who had been a Christian. They brought out an old box of things this roommate had left behind. There was a bunch of books and papers about a program to teach young people about Christianity. The roommates male name was on a lot of them and I realized later that this person had once been a pastor over youths. I asked the roommates about what had happened to this person and they told me that they had moved in as a woman with a gay man. Apparently, the relationship was rocky from the start and she ended up killing the man with a claw hammer to his head. I was very shaken by the story but was grateful that the same hadn’t happened to me with my boyfriend.

I never have known what happened to those roommates of mine after I left Tulsa.
—-

Just before I left to return home, my supervisor gave me a wonderful gift, a Bible. It was a large Bible with big print and lots of notes that explained different things in it. As I looked through it, I noticed that there were hand-written notes to me as well. I began to search through the whole book to find all of the notes in it and found one that transformed me yet again.

Inside the back cover of the Bible was written a woman’s name and an address as well as a set of directions for getting to the address. I stared at it for a long time, it was an address in Los Angeles, and while I had never been there I knew where it would be and how to get there. As I stared at it, something in my heart felt like it was saying that I had no more reasons for not doing what God asked of me, I had been given everything I needed to come to him, even a set of written directions.

I left Tulsa in the last week of September, 1996.
—-

My homecoming was bittersweet. While I was beginning to shed Synthia’s life, I still had her name and sex attached to my own. My hair, face, and body were still somewhere closer to female than male. I was still a lot more like her than myself.

The first place I visited was my family’s home. My parents were glad to see me, but my sister did not even come out of her room. We talked for a little while and then my father told me that I could not stay there. He gave me a little place to store some things temporarily and then I went to find my transgender friends. Things had changed drastically with my friends. The social group had been dismantled and most of the people had moved on. Friends I’d once counted on for help were no longer around or didn’t want to “deal” with me. Even my very best friend was unable to help me. I wound up living in a little pay-by-the-week motel.

Money was tight when I got home. I’d only barely had enough to make the trip. I had been referred to the California offices of the same market research company I’d worked for in Tulsa, but when I went in to look for work I was told that they had no openings. I picked up a little work doing makeup for a drag queen in a documentary about female impersonators. I never got paid for the work, though, and I never even got to see a copy of the film even though I was featured prominently in the first half. Eventually, I found myself with a few dollars, a box of Saltine crackers, a little can of potted meat food product, and a jug of fruit drink. I called my friend who’d been my supervisor in Tulsa and told her about the miserable time I was having getting myself going in California. She listened to me and then she asked me if I’d gone to the address in the back of my Bible. I hadn’t. Then she simply told me that that’s what I needed to do.

The next morning I took the last of my money and filled the tank of my car, I checked out of the motel and I drove to the address. At the address I found a church and at the church I met the woman whose name was written in my Bible. We sat and we talked and she asked me what I wanted to do. I said, “I want to be the man that God made me to be.” We prayed and she gave me a tour of the church and told me about a program they had for people whose lives had simply not worked out. I looked at all of it and was amazed at what they offered and then I walked away satisfied that I had done what I was supposed to do – I’d visited the church and now things would be better, I certainly had no intention of actually staying there, let alone joining the program.

I went back to see my best friend and I began to recount the things I’d seen at the church. I told her all about the building and the programs and the people I’d met and how incredible it all seemed to me. I must have talked about it for some time and with some excitement because she stopped me and told me that it sounded like I really wanted to go there. I simply looked at her, amazed that she’d said that and amazed to realize that she might be right. I didn’t answer. Then she told me that she thought I might be feeling like she wouldn’t love me and be my friend anymore if I went to the church and joined a program. She told me that it didn’t matter if I went there and if I stopped being Synthia, that she would always be my friend and always love me no matter what and somehow that gave me the confidence to let go of the long-pursued dream of becoming a woman and I left my friend and went to my family and told them what I was about to do.

My father approved of my decision and let me stay there with them for the night. I gathered a few things in the morning and went to the church. It was a Sunday, and I attended the morning service. The pastor was speaking about how some people are miserable even after they get to know God. After the message, there was prayer like at the other church I’d gone to in Tulsa. I really wanted someone to pray with me before joining the program so I went up when the pastor said to. A man came up behind me, the husband of the woman whose name was in my Bible, and he put his hand on my shoulder and he prayed. I cried a lot that morning, and I let a lot of things go. I let all the years of tortured confusion go and I let Synthia go. I let the life I’d been living go. I let everything in me that I could let go of at that moment go. There was a lot that had once hurt me that I was letting go, but none of it was hurting right then, I only felt free and complete for the very first time in my life.
—-

The next four years were hard ministry training in the inner city of Los Angeles. I grew up as a Christian and worked through the long road back from womanhood to manhood. I had not realized that just as it had taken years to create and try to become Synthia, that it would take about as long to come back to being Emilio. I wasn’t even able to get my name and sex changed back for nearly a year, and then it took getting special letters from doctors and psychiatrists. Up until then, everything I did was under the name of Synthia even though I was no longer being her or using her name for myself anymore. For three years after that I served that church in a variety of ways including producing and editing their worldwide television broadcast. In the last year that I was there, I married a wonderful woman who had been my friend for six of the seven years I was at that church and we have been married now for seven years and served in three international ministries as well as worked as children’s pastors and tried to share the love of God with as much of the world as we have come in contact with.

