Wire in my wallow...
A large part of this post was reused and rewritten for a post-hiatus piece written in 2009.
I've rather been wallowing in the past in the last few days for which I'm sorry, though I hope the results of my unearthing of the old photos was diverting.
I have (in common, I think, with a lot of transgender people) a complex relationship with my self image. The way I've insistently and obsessively photographed myself since the mid-nineties is, let's face it a bit weird.
Course, there's more than a cursory element of creative exploration about the process, but I sometimes wonder if beyond that is a kernel of something a bit stranger and, dare I say, sicker?
Sometimes, looking back over the galleries of photos of myself that I appear to have accumulated, there is an part of me that is reminded of those classic movie and TV scenes of the revelation of the stalker's room, plastered with voyeuristic shots of their intended target.
Friends ask me amusedly why I do what I do - not the dressing up, I think most enlightened people realise that there's no point in trying to explain the transvestic impulse (there certainly isn't enough time in the day) - but why the photos? And why so many?
And why shouldn't they ask - most would consider such humongous levels of vanity humorous, with more than a nod in the direction of the deranged box. And it is vanity of a monstrous kind. But why is it that I (and many other trannies) am so bloody vain?
Maybe I am deranged?
It's probably too late to change really. And of course, flickr is paradise for the deranged obsessive, obviously. We encounter them daily and the tools pander to the obsessive's need to classify and categorise, with the sets, collections, geotagging, archival tools like the EXIF/dating system.
Despite my misgivings though, I've of course really enjoyed finding the old photos and tracing my development and the physical and stylistic changes I've gone through in the last decade or so.
Our collecting of our images helps us validate our desired self images. Comments we receive help build on those wobbly foundations of validation.
Trannies are insecure individuals, prone to self doubt and long, dark nights of soul searching, purging and worse.
The doubt comes from the fundamental mismatch we feel between our self and our image. The images help us heal those mismatches in our heads. I'm not a hand-wringing, tortured, insecure, guilt-ridden tranny - I'm pretty happy in my skin - but even I can see that the avalanche of photos is a barrier against self-doubt. A wall built of yearning to keep the fear at bay.
No wonder the wall around my wallow gets bigger all the time. It's almost like that picture that Dorian Gray used to keep in his attic. But in reverse. As I decay, the pictures remain pristine, colourful, shiny and mysterious, the way I want to perceive myself.
Now what was The Picture of Dorian Grey a parable about?
Oh yeah. Vanity :)
So I've finished posting my old photos on flickr. The last one I posted, of me rather bizzarely, if coyly sucking my thumb (God knows what possessed me), was taken in April 1999.
See, Six Inch Killaz had (unknown to us at the time) just played our last gig. It was our one and only gig as a four piece after sacking Jasmine for well documented reasons.
The band drifted apart and we eventually called it a day couple of months afterwards.
I have trouble sleeping after getting home from playing gigs. I'm often awake, enervated and full of nervous energy (and booze) and I have developed the bizarre, narcissistic habit, which persists today, of pointing the camera drunkenly at myself and taking shots like this one.
This night was when that habit commenced.
That's the end of the stroll down memory lane. I hope I didn't outstay my welcome.
What going through these memories has done is made me want to dress again after a very long time.
So I think I will...
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