What a find…...!

A guy happened upon a box of old photos at a flea market, and from it came what looks like a marvellous book.

To think, I was a confused little transgendered kid in the redneck suburbs of Southern California, when these trannies were crossdressing in the Catskills!

...These men had one foot in the mainstream and the other in the margins,” Mr. Hill said the other day. “I’m fascinated by that position and their paradox, which is that the strict gender roles of the time were both the source of their anxiety and pain, and also the key to escaping that pain.”

What still moves Murray Moss, the impresario behind Moss the store, about the images in the book is their ordinariness. “You think of man dressed as woman and you think extremes: it’s kabuki, Elizabethan theater, Lady Macbeth,” he said. “It’s also sexual. But these aren’t sexual photos. The idea that they formed a secret society just to be ... ordinary. It’s like a mirror held up to convention. It’s not what you would expect. It’s also not pathetic. Everybody looks so happy.”

The NYT is its usual mix of poignancy and clueless in this article, as in these few sentences in the lede.

In those pre-Judith Butler, pre-Phil Donahue days, when gender was more tightly tethered to biology, these men’s “gender migrations,” or “gender dysphoria,” as the sociologists began to call cross-dressing, might cost them their marriages, their jobs, their freedom.

Does the writer really think the same is no longer true, especially in George Bush's America?!

Ah, wouldn't the world be amazed to find out who, among their heterosexual male friends and acquaintances, cross dresses!

I’d like to get this book.

Complete story here.