Thank you for reading my story. Please share it with as many people as you know and as far as you can.

The Love You Long For

Affection makes us feel all kinds of wonderful inside, but affection is never about more than our own good feeling. What you have is two or more people in a relationship, be it just a friendship or a full-on marriage, who are never doing more than taking what makes each of them feel good. People pulling on each other have nothing to give each other except more pulling and inevitably get pulled completely apart.

Affection is not love. It’s lust. It’s the selfish desire to fulfill what you want and the delusion that having what you want will make you happy. Affection only cares about others insofar as others make you feel good. Affection will only do for others as much as it needs to to maintain the good feeling you want.

Love is an entirely different, opposite thing. The key component of love is that it gives you no satisfaction unless you are giving your satisfaction to someone else. Where affection is rooted in self-importance, love is rooted in self-sacrifice.

Love sees to it that others feel wonderful. Love cares about others feeling good. Love gives the other something out of within yourself and provides something back to you. Love isn’t pulled out, it is poured in. People pouring into one another draw closer and closer together until each one has poured themselves so fully into the other that they are literally one person.

You don’t find love. You don’t go looking for someone to pour the love you long for into you. You give love, and you give it greatly, and you give it often – you pour yourself out into others. When you do, you will see that others will pour love into you and you will draw closer. You will have true friends then and even someone who will walk alongside you through life, with each of you pouring love into one another.

You will also have those who are only seeking affection. These will feel the love you pour out and will do nothing more than draw on it for their own good feeling. Be wise and evaluate each relation you enter, and look clearly to see if someone isn’t just letting you pour into them without really pouring back into you. Keep pouring your love on them, but know that they can’t give you anything back, at least not right now. Don’t cast them aside, but don’t let yourself be drawn into them completely either. Remember that you are a light and that you must shine as far and as brightly as possible. Someone who is only interested in affection will take the light of your love and cover it in themselves and it will be lost to the world and the world you have will be lost to you.

We all want to feel special, appreciated, cared about, like we matter. We all want others to come into our lives, to fill our world, to share our experiences, and to provide us comfort. We all fear the still quietness of an empty house, a life of pathways walked alone, or the thought of being forgotten when our spirits finally break free from this mound of flesh and bones. The feeling of not having love in our lives is enough to cause literal physical pain, and we can be driven to take any stupid thing that we can have an affection for. But, those things are just like pornography. They are things that look like love but that have no feeling for us, that satisfy our need to feel something but that pour nothing of themselves into us.

Love is given first. Love is given always. There are people in your life who need your love and people who have love for you that you’ve only given your needy affection to. Love them. Smile. Say Hello. Ask a simple question, really listen to their answer, and you will see a million more ways to love them. Love them without wanting to be loved in return. Love them for no other reason than to love them. Love them and there will be love for you.

DEMO 2009

From a childhood spent learning electronics at my uncle’s dining room table, to a youth largely wasted in garages and basements hacking away at the keyboard of computers in the days when 64kbits was your machine’s total memory (and you could only use about 48k of it), I eventually wandered into media production.

When I turned my life over to Jesus, I checked myself into a Bible school where we studied scriptures and learned about living a better life and then worked around the church doing various chores. When I got there, they took no care for my skills, everyone was the same and the jobs were all menial. My first duties there revolved around cleaning everything from parking lots to office floors to pots and pans. My rotten life before had revolved around a lot of bad things I did on computers, and though I loved the machines I figured that part of a new life was going to be leaving them behind. I was perfectly willing to do this, but there was a different plan for my life.

I got sick one day. I think it was the flu or something. All I really know is that my stomach hurt and I was having some trouble getting around. I went to the campus nurse and he told me to go take a day of bed rest. It was on the way to that bed rest that I ran into the pastor who asked me what was wrong. After I explained how I felt and what the nurse had told me, the pastor asked me, “Your stomach hurts, eh? Does your head still work?” I said that it did and he told me to follow him. We came to his office where an old electric typewriter sit collecting dust. Pastor handed me a copy of the list of scriptures we were required to memorize as part of the school’s program. He said he wanted me to re-type them neatly and then explained that one day we would have a computer and that I would have to type them in to that. My PC was in the back of my car out in the school parking lot. I told pastor and he immediately ordered me to bring it into the office where we set it up. A formatting and re-installing of the system and I was set in place as the school’s office administrator.

