Chapter Text
Meet Stephaine Rogers: The Real Captain America
By Joan Henderson
January 26, 2014
When I was approached by Ms. Potts, Tony Stark’s long-term business partner and girlfriend, at the Stark Industries Gala back in December, I was hoping she was going to ask me to cover a story for her. Most of the time that’s the only reason I get invited to such high-end galas, someone has a story for me. I had a feeling I was in for something special when all she told me was that a friend of hers had a story to tell and that she would be in touch with me.
Less than a week later I was scheduling this interview with Captain America. I had never met Rogers before, though I of course learned the stories in school like every American. I was eager to find out how much of it was just that, stories.
We initially planned to meet sooner, but Avengers duties called. We finally secured a date last Monday. I had only exchanged a few short emails with the captain going into the interview. From what I could tell, Rogers was nervous about meeting but told me it was important.
Now, I think it’s worth pointing out that I am a political correspondent for the Times. I’m not the chief correspondent; my boss was very bothered that he didn’t get to cover this story. I am, however, the most senior female correspondent at the paper, something I found myself considering as I walked into this interview.
When Captain America entered the room, I was certainly surprised.
Rogers was wearing a cream blouse with navy slacks, a touch of makeup, and a shoulder-length blonde bob tucked neatly behind her ears. The captain looked younger than I expected. Younger than the photographs portrayed. Younger than the icon.
I didn’t know what else to do other than shake her hand and sit back down.
Rogers smiled warmly at me and started by saying, “I’m sure you can understand why we are doing an interview now.”
I admitted that I thought I did.
For the better part of seventy years, Captain America has been one of the clearest images in American history: broad-shouldered, square-jawed, and unmistakably male.
The woman sitting across from me was broad-shouldered and square-jawed, but she was decidedly not male.
“My name is Stephanie Rogers,” she told me. “Though everyone calls me Stevie.”
There was a moment, after she said it, in which neither of us spoke. Then, because there wasn’t really any other place to begin, I asked the question that had already begun to rearrange everything I thought I knew. Had Captain America always been a woman?
“Yes,” Rogers said quietly. “Always.”
She said it without ceremony. Not proudly, not apologetically. More like someone setting down a heavy suitcase after carrying it far too long.
I asked her if she had always intended to tell the public.
“No,” she admitted. “At least, not at first. When I woke up, everything was already decided.”
She fidgeted with her necklace as she spoke, which made me realize that the chain was likely dog tags I couldn’t see the end of.
“The story told in ’43 had stuck. The history books said Steve Rogers. SHIELD and the Avengers called me Steve. It was as if I never existed. When enough people tell you who you are, it becomes easier to be who they wanted me to be.”
But it was never true.
Rogers gave me a small smile. “It was true enough,” she said. “Steve got me through the war. I just don’t think I can be him anymore.”
Hence the interview. Telling the truth.
For the past several months, the woman known to the world as Captain America has been living in public and in private as two different people. To the public, she has remained the same figure frozen in time since 1945: Steve Rogers, war hero, soldier, symbol.
Privately, among friends and teammates, she has been someone else. Her name is Stevie.
But then why was Captain America male?
“It wasn't exactly my idea,” she says with a small laugh. “The lie, I mean. Though I suppose after a while I took on the lie too.”
Rogers was born in Brooklyn in 1918. She grew up poor during the Depression, the daughter of Irish immigrants. Both her parents died when she was young. She grew up at St. Paul’s Industrial School, which was operated by the Sisters of Charity of New York.
Before the war, she worked as a nurse, like her mother had, and lived in a tiny apartment with her best friend, Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes.
“Bucky,” she said. “Everybody called her Bucky. Well, Becky before the war.”
There is a beat of silence.
Her?
Rogers didn’t appear to notice what she had said. Or perhaps she did and simply didn’t care.
“We looked after each other,” she said. “That's what people did back then when they didn't have anybody else.”
The official story of Captain America begins in 1943, when a frail young man named Steve Rogers volunteered for an experimental military program and emerged transformed.
The real story, according to Stevie, was more complicated.
“The serum didn't work,” she explained, “not at first. They tried it on a few men, and it didn't take. Dr. Erskine and Howard Stark had their theories. One of them was that perhaps the serum didn't cooperate very well with the Y chromosome.”
She laughs once, dryly.
“I offered to try it since I was a nurse and because I thought, well, if it doesn't work, they haven't lost much. I was sick all the time. I was small. Women weren't exactly considered valuable military resources in 1943. I just wanted to help in any way I could.”
It did work.
Within hours of receiving the serum, Rogers had become stronger and faster than any man or woman. Erskine was dead by the end of the night, assassinated before the process could be replicated.
Leaving the United States government with something it had never planned for: the only super-soldier in the world was a woman.
“They panicked,” Rogers said simply.
