Illustration by Philip Burke
This article appears in the April 2022 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Burn the Page: A True Story of Torching Doubts, Blazing Trails, and Igniting Change
By Danica Roem
Viking
“The facts of your life are what they are,” writes Virginia state legislator Danica Roem in the introduction to Burn the Page, her new memoir. “The question is: Are you going to tell your own story about them, or are you going to let other people do that for you?”
In an age of celebritized digital mass media, where just about anyone can define and perceive you, there is something audacious and even a little subversive about a politician such as Roem so honestly revealing herself the way she does in Burn the Page. She writes with real vulnerability about her hard-drinking, hard-rocking twenties; about her sex life; about her lifelong struggles with gender dysphoria before her transition in 2012; about nuanced familial tensions and trauma. It’s the kind of stuff most holier-than-thou public figures would get “canceled” for.
In America, Roem argues, it is possible to succeed “because of who you are, not despite it.” Not that succeeding is easy, especially in a political environment where personal stories can come into conflict with artificial narratives about “electability.” But Roem is a living testament to overcoming such obstacles. She won as a trans woman and first-time candidate in a district represented by a Republican for 25 years. Roem has now held that seat for three terms, making history as the first openly transgender individual serving in any legislature in America, while helping to flip a region Democratic in an enduring way.
“[Electability] keeps so many people who have been historically unrepresented in our politics—LGBTQ+ people, women, Black and Brown people, non-Black or Brown people of color—out of power,” Roem writes. Given this, she argues, telling one’s personal story and owning it is a deeply political act. But that’s not the only reason why Roem has been so successful; she’s been able to find what can move voters and colleagues to her side, even in the most banal or unglamorous corners of politics.
ROEM WAS BORN in Manassas, Virginia, in 1984, the younger of two children. When she was three, her father committed suicide in the family’s backyard. Roem was told at the time that he was killed in an accidental fire, and she would not learn the truth for many years. Roem’s mother was left to take care of Danica and her sister alone, as well as Danica’s maternal grandparents.
In all, Roem’s mom Marian had to take care of four people, pay a mortgage, and work a “full-time job that was twenty-plus miles away with a horrendous commute,” as Roem puts it. Despite whatever personal and political tensions would develop between them, Roem makes clear that her mother’s resilience, patience, and toughness were hugely influential to her.
It is in these early descriptions of her childhood and adolescence where we get some of Roem’s best writing, a treat for anyone feeling nostalgic for the 1990s, heavy metal music, or the culture of Northern Virginia (one really gets the sense, reading this book, that Roem bleeds NoVA). In particular, we learn about Roem’s early-life gender dysphoria.
As she writes in Chapter 2, “I wish I could look like her … was the lamenting, driving thought in my head all day, every day, as I saw my classmates in skirts and wearing their hair long.” Roem notes that she spent her middle-school years alone in her room in agony, desperately plotting strategies to avoid having her pantyhose showing during recess (solutions were hard to come by) or how to wear makeup without getting “caught” (the answer, for a while, was to wear colorful Chapstick). She became a sports obsessive as a way of hiding her queer- and transness from boys and men. Baseball, in particular, connected her to her maternal grandfather, a die-hard Yankee fan from the Bronx who idolized Joe DiMaggio.
Whether in her Catholic school classroom, on the baseball diamond, or at home in her bedroom, Roem encountered a culture of normalized—and sometimes internalized—homophobia, misogyny, and bigotry, which she took part in as an act of survival. “If someone asked you what you thought of fill-in-the-blank girl’s looks,” Roem writes, “you either agreed that she was hot or you put her down. You didn’t describe how her French braids looked or even remark on her personality … Doing that neither helped nor hurt me. It just kept me from outing myself, insofar as a child internalizing toxic masculinity to achieve that objective allowed.”
Roem credits metal music and the early internet for beginning the process of freeing herself from the shackles of a violent culture that sought to erase her. Metal finally allowed her a sense of individuality, to let her hair down, so to speak. On the internet, Roem found other like-minded metalheads and was not constrained by gender expectations.
Not many (if any) politicians with a national profile would so openly admit to the kind of drunken, bloody debauchery that Roem does. She challenges us to embrace our flawed humanity not in shame but as something that connects us. There is an organic populism to Roem, embedded in the underground, DIY culture of the music scene, that is heartening. It is the flip side of the ugly, hypermasculine braggadocio practiced by figures like Donald Trump.
Roem credits her journalism career as a “hack” for giving her the tools to understand intricate issues and events.
That said, whereas the intersection between Roem’s personal story and a larger political narrative is clear in the early chapters, it could be difficult at times to find overt political value in the hard-rocking middle chapters. As entertaining and salacious as they may be, there are just so many sex, drinking, and rock ’n’ roll stories in this section of the book that after a while they can begin to feel redundant and muddled.
The most egregious example of this may be Chapter 6, entitled “Vagabond,” which brings to mind the famous helicopter sequence toward the end of Goodfellas. Roem writes about a tour of the U.K. and Ireland her metal band Cab Ride Home embarked on in 2012. The play-by-play includes minute descriptions of Scottish bars and Northern Irish hotels, in frenzied, tense, and woozy detail. Roem concludes the chapter by encouraging readers to live out their wildest dreams, doubters be damned. One understands the temptation to tell entertaining stories, nor should an autobiography merely focus on the depths of agony and trauma. It just takes too long to get there through the tawdry information overload, and you wonder why you had to wade through it to reach that understanding.