Typing out the scriptures led to creating other documents. Eventually we established a publishing office. An unfortunate accident while taping a morning Bible study inspired me to re-edit the audio on the computer, and led to the creation of a proper media office. Inevitably, we ventured into creating videos and I learned how to edit those as well. In time, all of the things I learned came together and I began to create motion graphics and fully-produced videos. When the time came to leave the school, I was instantly pressed into duty in the church’s television department as a video graphics designer. Another unfortunate event left us without an editor. A freelancer came around for a couple of episodes. We got to know each other, and he got to see my work and expressed to my leadership that he believed I could do the production work for them. I became the show’s edtor, then it’s senior editor,  then it’s producer. I left that church and that job and was picked up by a major television ministry in Ohio. I came on as a production editor and left as the special effects editor after having designed numerous graphics and animations, some of which I have still seen used by the program recently. One day a friend of a fellow editor there called him to see if he was interested in re-locating to California. This editor didn’t want to re-locate, and he didn’t have some of the skills that the job required, but he knew that I was longing for home and that I did have all of the necessary skills. My wife and I came home and have been here since.

I have older demo reels of things I’ve done over the years and across the country. What is presented here is a compilation of some of the best work I did in the last two or three years since coming back to California. While strictly a short “taster,” this reel demonstrates a lot of what I am capable of and the kinds of work I usually tackle. While I did all of this work for one organization where I was employed, I am currently doing primarily freelance projects and am always looking for new clients. I would also be willing to consider more permanent positions and re-location for the right opportunity.

Lie To Me

Do you really want to be like Jesus? Then you need a Judas.

Betrayal is hard to swallow. Having the very people you love and trust and need turn their back on you will eat at your very soul. The ones you thought were friends and that you treated better than family turn out to be worse than the highwayman with the knife waiting to slit your throat for the two or three pennies in your pocket. You stop believing that there’s really anything “good” in the world, that everything is a falsehood and a lie that is only going to be true until the truth about it is discovered.  You await deception – suspicion your constant companion.

It was like that with Jesus and Judas. Of the millions of humans on the earth, the man who was God in a human body chose one dozen, just 12, individuals to share his divine life with. Not even his own parents, nor his brothers and sisters, were so lucky as to come to see with their own eyes, and know as a friend, the one who was appointed before the start of the Creation to be the sacrifice to pay for every messed up, stupid, wrong, evil, and mean thing we are capable of. But, even this huge opportunity was not enough for Judas, his greed and self-interest led him to petty theft from the very sack of money that the 12 needed to live off of. He went so far as to scold Jesus himself for accepting a gift of oil on his forehead and saying that the oil should have been sold and the money “spent on the poor,” all the while actually being angry that the expensive gift went on Jesus’ forehead instead of his own pocket. In the end, Judas gave Jesus up to the authorities of the church for a miserable 30 pieces of gold; the life of the man who was God and man at once sold for a bag of coins. Maybe they really were a lot of money, but no amount of money could ever be enough to trade for the wonderful person that was Jesus of Nazareth.

Certainly Jesus could have picked a better guy than this rat and thief and bottom-feeder to join him. There were probably other guys, men with character and a hunger to know the one true God of all that is, who would have jumped at the opportunity to live with the Master, the Anointed One, the Christ. There were 500 men and 1000 men in attendance on two separate occasions that Jesus fed. There had to be some pretty stand-up guys there. There was at least one guy who was freed of a 1000 evil spirits, he might have been ecstatic over the chance to go with the one who brought him out of all that agony. There had to be no shortage of candidates for the position of #12. And Jesus had to have known this. Jesus knew that the woman at the well was living in adultery. We even know that he knew all about Judas’ thievery all along. Judas’ poor character was despicable but in the greater plan for all of humanity he was indispensable, and irreplaceable, wholly necessary piece in the puzzle without which there would never be any hope for even one miserable soul on this earth.

Jesus declared to the 12, during the feast of Passover in his 33rd year, that one of the group was about to stab him in the back. One of these special, precious, lucky men, he said, was going to double-cross him. The whole room erupted in arguments about how none of them could even think about being a traitor, and it was probably true that the other 11 just would never have thought to harm so much as a hair on their teacher’s head. Judas, on the other hand, knew that Jesus was talking about him. He’d already been talking to the church leaders and weighing out the risk of giving Jesus up versus what he might be able to do with all of that money. And, if there had been any hesitance at any time in the mind and heart of Judas, there was none now. Full of evil intent, focused only on the gold and whatever he had planned to do with it, ignoring the love that Jesus had to have shown him, denying the power of God that coursed through Jesus’ being and that healed the sick and brought dead people back to life, Judas went to the church and took the leaders’ money and led them to Jesus. Within 6 hours, Jesus hung dead, nailed to a pair of heavy beams.

