June is Pride Month.
A respected columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a regular contributor to The Advocate, The Village Voice and Salon, Norah Vincent created her most ambitious work in 2006.
Norah chronicled her eighteen-month “experiment” of living as a man in her book Self-Made Man. Using the name “Ned,” Norah joined an all-male bowling club, joined a men’s therapy group, went to a strip club, dated women, and used her knowledge as a lapsed Catholic to visit monks in a monastery. She compared her experience to that of John Howard Griffin’s 1961 account of living as an African-American in his book Black Like Me.
Norah revealed that, for the first time in her life, she was viewed as “feminine” while she posed as a man. She explained that she was assumed to be gay by her colleagues, something she found amusing and intriguing.
Norah’s next project was 2008’s Voluntary Madness, in which she recounted her time in three different institutions for the mentally ill. And later, Norah wrote two novels — a comedic thriller and a work of historical fiction featuring Virginia Woolf as the main character.
Norah lived with depression her entire life. She died by assisted suicide in Switzerland in 2022. She was 53.