The military changed her name in the paperwork. They rewrote the story before the newspapers could get hold of it. She got voice training. Tailors altered her uniform. Reporters were told that Captain America valued his privacy.
“SHIELD continued the story later,” she explained. “Though by then I think everyone assumed it had always been true.”
The Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division, otherwise known as SHIELD, did not respond to a request for comment. Not much is known about the organization or its operations. There has been much controversy about SHIELD and its jurisdiction since the alleged nuclear missile was spotted during the attack on New York.
When asked whether she blamed SHIELD for maintaining the lie after she was found alive in the Arctic a year and a half ago, Rogers paused for a long moment.
“No,” she says finally. “I think people were trying to protect me in the only way they knew how.”
Protect you from what?
“Attention, questions, disappointment maybe.” She fidgeted with her shirt sleeves while she thought. “People have very strong ideas about who Captain America is supposed to be.”
Did anyone at SHIELD pressure you to keep pretending?
“No one forced me,” she says carefully. “They gave me time. I don't think any of us knew what to do.”
But they were involved in keeping the secret.
“I don't think that's fair,” she said, and for the first time there was a trace of steel in her voice. “Nobody sat me down and told me to lie. I just woke up in a world where people had already decided who I was.”
She informs me that the first people outside of SHIELD to learn the truth were her fellow Avengers.
How did they take it?
She smiles then and replies, “varied.”
She declines to say which teammate reacted best and which reacted worst.
“Though I will say that Dr. Banner was very kind about it.”
She also says that the experience of meeting people who knew Captain America before they knew Stevie is often strange.
“Growing up, it was clear who was favored. You had to be brave, strong, patriotic, masculine, tall, white, male. Especially that last bit. That was just the way it was. I didn’t agree with it, and I hope that much was clear during the war, but I was only one person. And then suddenly people addressed me as if I was all those things. It was a lot to take in.”
Was it difficult to tell people?
“Very,” Rogers admitted.
Why?
She considered the question for a long time.
“Because if you've spent long enough pretending, you start to worry that maybe the performance is the only part anyone wanted.”
Near the end of our time together, Rogers had relaxed enough to smile more easily. She talked about learning how to use a smartphone, about the shock of modern coffee, about the first time she saw Times Square lit by LED billboards and thought she had lost her mind. She didn’t talk much about the war.
“I think people already know that story,” Stevie says.
But there was one part of it that I had to ask about.
For decades there has been a persistent fringe theory among historians that Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes were involved in a secret romance. The theory has always been dismissed on the grounds that both were men.
When I mention this, Rogers nearly chokes on her drink.
“Oh my God,” she says. When she recovers, she laughs. “People thought that?”
I told her people still think that.
Rogers shook her head, smiling in disbelief. “Well, for the record, Bucky was a woman too.”
The words hung in the air between us.
Bucky Barnes was a woman?
“Yes.”
Did the government cover that up too?
“You'd have to ask the government,” Rogers said lightly.
It was the closest she came all afternoon to sounding evasive.
For a woman who had agreed to tell the country something that had stayed hidden for seventy years, Rogers remained remarkably careful about whom she blamed. She did not criticize SHIELD, though it was difficult to imagine that the organization had not played some role in preserving the myth after she was found in the Arctic. She did not criticize the military, though it was the military that first forced her to answer to a man’s name.
Instead, she changes the subject.
“Do you think people will mind?” she asks me suddenly. “That Captain America’s a woman.”
Outside the window, traffic crawled down Park Ave. Men in dark coats hurried down the sidewalk with paper cups of coffee. Somewhere in Washington, lawmakers were arguing about the debt ceiling. Somewhere on cable television, someone was almost certainly complaining that the country had already changed too much.
Rogers had missed nearly seven decades of American politics, but she seemed to understand instinctively what sort of conversation this article was likely to begin.
I think some people will be upset, I told her honestly.
She nods. “I know.”
Are you worried about that?
Rogers thought for a moment. “No,” she says finally. “Well, perhaps a little. But people were upset when women started wearing trousers too.”
For the first time that afternoon, she sounded amused.
“I think there are people who want Captain America to stay exactly the same as they remember him,” she says. “Or as they imagined him, anyway.”
And what about you? What do you want?
“I think I'd like people to remember that none of the important parts of my story have changing,” she said. “I still fought in the war. I still went down with the Valkyrie. I still woke up seventy years later and joined the Avengers. I'm still the same person.”
She smiled then, small and a little uncertain. “Just maybe with a better haircut.”
As we stood to leave, I asked whether there was anything she hoped people would take away from this story.
She was quiet for a long moment.
By the time this article is published, I will have had nearly a week to mull over what she told me. I can say from experience that the shock wears off surprisingly quickly.
What remains is not the strange fact that Captain America is a woman. What remains is the realization that perhaps she always made more sense this way.
“I hope people embrace Stevie,” Rogers says. “The world changed a lot in the sixty-six years I missed. I hope this is one of the ways it changed for the better.”