The death of Jesus was a horrible ordeal for him. He suffered not only the pain of torture, humiliation, and the actual horror show that was the act of crucifixion. Jesus suffered the pain due to all of humanity for it’s failings in the eyes of the Creator and Father. So deeply did the punishment and pain of sin go into Jesus’ being that the Father actually turned his back on Jesus. This was God turning his back on a part of himself, as if we could turn our back entirely on ourselves. 39 strikes with a whip of ropes with bits of bone and glass embedded in them, hard from blood dried on them. A crown made of slim branches with long thorns pressed onto, and into, his head. Beaten by sadistic guards, his beard ripped from it’s roots on his face. The prophet Isaiah, seeing the crucifixion in a prophetic vision, described the face of Jesus and unrecognizable as human. Then, nailed to a pair of beams in a cross shape, once in each wrist and once through both of his feet, he hung for three hours in the hot desert sun. Over and over again, already beaten and weak from the abuse on his way to the cross, he was forced to raise the entire weight of his body on the nails to gasp for air. Each time he relaxed, the nails tore deeper into his flesh and bones and his position and weight distribution caused his lungs to fill with liquid until he either raised himself up again or gave up and died of asphyxiation. When he finally surrendered the life in him, a soldier stabbed his hanging corpse in it’s side to make sure he was truly dead. Water and blood came poured out of the body, the result of his heart having exploded within his chest as a result of the deep stress of the ordeal. All of this to make us even with God for the sin, the failure to live up to God’s standard of conduct in our lives, by taking our punishment on him. And, all of this horror caused directly by one man – Judas.

The 12 all saw what happened, Judas included. Like the rest, Judas watched the beatings, the phony trials, the hate-filled crowds driven to a frenzy with bloodlust and the eventual horrific destruction of the man Jesus of Nazareth. The weight of the guilt on his heart at realizing just what he had done drove him mad and he ran back to the church and threw the coins back at the leaders and then he went out to a field with a tree and he hung himself in desperate shame for betraying God himself.

It’s easy to mentally cast Judas aside, to judge him for being the thief, opportunist, traitor, and even coward that he was, and rightly so. But it’s not so easy to dismiss the truth that had Judas not been the kind of man that he was, he would not have acted the way he did. And, had he not acted as he did, the death of Jesus Christ that paid for the sin of all of humanity would not have been possible. While there were probably hundreds and thousands of candidates that you or I would have said were more deserving of becoming one of the 12, no one but Judas could have accomplished the disgusting task.

We need betrayal sometimes. We need traitors to our cause. We need backstabbers. We need finks. We need the rotten bastards who take our worlds and turn them upside down, force failure down our throats, and leave us for dead.

Up until Judas made his move, the story of Jesus is like a fairy tale, we even tell it to children as a bedtime story. Up until Judas’ intentions become known, the whole ministry of Jesus is a thriving, growing, joyful, hopeful, ideal dream. Of course the other 11 reacted like they did when Jesus told them of the one that was going to betray him, things were good and when things are good we are lulled into a horrifyingly false sense of security. The 11 could not possibly have imagined the horrors the next few hours would show them.

When Judas made his move, the whole world literally came apart. At the very moment of Jesus’ death, the earth shook so hard that the curtains in the temple that separated the most holy objects of God were ripped in two and the skies went dark. At the moment of betrayal, many a good person has preferred death than to suffer the evil pain and face the coming suffering. The destruction of Jesus was as monumental for it’s brutality as for it’s importance to the eternity of humanity.

We despise betrayal. We despise having our loyalty dismissed. We despise having our love discarded. We despise having our hope and security ripped from our grasp. We despise the Judas’s for their cold and calculating manner, their heartless deeds, and their unrepentant ways. We look at the men and women who have stripped us of our very dignity with eyes filled with fire and hearts filled with hate. We despise hurt and the ones who do the hurting to us. And that is as it should be, for no one who makes another suffer should ever be let to do it. But, while the anger of betrayal may remain, the pain of it will not last forever.

The end of the pain of betrayal for Jesus was death. But that was not the end of Jesus, because he came back from death after three days and nights in the grave. And when he came back, he had actually defeated death and made it possible for all of humanity to live forever. When he died, the Father accepted his death as the full payment for all of our sin so that we could spend that eternity of life with him. When the curtains ripped apart in the temple, the Spirit of God was set free to enter into any human being who asked him to come into them, enabling humanity to have God’s perspective and guidance through life so that we could live the kind of life that God always wanted us to live. Even if the betrayal in our life kills us, we cannot truly be destroyed by it, because Jesus enabled us to live forever. And whatever life we have left is going to be lived guided by him within us, with our failures forgiven, and with the promise of a life forever with him.

Judas was, from the very start, the key to taking Jesus from the path of teacher, preacher, mentor, healer, and friend to the path of being the living sacrifice to pay for the freedom of all of humanity’s souls. Judas delivered Jesus directly into his life’s ultimate purpose and destiny. In the end, the traitor in your life is handing you into your ultimate purpose and destiny. Your traitor has shaken up your world and made you suffer and hurt, but you are headed directly into something greater than you can imagine. You are being freed from the limits of the life you have lived up until this point, like Jesus being freed from the body, and you are being enabled to accomplish what you have not yet imagined. Your traitor has cast you aside, but you will not be left to lay there dead and useless, you will be raised up from the death of your dreams, your goals, your hopes, and your security and you will have a new life and will be the promise of new life to others. Where your traitor is now left with his world and his treasures and whatever earthly rewards he can glean from those he continues to cause to suffer, you are free from his treachery and you are only suffering for a time before God’s greatest work is accomplished in your life.

