A Transgender Art Gallery

And there you have it, the piece of artwork that I alluded to in my first blog entry, which led to a near-beating and ironically spurred my decision to transition from male to female.

For those who didn't read the story and want the Coles Notes version, "Bodybag" first appeared in a number of online galleries in early 2005. Even though I was still not out to anyone else, I realized that I was transgendered, and described the piece (which is about as subtle as a jackhammer, in my opinion) as the experience of being transgendered. I had also had to state an artist location, and unwisely stated "Edmonton." This apparently inspired someone who was also located nearby to set out to track me down (I've since figured out how it was done and taken steps to avoid that in the future).

I'm filling in some of the blanks, because the three college-age men who were waiting for me when I arrived home from work were never caught. I can't get all the details. All I know was that when they were delivering an art critique to me in the form of a golf club and two fence boards, among the words "fag" and "pervert," someone said something about my gallery and a snide comment about bodybags.

I was lucky in that a neighbor was coming out into the alley and intervened before I could experience much more than a few bruises and a pain in my lower ribs that stayed with me for a few months. But the feral rage that I'd unexpectedly confronted really took its toll. I deleted nearly all of my online artwork, destroyed all the paper copies and original illustrations and retired the nickname under which I did graphic art. I restricted my travel to home, then work, then home again. I learned to look under the car as I approached it, to check in the back seat as I unlocked it, to never park where there were people nearby, to never stop anywhere but work and home. The cupboards were growing bare, because I had difficulty getting enough nerve to go shop for groceries. The gas tank would nearly be empty before I would finally give in and stop for gas. I went so far into the closet that I'm sure I must have been hidden under the carpet. What most stunned me is that I was attacked without even being otherwise visible as bisexual and transgendered. The solution, at first, was to try to become so hidden that I ultimately suffocated.

And that's when my reality hit the wall in a head-on collision. I realized that I couldn't live like that. I could either commit suicide, or finally come out with everything, and face whatever came at me. I arrived at the realization that I would rather live a year as a woman, rather than two or three more decades as a man. Actually, that's probably oversimplifying how dark those days became. But the title "Bodybag" could not have been more appropriate.

"Cybele" has been traditionally my most popular piece, and it wasn't until years after I'd done it that I really realized what I was trying to say with it.

A friend of mine once distinguished between the 9-to-5, paying the bills existence and her extracurricular romantic activities as a difference between "consciousness and life." The phrase stayed with me.

At the time of producing this piece, I was strongly questioning reality in my work, and pictured my employment activity (and just about everything that the man I was had to be involved in) as a kind of robotic function. I often joked that I didn't actually work, it was just the automaton that I'd sent there in my place. I'd written a free-verse poem that read:

"I

Am not me;

What you see

Is a figment

Of my imagination..."

I'd tried to find out how to go about transitioning when I was about 20 years old, but then eventually felt I had to give up. So I always knew in the back of my mind that I was transgendered, but even so, didn't realize until much later that the reason I personified myself in this piece as female was because it was when I could express myself as female that I truly felt alive.

A commission that was never paid for, "Creature" sort of married latex fetish with Gigerist angularity and (by implication) deformity.

Although not a common theme for me, this became a cult favorite of others, for a time.

Loosely inspired by conversations with a correspendent who expressed some transgender sense of self, as well as being involved in the leather (BDSM) community. The conversations were about a craft project that was in development, and I completed the image long before seeing any of the final result (consequently, it is very different).

Another expression of the self as female. In this case, expressing fragility.

Being transgendered was an isolating experience before the Internet. There were few, if any, that one could trust enough to talk to. There was a lot of confusion, pieces not fitting, no easy way to sort things out or find self-acceptance. I didn't hear the word "transvestite" in a context where I could figure out what it meant, until I was about 12 or so -- and even though I know now that it doesn't accurately describe me, it was still enough connection that I slunk off to my room and privately cried all night. I realized that if there was actually a word for it in the English language, then I wasn't the only one.

Even so, there was still always this feeling that what I was experiencing was a character defect, some personal flaw that I'd brought on myself... that there were still pieces missing.
After putting it all together, I was still so used to that fragile confusion that I always feared that "A Single Gust of Wind" could whip up and blow me all apart again.

