The Late Bloomer

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New York, New York 10014

Copyright © 2001, 2016 by Ken Baker

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eBook ISBN: 9781524704438

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Baker, Ken, date.

Man made : a memoir of my body / Ken Baker.

p. cm.

ISBN 1-58542-083-2 (hc.)

ISBN 9780143130611

1. Men. 2. Masculinity. 3. Gender identity. 4. Sex role. I. Title.

HQ1090.B348 2001 00-050796

305.31—dc21

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author's alone.

What follows is a true story. The names of certain characters have been changed in order to protect their privacy.

Cover design: Champ and Pepper Inc & Gnah Studios

F
OR
M
Y
F
AMILY

Prolactin:
A HORMONE THAT WOMEN SECRETE TO PRODUCE BREAST MILK

P
ROLACTIN LEVEL IN THE BLOOD OF AN AVERAGE MALE
=
9 NG
/
ML
*

P
ROLACTIN LEVEL OF
A PREGNANT WOMAN
=
200 NG
/
ML

A
UTHOR
'
S PROLACTIN LEVEL ON
O
CTOBER 16
,
1997
=
1
,
578 NG
/
ML

*
(ng = nanograms/ml =
milliliter)

According to the Buddha, you can't have pleasure without pain. As you'll read in this edition of
The Late Bloomer,
I have suffered plenty of the latter.

But, given the chance for a do-over in my life, would I choose to live without all that tumor-induced pain? No. And it's not because I am a masochist (although voluntarily doing a journalism job for the past twenty years that requires chasing around celebrities might suggest otherwise).

I now view my experience as a blessing. I look back on all the pleasures I've enjoyed since my late twenties rebirth—health, love, sex, children, a pro hockey adventure, a thriving career, a body simply no longer at war with itself—as karmic reward for my struggle. Regrets? I have a few. Okay, maybe more than a few. But I wouldn't change a thing. I truly mean that. To do so would be spiritually greedy. So far, I've had an amazing life.

But nobody fights a war without coming back with battle scars. I am still recovering from the trauma of my hormonal health crisis. Yet, just as I set out to do when I first wrote my memoir in 2001, I'm as focused as ever on turning that wilting phase of my Early Manhood into potent fertilizer for my ever-blooming Middle Manhood.

Among my most recent pleasures has been seeing my story inspire
a movie—more specifically, Hollywood's first-ever “brain tumor comedy.” Years ago, when a studio executive first told me he envisioned my awkward male misery as a rich source for comedy, I thought he was joking. But the creative twist was nothing short of genius. If laughter is the best form of medicine, then the film adaptation of
The Late Bloomer
, coupled with the re-release of this memoir, has given me perhaps the ultimate opportunity to heal.

Indeed, what a long, strange, perfectly imperfect trip it's been. Enjoy my ride. I have. Mostly . . .

Ken Baker
Hermosa Beach, California

My body was at war with itself, and on a summer morning in 1998 my brain surgeon brokered a peace agreement. While his steady hand removed a tumor from my skull, it could not halt the haunting, emasculating memories that came rushing forth as I lay recovering under the fluorescent glow of the hospital's intensive care unit. Those memories have allowed me, after spending my entire adult life trapped in a gender netherworld, to finally tell my story.

A little more than two years later, I'm sitting in front of the computer in my home office. Reflected in a mirror across the room I see a man from whose head a surgeon cut out a tumor as wide as a chestnut. Though a large tumor, the size wasn't so much the problem as the havoc the clump of cell tissue had been wreaking on my masculinity since I was about fifteen years old. As the tumor grew, my body was flooded with massive amounts of prolactin, a hormone that women secrete to produce breast milk but that men, who possess only trace amounts, don't need at all.

With too much prolactin, a man's testosterone level will plummet. As such, my sex drive diminished; my nipples grew sore and swollen, and they eventually started leaking a milky fluid; my poor muscle tone, from my abs to my legs to my arms, left me feeling soft, ill-defined; I had scant body and facial hair, whiskers that I needed to shave only
once every couple months; I suffered near constant pain in my forehead and temples that sometimes forced me to conduct business calls while at home lying in bed with an ice pack on my head. On those rare, anxiety-filled occasions when I worked up the courage to get into bed with a woman, I could not always achieve an erection, the single most cherished male bodily function.

I was so distraught by my deterioration that there were times I would rather have died than live another day as what I perceived as an inadequate, impotent, useless man. My erectile dysfunction (which, in the days before Viagra, I knew only as not being able to “get it up”) made me cower in the face of sexual expectations and performance pressures. I resented my traditional gender role: sexual aggressor, initiator and virile protector. The more physically attractive the woman, the more I loathed the thought of forcing myself to attempt sex with her. Self-denial and abstinence became my coping method.