All the while on the cross, Jesus made no sound. As he was whipped he made no cry. As he died, he asked once for something to drink, told John to take care of Mary, asked God why he’d left him, and then declared that his life and his work were done, nothing more. What you need to do now is do what Jesus did, bear the pain of betrayal and the suffering it has brought quietly, strengthened and enabled by the hope in the knowledge that even when God seems to have completely turned his back on you, he has not left you, at least not forever, and there is an end coming that is greater than where you were and what you were doing before your Judas came to light in your life.

There Is A Light

The Image

This is my wife, Mia, and me. I made the photos just this past weekend (September 12, 2009).

Mia and me have been together for just over 6-1/2 years now, though we’ve actually known each other for over 12 years.

We’re a happy couple. We laugh a lot and enjoy doing strange, but interesting things. We go to science fiction and anime shows. We rock out to the likes of “Weird Al” Yankovic. We have long, drawn-out, and serious conversations about things like Jon & Kate’s marriage, and how Little House on the Prairie can teach us important things about raising children in a modern world (seriously, we actually talked about it today).

We’ve had our challenges. We’ve both worked in children’s ministry for many years (my wife is the daughter of longtime children’s evangelists, and I’ve worked for the daughter of another great children’s evangelist who was a world-class ventriloquist (literally, her dad trained alongside Edgar Bergen of Charlie McCarthy fame) in her children’s church programs). (Did you get enough parentheses?), but we’ve not been able to have a child of our own, shattering one of Mia’s most fervent desires. But we also moved from California to Ohio and back and were privileged to have been able to effect the lives of hundreds of people in a positive way everywhere we went.

We refer to these years we’ve been together as “The Great Adventure.” And, if we were to really think about it, I believe that we would have to say that the adventure began in my little blue Chevy Tracker, one night in the Hollywood Hills.

We were just friends then. We liked to go out for drives and just talk, maybe grab something to eat, and just get away from the campus of the church we worked at (The Los Angeles International Church, “The Dream Center,” for those of you keeping score). One night, I had my MP3 player going in the car and The Smiths “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” came on (lyrics in the image, in case you missed it). Mia heard the lyrics and thought it was a very strange song (she wasn’t used to this kind of ironic style) and I explained the imagery to her and shared how I felt that it was actually, perhaps, one of the most romantic songs of all time. (Think about it, to say to the one you love that you are so in love with them that dying a horrible death with them would be a pleasure and a privilege is about as deeply beautiful a thought as you can ever express.)

I don’t remember exactly how long after that we figured out what we really meant to each other and turned 6 years of friendship into this “Great Adventure” together, but I can say that this song played in the main church auditorium on our wedding day and has been “our song” from the start.

The Process

Both photos were shot with my Canon Powershot S5IS point-and-shoot. I used a soft box in my office with a sheet of white paper up against one wall for a backdrop. I photographed my wife first then used the rotating view screen on the S5 to photograph myself. A number of processes were done in Photoshop.

The original images were in color. Slight blemishes and stray details were processed out first. For the special effects I began with a levels adjustment then created a contrast layer. A softening layer was then added and a sharpening layer added over that to re-introduce details. Each image was then desaturated with a black-and-white gradient map layer and another levels adjustment was made. Finally, a black soft-light layer was added to boost contrast, with one more black soft-light which was partially masked to create a vignette. The images were then composited in Photoshop where text was also added.

Please feel free to contact me directly at aztecatl [at] gmail [dot] com if you would like more details about the process or if you’d like me to do some photography or post-process work for you.

interchange

A year ago, today, I began this page as a way to showcase my artwork. Today there are over 100 photos that I have either made or modified. This covers the bulk of my serious photographic work up to this point.

I wish to thank everyone who has taken the time to visit the site and for all those who have shared thoughtful comments and praise with me for my work. Every artist wants to have their work appreciated and I’m no different, and that was really one of the driving forces in beginning the site. I had been sharing my photos with a graphic artist co-worker of mine, and he would often commend me on the quality of the images I was making. He felt that others would appreciate my photos as well and showed me some photo sites that belonged to some friends of his. I particularly liked a site by one of his friends that was built on WordPress, so I paid a visit to the site and started an account and built the page you see here today.

Sharing the story of each photo seemed an essential part of sharing my photos from the start. I make each photo for a specific reason and each one becomes a part of me as much as the moments and people that are captured in it, especially after the long hours of post-processing that I can invest in just one image. What I write about a photo is as much a part of the image as the colors, shapes, and details in it for me.

Now, after over 100 photos, and a year of sharing, I am taking some time to consider what direction to take this page in next. I am still photographing new images as often as I have a subject to shoot before me, and I have many older images that still haven’t posted, but I just don’t know how I want to continue to present my work. Things are a bit random right now with some posts focusing on techniques, others telling stories from my life, still others just sharing inspirational thoughts. It’s an ill-defined language and one that I would like to change. What form the site will take from this point is still something I’ve yet to work out, but I am working on it.

Again, thank you for visiting!

Wish You Were Here

•She was a girl from Utah. I was exploring the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS). I thought she was pretty, but I ended up nearly marrying her friend instead. The last night I saw her, we kissed. We didn’t kiss because we were in love, but simply because that’s how much we came to love one another.

