Incuding links to additional images
Childhood
The earliest roots of the self-imaging impulse displayed in this website are in pretty standard childhood dress-up and play-acting. Like many gay men, and probably more than a few non-gay men, I have memories of trying on my mother's clothes. For several months when I was six years old I indulged this proclivity with a girl playmate of my own age. Grace was a temporary refugee from then-British Guiana who had come, with her mother and three older sisters, to live with my family. Her oldest sister, a willowy sixteen -year-old, had a bona-fide ballet tutu that I itched to get into. It seemed to be a portal into a world of fantasy and transformation. I can't remember that I actually got to wear this pink tulle confection. I do remember that Grace was playing in it on the day that President Kennedy was assassinated.
Maybe it's odd that with this beginning, I haven't focused more on cross-dressing in these adult explorations, but it's all drag of a kind. Since I think of myself as a fairly femmy man, or at least an androgynous one, assuming guises more masculine than my usual persona contains a definite element of drag. Sometimes I describe myself as a male drag king.
Grace aside, many of my dress-up games as a child were private, which did set the tone for my more recent play: Generally I work on these character creations when I'm alone, take the pictures with my camera's self timer, and don't let anyone see me in my guises until I show them the pictures. My focus is often meditative and introspective, rather than showy and theatrical, much like that of a child very intent on solitary fantasy play.
Adolescence
Reaching what Cole Porter has described as "the charming age of puberty" my fantasy play persisted, but with a new emphasis. On one occasion, I was anticipating what it might be like to have heavier eyebrows in place of my wispy ones (a follicular development that never materialized) and used a piece of brown chalk to draw darker eyebrows on. The "masculinizing" effect was exciting -- even though at that point I felt great ambivalence about the prospect of becoming a man -- and I heightened it by adding a mustache, which gave me a tremendous charge. This discovery led to further face-painting sessions and some costume creations employing Indian-print bed spreads, tie-died sheets, and jewelry borrowed from my Mother's stash of hippie-ethnic baubles. The effect was of a kind of seminude raja. Being rather overweight as a teenager, (and painfully shy of exposing my body in public) I would swathe myself to display my ungainly form to best advantage in a full length mirror. These sessions --which only happened when I was home alone-- were both an expression of sexual impulse as well as of sexual identity.
College Years
I emerged from my shell a bit during college, when for the only time until then or since, I did some acting. My most notable achievement in this vein was perhaps my portrayal of all Seven Deadly Sins in a production of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. The quick changes from one outrageous personality to another were a harbinger of some of my recent photo studies. It is no surprise that -- as I protested to the director who at one point asked me to moderate my act a bit -- Lechery was my best sin.
The other significant development of these years were a few opportunities I had to model for my friend Margie, who was taking a photography course. In some of these photos I self-dramatized in fantasy getups, in others, I just camped it up. It was satisfying to get positive feedback on this from another person. This was my first opportunity to "make love to the camera" and I took to it almost addictively.
Margie recently reminded me that on showing one of these pictures to a male cousin of hers, he responded: "She is gorgeous!" Margie had to break it to him that I was a guy.
Though an English major and theology minor at Georgetown University, I did have a solo exhibition of my artwork sponsored by the fine arts department. At that point, and for several years to come, collage was my primary form of expression as a visual artist. Among the works at that one-man show was a self-portrait box collage that I had created from some of Margie's images and a few photo booth pictures, perhaps my first conscious attempt at self-portraiture.
The Early Period
A few years after college I borrowed my boyfriend's SLR 35mm camera and took a photography course myself. My instructor was rather unconventional in that for the first and final assignments of the course she had us take self-portraits. Some of my classmates appeared rather uncomfortable with this assignment; I, of course, took to it with glee, loved the results and continued the experimentation on my own.
While I never got really serious about photography (as a discerning eye can probably determine from assessing the technical quality of my pictures) I did get permanently hooked on self-imaging. When I went to buy my own camera, I considered a self-timer to be an essential feature; my second purchase after the camera itself was a tripod.
In the coming few years the most public manifestation of my self-imaging pursuits was a series of Valentines, which I sent out the way other people send Christmas cards. Some of these were unaltered photographs, others involved some collage elements and in more recent years my partner (a.k.a. Chameleon's Consort) got into the act.
It was in the course of these Valentine projects that I began experimenting with altering my appearance with makeup, wigs, and costumes (or lack thereof). In 1986 I discovered crepe hair, which is used in theatrical makeup for creating beards and mustaches. The result (I called him Raoul) amused and surprised my friends. The experience for me was artistically fulfilling and, frankly, erotic, since I had always had an almost fetishistic attraction to beards and bearded men but had never been able to grow decent facial hair of my own. Most significantly, I had the experience of manifesting and inhabiting a kind of alternative personality, which was simultaneously a dimension of myself and strangely "other." The experience was almost a kind of spiritual possession.
This led me to my early experimentations with character guises and the idea of using the images to express dimensions of an inner life or fantasy realm. In 1990, channeled these concepts into a triptych collage.
Digital and Beyond
In the last few years I have been approaching the self imaging more and more as an end in itself, investing an increasing amount of time in the creation of characters through makeup, props, costumes, and what lighting effects I can contrive with my limited resources and technical know-how. Wanting a forum to share these images beyond a limited circle of friends, I created this website, which I first posted in 1999. Having the site has been fun, and has afforded me a small sense of playing toward an audience. It's also enabled me to connect with other self-imagers, from Latvia to the U.K. to Arkansas, which has been both gratifying and edifying.
For Halloween of 2001, my work was featured on the cover and centerspread of D.C.'s queer entertainment weekly, MW. One way or another, I seem to be getting my 15 minutes of fame. Or, as the Consort tells me: "You've really hit the small time!"