So the trans issue of Out Magazine has hit the stands, and looks to be pretty good. The photo shoot that I was almost a part of (alas!) is actually really good. I was a bit wary when I heard that I didn't 'fit the look' that the photographer was going for, because I know that to a lot of people, I don't look particularly "trans" anymore, in the sense that most people automatically read me as male, and I don't have a particularly androgynous or "boi" look. I was worried that the photographer was going for that look, because I think it would be a disservice to misrepresent transguys to the readership of Out as being uniformly androgynous/still-sort-of-dykey looking.
It'd be particularly problematic in Out magazine, I think, because so many LGB people think they know what the "trannyboi" thing is all about, with all the "dykes who want to be boys"- I'm still smarting from interactions I've had with Gay people who were so sure they they got it, that I was one of those boyish dykes. Anyway, I think it's pretty problematic that a lot of people have this androgynous/boi image in their heads when they think of "transguy" and it is limiting and unfortunate to the community at large when those sorts of images are the only ones presented.
At any rate, that isn't what ended up happening for this photoshoot, and I'm glad to see it. There is a very nicely diverse range of guys modeling in the shoot, and the photos are gorgeous.
Friday, March 21, 2008
tres fashionable
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2 comments:
while what you say here is true...
there was no mention of, for instance, Lou Sullivan, a gay FTM who was instrumental in building FTM International and who was also a gay man who passed on due to AIDS-related complications during the height of its spread (1991)...
the guys photographed were all a bit young, and still a bit early in transition. where were the ftm bears out there? and the guys who have been in the scene since those photographed were toddlers? are they not young and hip enough for "Out"? Or is it that gay trans men are only safe (and hot) to look at if you could still imagine them "female" or "androgynous"?
I also wish they would have stuck to one story or another-- either trans men who were integrated into and dating within the general gay male community, or trans men who were mostly interested in other trans men. I'm not too much for the term "transfags" myself, and I think these are actually two quite different places to be. not saying anything like "dating a trans man is not dating a real man", that's not what I mean. but in terms of community, and the issues you face, I think it's a different issue
Yeah, you're definitely right on the age thing!
I suspect a lot of it is the young/hip factor, and some of it is the personal aesthetics of the photographer. She chose not to use me as a model, though I feel like I'm in the same young/vaguely hipster visual category as most of those guys...maybe because I was not hip enough? Maybe because I just didn't fit her vision?
I hadn't read the "transfag" story, but I just did, and I think you bring up a pertinent point there, too! Hard to believe there isn't a single mention of Lou Sullivan...
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