Transgender opera singer settles into new identity

Tona Brown at a recital. (delores johnson / the virginian-pilot)

By Gillian Gaynair
The Virginian-Pilot

The night before a recital, Tona Brown stands facing her best friend and vocal coach.

"All right, perform for me," Jennifer Randall says. "Lemme see what you're giving tomorrow."

With a pianist playing alongside her, Tona begins a piece from the American opera "Vanessa." She leans stiffly to one side as her mezzo soprano voice permeates the room. Her brow furrows.

Tona's friend guides her with whispers and gestures. She presses her hands against her cheeks, signaling Tona to shape her mouth vertically. When she rigidly clasps her hands at her middle, Tona gets the motion to drop them and relax.

This kind of singing is new territory. Tona's expertise is the violin, which she first tucked under her chin at 10. She used to practice for hours in her bedroom at Diggs Park, a low-income housing community in Norfolk.

Even then, Tona had a vision for her life.

"Some students have everything in front of them, but don't do anything with it," says Geraldine Boone, director emeritus of the Chesapeake Civic Chorus and her longtime piano accompanist. "And here is one who had very little, but she was determined to make a bit out of what she had.

"She does not give up.... She's sticking with it until it's done."

At 27, as this violinist becomes comfortable as a classical vocalist, she's settling into one other new identity.

Until a few years ago, Tona was Thomas.

During an elementary school field trip to see the National Symphony Orchestra, the boy who would become Tona zeroed in on the principal violinist. She doesn't remember now what captured her attention. She just remembers telling the school's orchestra teacher that she wanted to be like that lead musician.

"You can be anything you want," he said.

That notion still guides Tona today.

She envisions a life of world travel as a performer and teacher. Living in Europe, perhaps in the next couple of years. Encouraging disadvantaged youth through music.

She shrugs off the idea of any obstacles with a high-pitched, "Oh, well!"

Darrell Huskey, who now leads the strings program at Norfolk State University, was Tona's violin teacher at Lafayette Winona Middle School in Norfolk.

"Hungry" is how Huskey remembers his student. Bugging him for more one-on-one instruction. Calling him at home, asking him to demonstrate a musical section over the phone. Always wanting more.

Back then, Tona lived with her grandmother in Diggs Park while her parents had settled temporarily in Northern Virginia for work.

Her mother had had a hunch her child would have a career in the arts but figured the specialty would be dance. Her child was obsessed with the TV show "Fame," Sharon E. Brooks remembers. The 3-year-old imitated the dance moves of its characters and choreographed routines with friends to perform for relatives.

She was known as Thomas then. Strangers often thought he was a girl, and other children teased about his femininity, Brooks says.

"But it went in one ear and out the other," says Brooks, who remarried after Thomas' father died when he was 8. "He was so confident as a kid because... we accepted him for who he was."

Playing the violin brought additional teasing from some in the neighborhood. "Going to the projects with a violin? Oh, my God! Work with me!" jokes Tona, who has three younger brothers.

Her child's determination helped change attitudes, says Brooks, 45.

She remembers the time when a neighbor heard the sweet strains wafting down from an upstairs room, and he said, "'We didn't know white people lived here!' " Brooks says. "And when they saw him, they were like, 'Yo, man, you were playin' that violin.' "

Next thing, neighbors were boasting about the talent of the "little dude" on the strings.

At 14 came auditions and acceptance at the Governor's School for the Arts in Norfolk, then, later, participation in NSU's junior music program and scholarships for private lessons. The teenage prodigy performed in chamber ensembles and was the principal chair at regional competitions.

Despite the accolades, Tona still felt the sting of some competitors' low expectations. That only fueled motivation.

"It was just like, 'Here I'm black, I'm coming from the projects and I can play better than you,' " she says now.

Those afternoons practicing inside eventually paid off: In 1998, the kid from Diggs Park was granted a scholarship to Shenandoah University in Winchester after acing an audition. Some 700 students attend the conservatory, where Tona majored in music performance, with a concentration in violin and minors in piano and viola.

Shenandoah is where the woman emerged. It began in song.

