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| KylKKylie Love performs under the stage name "Sonique" at clubs and shows all across the nation. The transgender female is in the process of fully transitioning from her early life as a male. (Special photo) |
ORLANDO, Fla. — As Kylie Love looked around at her family members, all enjoying a meal recently at Blackbeard’s restaurant in Albany, she smiled to herself.
##“We were just sitting there, eating like a regular family,” Love says. “No one was pointing or laughing; it was just a family out for dinner. I said to myself, ‘Wow, I did this.’ That was when I realized what it feels like to be
normal.”
##Love’s childhood in Southwest Georgia could be described in any number of ways: difficult, lonely, dramatic, confusing, tragic even. But growing up in Albany, Camilla, Leesburg and Sasser was anything but
normal for Love. The classically beautiful woman whose dance skills now have her in demand across the country actually grew up as Jason Edwards.
##As a child, Jason didn’t understand why he liked to play with Barbie dolls, why other kids teased him and called him names like “sissy,” why he preferred dressing in girls’ clothes, why he never really felt like a boy. As a transgender woman who is deep into the arduous process of transitioning from male to female, Kylie understands well the gender confusion that is inherent among those who share her lot in life.
##“I get it how difficult it is for people to understand,” Love says during an extended conversation from a hotel room in Orlando, where she has a pair of performances scheduled. “It was hard for me to finally figure out who I was. Most people think being transgender means someone is gay. But that’s not it.
##“I was born with male anatomy, but I’ve always considered myself a girl. I was attracted to boys, but not in the way gay men are attracted to each other. I was attracted to men the way heterosexual females are attracted to them.”
##It took running away from home, becoming a “gypsy,” for Jason Edwards to discover the Kylie inside who was begging to emerge. Now, utilizing medically supervised hormone treatments and the first few of several sexual reassignment surgeries, Kylie Love has become the woman she was born to be.
##She’s booked regularly at clubs across the nation, her dance routine a sensation, and she’s had small roles in an independent film and on the television series “Glee.” She became something of a sensation on the Logo Network hit series “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” and now is in discussions to star in a pair of reality TV series.
##Love, who performs under the exotic stage name “Sonique,” will put her talents on display in her hometown Dec. 31 at the Flint RiverQuarium as the featured performer during the Good Life Social Club’s New Year’s Eve Masquerade Ball.
##“You have no idea how long I’ve dreamed of this, of coming back as my true self and performing in my hometown,” Love said. “It’s a thrill for me, but I’m a little scared, too. I’m going to be singing for the first time anywhere and singing one of my own songs. I’m just so nervous.”
##Being transgender did not register with Jason Edwards growing up in Southwest Georgia. He was a free-spirited if confused young boy, not quite sure why his playmates and even some of their parents ostracized him and called him names. He was, after all, only being himself.
##“At as young an age as I can remember, I knew I was not a typical boy,” Love says as she looks back on her early life. “Physically, I was born a boy, but I never truly considered myself a boy. And, yes, I played with Barbies and colored my nails and dressed in girls’ clothes. But that was what was natural to me, not some learned behavior.”
##At 15, Jason told his mother that he “liked boys, but not in a gay way,” and she told him he was “just going through a phase.”
##“I knew better,” Love laughs. “My first crush was Mario Lopez on ‘Saved by the Bell.’”
##At 17, Jason, whose introduction to alternative lifestyles was seeing men dressed as women on the “Jerry Springer Show,” met his first transgender person at a local club.
##“I didn’t know how to react,” Love says of that encounter. “I didn’t know what ‘transgender’ meant. It was very confusing.”
##Concerned that the “phase” her son was going through had lasted far longer than it should have, Jason’s mother sent him to military school in hopes that he’d become “more masculine.” He didn’t fit in, though, and was ostracized even more unmercifully. Finally, he dropped out of school, got a GED at Albany Technical College and became a “gypsy,” roaming all over the South.
##“I went to North Carolina, Florida, Atlanta … started to understand that there was more to the world than Albany,” Love says of that time. “I was able to expand my mind and finally started to understand myself.”
##Jason experienced love for the first time in Athens, living with a man he’d met there for a three-year period. He became a regular “female impersonator” in north Georgia clubs and soon was invited to audition for a spot in a regional “gay pride” show. He was selected for the revue and taken under the wing of “The Goddess Raven.”
##“Raven lived as a boy and did drag shows as work,” Love said. “But when the shows were over and the makeup came off, Raven was a boy. It wasn’t like that for me.”
##Jason met a transsexual female while performing in Atlanta and was hit with the stunning realization that, “Oh, you can be a girl?”
##“That started turning the gears for me,” Love says.
##Jason learned through the underground what hormones could be taken to give males female characteristics, so he started taking them without a doctor’s supervision. That bit of experimentation turned out to be a disaster, though, so he settled into a new reality: “I felt I was destined to live my life (as a woman) vicariously through my drag character.”
##But scouts for “RuPaul’s Drag Race” saw Jason performing and invited him to be on the show. He’d discovered through friends what a true transitioning process entailed and was set to start that when he got the call from executives with the infamous drag queen’s show. They wanted Jason for the show but told him he couldn’t go through hormone treatment over the course of filming.
##When the show, which Love says “changed my life forever,” finished shooting, Jason started seeing an endocrinologist and began in earnest the gender reassignment process.
##“It was so freeing coming out to the world as a girl on national television,” Love says of being the reality show’s first transgender performer. “Since the show aired, I’ve gotten emails from people all over the world who tell me things like ‘you saved my life.’ I’ve heard horror stories of friends’ suicides and been told that my coming out gave so many people the courage to live their lives as who they are.
##“That’s why I agreed to do this story with you. I hope this article will help change one person’s life, will help convince that person that they don’t have to pretend to be someone other than who they are.”
##Love’s family has pretty much come to terms with the transition in her life. Her mother and stepfather have supported her, and her siblings have gradually come around.
##“Hey, I understand (their reluctance),” Love says. “After I was 17, we didn’t see each other that much, so I can’t be upset that they didn’t get it at first. I could put myself in their shoes.”
##In the wake of her success on “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” Love “fell in love” with California and moved West. There, she lives her life as the woman she was born to be.
##“I hadn’t thought about a new name when I started the transitioning process,” she said. “It was just so confusing living as a woman and having people call me ‘Jason.’ I was performing one night, and the microphone had the word ‘Kylie’ on it, a reference to (Australian pop singer Kylie Minogue). I took that name and ‘Love’ as a last name.”
##Now five years into the sexual reassignment process, Kylie Love is happy with her life. She’s reveling in the spotlight she adores and anxious to be recognized in her hometown alongside such home-grown stars as Luke Bryan, Phillip Phillips and Paula Deen. She has her good days — her “normal” days — and her bad days. Just like everyone else.
##“I never lived as a female in Atlanta because I felt people saw me as some kind of freak,” Love says. “It’s been an adjustment living as a girl in California, but it’s getting easier.
##“I was out with a friend recently, and I was uncomfortable because I felt people were staring at me. My friend asked me what was wrong, and I told her. She said, ‘Relax, Kylie, people are looking at you because you’re beautiful. You’re not a freak; there’s nothing wrong with you. People stare at you because you’re beautiful.’”
