# Wendy Carlos & revisionist history **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [March 12, 2003, 6:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wendy-carlos-revisionist-history/160767 "2003-03-12T06:24:26Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2014, 7:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wendy-carlos-revisionist-history/160767/41 "2014-02-14T19:47:31Z")
> [@gaffa](#): > > The full interview used to be on a blog, but it has been deleted. > > ETA: [Found one.](http://www.punkkaraoke.com/shitstorm/carlos_PB5-79-3.pdf) Can’t open pdfs at work, will have to wait until later. Could some point out the more horrid parts of the interview, and maybe give a rough estimate as to how much of it was spent talking about the operation? edited to add: Forgot to say thank you _very_ much. ---
**Author:** ![Ranger\_Jeff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ranger_jeff/32/2065_2.png) [@Ranger\_Jeff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ranger_Jeff)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2014, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wendy-carlos-revisionist-history/160767/42 "2014-02-14T19:55:34Z")
I think old McGregor the Sheep Fucker would understand Wendy’s feelings about the matter. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2014, 8:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wendy-carlos-revisionist-history/160767/43 "2014-02-14T20:04:38Z")
> [@Ranger\_Jeff](#): > > I think old McGregor the Sheep Fucker would understand Wendy’s feelings about the matter. McG the SF wouldn’t bring the subject up nine years later right out of the blue to complain about what people said nine years before-He would have left sleeping sheep lie. ---
**Author:** ![gaffa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e68b1a/32.png) [@gaffa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gaffa)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2014, 8:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wendy-carlos-revisionist-history/160767/44 "2014-02-14T20:13:18Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > Can’t open pdfs at work, will have to wait until later. Could some point out the more horrid parts of the interview, and maybe give a rough estimate as to how much of it was spent talking about the operation? > > edited to add: Forgot to say thank you _very_ much. Well, for one, Wendy uses the term transexual throughout, except where she says that she prefers the term transgender. To generate 800 pages of transcript, they had a large number of interviews. In the last part of the introduction, the interviewer says that he was hit by a cab and had a sprained knee. Wendy came to his house and during the interview nursed him. He describes her appearance as “stunning” and said that was the first time he really saw her as a woman, that any thoughts of her “being a man in a woman’s body went the way of all flesh”. The interview starts with her childhood, and the gender dysphoria she experienced. She says that she always felt she was a girl, and couldn’t understand why her parents couldn’t see that. Puberty was even more traumatic than usual, but she had no sex life of any sort, not even masturbation, and didn’t masturbate until 1974, after her transition. The bulk of the interview is about her transition, but this is _Playboy_. _Keyboard_ magazine would be a better one to talk about electronic music. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2014, 8:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wendy-carlos-revisionist-history/160767/45 "2014-02-14T20:21:13Z")
Which parts of the interview put her in a bad light, do you think? ---
**Author:** ![gaffa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e68b1a/32.png) [@gaffa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gaffa)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2014, 8:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wendy-carlos-revisionist-history/160767/46 "2014-02-14T20:47:33Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > Which parts of the interview put her in a bad light, do you think? A bad light? None of it. When she was talking about her childhood I really felt for her. I don’t think any reasonable modern person would read it and think the less of her. A bit of her prickly personality does come across: \*\* Playboy:\*\* What about children in your own life? Does it make you feel unfulfilled as a woman to know you can’t have kids? **Carlos:** A lot of people can’t have children. I guess in a way saddens me, but in another sense I know I’m a career monster. So many ideas are so much more important to me than children. I probably would have chosen not to have children, anyway, so I don’t mind particularly. **Playboy:** Would you consider marriage? **Carlos:** I would consider anything. But do I think seriously about marriage? No. Do I think would be easy to find someone would marry me? Absolutely not. You have to be a very strange person to be able to tolerate someone who, as of this interview, is going to be a publicly acknowledged transsexual. **Playboy:** What if your closest friend, Rachel, got married? **Carlos:** I try not to think about it. Rachel and I have lived very closely together for many years and, to some