So, there was this writer I liked back in the early 90s, Luc Sante. He wrote a book called
Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York that was a cool history of the nasty old days on the Bowery a century or more ago. I was always interested since when I saw his byline- pretty good cultural writer, I loathe NYC hipsters but I didn't then, plus he was much older. Acceptable old hipster.
Now he's trooned out at 67 years of age in a splashy Vanity Fair article, it's
Lucy Sante now and I'm struck by the speed in which his past has been semi-erased. It's very like "Eliot Page is a man. Elliot Page has always been a man." that wiped that Wikipedia entry and other sites super-quick.
We have always been at war with Eastasia. Even his books have been reprinted as by "Lucy Sante".
And another striking thing, he writes that he was basically hypnotized by Faceapp images of himself as a woman to do this. It's the single primary driver of what led him to disrupt his life this way. He ran
every single photo of himself he had to feminize himself on the Faceapp thing, the image of himself as a woman clearly took over his whole brain to the point of obsession. He writes of feeling tranny long before in his life, but Faceapp really seemed to shove him off the ledge. Was the internet a good idea really?