 with Charles Tyson, Jr. & Martha Madrigal.’ Rarely shuts up.”){kind=link}
This week’s Portrait has a bio that reads, “Trans Artivist/Writer/Humorist ~ co-host of ‘Full Circle (The Podcast) with Charles Tyson, Jr. & Martha Madrigal.’ Rarely shuts up.”
We put that to the test as we spoke to Martha Madrigal about her life and work. Some responses have been edited for length or clarity.
Where are you originally from?
I was born in South Jersey and I live in South Jersey again now in the house I grew up in. I left at 22, was in Philadelphia for 35 years, and we came back when COVID hit. My mother died in 2017 and I thought I had the house sold twice, but it fell through both times. It was like she was saying, “You will not sell my house!” My fiancé, Charles, and I started working on the house, and he decided he loved it here. It’s so quiet and peaceful and pretty. He had grown up in West Philadelphia and said, “Why can’t we live here?” We owned a bar for five years in Tacony that closed because of COVID. We were living above the bar in the city but everything great about the city was gone temporarily. So we resettled here in October. My father built this house in 1953.
Wow. So I was reading a little bit about the person who lived behind you who used to babysit you.
Mommy Edna. So I was the third child, and my brother and sister were 15 and 13 years older. My mother worked and was 35 when I was born. She always struggled with her weight and had lost a great deal of weight, so she just thought she was putting weight back on. She was always quick to tell me, “My whole life I was on the pill. It’s not 100% effective, you know.” Thanks Mom. So when she went back to work, the neighbor was my babysitter from the time I was two months old. So I grew up in two houses, really, because I was there all day. My sister was in high school, and she used to drop me off in the morning and then pick me up after school. She was not fond of that whole arrangement, but that’s how it worked.
Until school, I was just another kid on the street. Everyone got along and my differences were just me, right? The fact that I chose girl names when we were playing pretend, and I played with the girls and the dolls was just accepted as who I was. It wasn’t until kindergarten when I realized they segregated people, that there were lines, and I kept getting in the wrong one, according to them. I remember there were all these great toys inside. A toy kitchen and a closet with play clothes, and it was so much fun, but I got sent outside with the boys, and they were rough and tumble, and nothing I understood.
There was a boy in the neighborhood probably about five years older than me, and one summer day, he excitedly said, “I know what you are!” He said he had watched a daytime talk show — it had to have been Phil Donahue — and there were transsexuals on the talk show. I said, “Well, what’s that?” And he said, “Well, you know, it’s a girl inside a boy’s body, just like you.” I went, huh? and that’s how I learned the word. I was somewhere around 8 or 10. He said it with no guile whatsoever — just, “Hey, I learned this thing.” But in school, it was a whole different matter. I was bullied heavily. It started in the fourth grade, and it just got progressively worse. Seventh grade was a nightmare and eighth grade was worse, and that’s when I had my parents put me in a private school. I found one that was not too expensive, and it was a Christian school. My thought was, “They’re afraid to go to hell so maybe they won’t torture me.” And it basically worked out that way. I could have had a much better education, but I was trying to stay alive.
Puberty was the hardest thing. I didn’t want it. I didn’t like it. Puberty felt like the lights went out. For example, my sister took me school-clothes shopping between sixth and seventh grade and bought me “the boy uniform” — shirts that had sports stuff on them, or flannel shirts and jeans. It was the ’70s and I’d had a pretty flamboyant wardrobe up until then, leisure suits and floral shirts and all kinds of fun clothes. Then it was as if the color was drained from life and the very clear message was that all of the femininity that was part of childhood had to be put away.
This was life now. And it was hard, sad. I mean I tried to fit in. I lived with my sister for a year because the school that I went to was in Delaware. My sister was a born again, Pentecostal kind of person and pulled me into that world for a while too. This added a religious component to things — this idea that what I was was some sort of an abomination, just praying hard to fix it. No one prayed harder than me but clearly that didn’t work. I just learned how to build stronger boxes.
Tell me about your grandmother.
My grandmother lived with us. During the day, I went across the street because my grandmother suffered from mental illness. She slept most of the day, got up at one or two in the afternoon and cooked us dinner. But she’s also the person who read to me every night. She taught me how to cook in this kitchen and told me stories. My grandmother was Hungarian, and taught me some of the language. I felt safe with her.