By contrast, Roem writes about her transition with refreshing vulnerability. She resists the temptation to self-aggrandize or go Hollywood on the reader, instead portraying the whole experience as a beautiful, complicated, and messy process that enabled her to live her truth. “I’d love to tell you that it all clicked for her and she gave me a big hug and told me she loved me for who I was,” writes Roem of the tense evening she came out to her mother as a trans woman. “[I]t was hard for her, as it is for a lot of parents … But in some way, that moment started us on a path to a bigger understanding.” Mom gradually came around, and Roem pleads with queer people for patience with parents who may not initially understand them, unless parents are aggressively toxic and abusive. At the same time, Roem writes, “Parents of queer and trans kids need to recognize the courage of their children and the trust they’re placing in them by being authentic and real to them.”
ANOTHER IMPORTANT ASPECT of Roem’s story is her professional history, which is sprinkled throughout the book. She worked in various small newsrooms in Northern Virginia, often covering local politics. To make ends meet, she often worked multiple jobs, sometimes even working full-time for two newspapers at once. Roem credits her journalism career as a “hack” for exposing her to the ways of politicians and for giving her the tools to understand intricate issues and events. But it was a tough road; by the time Roem decided to run for the Virginia House of Delegates, she was supplementing her meager income by working as a delivery person for an Afghan restaurant.
Roem had never sought elected office before 2017. She only ran because she was looking for a career change and “was asked.” During the mid-2010s, by then out as a trans woman, Roem became active in lobbying for trans rights in Richmond, while still working as a print journalist. She caught the attention of statewide organizers such as James Parrish, then of Equality Virginia. In particular, a successful effort led by Roem to overturn a discriminatory policy by the Prince William County school board convinced both Roem and local Democratic Party organizers that she had a talent for organization, strategy, and policy.
KEVIN WOLF/AP PHOTO
Roem had never sought elected office before 2007, and was asked to do so after becoming active in lobbying for trans rights in Richmond.
Roem knows her political strengths and how to implement them. “Quality conversations. Quality conversations. Quality conversations. It’s a mantra I repeated over and over in the campaign,” she writes. Outhustling and outorganizing her Democratic Party opponents, she emerged from the primary with an 11.5 percent victory. Up next in the general election would be Bob Marshall, a notoriously anti-transgender delegate who had represented the district for well over two decades.
Starting off as a heavy underdog, Roem sought to build personal connections with voters and run a persuasion campaign, something seen as a lost art in American politics. Roem wasn’t going to win in a traditionally Republican district by sticking to Democratic Party boilerplate. Instead, Roem strictly campaigned on matters that directly affected the voters of her district—traffic, jobs, schools, and health care. (Especially traffic: fixing Route 28, a highway that bisected the district, became such a mantra that after the victory Roem remarked to reporters, “We’ve now made Route 28 world-famous.”) Roem and her team of staffers and volunteers hit as many houses as humanly possible for one-on-one conversations. All the while, Marshall and his campaign went through the motions, not bothering to make nearly the same kind of effort and putting out lazy, transphobic rhetoric that only served as a negative contrast to Roem’s disciplined style and focus on the issues that mattered to voters. The bet paid off; Roem won by nearly eight points.
The book’s final chapter details Roem’s experiences in the Virginia House of Delegates. She spent the first two years in the minority party and describes being put on a GOP “kill list”—a list of newly elected Democratic delegates from swing districts whose bills were to always be killed in committee. Roem describes the trauma that comes with such legislative games. She writes about a woman named Kim Fleming, who had fought for a bill that would require suicidal ideation training for teachers after her son committed suicide. When the bill went down in committee, Fleming cried in Roem’s arms.
Roem took those first two years as a big learning experience. She went above and beyond to work with her Republican colleagues, even driving three and a half hours to one of her GOP colleagues’ homes to discuss a bill. Though such hard work did not necessarily pay off immediately, it enabled Roem to get a lot done after Democrats won the majority in 2019. A particularly proud accomplishment came in 2020 when Roem helped pass a major LGBT equality bill, giving a passionate, fiery speech on the debate floor in the process. And though the wheels of policy move slowly, a Route 28 widening project has begun and a four-lane bypass is now in the design and engineering phase. Roem helped to kick-start these efforts.
I completed Burn the Page longing for more. I would love to read a more overtly political book by Roem, in which she outlines her overarching philosophies and specific thoughts and solutions about the crises we face. It is not sufficient to just be open and vulnerable about your personal journey, you must also speak your political truth. I didn’t always sense that Roem felt comfortable doing that, certainly not on wider issues like U.S. imperialism or the climate crisis, and it undermined the overall message of the book. She references drawn-out school board meetings, localized anti-trans discrimination, and the need to fix Route 28, but she never quite gets into the nitty-gritty of policy.
That is not to take away from Roem’s story or Burn the Page. There is a lot of value in the book. It is a worthwhile read for LGBT folks wishing to find their voice, as well as anyone interested in running for local office. There is power in storytelling and more so in the conviction that persuasion and conversation is still possible in American politics.
