Abstract
As a photographer, writer, advocate, and ally of the transgender community, I have presented slide shows at a variety of conferences during the past 30 years. I have varied the slide shows according to the audience and, to challenge myself, asked various questions about my art. What fresh visual connections can I make? How do my newest images relate to earlier series? Shall I focus on individual heroes and heroines—community leaders—or on dramatic historical events that galvanized people to rethink their lives and demand policy changes? Is it appropriate to show body images and surgery? Should I focus on youth and relationships? What about speaking of my life as an artist and how it connects to the transgender community? Long before I knowingly met a transgender person, I pondered such questions as, Why are certain character traits assigned to men or to women? and Are these traits immutable or culturally defined? My cultural anthropology studies offered some theories, but it was not until 1978, when I visited New Orleans for Mardi Gras, that I came face to face with the opportunity to explore gender identity issues through personal experience. On the last morning of Mardi Gras, I came down to breakfast at the hotel where I was staying in the French Quarter to discover a room full of people in ball gowns, cascading wigs, butterfly eyelashes, and other regalia. Lee Brewster, founder of Lee’s Mardi Gras Boutique and of Drag Magazine, and also known for making drag bars legal in New York City, had organized this annual trip. The group invited me to join them for breakfast, after which they paraded out of the dining room and lined up on one side of the swimming pool, striking poses. When I lifted my camera to take the picture in Figure 1, I noticed that everyone in the group was gazing in different directions except for one person, Vicky West, who focused straight back at me. As I peered through the camera lens, I had the feeling that I was looking at neither a man nor a woman but at the essence of a human being; right then, I decided that I must have this person in my life. As it turned out, Vicky West lived about 20 blocks from me in New York City. I accompanied her to parties at Lee Brewster’s Mardi Gras Boutique, to clubs around town for drag shows, and, finally, to Fantasia Fair in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the longest-running transgender conference in the United States. At Fantasia Fair, I met Ariadne Kane (see Figure 2), who founded the fair, identified as an androgyne, and referred to the transgender community as the paraculture. Through Virginia Prince (see Figures 2 and 3), who identified as a transgenderist, I came to see that anatomy need not dictate sexual orientation or gender identity and
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