The Patricia & Frost Art Museum on the F.I.U. Campus in Miami is the first stop for an exhibit of stunning captivating work from artist Jess T. Dugan. To Survive On This Shore consists of a series of powerful images of transgender and gender non-conforming older adults, but what really impacts the portraits is the very raw interviews with each individual who have shared their very compelling stories with Brown School Assistant Professor Vanessa Fabbre. Together the images and the subjects relating their history, touches your very core.
Dugan whose work explores issues of identity, gender, sexuality, and community travelled throughout the US with Fabbre seeking a wide range of subjects that represented so many socio-economic aspects of being queer seniors. The combined experiences of the people they selected contained a vast amount of different and unique experiences, but collectively they provide a very authentic history of so many aspects of the transgender and genderqueer community.
What is so wonderfully apparent in all the portraits that even if the subject had been subjected to a particularly rough time because of their gender identity, there is such a glorious sense of pride knowing that despite everything, they had made the right choice.
Giving seniors a voice like this does us all such a great service as we all need to know and accept our community’s history, if we are to have a future that we can be proud off too.
Jess T. Dugan and Vanessa Fabbre: To Survive on This Shore Until April 28th 2019 https://frost.fiu.edu/index.html
N.B. The book of this Project can be purchased at AMAZON and the Exhibition will be in Provincetown from May 30th- June 30th 2019 At PAAM https://www.paam.org/exhibitions/
I think people talk in either/or terms, right? Before transition and after. But to me, it’s really development. I’m proud of both lives. I’m proud of both me’s, if you see what I’m saying. And I feel it has been a remarkable thing to have happened to a person. I’m grateful. You can’t just become a woman with a knife or a pill or anything like that. It takes a whole combination in a sequence, in a formation. You’ve got this time span, it’s a learning experience, it’s a little bit of everything. It’s what I call going through the internship phase, stumbling through the adolescent phase, then going through the maturity phase. Bobbi, 83, Detroit, MI, 2014
I also experienced losses in my work life. I was a strategic account manager at a major corporation. I had big accounts like Walmart and Boeing. I was in the big leagues. When I decided to transition, I did it very carefully through Human Resources. I had it all planned out with management and thought I’d be supported. But even though I did it by the book, not long after I transitioned, there was a great deal of movement away from me. Almost immediately the people in my group, who were all men except for one, formed this wall. I remember one day very specifically when we were sitting in a morning meeting and the VP was looking around and said, “Does anyone want any bagels, donuts?” And, of course, everybody raises their hand. Then he goes, “Stephanie, how about you run over to Einstein’s and pick us up some?” And there I was, a high-level manager, being treated totally differently after I transitioned. Stephanie, 64, St. Louis, MO, 2014
Cheryl: When we got married, I never imagined that someday my husband would become my wife. Right from the start, SueZie confided that she identified as female on the inside, but transition never appeared to be an option. But, I never had a problem with her wearing lingerie. You know, it’s just clothes. I fell in love with the person inside, and what’s on the outside is more about what they feel comfortable with. In 2009, when she said she wanted to transition, I admit I wasn’t very accepting. It was more like “What’s going to happen to the kids and what are people going to think?” At that time we weren’t strong enough to risk losing everything, including each other. SueZie, 51, and Cheryl, 55, Valrico, FL, 2015
I knew that I might lose family, that people might reject me. But I weighed that, and I thought, “If I lose everything and everybody, but I keep me, that’s all that matters. That’s all that matters, because I’m not going to live a life that I’m not happy in, for other people. Why? It doesn’t make any sense.” So I put my money down and took my chances. My family accepted me. They came to accept me, and I’ve had kids around me, I’ve gone to all the weddings, all the funerals, and it’s a situation that everybody just thinks of me as who I am. It’s not even an issue anymore. “Oh, you mean her? Oh, that’s just Auntie.” Duchess Milan, 69, Los Angeles, CA, 2017
Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older AdultPhotographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older AdultMy partner, Eleanor, was a big time activist. She was one of the most outspoken people in our community. But she had a huge stroke when she was fifty-six and from there on I was either taking care of her or she was in a nursing home where she was horribly abused. I mean, horribly abused. Eleanor had bedsores from lack of care and neglect at the nursing home and this woman would come in and take this rag and wipe between Eleanor’s legs while screaming at her, “This is for Joy, isn’t it? This is for Joy. You’re going to hell! You should repent or you are going to hell when you die. You’re going to burn in hell, you pervert.” Joy is my previous name and how the nursing home knew me. So that is what they inflicted on her, they basically rubbed the bacteria from her anus and genital area into her bedsores. Jay, 59, New York, NY, 2015
We created the first trans ministry in our church and I sat on the “mother board” with the other mothers. One day, mother Gladys asked me to come and sit down there with them. And after we had our little meeting, after church, Miss Gladys went to do something in the office and then they surrounded me and said, “What gives you the right to be here on this mothers’ board? We don’t understand it.” I said, “Because I’m a mother to the ones you can’t love. The ones that you cannot be a mother to, that you throw out on the street every day. Those are my children. The ones you throw away.” I said, “That’s why I’m here.” You could hear a pin drop, nobody said nothing. They went on and accepted me and said, “Come on girl, sit down.” Dee Dee Ngozi, 55, Atlanta, GA, 2016
In the Hispanic community, you know, a lot of cisgender men, they don’t take trans very easy. So that’s why I just make sure I’m careful. It’s really a safety issue. I don’t trust too much. Being Hispanic, I have to be more masculine. You know, like I gotta really make sure, you can’t be that soft or whatever. It’s like, “Boom, masculinity!” with some Hispanics. I was married for fifteen years, but she passed away ten years ago. Her family didn’t know I’m trans. When they found out, they wanted us to break up. It was kind of rocky, but we worked it out for fifteen years. Now I’m in a relationship for the first time in ten years. We’ve been going out for three years now. Talking about marriage, but I don’t know yet. Sukie, 59, New York, NY, 2016
I have a unique situation wherein I have a long-term relationship with Sky, a long-term relationship with a woman who identifies as queer, and an SM relationship with another man, who I’ve been with for ten years. Sky and I have been together for twenty-five years, and my girlfriend and I have been together for fifteen years. Sky’s the first person I met who I could see growing old with, and that’s one of the reasons we’ve stayed together. We’re able to talk to each other and confide in each other. And the fact that we’re polyamorous; the freedom to have other relationships has made our relationship stronger. Sky, 64, and Mike, 55, Palm Springs, CA
I’m happy now. I have a good relationship with what’s left of my family. I wish I had known when I was younger that I wasn’t doing anybody in my family or my circle of friends – or myself – any favors by not being aggressive and asserting who I was from the get-go. I felt like I could be fluid enough to drift in and drift out of other peoples’ lives, and be who they were comfortable with me being, and then leave them and go somewhere else and be myself. I think that was a mistake. I felt isolated as a child because there were only certain people I could be myself around, and I feel like I carried that with me through adulthood. So, I can be myself when I’m by myself, or with a few close friends, but I feel like I should’ve been able to be myself with my family a little bit more and with a larger group of people, but I just didn’t trust them enough to do it. It wasn’t a risk that I felt like taking and I wish I had. Justin Vivian, 54, New York, NY, 2017
I’m a fifty-five year old woman of trans experience and I’m a woman of color. And my life is amazing. I am the eighth child of twenty-three. I remember back, starting at the age of three, my mother used to buy these Tonka trucks. Santa Claus would bring all the little toys and I always got the boy toys and I was not fond of them. I always played with the teapots and the baby dolls, and so she always knew, always had an inclination, and she just waited for confirmation. I had sisters that were older than me and they had birth control pills that they never took. As early as twelve, I swallowed the pills and got my little baby bruises. Caprice, 55, Chicago, IL, 2015
All Images and Text © Jess T Dugan and Vanessa Fabbre