I had friendships and things were really good when I was small. I was a happy kid, just floating through until I started becoming a target for being too feminine. And that’s when I went about the business of studying maleness and trying to figure it out. Today, when I work with trans clients, it’s one of the things I talk about: having to think about absolutely everything one does, you know? How I speak, and how it comes across. What is my ass doing right now? Is it swinging too much? That constant awareness of what people are thinking, and how they’re perceiving you.
Is that why you studied sociology?
In part, at the time, I was fascinated with sociology because it was the bigger picture of why we do things and how we do things, and how our environment helps to shape us. So, it kind of went beyond the individual.
When you were in high school, were there any extracurricular things you enjoyed?
Yeah, survival. I forget the name of the school, but it did individual learning called a pace system. So you learned in booklets, then you took a test and then went on to another booklet, and that was really how the day went. So there wasn’t a lot of extracurricular stuff. That was part of the downside. I went for a year in Delaware and it was really hard. Then, they opened another Christian Academy right down the street here in South Jersey so I came home at 15.
One of my mother’s friends ran a nursing home kitchen and hired me, saying I was 16. So I had a job and it changed the dynamic at school. They respected me more and there wasn’t the same bullying. That was the first time I had friends as a teen, but the education sucked. I was supposed to graduate a year early in 1983 but they hadn’t ordered the booklets or something, so I was gonna have to go back. Instead, I quit.
My mother was furious, but I’d just turned 18, and I said, “Fuck it. I’ll get a GED and I’ll go to work.” And that’s what I did. I just wanted to be away from that environment — a lot of scars, a lot of ugly, lots of… yeah. And I had no belief that college would be any different. I talk a lot about education gaps in a trans person’s resume. I have them.
Take me a little through your journey from there.
I got a job as a fast-food manager because I found out they paid, I think it was $15,000 a year at the time, and it was double what I was making. I am bisexual. That part’s always going to be true, and I met a young woman and realized I could have a “normal” life. She got pregnant, and we got married. I’d just turned 22 and she was 18 and we had both grown up too fast. We were both really smart and thought we could conquer the world, but the world is a hard place, and children shouldn’t be married. But I jumped right in. I worked three jobs. We bought a house and that’s how I moved to Philadelphia.
When the marriage ended after seven years, I stayed and I spent 24 years raising my kids. I tried to make up for everything that I didn’t have as a child — attention and involvement and all of that. I married a second time, and we were together for 15 years, until she decided she didn’t want to be married. There were no fireworks. It was just “nope” and the marriage ended. After that, I just started to re-examine everything and realized this wasn’t working. You know, as much as I tried, women were not working out. So I’m like, “OK, fuck it.” There’s this whole part of me that I have sealed off, and I started dating men. I went on Match.com and I kept meeting this series of train wrecks. It was a comedy.
I worked at Penn at the time and was a regular at Pizza Rustica and so was Charles, my now partner. We had talked at that bar for 10 years. I thought he was fascinating and witty, but he was 10 years younger than me, so to me, he was a kid. He was 36 at the time so he was an adult. One day, he stopped me and said, “Are you ever gonna ask me out?” And I went, “You want to go out with me?” And that was that. We’ve been together for 12 years, and gone through a lot. He was the reason I had to come out as queer, because he was very out. Charles was one of the kids at The Attic Youth Center when he was just out of high school, and one of the founding members of Temple Lambda, so there was no way for us to be together and me not also be loud and queer.
That’s great.
Yeah, so that’s how life changed. Charles was a creative and an artist, and I got involved with some of the work he did. I was finally in a relationship that insisted I be myself, all of it. [Laughing] But then it was like wait, there’s another layer here. And halfway in, I said, “We’re about to find out just how bisexual you are.” And I came out as trans. I did drag for a while, as so many of us do, but it quickly became clear that performing femininity wasn’t the performance. The performance was when I took the makeup off.
I don’t know if you knew Dawn Munro. She was a Scottish biologist. She retired from Penn. She was a salty broad who was involved in everything, and volun-told me for all kinds of things. She was different from every other trans woman I ever met. She was a lesbian. She didn’t pass as anything but herself, you know, she was balding and didn’t care. She had a little ponytail in the back. Walked around in T-shirts and jeans and sneakers, and everyone adored her. All the girls on the stroll knew her because she treated them with dignity and she took care of them.
