Photography, Dress, and LGBTQ+ Life

My current research, outside of the Collaboratory oral history work, is a single-authored monograph that explores the relationship between photography, clothing, and LGBTQ+ life in 1945-2000, with a focus on the U.S. The questions animating this work include: how do photographs and clothing bring queer and trans subjects into being? How can photographs help us know and feel the queer and trans past? I would like to reach a broader audience with this project and am taking creative non-fiction writing classes to learn how to focus more on narrative, and less on narration—how to show the history, as well as tell it.

I haven’t yet settled on an overall structure for the book. One approach, which is a more academic one, would be to organize it around 5-6 chapters on topics such as: trans femininity, dress, and photography, 1950s-1960s (Louise Lawrence as focus); respectability politics, clothing, and homophile activism, 1950s-1960s; gay liberation in the 1970s; lesbian feminism and photography in the 1970s-1980s; trans masculinity and drag king cultures in the 1980s-1990s, etc. Another approach would focus on a series of iconic photographs, or those that should be iconic, and tell the stories behind their making, and the histories these images document and/or help to construct. Here, I would imagine about 10 shorter chapters.

Archival research so far has taken me to the Kinsey Institute; the NY Public Library; NYU Special Collections; UC Northridge; the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria; and Smith College.

I’m at the beginning stages of this project, focusing right now on Louise Lawrence, the creator of the first trans network in the U.S., and an important mentor for Alfred Kinsey in his later life research on trans femme cross dressers. I’ll continue to poke around archives and feel out what makes sense for the book’s structure before committing to a table of contents and a draft title. I hope to get to that stage by Fall 2025.