More about Wendy Carlos <3
Wendy Carlos is an American musician and composer best known for her electronic music and film scores. Carlos is the first transgender recipient of a Grammy Award.
In 1979, Carlos raised public awareness of transgender issues by disclosing she had been living as a woman since at least 1968, and in 1972 had undergone sex reassignment surgery.
Carlos became aware of her gender dysphoria at an early age, recalling: "I was about five or six. I remember being convinced I was a little girl, much preferring long hair and girls' clothes, and not knowing why my parents didn't see it clearly". While at Brown, she went on a date with a girl and felt "so jealous of her I was beside myself".
Sometime after entering graduate school at Columbia University in the fall of 1962, she encountered studies of transgender issues for the first time, which explained to her what she was feeling. In the summer of 1966 New York sexologist and pioneering transgender advocate Harry Benjamin published his landmark book The Transsexual Phenomenon, and in the fall of 1967 Carlos began counseling with him (well before Switched-On Bach).
By early 1968, Carlos had begun hormone replacement treatments under Benjamin's care, which began altering her appearance. This created some problems for Carlos when Switched-On Bach became an unexpected hit after its release in October 1968.
Prior to a live performance of excerpts from the album with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Carlos felt terrified to appear in public. She cried in her hotel room and left wearing fake sideburns and a man's wig, and drew facial hair on her face with an eyebrow pencil to appear more like a man. Carlos did the same thing when she met Kubrick and for an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show in 1970.
Finally, the commercial success of Switched-On Bach allowed Carlos to undergo sex reassignment surgery in May 1972, although for marketing reasons she released two more albums as Walter Carlos (1973's Switched-On Bach II and 1975's By Request.
Carlos disclosed her transgender status in a series of interviews with Arthur Bell held between December 1978 and January 1979 and published in the May 1979 issue of Playboy magazine. She explained in Playboy that she had "always been concerned with liberation, and [I was] anxious to liberate myself". In 1985, Carlos spoke about the reaction to her transition: "The public turned out to be amazingly tolerant or, if you wish, indifferent. There had never been any need of this charade to have taken place. It had proven a monstrous waste of years of my life."
The first album released after the Playboy interview, Switched-On Brandenburgs (1980), and all subsequent releases and re-releases have been issued under the name Wendy Carlos.
As of 2022, much of Carlos's discography is out of print, and has not been licensed for digital distribution to streaming or download platforms.