degree, that will come to a stop. And that saddens me, frightens me. She has a man, and they’re talking about getting married. So it may well happen. But it won’t be because I gone public. Rachel is about the only person I can name in this interview, because she is not afraid. There is nothing I can say that can scare her. So it’s not as if I fear rejection by her. **Playboy** : But fear of rejection _was_ one of the shaping influences your life? **Carlos:** Transsexuality is a crash course in dealing with the fear of rejection. I was raised as a boy. I wanted love. I wanted people to like me. So I was not going to say something that, in my infant mind, could cause people get upset with me. There is nothing particularly striking about my background, except that, in my head I had this obsession is among my earliest memories. So, in a way, it’s all so boring. I think I would feel happy if the reaction to this interview were a yawn. I mean, who cares? I gone through procedure. It’s done with. Just let me with my God damn life and I will let you live yours. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2014, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wendy-carlos-revisionist-history/160767/47 "2014-02-14T20:52:18Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > Did you not read _any_ of that post? Um… I read all of the post, and the response, and I don’t get what your point is in this rebuttal. Could you tell us, please, where the disconnect is? ---
**Author:** ![Ulf\_the\_Unwashed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/b4bc9f/32.png) [@Ulf\_the\_Unwashed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulf_the_Unwashed)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2014, 12:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wendy-carlos-revisionist-history/160767/48 "2014-02-15T00:38:17Z")
The thing is that when you agree to give an interview, you lose control over how your story and words will be presented. What you see as the most important elements of your life may not be what the interviewer sees as the most important or compelling. It’s too bad, in some sense, but as \*\*Czarcasm \*\*points out no one is putting a gun to your head and forcing you to talk. Also, when you’re asked questions about things you’d prefer not to take a lead role in the resulting story, you can smile and say, “I’d prefer not to talk about that, thank you.” Otherwise, sure as shooting, it’ll wind up in the story, probably as the lead. I’m nobody famous, but I have given journalists a number of interviews over the years and I know this. I’m sorry for her pain, but I’m left wondering how she didn’t know it. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2014, 1:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wendy-carlos-revisionist-history/160767/49 "2014-02-15T01:59:51Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > Um… I read all of the post, and the response, and I don’t get what your point is in this rebuttal. Could you tell us, please, where the disconnect is? The fact that all of his questions were already answered? There were an entire two paragraphs explaining the situation with Playboy. > [@](#): > > As to the seeming paradox of her granting Playboy her coming out interview but then classing Playboy’s editors as “arrogant, selfish prig[s], with a genuine sadistic streak” – the introduction to the Playboy interview states that the unedited interview transcript took up eight hundred manuscript pages. The final interview as printed was ten pages in Playboy, several of them talking exclusively about the composer’s sexuality and reassignment surgery. The rest of those eight hundred pages, certainly what Wendy would have considered the important parts, were written off by the editors in the preface as “cosmic ramblings… relevant to Wendy but irrelevant to the interview.” > > It is no great stretch to see how this could be construed as extremely bad faith on the part of the editors and interviewer, a sort of double-cross that played on her insecurities and desire for a safe space in which to discuss her music and her life free of judgement or focus on her transition. This first interview she granted was to have been the opportunity to acknowledge and move past her transition and resume her career, and instead became a single-minded essay on the transition topic and that topic alone. Those few times Wendy was comfortable enough to speak incidentally about sexual matters were edited down into the lion’s share of the interview, reducing her to the subject of lurid curiosity by simple omission of nearly anything else that rounds her out as a person or focuses on her career. So, according to what was said above, they took an interview that was supposed to be about her entire life and reduced it to just be about her sexuality, even throwing in an freaking insult, calling the rest of her life and all of her contributions to music just “cosmic ramblings.” She was just a subject of “lurid curiosity,” or, in other words, treated like a side show attraction. Playboy themselves “twisted her arm” by misleading her as to what the interview was about. Misleading people tends to make you the villain. And demoting someone’s entire life to “cosmic ramblings” tends to portray people in a negative light. And it sure doesn’t help that **Czarcasm** asked the questions as if they weren’t answered in the text, using them rhetorically to imply answers that contradict the text. That level of ignorance in the face of spoonfed information is a bit frustrating. Especially when a poster seems to make a habit posting such questions. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2014, 2:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wendy-carlos-revisionist-history/160767/50 "2014-02-15T02:33:42Z")
