Susan Kimberly thought she’d told her whole story in the early 1980s. It had swallowed front pages and whole segments of TV news when, at age 41, she left her life as businessman and former St. Paul City Council President Bob Sylvester and became Susan Kimberly.
But when Kimberly wrote the play about her life that opened this weekend (Feb. 8, running through March 1) at History Theatre, she found “there’s so much more to tell.” In “Superman Becomes Lois Lane,” “I tell stuff I never thought I would,” Kimberly says.
“I’ve never felt better, and I’ve never felt more exposed.”
Kimberly, 77, lived her first four decades as a man. Sylvester was described in one of those newspaper stories as “the 1970s prince of the political power structure in St. Paul.”
Sylvester had been married for 10 years. He had been a journalist. He had enormous influence in St. Paul politics. He was an investment banker who made more than $100,000 a year.
Susan Kimberly left it all to become her “authentic self,” she says.
Kimberly says she’d known since she was very young, during her early years in Worthington, Minn., that she was not right with being a boy. In the play, she recounts the time Sylvester was 3 and put on a little girl’s outfit.
“That’s a problem, sometimes,” Sylvester’s mother explained. His father and sister would not approve and he could wear it only when they weren’t around.
The family moved to St. Paul in 1947 when Sylvester’s father, who was a printer and had worked for newspapers, got a job with Brown & Bigelow for $100 a week. “He just couldn’t pass that up,” she recalls. The family lived on Maywood Street, and Kimberly has lived in St. Paul since.
When Sylvester was 6, the neighborhood kids were playing in the alleyway “and got to talking about the difference between girls and boys,” Kimberly says. “Oh, you don’t know the half of it,” the 6-year-old boy thought, and he went into the house to put on his “girl’s outfit.”
Kimberly remembers the neighborhood outrage. “You can never do that again,” Sylvester’s mother told him. He went to the bottom of the basement stairs.
“I can still remember how the darkness closed in,” Kimberly says. “And I didn’t tell anyone for 20 years. I just toughed it out.”
‘MY LIFE WAS SPARED’
Susan and Bob had an inner dialogue, which is the basis of her play. He wanted to be mayor of St. Paul; “she always wanted to be an artist.”
The deciding moment came in 1982 after Sylvester survived his car going over a cliff into a river on a business trip in Montana. Kimberly says she looked up at the sky and realized it was time to start living her authentic life. The incident opens her play.
“My life was spared, and I assume it was spared for a reason — to live the life I’d always imagined,” Kimberly says.
Bob and Susan didn’t have much in common, Kimberly says. “They had the same body and the same mind, but they got in each other’s way.”
After Jan. 1, 1983, she never again dressed as a man.
Related: Review: ‘Superman Becomes Lois Lane’ is a look at a difficult and courageous decision
In the play’s program notes, Kimberly writes: “Bob Sylvester gave up his marriage, his political ambitions and his investment banker’s lifestyle to become Susan Kimberly.”
She got to wear the clothes she had always wanted to wear “and reveled in feminine pronouns,” but she also faced “glass ceilings, dirty jokes and greatly diminished circumstances.”
No one listened to Kimberly the way they once did. But city leaders recognized her experience and smarts. She was hired as a consultant on tax-exempt city funding in January 1985. In March of that year, she was appointed to the Metropolitan Waste Control Commission.
Kimberly’s next-door neighbor in 1989 was Norm Coleman, who would go on to be St. Paul mayor and a U.S. senator. “We literally talked over the back fence,” she says.
In a telephone interview last week from Florida, Coleman remembers her penchant for snappy sportscars. They were neighbors and friends, though they had a very public disagreement when Mayor Coleman wouldn’t sign a city proclamation for a gay rights/Pride Day in St. Paul.
Coleman remembers breakfast meetings with Kimberly and other political insiders before he was elected mayor in 1993. He says he was impressed with her “intellect and understanding of how things work.”
Kimberly remembers the day in 1995 when Mayor Coleman said to her: “Susan, I’d like to try something different this year. I’d like to try to get along.” He asked her to be deputy mayor, a position that gave her all the powers of mayor when he wasn’t around.
She became the first transgender deputy mayor in a major U.S. city.
“It was the most surprising act of political generosity I’ve ever seen or experienced,” Kimberly says.
Coleman says he was seizing an opportunity. “All I did was hire one of the most talented people with whom I’ve ever worked,” he says. “She knew more about city government and the operation of city government than anybody I’ve known in my life.”
Kimberly stuck with Coleman after he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2003, running his Minnesota office.
Retired since 2010, she says she is the “former practically everything in St. Paul”: president of the city council, chair of the St. Paul Housing and Redevelopment Authority, assistant to Mayor George Latimer, member of the Metropolitan Waste Control Commission, deputy mayor and chair of staff for Mayor Norm Coleman, deputy state director for U.S. Sen. Coleman, director of the St. Paul Department of Planning and Economic Development, interim president of the St. Paul Area Chamber of Commerce.
