Imagine having been raised Pagan in a flyspeck town in rural New Hampshire -- and being smart enough to skip two grades in your early schooling. Imagine being a very late bloomer and finding yourself socially and physically always four years behind your classmates... who know you're from another planet, and treat you accordingly. Ostracism and exile will be the hallmark of your life. With the exception of a specific tree found during third grade, all your friends were your parent's adult friends, or the artists in a local collective who taught you the ins and out of jewelry making and collage. No matter how smart you are, or what sage advice those around you might give, how would you define your self? What place would you put your self in? How do you determine your role when all the people surrounding you are so different?
Not simple questions to answer -- especially when your female body holds within it a developing male core.
This very young and very naive girl came to college in Boston and found herself thrown into a world populated by unsupervised and hormonally deranged teenagers. The physical and emotional bubble she had been living in immediately exploded. For the first time people near her own age noticed her, let her know she might be a person worthy of interest and not at all as strange as she thought. Of course, her immediate and most pressing need was to start learning how to socialize herself -- and within three weeks of this new and unfettered freedom, she found she was bisexual. There are joys in freedom and in sex and in learning how to be a person amongst people for the first time, and she started to blossom. She shaped herself mostly for the eyes of others. As inexperienced and hungry as she was, she needed the people who made up her life to tell her who to be. Their lives became hers, their sex became hers, their understandings defined hers. She moved from friend to friend, lover to lover, took on new hair and clothes and names, all in an effort to make a real self.
But then there was the stranger she caught looking back at herself from window reflections and unexpected mirrors. She had come to accept that he was there, even though she didn't understand why. Answers come with time though, and as her life opened out so did her awareness of who he was. By nineteen, the stranger in the mirror had become so constant in her life and so insistent for recognition that she sought out an older transman and asked for council. She was warned to find every happiness she could in being the person she was, and not to consider transitioning into being male until she had explored every other option she could find. So she looked at them all. For six more years she sought to be a comfortable woman. She struggled with an impossible and agonizing relationship, and with the every day-ness of living a role that became less and less hospitable. Six years is an eternity -- and at 25 she began the process of becoming Dan.
I knew Dan was a transman before we met -- he answered a request I put out for gay, lesbian and transgendered folk to sit for portraits. The person who showed up looked more like a mature teenager than a thirty year old woman. With mannerisms more masculine than feminine, he's a blend of male confidence and a female desire to please. He has frequently colorful and interesting hair that sits over rock steady eyes over an ever-expressive mouth over a good chin sprouting hair that falls somewhere between peach fuzz and whiskers. The time Dan has spent looking for himself, and shaping the self he found, make him the ideal subject for someone like me. He's fully invested in his transition from female to male, and the man who came to have his picture taken brought none of the self-protective masks I had expected. Instead he talks without hesitation about his life's journey, and his sense of where he is now. He invites you in, gives you everything you ask for, and asks for next to nothing in return. He's also an adept photographer, and understands the camera as a recording device that is neither friend nor foe, but will give back to you as much or more than you give it. He doesn't pose, he lets himself be; he doesn't hide his emotions, he lets them come through his face; he talks and listens and lets the session follow itself.
He has a comfortably intellectual approach to what he does -- leavened with sarcasm and wit. His appreciation for life is filtered through the knowledge that it can be changed, for the better or the worse, should needs be. Usually he knows himself to be a gay male, and when I asked him about why, he told me, "Men have a playfulness about them that I don't find in women as much. I love that men never stop being goofy. Being a man is about playacting. I don't know any man who isn't playing at being a man, in one way or another. Gender is performance, and one thing I've noticed since I started living full time as a male is that I didn't need to be on stage so much any more. My life has become a performance I can live in, and one I no longer need to escape."
When I asked him what thoughts our photographs sparked in him, he told me, "I don't think I expected to turn into Brad Pitt by any means, but somedays I'm dissatisfied with my body -- just like most queer men. I'm certainly more at home in it than I was before transition.... My body isn't perfect, but it's mine and it's what I made it. My body is more my purposed creation than most people's, and that gives me a deeper ownership than most people have. Sometimes in one picture or another, instead of seeing a delicate man (which is what I usually see), I'll see the fierce woman I could have been instead, and that's always sort of a shock. But, honestly, I don't know if I really think of myself as male or female most of the time. I just think of myself as Dan -- and I am what I am."
Comments