Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens

by Eddie Izzard

Even Christ liked Christmas. I’m not sure of this, but I think he would’ve. Until he started asking questions . . .

If you are an LGBT+ person and you come out, you have to go through your knight’s quest to create ground for yourself, to create a space for yourself, to stand there and say, “I exist. I have no reason to feel guilt or shame. I am proud to exist, and while I’m not perfect, I deserve to exist in society just like anyone else.”

This is where I exist in society. I am just this guy. I am transgender, and I exist. But that is just my sexuality. More important than that is that I perform comedy, I perform drama, I run marathons, and I’m an activist in politics. These are the things I do. How you self-identify with your sexuality matters not one wit. What you do in life—what you do to add to the human existence—that is what matters. That is the beautiful thing.*

When women started putting on trousers, or “pants” as one says in America, back in the ’30s and ’40s, people said to Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn, “You women are dressing as men.” They and other women disagreed with that and said, “No, we’re not. We’re just wearing pants [or trousers].” And now women have that right to wear whatever they want to wear whenever they want to wear it. Therefore, I claim the same rights. To wear whatever I want to wear, too.

So I don’t say, “I’m dressing as a woman.” I say, “I’m wearing a dress, I’m wearing a skirt, I’m wearing some heels.” As we don’t say (anymore) that women are “dressing like a man” when they wear trousers.

In fact, it seems there are three different lines on the sexuality spectrum: how you self-identify, who you’re attracted to, and what you look like. And it seems the dial can be at any place on any of those three lines. That seems to be how humanity is made up.

That’s why I don’t like the word dysphoria. I refuse to be confused about this. It’s confusing, but I am trying to be not confused.

in the old days, whenever you said you were transgender, other people felt you were essentially saying you were pornographic. Perversion was implied and assumed—and that’s what I, and everyone else who has come out with any kind of alternative sexuality, have had to deal with. We’ve all had to fight these negative words and say, “No, actually—member of society.”

silly but intelligent humor.

I believe we can all do more than we think we can do.

Love is universal and love is the same for all human beings. We should all have the ability to love (do we?), and I really hope that love is stronger than hate, even though with Brexhate in Britain and Trump-hate in America in 2016, it does seem that hate this time has been more powerful than love, as it was back in the ’30s.

The twenty-first century is a key century for us on this planet. Either we make a world, where all seven billion people have a fair chance in this century—or forget it. If we can’t do this, I don’t think we are going to make it as a species.