I was close to coming out for the second time, at age 37, when I did "Cascade."

The idea of the woman's hair emerging from the portrait and becoming a reality was a kind of wishful thinking. The hiding of half her face reflected the kind of masked existence I still felt from trying to "pass" as a man in the everyday world.

And there was definitely an intentional use of color, this warm woman trapped in a cold world, but yearning to flow outward into something richer and more welcoming.

Another one that makes no effort to hide its message.

This is one of my earliest pieces, and I'm very unhappy with it. However, it still seems to be one of my most popular. I may have to revisit it one day.

One thing I am pleased with is the griminess of the gears, and the dankness of the colours.

The title, "My Own Pretty Hate Machine" comes from a line by Tori Amos in "Caught A Light Sneeze."

There are two versions of this image, one without text. The other image clearly shows a pre-operative transsexual woman, and also sold far more copies when available as a print.

The transgender community sometimes decries expressions of "drag" or "shemale" motifs as creating negative stereotypes about the community. I believe that there is a serious danger in doing so. It has to be remembered that people who expressed themselves in this way were among the first to be bold and visible, as well as remaining after many other transwomen transitioned and moved on to become stealth, in order to teach the new generations of girls how to tuck, apply makeup and "pass." Excluding them now would be very much like the injustice done to "butch/femme" lesbians who in the politically-correct '80s were ejected from the movement that they founded and gave strength to -- or like the injustice done to the transgender community when we participated in (and arguably even started) the Stonewall riots that touched off the Gay Pride movement, only to be excluded from it, left off legislation and treated like an embarassment and political liability, afterward.

In the 17 years between my first and second decisions to transition, I struggled with the belief that I would never be able to have GRS surgery. "Rockette" and other works that I did in an erotica environment were expressions of a period that I had to pass through, in which I had to examine partial transition and decide if I could live with that and/or feel that I could still be beautiful. I believe that "drag" and the "shemale" motif are very much a case of others similarily defining themselves, regardless of whether there is any pandering taking place.

The character's ram horns were a nod to my earliest "Freak" pieces (see below).

"Scarlet" happened at about the moment of my decision at 37 to transition.

It was a rare post-assault piece, and possibly happened because the render had already been done previously -- all I had to do was finally compose it.

She was my way of saying, "Here I am. Deal with it." Notice that the face is far less hidden than in "Cascade."

I do not have blue eyes, but brown does not look so good in spot-colour.

"Night Out" was originally done as an advertisement commissioned by a nightclub. I went for a composition effect, and it later won an online award for it.

The text is not necessary to read for the enjoyment of the piece, but the script about feeling sexy and that "it's moments like these that one feels wanted, intimate, alive...." (another reference to what was later expressed in "Cybele") betrays a little about what my subconscious was trying to tell me at the time.

"Alive" is scripted backwards, because life itself seemed to me to be that way.

This was the start of my "unreality" phase, if I recall correctly.

"Freak V" is one of my earliest pieces, and the only surviving one out of about 12 entitled "Freak."

Many of the images at this time showed a struggle with being different, sometimes showing shame and self-loathing; other times (as here) depicting the hate as coming from external sources.

The central figures in the "Freak" images were sometimes monstrous hybrids, although that is not visible in this one. The common character sported ram horns, bat wings, horse hooves and a forked tail, a vilification that I think was seen more from external sources than internal. In most of the images, the woman displayed an ironic kind of pride despite deformity.

Much of the artwork at this time was amateurish and lacking skill, which is ultimately why I purged them. I liked this one enough to keep, but it has had a tendency to be banned everywhere due to the crucifixion motif.

This is one of two images entitled "The Unknown Universe."

For many, it's the idea of a man trying to understand women.

For me, it was a yearning for the experience of growing up and living life as one.

In both interpretations, there is the sense that she is unattainable.

Everyone speculates about "Past Lives" at one time or another, even if they don't believe in them.

Here, all the lives -- displayed on a flowing swirl of cards or windows -- all express the protagonist being alternately male or female, as if the body is immaterial but the soul doesn't change.