> [@Ulf\_the\_Unwashed](#): > > The thing is that when you agree to give an interview, you lose control over how your story and words will be presented. . . . Not always! I know of cases where the contract stipulated the subject had approval rights over the final form of the interview. This is not the usual case, I hasten to add. Playboy would never agree to it. But it is not unknown. ---
**Author:** ![gaffa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e68b1a/32.png) [@gaffa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gaffa)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2014, 2:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wendy-carlos-revisionist-history/160767/51 "2014-02-15T02:50:02Z")
She chose to give an interview to a magazine with a primary focus on sex and is surprised that they choose to focus on sex? ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2014, 3:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wendy-carlos-revisionist-history/160767/52 "2014-02-15T03:54:16Z")
> [@BigT](#): > > …calling the rest of her life and all of her contributions to music just “cosmic ramblings.” The next time you decide to _attempt_ to rip me a new one, try to get something right. From the intro to the interview: > [@](#): > > When she was in the driver’s seat, she thought the sessions were wonderful. The few times when I acted tough reporter were the sessions she didn’t like at all. Sure, she knew all the answers, but to nail Wendy down was a problem. I’d often have to listen to cosmic ramblings before she’d come up with specifics. The ramblings were relevant to Wendy but irrelevant to the interview. ]So it isn’t the 790 pages that weren’t used that are called “cosmic ramblings”. It isn’t the majority of the interview that is called “cosmic ramblings”. It is the _few_ times she wasn’t in control of the interviewing process and didn’t want to talk as freely to the interviewer as she did when she was still in control. As far as her not wanting to talk about the operation and its effects on her life, she volunteered this at the start of the interview, after talking about how scared she was: > [@](#): > > **Carlos** : But I’ve gotten tired of lying. I think that in the past couple of years, the dangers of allowing the public to know about me have lessened. The climate has changed and the time is right. With the appearance of this interview, my friends won’t have to lie and dissemble for me anymore. > **Playboy** : Why speak out in this forum? > **Carlos** : I’ve been looking for the right forum and have considered all the options. PLAYBOY is ideal. The magazine has always been concerned with liberation, and I’m anxious to liberate myself. She knew what the magazine was about, and she decided that it was the place to talk about what she had, and was, going through. ---
**Author:** ![Una\_Persson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/una_persson/32/346_2.png) [@Una\_Persson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Una_Persson)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2014, 3:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wendy-carlos-revisionist-history/160767/53 "2014-02-15T15:18:43Z")
> [@nphoenix](#): > > As anyone who is a friend or family member of a transgendered person could tell you, surgery is the least important part of transitioning. Many transgendered people skip it altogether. Hormone therapy is much more important, but still more important is simply living as the gender one innately identifies as. Let’s not minimize the importance of surgery. For us surgery is important, it’s just not the all-consuming thing which cisgender people tend to think it is for us. And many of us skip it because many of us are desperately poor, scared, or have coincident health problems which make us not surgical candidates. Living as one’s gender is the most important thing, by far, as you say. > [@](#): > > As to the seeming paradox of her granting Playboy her coming out interview but then classing Playboy’s editors as “arrogant, selfish prig[s], with a genuine sadistic streak” – the introduction to the Playboy interview states that the unedited interview transcript took up eight hundred manuscript pages. The final interview as printed was ten pages in Playboy, several of them talking exclusively about the composer’s sexuality and reassignment surgery. The rest of those eight hundred pages, certainly what Wendy would have considered the important parts, were written off by the editors in the preface as “cosmic ramblings… relevant to Wendy but irrelevant to the interview.” Holy Hannah, I would love to get those 800 pages… > [@](#): > > Those few times Wendy was comfortable enough to speak incidentally about sexual matters were edited down into the lion’s share of the interview, reducing