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Left: Max Beck his wife Tamara, and their children. Right (from top): The Becks’ 2000 wedding, Judy and Tamara in 1994. (Courtesy Tamara Beck)
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HOME > NEWS > LOCAL
By: DYANA BAGBY
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“I will be dying soon; when is anybody’s guess. This sucks, of course, totally. But I am content. I look at my life and am satisfied — and that’s saying a lot. A definition of successful, even. I count myself lucky. Blessed. Full. Rich.” — Max Beck, Dec. 31, 2007
On Jan. 12, less than two weeks after Joseph Maxfield Beck, known to everyone as Max, wrote this final entry in his blog, he succumbed to cancer, at home and surrounded by those who loved him. And despite the pain he suffered from chemo, radiation, side effects of powerful drugs and just being sick all the time, he never lost his spirit, said his wife, Tamara Beck.
“He was diagnosed in March 2005 and it was stage four then,” she said this week, seated on the couch in her Grant Park home. “He was such a fighter. He said, ‘I’ll be the miracle case.’”
Beck, who was born intersexed and lived most of his life as a woman, was 41 when he died of vaginal cancer. He is survived by his family, including his wife, 7-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son.
“My family speaks for itself. Something I never even thought I would, or could, have," Beck wrote in his final blog entry. "I found my soul mate, and she dragged me kicking and screaming into marriage and fatherhood.
Kicking and screaming, and I am so glad that she did, for my children are the center of my world, a miracle of noise and laughter and mayhem of which I am so proud and — every day — in breathless amazement.”
Arriving home from school during this interview, Beck's daughter introduced herself, then announced, “Daddy’s not here."
Tamara explained to her precocious child with an affinity for dinosaurs that daddy was going to be in the newspaper.
“He would have liked that,” said Tamara, who serves as the Grant Park playgroup liaison.
Max wasn’t a stranger to publicity and felt telling his story was a form of activism, Tamara said.
He was interviewed by CNN’s Anderson Cooper in 2005, featured on The Learning Channel, profiled on the HBO documentary “Middle Sexes” and appeared on the PBS series Nova.
Max unabashedly told his story of being intersexed to not only reporters, but to young people facing the same struggle and doctors who have intersex patients. One of his passions was working with the Intersex Society of North America (www.isna.org).
Max very frankly discussed his experience of being raised a girl named Judy — an “unfinished girl” the doctors explained when she was a preteen undergoing hormone therapy and eventually genital surgery.
At the time, Tamara said, doctors believed in assigning most children born with ambiguous genitalia as girls because, and she quoted one doctor, “It’s easier to make a hole than build a pole.”
Judy eventually married a man, but decided she was a butch lesbian when she fell head-over-heels in love with Tamara in 1992 after the two met in college in Pennsylvania.
When Judy told Tamara that she had a “horrible” secret, Tamara said, ironically, she feared Judy had cancer.
But when Judy — and Tamara is careful to talk about Judy and Max as they were, actually, two different people — told Tamara her “shameful secret,” Tamara said she told Judy it didn’t matter “because I love you.”
“The horrible thing of it was this amazing person was carrying around this enormous secret alone,” Tamara said.
“She was and he was the most interesting person I met. He was incredibly deep, able to see beyond the banter to the important stuff,” Tamara added. “Everybody liked him. He had charisma. He had a genuine way of relating to people that was refreshing and surprising."
There is a match to your rough edges, Tamara explained, and Max was that to her. “That was my person,” she said. “He was the person who loved me unconditionally. We had a deep knowledge of each other. I was very lucky — I suspect most people don’t have that.”
Max Beck found out about being intersex by accident when he sent off for vaccination records needed for a job. His childhood medical records showed he was a “male pseudo hermaphrodite.” Never completely comfortable as a woman, Judy began pondering becoming a ...
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