When a roommate introduced the works of black classical vocalists and composers, "I fell in love with the voice," Tona says.

The eventual discovery of her own true voice, she says, helped her accept who she really was.

At college, she started going to class in high-heeled boots, earrings and hair that was big and long. "I was just naturally me," says Tona, who now routinely changes her hairstyle, from curly to straight to braids.

She was still known as Thomas then, but out in public she was increasingly being greeted by strangers with "ma'am" or "miss." Cashing paychecks became a problem because name and gender didn't seem to match.

On nights out dancing at hip-hop clubs near Shenandoah, friends began calling Thomas "Tenacity." That's a name he used in online chat rooms and a nickname friends used until he legally adopted Tona a few years later.

At Shenandoah, Tona joined a gospel choir. She took voice lessons. Her pitch was high, but she was biologically a man, so teachers encouraged her to sing as a tenor. To Tona, it felt forced.

"No one would let her voice be what it is," says Randall, in whom Tona confided her frustrations.

Then one day, Tona told Randall she could sing in another register. When she did, she hit a C-sharp.

"I was like, 'Oh, no, you're a soprano!' " Randall says.

That was Tona's key turning point.

"You can't deny your body," she now says. "I was trying to be something I wasn't all my life. I was trying to do it with my voice... " But her vocal chords, she says, couldn't handle it.

The following year, she left Shenandoah a couple of classes shy of graduating. She says she ran out of money.

Her transition to womanhood then became more complete.

Long attracted to men, Tona participated in gay male chat rooms, sometimes getting on a speaker or a Web camera, but men saw and heard a woman. They wondered what she was doing in their corner of cyberspace.

Some transgender folks noticed Tona online and asked her more about herself. Transgender is a term for people who've taken on physical characteristics of the opposite sex or present themselves in a way that doesn't correspond with their sex at birth.

"The environment opened up so that I could transition. The environment said that there is a place for you as an individual, and that is being a transsexual person."

After college, she dressed exclusively as a woman. She took female hormones for a few months. She did not undergo surgery and says she doesn't intend to.

Unlike some transgender people, Tona says she never felt trapped in the wrong body. She wasn't disgusted with being born male. Her family did not abandon her.

But the dress, the new name and pronouns were initially difficult for them. It felt as if they were losing Thomas.

"You get sad," Brooks says. "I had accepted that this was always going to be Thomas. "

Eventually, Brooks says, she and the family saw the person they loved and who loved them was still there.

Tona returned to Norfolk four years ago to embark on her career with a new identity. She contacted her mentors, Boone and Huskey, and told them about her personal changes.

"When she called, it was a lovely surprise," Boone says.

"In the music world, we have all kinds of people. We're basically interested in the artistic part."

As Tona works on carving her niche as a performer, she has reached out primarily to the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community, where she believes she can develop a dedicated following. Last year she participated with the Tranny Roadshow, a monthlong traveling show of transgender poets, singers, comedians, storytellers and other artists.

Locally, Tona teaches voice and violin lessons from her Chesapeake apartment, where the living room is dominated by a white piano. It was donated to her by The Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Norfolk, where she performs at Sunday services and funerals and tutors girls in a community choir.

She's working with Huskey to establish a community orchestra. She also leads Elegance By Deux, a string ensemble, and the Aida String Quartet

Tona still receives monthly voice coaching from Randall, who performs and teaches in Washington. Tona is accustomed to emoting through the violin, Randall says, whereas as a vocalist, she needs to learn to connect directly with the audience.

Though she enjoys opera, Tona says, her heart is with Negro spirituals and art songs - works by black composers that speak historically and culturally to their experience. It's a niche she wants to cultivate.

"I could sing about flowers - 'la fluuueerr!' - but I don't feel it."

Her voice journey is still in its infancy, says Boone, who also coordinates the master of music degree program at NSU. Most singers don't reach vocal maturity, she says, until their mid-30s.

"The quality of her voice is getting better. The more she sings, the richer her tone."

Tona says she intends to keep pushing.

"You have to go for what you want, and everything else falls into place."

• Reach Gillian Gaynair at (757) 222-3895 or gillian.gaynair@pilotonline.com.