And now, a playwright, which she says was the most challenging of all her jobs.
TELLING HER STORY
Kimberly had been “three months into living as Susan” when the newspapers wanted to tell her story. A Pioneer Press reporter told her that since she was no longer a public figure, he wouldn’t do the story, she says.
The St. Paul Dispatch wanted the story, but she still wavered. Then Dispatch features copy/layout editor Don Effenberger was a longtime friend. Sylvester had hired Effenberger in 1971 at the Catholic Bulletin. They roomed together for a while before Sylvester’s marriage.
Effenberger and his wife, Pat, invited Kimberly to dinner. “I just cried,” Kimberly says. But she decided to tell her story and Effenberger helped set the ground rules with the team of reporters who were pulled off their regular beats to write the top-secret story.
“It was very smart for both Susan and the newspaper to establish ground rules ahead of time so that neither side would be blindsided by some development — and that both sides would be comfortable throughout the process,” said Effenberger, who planned to be at opening night Saturday, as did Coleman.
The story broke in the Dispatch on a Thursday and was followed by TV interviews and stories in all the major Twin Cities media. (At the time, St. Paul had two newspapers, the morning Pioneer Press and the afternoon Dispatch. They were fierce competitors.)
Kimberly says reaction to her coming out was “amazing.” She received notes and flowers.
“Most people come out to one person at a time,” she says. “I came out on the front pages of the newspapers. I got to tell everybody all at once.”
By the time that first week was over, Kimberly says, she was exhausted, “but I’d do it all over again.”
FINDING A NAME AT TARGET
In the time leading up to her transition, Kimberly was seeing a therapist. Sylvester was seeing a therapist. Ex-wife Mae was seeing a therapist, says Kimberly, who estimates that at one time there were about a dozen therapists involved. Some of that was required before her gender transition surgeries, she adds.
Kimberly’s therapist said she had to pick a name. But people don’t pick their own names, she countered. Names are given. She asked the therapist for suggestions. At their next session, the therapist said it should be a traditional name. How about Susan, Barbara or Nancy?
“I’d known a Barbara and a Nancy and I didn’t want to think about them every time I wrote a check,” Kimberly says. It was Susan, but she still needed a last name. On a trip to Target, she saw a huge box of Kotex with the manufacturer’s name in the corner: Kimberly-Clark. Kimberly seemed like a good feminine name.
Today the process is called gender-affirming surgery, Kimberly says. She doesn’t use that in the play, because in the 1980s it was “gender reassignment” or, for purposes of headline counts in the newspaper, “sex change.”
Kimberly had her gender-affirming surgery in Colorado in 1984. She was required to live as a woman for a full year before it could be set. And the $35,000 cost was a blow to her greatly reduced financial situation — about one-eighth of what Sylvester had been making.
Bob Sylvester had some beautiful “investment banker pinstripe suits,” Kimberly says. She got rid of those and found Susan could “dress for success” in the suits and straight skirts of the 1980s. They were restricting, as were pantyhose and three-inch heels.
“But I loved every minute of it. I’d always wanted to do that. It was a look I’d wished for 40 years before.”
Gender transition in the early 1980s was a public rarity, but Kimberly told the story of her surgery to the Dispatch. She was contacted for comment recently when high-profile celebrity Olympic athlete and actor Bruce Jenner became Caitlyn Jenner.
Her message to Caitlyn: “Welcome. I’m glad you’re here. You’re going to be glad you did this.”
Mae Sylvester accompanied Kimberly to Colorado for the surgery. They’d both said goodbye to Bob Sylvester and have become good friends.
“I rediscovered my former wife,” Kimberly says. “I’ve never been closer to her than I am now.” Mae planned to be in the seat next to Kimberly at the play opening.
‘IN TOUCH WITH SUSAN AND BOB’
Writing the play has been another healing process.
“I’ve never felt so in touch with Susan and Bob,” Kimberly says. “It’s all one piece, not two people. It’s all one person, and that’s different.”
A transgender actor, Freya Richman, is playing Kimberly in “Superman Becomes Lois Lane.” They have different stories and different paths to their authentic selves, but Kimberly says the play “would lack a lot of integrity if we didn’t have a trans actor as Susan in this play.”
And the message she wants audiences to take away from her play?
“I hope, in the end, it’s not just about transgender identity,” Kimberly says. “It’s about hope, love and fashioning the life you’ve always imagined.”
IF YOU GO
- What: “Superman Becomes Lois Lane”
- When: Through March 1
- Where: History Theatre, 30 E. 10th St., St. Paul
- Tickets: $53-$15; 651-292-4323 or historytheatre.com
