All my life I have been surrounded by women.
One of my first shocks happened when I was 8 or 9 in Argentina during the annual carnival. I was with my mother in the subte (the Buenos Aires subway). In the car in front, I saw a woman’s bare back. I was confused as the woman turned her head on the side and it was clearly a man.
Perhaps soon after, when I was in colectivo (bus), a woman
got on with a little creature in a dress with all the hair shaved. I had always
connected little girls as having long hair. I did not know what to think.
My grandmother often told me of my Filipino great aunt
who rode horses and dressed as a man. That was her Victorian way of pointing out that she was a lesbian. Many years later my aunt and he partner visited us at our Kerrisdale home and charmed us. We were a tad sorry for her as her partner had the beginnings of dementia.
In my late 50s four years at St. Edward’s High School in Austin, the only hint we had of homosexuality happened when one of our classmates joined the cheerleaders. We thought he was effeminate. We soon found out that he was extra smart as without any girls in our all boy’s school, he was with all those beauties.
Somehow all these years in Vancouver having photographed gay men in the late 70s for a publication called Bi-Line, I have never had any thoughts about homosexuality as being out of the ordinary.
In one of those Bi-Line shoots I had coffee with a lovely lesbian and I thought to myself, “She is not interested in me as a man. This means I do not have to prove anything.” That felt refreshing.
Because both my mother and my Rosemary were feminists I had to learn to do stuff that women were supposed to do like hem my jeans, sew my buttons and cook.
Now in 2024, I am experiencing a transformation in how I look at women. I tell my family and friends that the only woman I am interested in is my Rosemary who is dead. I would like to send Chip Wilson to hell for having created those yoga pants. I am tired of tight buns and red-carpet cleavage. I long for a woman who wears a dress. When I see on the street I generally thank them and I smile.
My friends cannot understand this transformation as in my
files I have many photographs of women not wearing much or not wearing anything
at all. For a long time I wanted to define eroticism with my photographs. Eros (because I am 82?) bores me.
Now, (could this be a relief?), I simply want to define
that Platonic essence that makes a woman a woman. If I faced a trans woman, that
would not in any way affect my pursuit of that womanly essence. A trans woman would have it.
All the above brings me to these sandwiched (two negatives scanned together) of the extraordinarily beautiful Anastasia Milne who posed for me in a room of the Marble Arch Hotel sometime at the end of the last century.
There was something about her that captivated me. With this negative sandwich I perceive a transformation that approaches that essence.
She is a woman.