•They were the missionaries from the LDS near Great Lakes, IL. They befriended me and taught me all about their faith and I was a member of the church for nearly a decade before everything fell apart. I always knew that they really loved me though and that they really only wanted the best for my life. I feel the same about them even now.

•She still kind of looked up to me then. I’d give her plenty of reason to hate me one day.

•They were like my second parents. My sister and me were raised just as much in their home as in our own. He taught me all about electronics and even introduced me to the very first computer I ever used – it wasn’t the Commodore VIC-20 I learned programming on, but rather the HeathKit Assembly Language kit that we built together. He opened up my eyes to the possibilities beyond the realities of a barrio boy’s world and I owe him for giving me the tools that enabled me to be nearly all that I am as a professional today.

•She was my first “real” girlfriend. Her dad sold my dad what has become our family home, the only thing we really have that is ours. She liked me first and sent me letters and called me and spent time with me when our dad’s would get together to work out the dealings of buying the house. Our relationship was a short-lived one, I don’t even remember what happened, but she did go to the prom with me and we had a great time.

•She was literally the girl next door. She was the first girl I ever “really” kissed, right over the little fence that separated our two houses. We had a lot of affection for each other but she had a wild way just like her mother and I wasn’t the one who would get to try and tame her.

•He was a good friend at one time, but he betrayed me. My sister hit it off with him somehow, and they were going to go to her prom together. Then, without giving a reason, he deserted her on that night. He never answered for his actions and I still sometimes feel like I would kill him if I ever saw him again.

•She couldn’t handle having me so far away. She wrote to me often to tell me how much she loved and missed me. She never did tell me that she ended up in the hospital sick with depression over my leaving. I guess I’ve always been the “Mama’s Boy” my dad said she would turn me into. I just don’t know that I can hurt her like that again now that she’s so alone.

•He knew that it was the best thing for me to go away. I wasn’t doing anything with my life at home. He had been the same way when he was my age and he had done the same thing in his life. I was Navy and he’d been Army, but when I returned after my four years, for the first time we were able to look one another in the eye with true respect, and we did so even at the last moment that I ever saw him alive.

•A note from him when he left for Great Lakes before me. A card she gave me that I only got rid of a short time ago. That ring that she took. The first pair of reading glasses that were tinted for working with computer screens. The music I thought made me seem cool and deeply thoughtful.

•It was playing Pink Floyd. I listened to it over and over again and snapped the photo to remember that moment and those people forever.

Boston

In the Summer of 1993, the USS Guam (LPH-9) was invited to join the festivities in Boston, MA, for the 4th of July. We had just come off a Mediterranean Cruise and I was just months away from my discharge from active duty.

I was lucky to not be on duty for the Fourth and doubly lucky that my best friend, Muskrat (his real name is Rob, but somehow I christened him “Muskrat” and that’s who he’s been for the last 18 years since), was also free. As it was Independence Day we were required to wear our dress uniforms for the day, but that was alright as long as we were able to get off the ship and into the city.

Early in the day, we were walking past the government buildings and we ran into a guy in shorts, a tank, and running shoes, obviously out for a jog. He saw our uniforms and chatted us up – we talked about where we were from, how we were enjoying the city, and we found out that he was the mayor of Boston. We talked a little more and he asked us about our plans for celebrating the day. We hadn’t thought about much beyond drinking the day away, so he suggested we take in the Boston Pops concert at the Esplanade park. All I knew at the time was that the Boston Pops was being conducted by John Williams and that Williams had composed the music for Star Wars and that I loved Star Wars so I was totally in for the show. We left the mayor and made our way to the park.

The park was huge and the Hatch Shell stage where the Pops would perform seemed about a mile away. People had claimed literally every square inch of the park and a lot of the spaces along it’s edge. With a bit of luck, we were able to get a little spot to stand against a wall along the park’s edge. The show was still a couple of hours away from starting, so we got comfortable and waited. Our uniform’s were natural attention-getters so we had a bunch of friendly chatter and made fast friends with the locals. Then we met one amazing man.

The man came seemingly from nowhere. There were so many people and so many of them were talking with us and being friendly that we really weren’t able to keep track of who was who that we’d met. We talked for a moment and then he told us that he and his family had a better spot to see the show from and that he’d love to have us join them. Glad for the man’s generosity, Muskrat and I accepted and we followed him into the maze of blankets and lawn chairs that literally covered the entirety of the Esplanade.

The trick to navigating the crowd, we quickly discovered, was to keep looking down. The whole trip  to the man’s spot was a matter of watching where the man stepped and then stepping right where he had, never really looking where we were going, just trying to avoid stepping on anyone’s encampment and not lose sight of our host. When he finally stopped, he said, “Well, here we are!” and I looked up for the very first time on our journey with him to find that Muskrat and me were standing in the literal front row, dead center, of the whole event. We had been treated to the absolute finest seats in the entire park for a concert with John Williams conducting the Boston Pops Orchestra on the 4th of July in Boston, MA.