She was on the Police LGBT Liaison Committee, so I wound up on the Police LGBT Liaison Committee, and she was the first person who really started to talk me through my own internalized transphobia, my own fears, my own doubts. I met so many young girls, who couldn’t fill out a resume, but were very enamored with their appearance. And I was like, “Is that all there is?” And she’s like, “What are you talking about? Look at me. No, that’s not all there is.” We would go up into her apartment, and she’d pull five books off her shelf and hand them to me and say, “Go read, and bring them back when you’re done.” And I would, and then there’d be five more, so she was also my education. We lost her in…I want to say 2019, pre-COVID. But she was the person who said, “You can be whoever you are. There’s not a right or a wrong way to do this.”
How did you get started in the work you do now?
I was at Penn for 12 years. I went from the university side to the health system side. Hated the health system side. I left in December of 2012 and had some money put away. A partner, and I wanted to buy Pizza Rustica but they wanted way too much money. I had a good friend who was a bar owner who said, “Let’s open a bar in our neighborhood.” So I did. We never made a dime, but we had a blast, and we really tried to create an art space that was queer friendly, that was a neighborhood bar. But of course, we got labeled a gay bar and found that the neighborhood was not going to support us the way we needed them to.
Then COVID hit, and life turned around. We had to sell the liquor license. I had one house left in Philadelphia, and then this one, so I sold that house. I didn’t have a plan, truly. I was out as trans and we needed income. We hadn’t had any in a while. Thank God for unemployment. During that time, I put out 150 resumes with custom cover letters. And I know how to write a resume. I’ve done some interesting stuff for some pretty important people. So I thought somebody would call, and no one did.
I told Charles, “I’m gonna scrub my resume.” And he said, “What are you even talking about?” I’m like, “It is obvious that I am trans — all the volunteer work I do, the queerness of so much of what we’ve done. We’ve worked with AIDS Fund for years. I’m scrubbing it so I can get a job.” And he started to cry, and he said, “You will not, you will not!” So I said, “OK, then I’m only applying for jobs that have LGBTQ in the fucking job title!” And that’s what I did.
I applied to two places, one that was for a peer recovery specialist. I had no idea what that was, no idea, but I got a phone call two days later. Nicole MacHenry called me and said, “You are the person I’ve been waiting for.” It was like I finally found a place where my life had value, my experiences had value. The company, Maryville Integrated Care, got a grant to serve our community. And part of the grant stipulates that everyone who works with it is from the community. Nikki’s an out lesbian who had been working there as a counselor. She has a history of addiction herself, and said, “We get to do this. We get to design this. We get to figure out how this all works and build a program. And I need a trans person. I need to understand so much more than I do.” And we just hit it off.
On the day I had the interview, Charles said, “You’re going to come home with the job.” I responded, “Nobody hires you on the spot” and I got hired on the spot.
Great story. Let me ask about the podcast.
So, Charles wanted to do a podcast from the time we had the bar. Different podcasters had recorded within our bar. He had a friend who was one of the early Black Twitter folks and had a real presence. The problem was, everybody was too busy to schedule. And I finally said to Charles, “We have some really interesting conversations, right? You know, we live at this intersection of race and orientation and gender, and the conversations we have with each other — just about the world and the way we interact with it — are pretty interesting. And we both stay informed, compulsively.” I thought this could be interesting.
That was March of 2022. I started my transition in 2018. I was not out to everyone. I didn’t start HRT until 2020, after the death of a friend, who committed suicide and had a lot of estrogen leftover. I found a doctor who did my blood work and helped me understand how to use it. That was the catalyst to come out publicly to everyone who didn’t know. I said, “This is me, and this is what’s been happening. No one died, so don’t throw a funeral. Throw me a quinceañera if you want to do something. I’m up for that.” I said, “If you want to come along, let me know.” And a bunch of people did.
I look forward to checking out the podcast.