her to the subject of lurid curiosity by simple omission of nearly anything else that rounds her out as a person or focuses on her career. All too common. It’s much better now than it used to be. My last media interview was nearly an hour, and surgery didn’t come up once. > [@](#): > > It is interesting as well, in light of Wendy’s prescience in other areas, that she states in this 1979 Playboy interview that, “I wish the word transsexual hadn’t become current. Transgender is a better description, because sexuality per se is only one factor in the spectrum of feelings and needs that led me to this step.” (In step with the rest of the editors’ decisions, the interview goes on, in the next sentence, to use the term “transsexual” again.) They’re both useful words with an important distinction - is one in the process of or have completed a legal, social, and physical transition, or not? I’m a transsexual, my transition is done. I’m also transgender. I’m also intersex. And at times in my life, I’ve been gay, bi, lesbian, asexual, and questioning, and I was born intersex. I have as many labels as an old-school suitcase. It happens, and I don’t harp on it. If I hadn’t decided to become a community activist, I would have gone stealth and just been “woman.” > [@](#): > > So when Wendy Carlos decries this line of inquiry as “someone else’s fetishistic hang-ups” on her website, she is so right. She’s not a prude or a crazy person, she’s not deluded, or revisionist. She’s just tired of being reduced to one prurient fact. As she says in the Playboy interview, “I mean, who cares? I’ve gone through a procedure. It’s done with. Just let me live my goddamn life and I will let you live yours.” Indeed. ---
**Author:** ![gaffa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e68b1a/32.png) [@gaffa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gaffa)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2014, 4:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wendy-carlos-revisionist-history/160767/54 "2014-02-15T16:47:46Z")
> [@Una\_Persson](#): > > Holy Hannah, I would love to get those 800 pages… As would I. The Wikipedia article is dreadfully thin on her music. > [@](#): > > They’re both useful words with an important distinction - is one in the process of or have completed a legal, social, and physical transition, or not? I’m a transsexual, my transition is done. I’m also transgender. I’m also intersex. And at times in my life, I’ve been gay, bi, lesbian, asexual, and questioning, and I was born intersex. I have as many labels as an old-school suitcase. It happens, and I don’t harp on it. If I hadn’t decided to become a community activist, I would have gone stealth and just been “woman.” One of the interesting items in the interview is that Wendy had a sibling who died in infancy who was intergendered. ---
**Author:** ![Tangent](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tangent/32/3098_2.png) [@Tangent](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tangent)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2014, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wendy-carlos-revisionist-history/160767/55 "2014-02-15T16:52:44Z")
> [@yosemite](#): > > I skimmed through the linked pages, since she’s kinda a windbag and I just don’t have the energy to read it all. > [@nphoenix](#): > > I realize this thread is nine years old, but with Wendy Carlos turning 75 this year, it will be a year of revisiting her contributions to music and technology. Since this thread is one of the first items that comes up when one searches for her recordings having been released under the name Walter, it is worth noting the facts. > > By the time Switched-On Bach was released, in 1968, Wendy had already been in treatment at the Benjamin Foundation for a year, and she began living permanently as a woman in May of 1969. When S-OB required her to appear in the press, she had been on hormone treatments for enough time that her body and facial appearance had already undergone significant changes. > > Over the following ten years, her publicity photos were indeed doctored to make her look like a man, adding facial hair and other masculine traits that had already largely disappeared or were not particularly prevalent to begin with, and her few public appearances and professional trips were conducted in male drag, with her 1969 live performance with the St. Louis Symphony conducted in a short hair wig, false sideburns, and five o’clock shadow applied with an eyebrow pencil. Her staff made increasing excuses to keep her out of the public eye, and her career stagnated to some extent as a result. > > Wendy’s transition has virtually nothing to do with the charade that she was forced to undergo to receive professional recognition. By the time her music become known, she was already living as Wendy. But producers and the industry as a whole preferred to work with a man, and there was no acceptable way to discuss transitioning in a way that would not become sensational and jeopardize her career, and so Wendy was forced to put the Walter identity back on over and over again, and essentially conduct her public and professional identity in male drag. > > This decade of hiding and mummery is what she is referring to. It is not “revisionism” or “pretending that it never happened” with respect to her transition. It is, rather, recognition that her gender identity before she became well known was really rather inconsequential, and that after her rise to popularity, when she was already female in her private life, she was forced to endure an absurd set of charades to present a false male identity due to the industry’s attitudes about gender and, especially, about women in relation to technology. When she writes that every one of her recordings was recorded as Wendy Carlos, she is telling the truth. > > As anyone who is a friend or family member of a transgendered person could tell you, surgery is the least important part of transitioning. Many transgendered people skip it altogether. Hormone therapy is much more important, but still more important is simply living as the gender one innately identifies as. Had Switched-On Bach been released a few years later, when Wendy’s legal name had already been changed, none of this might have been an issue. As it is, the unfortunate climate of sensationalism surrounding other transitions stifled and limited the career of one of the most influential individuals in musical technology. > > As to the seeming paradox of her granting Playboy her coming out interview but then classing Playboy’s editors as “arrogant, selfish prig[s], with a genuine sadistic streak” – the introduction to the Playboy interview states that the unedited interview transcript took up eight hundred manuscript pages. The final interview as printed was ten pages in Playboy, several of them talking exclusively about the composer’s sexuality and reassignment surgery. The rest of those eight hundred pages, certainly what Wendy would have considered the important parts, were written off by the editors in the preface as “cosmic ramblings… relevant to Wendy but irrelevant to the interview.” > > It is no great stretch to see how this could be construed as extremely bad faith on the part of the editors and interviewer, a sort of double-cross that played on her insecurities and desire for a safe space in which to discuss her music and her life free of judgement or focus on her transition. This first interview she granted was to have been the opportunity to acknowledge and move past her transition and resume her career, and instead became a single-minded essay on the transition topic and that topic alone. Those few times Wendy was comfortable enough to speak incidentally about sexual matters were edited down into the lion’s share of the interview, reducing her to the subject of lurid curiosity by simple omission of nearly anything else that rounds her out as a person or focuses on her career. > > It is interesting as well, in light of Wendy’s prescience in other areas, that she states in this 1979 Playboy interview that, “I wish the word transsexual hadn’t become current. Transgender is a better description, because sexuality per se is only one factor in the spectrum of feelings and needs that led me to this step.” (In step with the rest of the editors’ decisions, the interview goes on, in the next sentence, to use the term “transsexual” again.) > > Wendy says other remarkably forward-thinking things in the article about sexual orientation and the spectrum of sexual attraction, which are only now being acknowledged as normative, and she does have some opportunity to speak very briefly about what appears to have been a prototype microcomputer-driven full Fourier synthesis instrument she was working on, but what remains to the reader of the article is the sense that some enormous percentage of what Wendy Carlos really wanted to talk about was summarily omitted, and that when she agreed to an interview, expecting to talk largely about technology, music, and all the other topics she remains, at 75, remarkably adept at discussing, she could not have anticipated that she would be instead stripped of her voice, and reduced to a sexual curiosity, by those she had entrusted with her coming out – exactly the fear that had kept her sequestered for the better part of a decade. > > So when Wendy Carlos decries this line of inquiry as “someone else’s fetishistic hang-ups” on her website, she is so right. She’s not a prude or a crazy person, she’s not deluded, or revisionist. She’s just tired of being reduced to one prurient fact. As she says in the Playboy interview, “I mean, who cares? I’ve gone through a procedure. It’s done with. Just let me live my goddamn life and I will let you live yours.” Hi, Wendy! ---