We sat down and met the man’s family. They shared sodas and McDonald’s cheeseburgers with us and were nothing short of amazing to us.

The show was being broadcast nationwide via A&E, and their cameras were all over the area where we were seated. When the show began, the orchestra started with the National Anthem and Muskrat and me stood up and saluted the flag. The A&E camera caught a shot of me standing at attention, giving honor to the anthem and the flag. Afterward, our hosts explained that every year the producers of the broadcast looked for service members in the crowd to focus on. Wanting to be on camera themselves, they decided that each year they would look for a service member or two and invite them to join them and to give them a special treat by hosting them for the event at their little spot. The camera’s got their shot, the family got to be on the show, some service members got blessed, and everyone was happy. And Muskrat and I were very happy. We still consider that family as some of the finest people we have ever met in our lives.

John Williams conducted the orchestra through a number of great American standards and popular classics, including the grand finale number where the orchestra played Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.” In the part where the orchestra plays cannons there were two live US Army Howitzer cannons fired from one side of the park. Then when the church bells sound, the bells were rung at the Old North Church (where Paul Revere began his midnight ride after receiving a lantern signal from Robert Newman, who was on the church’s steeple, that the British were coming) on the other side of the park. We watched it all from our spot on the front row and center, including the spectacular fireworks show which was literally right over our heads. At the end, I knew that I had truly had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (I was just a tiny bit disappointed that nothing from Star Wars had been played, but we had been treated to the very first public performance of the soundtrack to Jurassic Park (which had just been released)) . It was an incredible experience that we have never forgotten and never ever stopped being grateful for.

After the show, high from the experience, Muskrat and me celebrated with a trip to an Irish Pub where we met a group of students from France (I spoke French with them for a while) before we got so drunk that me and a couple of our shipmates – BM2 Galvan and BM1 Martinez – got up and sang “Irish Eyes” with the folk-singer who was working the crowd. I’m not sure what we did after that, but I do remember being so drunk that I wanted to take a nap on the street rather than have to walk all the way back to the ship. In the end, we did get to the ship, had some Polish sausage sandwiches that I have never forgotten from a street vendor at the pier, and then went home to our berthing.

The photo here is not really mine. Muskrat had it in his collection and he scanned it and was kind enough to email me a copy of it. All I have done to the photo is crop it so it is a little bit more balanced (that keeps it legit as a photo I either made or re-touched, barely). In the foreground is Muskrat, and then there’s me (good-looking even way back then), and behind me is the man whose name we don’t remember who made the whole amazing experience possible.

Talking with Muskrat not too long ago when he sent me the photo, we both lamented not having made more of an attempt to keep in touch with this man. So, I am recognizing him here and I wish to express my undying gratitude to him and his family for the great hospitality they showed to Rob and me. We came to the show strangers and left as friends. We never got the chance to return the kindness, but we held on and cherished the memory of it to this very day as we always will. Thank you!

Cheri

I was 20 and in Basic Electronics and Electrical School at the Naval Training Center in Orlando, FL. There was a Recruit Training Command on the base that was the only Basic Training for women in the Navy at the time. We were all really just a bunch of kids, most of us away from home for the very first time. I was lonely and young with time and money and I met a girl at church just like me.

It was that silly story full of cheesy dramatic overtures of something trying to be romantic, deep, and meaningful. We found something in common between us and we each thought the other was the “one.” It was intense, with lots of young passion, bold statements, and a complete disregard for our own immaturity and the reality of our whole situation, even of the whole world. We felt good around each other and we took it for happiness, and in a way, we really were happy when we were together. I was so young and so stupid that I hesitate to call it love, but I did and do really believe that I was in love with Cheri.

I didn’t have a car, but I had friends who did. I’d find a shipmate who was scheduled for duty and I’d ask, beg, or bribe their ride so Cherie and I could get away on an adventure. We got away to lots of places, places whose memories in my mind are forever linked to the memories of that wonderful red-headed girl. We shared a world that neither of us had ever known and we had fun. We saw the lights of the city on a long walk, danced when there was music, laughed at all kinds of wonderful surprises, and one day we walked on the beach at Daytona and I made a picture of her with my dad’s old Konica 35mm.

Knowing that the Navy would soon send us in different directions, I asked Cheri to marry me and she accepted. With a $12 ring from the base exchange, we were engaged and we began to imagine a life together. She met my parents when they came for a visit and I really believed that I would spend the rest of my days holding on to and caring for and being blessed by the loving look in the eyes of this beautiful young woman.

When the military did inevitably send us off in different directions though, our emotions didn’t last. We kept on going our different ways and I carried hurt within me and I gave into a depression that nearly ended my Naval career. I wound up losing my school, and losing a rank, and nearly getting a dishonorable discharge before the grace of the universe brought about the first Gulf War and I was given orders to the Middle East instead. The orders included a brief visit to California where I knew Cheri was a mere 3 hours away.

