I
suppose I have told the same old story countless
times now. I mean, every transsexual man
I've ever met tells the same story: "I never
felt like a girl; I played with boys' toys and
liked boys' games, etc." Then a rehash about
pubescent anxiety, how your body betrays you and
you begin to develop very clever coping
mechanisms to manage the stress. Like bad
posture to hide your budding breasts and big
boots and baggy shirts--and lesbianism, if
you're lucky.
That was my story, anyway. I figured out
early on that I had somehow gotten a square peg,
and I wasn't too happy about it. Right from the
start this skin of mine just didn't fit. Maybe
it was because Mom was going through a divorce
when she carried me in her womb. Maybe she was
having some survival issues, causing her to put
me awash in testosterone.
Or maybe it was those G.I. Joes I played
with. Did you ever have one? They had the best
uniforms. Lots of outfits to choose from--and
boots, don't forget the boots. Big guns and
grenades and cool scars. (Scars. I see a real
early influence here.) Or it could be that I
noticed I always got KP duty and was never
promoted above the rank of private when I played
Army with the boys on my block. Girls were never
allowed to go into combat.
I don't really know what felt so out of
whack, and I don't think I really care. I guess
there are as many reasons why a transsexual is
transsexual as there are people in the world.
All that matters is that it's my body and I can
do what I want with it.
It's too bad that my days in Lesbiana had to
come to an end. After about ten years of Butch
Camp, I graduated to Boy World, big time. All of
a sudden, one year I woke up and realized that
the boobs had to go. What's more, I wanted a
beard too. And a nice, hard, lean body to go
with it. A penis? I would settle for an oversize
clitoris; it was cheaper, and it works
better.
I guess that meant I wanted to be a man. But
that felt so alien in the beginning of my
change. I was still very socialized as Butch
Lesbian. (That isn't the same as Female. Do ya
get it?) I felt like a boy in the first few
years, and I looked like one too: lots of
pimples and a breaking voice, a bad temper and a
randy disposition. I remember one occasion when
I was shopping for clothes with my girlfriend
Isabella. She was High Femme (I was still into
femmes in those days), a few inches taller, and
a little older than I was. We were in the boys'
clothing department at Macy's, which was the
only place I could find shirts to fit me.
(Besides, I was in my second adolescence.) The
salesperson looked at Isabella and then at me
and said, "Oh, is that your son?" I was
mortified. I was 29 years old; Isabella was 36.
People used to think she was some kind of
pervert or something. She was a real trooper,
stayed with me through teenage zits,
disapproving lesbians, and hetero assumptions.
Life was pretty weird in those first years of
transition, but it was exciting as well.
It was then that I picked up a camera for the
first time. Around '93, I guess. I was taking
really bad snapshots of myself to send to
friends and family. You know, the kind that are
sort of out of focus and lop off the top of your
head because you're holding the camera at arms
length. I really got it that visuals were
essential to help the folks back home keep up
with me as I went through this strange body
transformation, this chemical and surgical
reinvention of self. That's when I realized that
visuals were useful in helping everybody else
understand it too.
I knew I had to photograph us. Transsexuals,
I mean. Us--that's what was new and different
about the idea. I was going to be a photographer
who was like them. I believed that we needed
that, to see images of ourselves by one of us
whose eye through the lens looked for a
reflection. Self-portraiture. An eye that didn't
see anything odd or freakish. An eye that looked
for beauty.
I began meeting more transsexual people,
listening to their stories of change, and I
started taking their pictures. I took more
photos of myself and watched eagerly as the
hormones, body building, and chest surgery
sculpted my female form more and more into a
male one. I was proud of what I saw, in me and
in them. We all had one thing in common, if
nothing else: We were hell-bent on becoming the
people we believed ourselves to be. We had to;
we didn't feel it was a matter of choice.
By 1996 my book Body Alchemy was
published. It's a collection of photographs that
will show you just about everything you ever
wanted to know about female-to-male bodies and
is chock-full of proud, handsome trans men. I
have tried to represent some measure of my
community in an effort to provide bolstering and
informative images with text for both trans and
nontrans readers. I feel it has been a needed
contribution in a new wave of transsexual
activism, very much a part of a burgeoning
movement that began about the time I was
figuring out what an f-stop was.
Finally, nearly 12 years later, I am feeling
just fine. I look in the mirror, and I see the
man I've worked so hard to grow up to be. My
body has that muscular and hard build like those
comic book heroes that I always wanted to look
like. (Well, maybe not quite as big, especially
in the crotch. Did you ever notice how big they
look in those tights?) My beard, at long last,
has filled in, while my head begins to bald, and
my photography career goes skipping down its
path. I've got a delicious pup of a girlfriend
(partner) who, ironically (or maybe not so
ironically), is a very handsome butch, indeed.
Everybody thinks that Stephanie is my son--or my
boy--and that I am some kind of old pervert
queer. I tell you, being a man can be a very
confusing thing sometimes.
Loren's work has appeared in Artweek
and in his book Body
Alchemy, published by Cleis Press.
