 Queer Babes is a portrait project that I've been working on that celebrates the complex identities of queer and transgender people. I began the project by photographing my own friends and lovers in the Bay Area when I was deep into my own gender transition. It was a way for me to admire the people around me that gave me the strength to stick with my transition. The project has since expanded to include new acquaintances and new people that I hadn't met until I encountered them for the project. And not everyone is transgender. There are cisgendered people also in the project, but everybody has a critical relationship to gender identity and to ideals of beauty. And I'm really pleased to be here today with y'all because lately I've been showing my work a lot in straight spaces. And the way that my work has been interpreted in those spaces has been rubbing me a little bit the wrong way. But it's also been helping me to figure out how to enunciate more clearly the investments of my project, and that's what I want to talk with you about tonight. Curators and writers sometimes insist on framing my photographs as images of pioneering individuals who dare to live beyond the gender binary, carving out a hopeful future for our world. They believe that my work is intended to do the political work of fighting for acceptance for queer and transgender people. But this is actually not what Queer Babes is about. For people outside of the queer community, I can see how the tenderness and the intimacy of the portraits seems to announce the fashionable news that we are humans deserving of respect and good lives. Of course we are humans deserving of good lives. That is not actually news to us. Even though it's true that marginalized communities intervening in the field of representation has been an important part of struggles for civil rights and I have a great respect for that tradition of photography. This is actually not the intention of the Queer Babes project. I don't actually make these photographs for straight people to look at us and to accept us. I make the images for us, for us to look at each other, for us to adore each other, and for us to adore ourselves. The images are tender and intimate because wouldn't anybody want to portray their own cherished beloved family in the most honoring light? I do a lot of research about the history of portraiture and family photography. And I believe that my photographs should be understood more as a part of a long tradition of sitting for one's formal portrait. Now that we live in a world of selfies and scrolling through hundreds of pictures a day, we have come a long way from this tradition of portraiture. Dressing up, going to the portrait studio, putting everything that we would like to say about ourselves, our identity, our status, our being into one very carefully considered portrait. My photographs are more like this. To really find the meaning of the photographs, we would actually have to talk to each individual and discover why it was that they decided to sit for a portrait with me. And they do talk to them. We spend hours making each of these images and we get to know each other and we talk about all sorts of things during those hours. In those conversations, I haven't really gotten the sense that anyone sits in front of my camera in order to win acceptance of straight people or to fight for civil rights. They don't always share their specific reasons with me, but I often get the feeling that people have some really personal and heartfelt reasons for wanting a portrait of themselves. Being in front of a camera is incredibly exposing and even terrifying. One has to have a good reason to do it. I think there's a hope that the camera will allow us to be seen for who we are or for who we hope to become. Who we are and who we hope to become, these are things that are part of the process of forming one's identity and maintaining it, especially against the restrictive ideals of mainstream society. Recently, I photographed Emma a couple of weeks ago, so her picture is not here yet, but I wanted to share her experience. Emma is becoming a nurse practitioner and she wanted her portrait to express her continued commitment to her radical queerness while she was joining a very conservative profession. She saw her portrait not as a way to gain acceptance, but as a way to make a vow to the queer community to never be acceptable, to never assimilate into mainstream norms in order to succeed. Emma's intentions are more in line with my own ideas about the queer babes project. I want to show the sense of rightness and strength that results from a profound rejection of gender ideals that normally shape the appearance of the body in society. This rejection forms a norm-defying stance that sets our sights beyond the goals of civil rights and acceptance. It is a queer refusal to assimilate that is at the core of the project. My subjects claim their attractive status as queer babes on the basis of the very physical characteristics that are devalued by mainstream notions of beauty and desirability. This project claims a space of allure and desire firmly outside of normal concepts of beauty. We reject the mandate that our bodies be decipherable. We embrace folds of fat, body hair, stubble, dark skin, wandering eyes, crooked teeth, as traits of enviable good looks. We don't want to fit in, but we do want to be allowed to live and to thrive. We discard the cultural myth that we must be legible and acceptable in order to live well. For us, being illegible and unacceptable are the conditions under which living well begins.