It’s absolutely a labor of love. You know, I hadn’t even thought about changing my name legally yet and was still kind of feeling my way around when we started this podcast together. People knew we were a couple. And I felt like, “OK, this could become very public,” but I decided the one thing I will never do is apologize. I waited a long time, and came out because there was nothing left. I had attempted suicide three times, and after the third time, yeah, I just had to be me, loudly.
Like Sammy Davis said, “I’ve gotta be me.”
So much changed. We have wonderful people in our lives. And we’ve volunteered and done a lot of cool stuff. I met the wonderful Elizabeth Coffey Williams doing an AIDS quilt display that I had arranged in the Northeast.
I’m in school again to get my alcohol and drug counselor license. I’m working with my population every day. My client list is probably half trans, but all from within the community. And what we’ve really done is just see them. I tell them all, “You can’t be weird here.” We’ve got some of everyone, but we come from that place of whatever you’re dealing with. It’s not because you’re queer, it’s not because you’re trans, it’s all these other things that we deal with. And we’ve seen success that’s unprecedented in the field. It’s wonderful, and it’s gratifying.
I’ve also been doing TransWay with Elizabeth since 2020. I remember going in once or twice and was like, “Yeah, it’s not for me. It’s not going to give me what I need.” And Elizabeth said, “Maybe they need you. Think of that.” So I started to fill in when Elizabeth couldn’t be there. And it became a ritual Thursday nights, and still is a really big, important part of my life. Everything does fit together.
That’s great.
It’s so important, especially in light of the election. We’ve been working with Nico Lang who wrote the book “American Teenager,” which is an amazing book interviewing trans kids and their families. I highly recommend it. We were one of the first readers of the book, and one of the last ones to interview him on the podcast right before it was published. The book is groundbreaking. It’s something that we can point to and say this is the humanity you’re trying to erase.
Excellent. OK, let’s do some random questions. What show can you watch again and again in reruns?
“Law and Order,” in particular “SVU.” Mariska Hargitay is Hungarian, so I gotta watch the Hungarian girl. It’s something I can put on in the background. I’ve probably watched all the way through a dozen times. I’m doing that with “House” right now.
Something you like to do that most people think is a pain.
Washing dishes. I just like the fact that you start with a sink full of dirty dishes, and it’s got a beginning, a middle and an end, and you can be done. We have a dishwasher, and I still prefer to do it myself.
What’s a go-to karaoke song?
Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.” And Charles and I duet “Faith” all the time when we do karaoke. And “I’ve Gotta Be Me” is one too. Sammy Davis Jr, and I share the same birthday. Oh, and my favorite Christmas song, by the way, is “Silent Night” by The Temptations.
A favorite Christmas memory?
My parents used to have a huge Christmas Eve open house every year. Later in life, my father was sick. He had lung cancer. But he kept setting goals. He was going to live to hold his first great grandchild, and he did. Then it was, “I’m going to plant one more garden,” and he did. He was known for his tomatoes. And the last thing he asked me for, was to have the Christmas Eve open house party once again. We did, and he was there, and he participated. And that was his last day on earth. He collapsed Christmas morning.
Being able to give him something that was so important to him and share it with him was really special. My father told me, “I’m not afraid to die. I’m afraid to be sick.” And I said, “Yeah, I’ve met your wife. She’s not going to wipe your ass.” [Laughing] My mother was not a nurse. Our relationship wasn’t perfect, but he knew I always listened, or would listen when he wanted to talk, and if he asked me for something, it would happen. That was thrilling to make that happen for him. That’s a really good memory.
Favorite poet?
Maya Angelou is one of my favorite writers, and “Still I Rise” is my favorite poem. I have it on the wall of my office.
Last question. Do you have a favorite quote?
So my son has a tattooed sleeve, right? I have no tattoos. Charles has several. I just can’t think of the person, or thing I would want on my body permanently. I just can’t. And my son said, “I know what you would get: ‘Pay Attention.’” Throughout their lives, I’ve said, “The two most important words you’ll ever hear are ‘pay attention.’ It means noticing the world around you. It means seeing what other people go through and what other people’s lives are — the richness, the confusion, the inhumanity. Pay attention to this life, because it’s so great. It goes so quickly.” So he was right and if I ever do get a tattoo, it will probably be that written out in spring flowers.
For more information on “Full Circle (The Podcast),” visit fullcirclethepod.com.