Category: photos

Mariette Pathy Allen

Posted by helenboyd – May 6, 2013

Felicity by Mariette Pathy Allen

Slate’s just done a nice piece about Mariette Pathy Allen, who has been photographing members of the trans community for a long while. Her books were some of the first I saw and read, in fact.

This is one of my favorites of hers, and it’s of Felicity, who died a few years ago at the age of 102. She is sitting in front of a photo of her child self at the turn of the last century.

It was almost a rite of passage when she photographed us when we were at Fantasia Fair in Provincetown nearly a decade ago.

You can see more of her photography on her own website.

us at the #glaad awards

Posted by helenboyd – March 19, 2013

… and there’s this one, too, of me and my wife.

 

#glaadawards: John Leguizamo

Posted by helenboyd – March 18, 2013

I was a giant fan of his in the early 90s when “House of Buggin’” was on TV and I was maybe the only white girl living in Washington Heights. No, really.

I didn’t see To Wong Foo when it came out, believe it or not. Mostly I went to see him on stage, for Freak and Spic O Rama and Sexaholix, which I loved (even just that clip of it is NSFW).

And he was a totally nice guy, too.

But this PSA kinda gives you the lowdown.

My wife, in the meantime, had a lovely time chatting with his wife, and a good time was had by all.

(And John, if you happen to read this: I’m not the trans one. That was my version of funny.)

 

 

Happy 83rd Birthday, Mom!

Posted by helenboyd – February 17, 2013

mom dad 1952

 

They were Brooklyn kids, can you tell? Sweet and tough all at once.

(& Yes, we all still miss the big galoot in the photo, & we miss him a lot.)

They were in their early 20s when this one was taken, & they’re sitting on the stoop of a family home on Jerome Street, somewhere near Pitkin Avenue.

Photos by Alex Colby

Posted by helenboyd – February 15, 2013


My friend Alex takes really cool photos, like these two of Eli.

Find more here.

Us @ the Fair Wisconsin Education Fund Gala 2/9/13

Posted by helenboyd – February 11, 2013

I kinda love this one: me and my wife listening intently all fancied up.

Happy Halloween!

Posted by helenboyd – October 31, 2012

Us, 2012.

(about Medusa)

Rheims With Gender

Posted by helenboyd – June 27, 2012

I really am not sure what to think of this project. The idea was to photograph genders, as she did in the 80s, but somewhere along the way she discovered a few people who were genderqueer or trans*.

I love the idea but I also feel a little squeamish about the description of the project.

I think I’d prefer to hear their voices talking about how they live in their bodies and genders, and what they think of both.

 

1000 Words on the Wisconsin Protests

Posted by helenboyd – February 28, 2011

Kickstart: Transfigurations

Posted by helenboyd – January 21, 2011

Photographer Jana Marcus wants to turn her touring exhibit of photography of trans subjects into a book.

Donate if you like her work and/or if you’d like to own a copy. She needs just under $3k in a month. (Tell her Helen sent you! My thanks to Lannie Rose for the heads up.)

Face of the Day

Posted by helenboyd – December 5, 2010

On 12/1, Andrew Sullivan had a “Face of the Day” photo of a Pakistani hjira (although he called her a eunuch).

NOH8

Posted by helenboyd – April 17, 2010

A Lawrence student has been taking photographs of faculty, staff & students who wanted to participate in the NOH8 campaign, and yesterday, on our 12th anniversary, we decided to (finally) get ours taken. Here are some of the shots.

Photographer: Andrew Hawley

Trans Couples: Tink & B.

Posted by helenboyd – November 19, 2007

A Note from the Author:

Just a couple of things I want to say first. As one of the conditions for this is no names, I shall refer to my beloved in boy format as B*. This stands for Beloved. Another major character is X, which refers to the ex-wife. Finally, please excuse any pronoun confusion that may arise. I have tried to use “he” when referring to my dearest in “boy-mode,” and “she” when referring to same in “girlie-mode” (his own terms) but there are still times when I’m not sure which to use when.

Chapter 1: In which Tink sees photos.

I think I first fell in love when I saw her picture. The problem was, he belonged to somebody else- a friend of mine- and so I put it out of my mind.