**Author:** ![nphoenix](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/6de8d8/32.png) [@nphoenix](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nphoenix)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2014, 1:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wendy-carlos-revisionist-history/160767/56 "2014-02-16T01:47:20Z")
> [@Yosemite](#): > > I skimmed through the linked pages, since she’s kinda a windbag and I just don’t have the energy to read it all. > [@Tangent](#): > > Hi, Wendy! LOL… Nah, just a fellow windbag. I do love the great, geeky, unfiltered richness of Wendy’s website and the way she freely mixes personal anecdotes, deeply technical information, and theory of all sorts. Let’s not forget that she’s from a generation which precedes the sound bite, and for whom deep and often wide-ranging correspondence was rather normative, nor that she corresponded for decades with such polymaths as Robert Moog and Arthur C. Clarke, for whom a complex sentence or a context switch _in media res_ would have been no big deal. She is also clearly concerned with putting down as much as she can in writing on her site as she gets older, for which we should be grateful – too many pioneers in their fields left us with only minimal insights into who they were as human beings, which is ultimately at least as interesting than the dry facts of their achievements, as it goes to the forces that drive such people to take the risks that change our culture. And, finally, it is worth noting that some of the laudatory introductory text on Wendy’s site, as well as some of the discography and other interstitial text, was written by her web editors, not by Wendy herself. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2014, 2:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wendy-carlos-revisionist-history/160767/57 "2014-02-16T02:32:39Z")
> [@nphoenix](#): > > LOL… Nah, just a fellow windbag. I do love the great, geeky, unfiltered richness of Wendy’s website and the way she freely mixes personal anecdotes, deeply technical information, and theory of all sorts. Let’s not forget that she’s from a generation which precedes the sound bite, and for whom deep and often wide-ranging correspondence was rather normative, nor that she corresponded for decades with such polymaths as Robert Moog and Arthur C. Clarke, for whom a complex sentence or a context switch _in media res_ would have been no big deal. > > She is also clearly concerned with putting down as much as she can in writing on her site as she gets older, for which we should be grateful – too many pioneers in their fields left us with only minimal insights into who they were as human beings, which is ultimately at least as interesting than the dry facts of their achievements, as it goes to the forces that drive such people to take the risks that change our culture. > > And, finally, it is worth noting that some of the laudatory introductory text on Wendy’s site, as well as some of the discography and other interstitial text, was written by her web editors, not by Wendy herself. What do you know of the 800 pages that were not used in the Playboy interview, and why did you claim they were dismissed as “cosmic ramblings… relevant to Wendy but irrelevant to the interview”, when I have shown, from the actual interview, that it wasn’t true at all? ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2014, 2:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wendy-carlos-revisionist-history/160767/58 "2014-02-16T02:42:56Z")
> [@nphoenix](#): > > And, finally, it is worth noting that some of the laudatory introductory text on Wendy’s site, as well as some of the discography and other interstitial text, was written by her web editors, not by Wendy herself. It is also worth noting that, if it is indeed Wendy’s site, then anything written on it meets with her approval. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Angel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d26b3c/32.png) [@Johnny\_Angel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Angel)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2014, 2:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wendy-carlos-revisionist-history/160767/59 "2014-02-16T02:43:40Z")
Am I the only one for whom Wendy Carlos means Tron? If I knew someone, even as a mere acquaintance, who really wanted to talk about her transexuality, I would be ashamed of myself if I couldn’t rally to be supportive. But it’s not a subject that I myself am prepared to speak of comfortably. So, if someone doesn’t want to talk about it, I would consider myself glad to be off the hook. Why not talk instead about, say the Tron soundtrack? ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2014, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wendy-carlos-revisionist-history/160767/60 "2014-02-16T03:00:49Z")
> [@Johnny\_Angel](#): > > Am I the only one for whom Wendy Carlos means Tron? > > If I knew someone, even as a mere acquaintance, who really wanted to talk about her transexuality, I would be ashamed of myself if I couldn’t rally to be supportive. But it’s not a subject that I myself am prepared to speak of comfortably. So, if someone doesn’t want to talk about it, I would consider myself glad to be off the hook. Why not talk instead about, say the Tron soundtrack? Because people will talk about what they want to talk about, trying to put some aspects of a famous person’s life off-limits, _almost a decade after such talk was actually happening_ is bound to cause people to revive the supposedly forbidden topic. To do so while making claims that can easily be verified in this age of the internet doesn’t really help. BTW, the Wiki article puts much more focus on the musical career of Ms. Carlos, but the only official website listed there goes to one not updated since 2009. Is there a more recent official website available? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wendy-carlos-revisionist-history/160767.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wendy-carlos-revisionist-history/160767.md?page=4)