In order to exist as a biochemically normal male today, I must take a prolactin-suppressing medication—in the form of a white pill resembling a Tic Tac—twice a week, probably for the rest of my life. What will happen if I stop ingesting these tiny yet potent pills? The same hormonal demise I know too well.

Luckily, though, so far the medication
is
working, and I
am
a hormonally healthy man. And there are none of the signs of my disease—the impotence, fatigue, depression, heightened emotional sensitivity, milky nipples, gender confusion, sexual performance anxiety, splitting headaches—that I experienced before I went under the knife. As a result, I am free of the shame and feelings of worthlessness that sexual dysfunction causes in men, and I no longer must carry the additional burden of inflicting the confusion, concern, guilt and self-doubt that my disease created for women I loved.

—

Ignorant of the prolactin-secreting invader growing three inches behind my eyes and a few centimeters from my brain's speech and
language center, I dealt with my struggle to be “normal” as I believed any real man should: I drew a line in the sand and waged a battle—against an enemy that I mistakenly thought was my own psychological weakness. Blaming my self-regarded “pussy-ass” disposition on an imagined subconscious reaction to having been raised as an overachieving, hockey-playing son of a hypermacho father in upstate New York, I set out to conquer my sexual demons as a climber would Everest. Like many young men, I had been taught that one's manliness was gauged largely by his ability to overcome adversity. Dad, my brothers, my hockey coaches, the entire culture, passed this myth of manhood on to me. With enough strength and fortitude, so our culture's man-as-hero myth goes, I could be the fisherman in Hemingway's
Old Man and the Sea
, becoming better through surviving life's hardships; the Jack London character braving subzero temperatures in the northern woods; or the apostle Paul my Sunday school teachers talked about, who walked hundreds of miles to spread the good news of eternal life through faith in that model man, Jesus Christ. Along with the direct influence of my parents, these characters—and the countless other images of manhood in stories and the popular culture—helped form my idea that manhood means strength, manhood means stoicism, manhood means overcoming hardship and destroying the enemy.

But what should a man do when that enemy is his own body, inside of which hormones are making such manly behavior increasingly difficult to act out?

Sadly, I refused to acknowledge that I was in a fight that I couldn't win alone, that I couldn't survive without revealing my pain to someone else. And throughout my decline I lost more than sexual function. As a teenager I was a top-ranked goaltender in the United States Olympic ice hockey program. Reared in a working-class family outside of Buffalo where most men seemed consumed by beer, chicks and hockey, I was a young man whose success and happiness in life had always depended almost entirely on his body's athletic ability. I eventually fell
out of love not only with hockey but with the macho culture in which I was raised. I came to feel alienated from the manhood that society had defined for me and groped helplessly to find comfort in my male identity. No matter how influential my macho
nurture
had been, my increasingly effeminate
nature
prevented me from behaving the only way I understood. And I kept my pain a secret.

With those years remanded to memories, I can now view my hormonal crisis as a gift. By possessing more than 150 times the normal level of prolactin, and experiencing the related effects of testosterone depletion, I was able to journey to a biological place few men will ever know. My entire being approached a state of biochemical femaleness, and my manhood today is stronger because of it.

As such, I feel a sort of kinship with women. I, too, was once confounded and frustrated by that seemingly foreign brand of human being: men. I, too, spent a lot of time trying to understand why so many men acted so different than me—from slapping waitresses on the ass, to cheating on girlfriends, to getting into fistfights over who stole their parking spaces. I used to resent how society seemed to reward maleness more than manliness. Yet, I also respect and appreciate the innate gifts of being a heterosexual male: my affection for women, my testosterone-fueled physical strength, my renewed athleticism and my sex drive.

I cherish my ability to procreate and raise a child, and, using the lessons that my father and my subsequent illness have taught me, I vow to help my son, should I have one, avoid making the mistakes I did.

—

I've never heard a father tell his son to “be a male.” For most guys, being male is the easy part; it's being a man that poses the real challenge. Having a normal composition of male hormones makes being a man in our sex-obsessed culture much easier because sexuality and manhood, according to the laws of nature and rules of society, are not mutually exclusive.

No matter how “normal” I am today, I remember the days when I muddled through life in what seemed a moribund state of androgyny, when I viewed the relationship between maleness and manhood as an unattainable quid pro quo. I've come to realize, however, that maleness is the shell; manhood is the soul.

I have spent my career as a journalist writing about other people—in essays, academic papers, newspaper and magazine articles. But I was only able to start writing this book after I made a series of life-changing vows: no more silence, no more telling other people's stories while avoiding my own, no more trying to hold back the flood of memories that rushed to me as I lay in a sterile intensive care unit. Surgery healed my body; writing will heal my
soul.