Morale Boosting Nudity for Turbulent Times

So. How are you? 

Is the answer “exhausted from the firehose of bad news that is pointed at my face at all times, blasing my orifices to bones and reminding me that half the country would murder me if my public death lowered gas prices by a half-cent?” 

Hard same, bestie, which is why we’re not doing an essay this week. There will be works in the coming weeks that have plenty of venom. At this moment, the world feels venomous enough for myself and the people I love, and so I have decided to provide some counterprogramming in the form of my naked ass. My photos usually cost money, but these ones are free because I feel like sharing them. You're welcome.

I took these photos in my living room. I made a weird light rig out of an overhead bulb and a color-changing LED sunrise lamp from my partner’s bedside table. Shoutout to the Leather Archives, where I’ve been able to attend a couple cheap photography classes and learn how light sources actually work. I’m still shooting with an old Android because I don’t have anything else, but I’m learning how to use the unreliable capture and weird focus issues to my advantage. The limitations of cheap technology can become a hallmark of your work, if you lean into it.

Maybe someday I’ll have a real camera. Maybe someday I’ll have a passport with the right name and gender marker on the front page. “Someday” doesn’t mean much when the world is on fire.

So I pile living room furniture into unsteady tripods and set the burst timer on my shitty little phone camera, hoping to capture a fleeting moment in my evolution that will never happen again. A hesitant flipper on land, a bone curling into an opposable thumb.

I took these particular photos because I realized it had been a long time since I’d photographed myself, and much has changed. I am bigger and hairier and more myself. I am reading books about composition and colors when I am not reading books about historical genocide. I’m learning how to make the art I want to make, and I am learning how to make myself too. I share this process with the world because I know I am not the only one experiencing it, and seeing naked trans folks make weird art helped me understand what was possible for me back when I was an ignorant girl in Ohio.

As a result of my efforts, I am not an ignorant girl from Ohio anymore. I am a cool Chicago dude now, a fact that still amazes me when I stop to consider it. The punctuated equilibrium of hormones and life events have finally guided me to a place where i can delight in my naked body again. I invite you to join me in that.

There is a part of me that wants to provide a list of caveats about these photos, things I see as flaws and imperfections that I need to claim before someone weaponizes them against me. But the truth is that I do not want to give you an apology for my body, because there are so many people with a body like mine who feel compelled to apologize for it every day. We should not have to apologize to anyone. You can look at me and find me beautiful, and you can find people like me beautiful too. If you cannot, it is time to fix your heart or die. It’s not my problem, either way.

What I would like to provide for you, instead of an apology, is this:

It is a Spring late afternoon in Chicago. The sun is insistently radiating light and heat from beneath the usual blanket of lakeside cold-weather clouds still refusing to be burnt away. College radio is blasting from a tinny Bluetooth speaker, zig-zagging wildly and enjoyably from Brian Eno to Whitney Houston in the span of seconds. Below the music I can hear the comfortable noises of home; the murmur of my partner’s voice chatting with a coworker over Zoom, my girlfriend’s feet pounding up the stairs to feed an insistently meowling cat, our cantankerous HVAC rumbling itself to sleep. The air smells like cheap sandalwood incense and a neighbor’s charcoal barbeque. I can feel the plastic click and slide of keys under my index fingers, scooting my photos around my laptop screen and thrilling me with what I can finally see. 

Everything is warm and still and safe. I have never felt quite this good in my entire life, even perched as I am in the eye of six different hurricanes. In this precise moment, I am exactly where I want to be, doing exactly what I want to do, and becoming the sort of man I was always meant to be. Someday is nothing in the face of this now.