It was perhaps a kind of "coping" with living a male life, maybe telling myself that this was just what I had to do, in order to pass on to the next (hopefully female) existence. Even so, the Priestess that the lives flow from is not Gaia, as many have speculated to me, but my own soul, so there was still a clear defining of self.

There is a touching moment in the foreign film, "Beautiful Boxer" in which the young Nong Toom asks the monk he is given to follow if it is possible that if he is good, kind and selfless in this life that he might receive his greatest wish (which we know is to be a girl) in the next life. The monk answers, if you are good and sincere enough, then "perhaps you will even achieve it in this one."

"The Undersea World of Jacqueline Rousseau" occurred at a time in which everything I was doing reflected a certain disillusion with reality, and played with gross distortions of it. "Night Out" initiated the phase, and "Cybele" was the pinnacle of it, although there were much stranger pieces at this time ("The Inane Asylum," "Arcana," "Paradigms Lost," not shown here).

Perhaps strangest of all was this one, commissioned by a woman in Texas, with only a small few requests about the composition. What resulted was a kind of fanciful "Adventures of Baron Munschausen" -style ridiculously tall-tale take on the work of Jacques Cousteau, which I considered turning into a series.

The rider and the seahorse were meant as a kind of dominance and submission theme -- partly due to the commissioner's request, and partly to create a binary framework. Even through the characters look very different, they are meant to represent the same person, and a kind of inner diversity. The subterranean environment was my way of expressing a look deep within. But despite the binary conception, making either character male just did not seem appropriate, both to the one who commissioned the piece and to myself.

Some of what I was saying in this piece is still a mystery to me. The horse symbolization, for example (the characters in the "Freak" series often sported horses' hooves as well -- I'm not clear about the significance).

I have deleted, destroyed and lost a number of my graphic files and works, including the high resolution version of this one. Strangely, this is the one I miss most.

The line, "Every Day Its Halloween," goes back to the best way that I could find to describe what it is like to be female, living in a male body.

"People think of transsexuals as dressing up and having surgery to become someone else, a kind of Halloween outing taken to the extreme," I once wrote in my weblog. "But it is every other day that is Halloween. It's about becoming tired of trying to pass as something you've been forced to be, by virtue of a body that doesn't feel like it belongs to you."

This will probably seem a strange one. It is also very dark, and depending on the brightness of your monitor, you might have difficulty viewing it.

During the 17 years between first and second attempts to transition (again, with the belief that I would never be able to have GRS surgery), one curious expression of coping with living somewhere between genders emerged. "Sweet Chastity" was an answer to that, in a motif which popped up in several pieces at that time.

For many transsexuals, myself included, we can be very uncomfortable with our bodies. For me, the pre-operative genitalia were (are) a "no fly zone," as it were. I became more and more uncomfortable with any kind of contact there, aside from whatever was necessary during the morning shower. It's indescribable -- an overwhelming feeling that something just isn't "right," there. Contact becomes an automatic mood-wrecker. So the idea of something preventing contact and use was surprisingly welcome, even if not understood, in the beginning.

The steel belt in this image is a 3D object modeled after the design of a real belt manufacturer. So yes, belts like this really do exist, from a number of manufacturers, both for male and female anatomy. This Neosteel belt design was selected because it specifically contains male anatomy but is designed to look as though it contains female anatomy.

As a kind of coping mechanism regarding the possibility of partial transition at this time, this symbolized a way to both hide the male anatomy and to restrict experiences of love and eroticism to female expressions, rather than male ones.

Metaphors of the mind work in mysterious ways.

I passed off "Back to Doing Things the Old Way" as a humourous jab at computer failure and other frustrating throwback experiences.

But the wringer was definitely life, and the figure passing through it was definitely the woman I was, trying to cope with it.

Of the remaining images that follow:

The hourglass figure in "ErotiKaleidoScope" is a complete optical illusion. The entire piece is composed from four reflections of a 3D render of a single booted leg, and then layered.

And "Edges of Twilight" is an emotive piece, of the passage of time and being lost in introspection.

This one was for all the sleepless nights and crying, wondering what was wrong with me or attempting to somehow bargain with a higher power to be able to become female -- or at least to make my brain and body match, whichever way I had to go.