I had known B* for a couple of years. He was going out with X, who was a friend of mine, and we became good friends ourselves, the kind that sees each in other in the pub, but with occasional deep and meaningful conversations between just the two if us. This was one of those times. Most of our other friends had retired early, and it was just the two of us in one of those dodgy local rock clubs that you seem to find in every city. He was entertaining me with pictures on his mobile phone. They were various models, singers and actresses all looking beautiful. I had the difficult task of putting names to the faces, and my knowledge of popular culture kept letting me down. He selected another image and presented it to me. Again I was clueless. She was slim and beautiful like all the rest, with lovely long, dark hair and dressed in black. I took a wild guess.
“Morticia Addams?” Apparently I was wrong and had to look again. “I have no idea, but whoever she is, she’s very pretty.”
“It’s me.”
“Wow!” I was stunned. I looked again, and I just couldn’t believe it. She was just amazing.
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New Piercing

Posted by helenboyd – October 22, 2007

I’m pleased as punch that I got a chance – right after my keynote at Fantasia Fair – not only to meet the Bearded Lady of Provincetown, but to get her to stretch my previous ear piercings so that I could wear these lovely new omegas I bought in her shop.

She tells me that I can make them bigger in a few months, too. Betty’s starting to worry.

If you’re coming here after Fantasia Fair, do remind me of the resources I said I would post. I know some (a lot) of them are probably about sex, so you might want to start by browsing the posts marked s.e.x. on this blog.

Trans Couples: Jeanne & Diana

Posted by helenboyd – October 20, 2007

There are not a lot of stories of successful transsexual / non-trans partner marriages. One recurring theme that I see is the need for pacing. Unfortunately too many trans-partners once they have their epiphany rush like a runaway freight train towards transition. Like most runaway freight trains these relationships typically end in destruction.

I’m not going to say that there is any one right way to transition. We all know that those paths are as unique as the individuals who tread them. However, if a couple is going to have any possibility of remaining intact each partner must be willing to recognize that compromises will be an integral part of the process.

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Five Questions With… Julia Serano

Posted by helenboyd – September 26, 2007

Julia Serano is a Bay Area slam-winning poet, author, performer, activist, & biologist. She organized the GenderEnders event from 2003 until last year; plays guitar, sings & writes lyrics for her band Bitesize, and oh – has a Ph.D. in biochemistry. We got to meet her when she was in town promoting her book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, recently published by Seal Press.

(1) I loved Whipping Girl, for starters. I think it’s a pivotal work for trans communities, especially in building trans pride. But you know I kept waiting for you to actually define “feminine” – maybe if not for all time, but in some way that I could understand what you meant by it specifically. Your “barrette Manifesto” came close, except that I see barrettes as childish, not feminine per se. So can you help the genderblind like myself? What is femininity? Can you be feminine without being girly?

In the next to last chapter of the book, “Putting the Feminine Back into Feminism,” I talk about that a bit, but I’ll try to define it here a little more clearly. I would say that femininity is a heterogeneous set of traits (some of which are cultural in origin, some biological, some psychological, and many are a combination thereof). The only thing that all feminine traits have in common is that they are typically associated with women in our culture. But they certainly aren’t exclusive to women, as many men and MTF spectrum transgender folks also express feminine traits (similarly, many women express masculine rather than feminine traits). I think most of us tend to express some combination of both feminine and masculine traits.

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Trans Couples: Natasha & Kyle

Posted by helenboyd – September 20, 2007

“Tranny, 24, slim attractive brunette, seeks fun loving friend for laughter and love.”

Hey, every story has to begin somewhere, and this one’s starting with that. It’s the text of a personals ad, submitted to a local free weekly paper. The sort of thing that’s three quarters real estate listings.

I can’t claim sole authorship for the ad. My ex wife and I penned it. We started with the vague notion that it was about time I started seeing people. She, after all, had hooked up with a new guy and was rapidly approaching domestic bliss. I’d been moping around for a while, but was now finally starting to re-emerge into the world; to get my shit together, as it were.

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Five Questions With… Marilyn Frank

Posted by helenboyd – August 29, 2007

Marilyn Frank has been sharing her story with wives at Fantasia Fair, IFGE and Tri-Ess seminars since 1982. She married her husband Len in 1954 and didn’t learn about the cross dressing until 1964, 10 years and 3 children later. At that time the only information available to her was Virginia Prince’s book The Transvestite and His Wife (now titled The Cross-dresser and His Wife) which she still finds to be one of the best books written.