The day I got home, it was Cheri’s birthday. I called her and she told me she was going to spend the day quietly alone. I got into my car and drove the 3 hours over the Grapevine and to the little town where she lived. Going by an address I remembered from her letters and an AAA map, I found her home and surprised her for her special day. She showed me the town and we went to a park and we found the same chemistry that we’d known in Florida again and I brought her back home to LA with me. We spent my last day at home before I left for what I didn’t know was going to become a war together. My dad and I dropped her off with a ticket home at the bus depot in Downtown and I went to catch a flight east from LAX.

One night, over the phone, just as I was deploying from Philadelphia, we promised ourselves to each other once again. I left for Saudi Arabia unafraid, determined to come back to the girl I’d known and been with clear across a whole nation. But, once again, our emotions couldn’t last and on the night before we entered the combat theater, I stood on the hangar bay of the USS Guam (LPH-9) and read the good-bye she wrote. In the tenseness of the preparations for what was about to come, I merely prayed a quiet good-bye, swallowed all my pain, turned it into hatred for the enemy we were about to engage, and left the girl who’d broken my heart twice with that letter in the waters of the Persian Gulf.

When the war ended, the ship returned to Norfolk, Virginia, and I was a different man. I’d turned 21 on the last leg of the deployment, but I had been drinking at every port from the minute we hit our first shore. I smoked the same harsh, unfiltered cigarettes that eventually took my father’s life. I had hardened up and I just didn’t care about anything but getting as drunk and stupid as I could as often as I could. I hung out with shipmates just as stupid as I was and we filled every moment we weren’t on duty with beer, whiskey, tequila, and the dancing girls in places with names like “The Body Shop.”

One day, a shipmate of mine and I were out at a mall near the Oceana Naval Air Base, just wasting time cruising the shops and happy to be away from the ship. We went into a gift shop just looking at whatever was there. Passing by the front counter, I looked across the room. Her hair was longer and in a pretty curly red pigtail, but other than that she looked exactly like she had the day that I left her at the bus depot in L.A. I turned to my buddy and told him, “See that girl? I almost married her.” I went over and said hello and found out she was assigned to the air station. It was only a few words and we went our separate ways. I got drunk that night, real drunk, drunk enough that I was sick the next day. I got drunk like that for a lot more nights, too.

In the end, there was a phone message that I never responded to and then one day, some time later, I was back at the mall near Oceana again. She looked a little different this time and was with a guy who I couldn’t have known from Adam and someone else. I walked up to her and said hi, and she introduced me to her husband and to her son… …I never have been able to forget the exact feeling I felt at that moment. This woman whom I had loved and hurt for so much, whom I’d traveled across the very US for before she broke my heart, was introducing me to her son and all I could think looking at that beautiful little boy was, he would have been my son… A little small talk and we went our separate ways for the last time in our lives. I got drunk again, fought another war overseas, messed up my life beyond repair before finally figuring out some stuff about this Jesus guy, and I never heard from or about her again.

Ciro’s

Up the street is Our Lady of the Assumption Church where I performed the Catholic sacraments of First Communion and Confirmation. My family attended there when we actually attended church growing up. My sister and me even attended Assumption Elementary, the church school, right across the street. Every day I passed by the other icon of the street, Manuel’s El Tepeyac, and saw Manuel himself, who always went by Manny, out front sweeping and washing the sidewalk and the open dining area of the restaurant. Down the street is the liguor store that was called Kim’s Market.

When I worked in a school district paint shop after the Navy, we’d hide our truck in an alley in the back and get our breakfast. And there were always the “undercover” police cars (big sedans with gov’t. plates, search lights, and two white guys in Hawaiian shirts trying to blend in in the barrio) and the detectives on lunch break. I even remember watching a firetruck come roaring down the street and pulling up just so the guys could get some lunch.

37 years and the little cashier’s window still has the “Migra Mouse” poster next to it and the little canteen with “Amistad es tomar y no chingar (Friendship is to drink and not f___ with anyone)” written on it is still hanging over the dish area. The waitresses are still wonderful Mexican women who remind me of my aunts and you can grab a seat right away in the front or you can wait for the “good seats” up in the back. You still start with tortilla chips that are beyond decription, served with a perfect green salsa and a diced avocado pico de gallo. The sodas are straight from the can, served with a glass of ice and every round costs you extra. Once I dared to try the enchiladas, and they were the best that weren’t made by my own mother, but only that once did I dare not order the flautas – six with guacamole and sour cream, half of them shredded chicken, half shredded beef, the beans from an old clay pot served covered in cheese, spanish rice perfectly prepared, and a heap of lettuce to cool the palate when things get fiery.

Through the door of Ciro’s Flautas in Boyle Heights, the world is always full of Spanish, the way we spoke it in my house, and the waitress calls you “mijo”. The smell of fried cornmeal is always making the air so sweet. Macho men sit to eat and unspeakably beautiful women with golden bronze skin and jet black hair and nearly not enough clothes join them. Impossibly huge platters of artery destroying happiness pass from kitchen to table and it seems like no one ever manages to get through the meal without needing one of the little styrofoam boxes so they can finish the rest later. I can sit here and just be happy.

This is what the world is supposed to look like, sound like, and smell like when you come from this barrio, and it is always the home that you carry in your heart.