1) First, Marilyn, I want to thank you on behalf of all the partners out there, for stepping up at a time when most of us weren’t even in high school yet. Without women like you & Peggy Rudd, the struggle to have partners’ issues recognized would be a lot more difficult. So what caused you to do the educating you did?

In the 1970’s I was a volunteer on a crisis intervention hot line in Morris County, NJ. When I became Director, I questioned some of the professionals in the group, who did not know much about cross dressing, but were able to assist me in finding people who did know. During this time we came upon Tri-Ess, and then in 1980 Len read the article in Playboy about Fantasia Fair and in 1981 we spent a few days at the Fair. I had many discussions with Ariadne Kane about the wives’ needs, and this brought Niela Miller to the Fair and that’s where my true education began. Since it had been a very lonely road not only for Len, but for me, I decided I would reach out to help others, so that’s when I started facilitating a wives group at our local Tri-Ess Chapter, which I did for for over 10 years. I also was instrumental in starting the wives’ program at the first IFGE Convention. My philosophy is that every time I help someone, I help myself. It’s true the marriage had its ups and downs where the cross dressing was concerned, but for us it was a small part of our overall marriage. We have always had good communication, enjoy many of the same things and do have a sense of humor (that helps).

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Five Questions With… Eli Clare

Posted by helenboyd – August 22, 2007

Eli Clare is the author of Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (South End Press, 1999) and has been widely published. He has walked across the United States for peace, coordinated a rape prevention program and co-organized the first-ever Queerness and Disability Conference. He works for the University of Vermont ‘s LGBTQA Services. We were lucky enough to meet him at a Translating Identity Conference at UVM, and I was happy to get the chance to talk to him about his new book, The Marrow’s Telling, which was recently published by HomoFactus Press.

(1) Why poetry?

As a writer, my first love is poetry. I think of it as a thug who grabbed me by the collar many years ago and whispered in my ear, “You’re coming with me.” I went willingly, not having any idea where poetry would take me or what it would demand. Twenty-five years later I find myself writing a mix of poetry and creative nonfiction; my first book, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, is a collection of essays, and my second book, The Marrow’s Telling: Words in Motion, which ought to be rolling off the press at any moment now, is a mix of poems and short prose pieces, not quite essays but more than prose poems.

Audre Lorde in her essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” writes of poetry as a “revelatory distillation of experience.” Poems demand both wildness/revelation–moments where language, sound, and rhythm, rather than thought or idea or analysis, take the lead–and discipline/distillation–the paring down to heart and bone. As a writer, a reader, an activist trying to make sense of the world, I need revelatory distillation.

I also know that in the United States too many of us have been taught to fear or avoid poetry, to feel bored or stupid in its presence. As an activist-poet, I always hope that my poems will be doors held wide open, roller coasters, parachutes opening above you, slow meandering rivers.

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Trans Couples: Adrien & Elena

Posted by helenboyd – August 20, 2007

I’m going to tell you the story of me, Adrien an FtM transman, and my partner, Elena a free-spirited, open-minded, adventurous, bi-sexual genetic woman. Y’all get ready, because some parts of it are scandalous. OK, here we go.

When Elena and I first met, I think it was late 1998, we just really hit it off, the way you do. The meeting that stood out was at the state fair, for a friend’s birthday. We were there with lots of friends and acquaintances and between us there was that magnetic energy – we were more interested in each other than anyone else and for reasons soon to be disclosed, this wasn’t entirely appropriate. Soon after that night at the fair, we met again at a party, a lesbian party. At this point on the timeline of my transition, I was just getting into the transgender vocabulary and ideas and was definitely starting to recognize myself as trans, but I was pre-everything with only some glimmerings that chest surgery might be something feasible for me. So, I was still living at home in the bosom of the lesbian community, but starting to scratch the itch that would bring my time there to its end. At present, we still have many gay and lesbian friends, but some have dropped out of our lives as well. Since the beginning of our relationship, we always found that we felt more aligned with our straight couple friends and I definitely do not call myself a lesbian any more. Elena’s relationship and sexual history includes men and women but at the time we met, she was identified as lesbian and had a female partner. But back to the story…

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