If you turn the corner in my memory palace, you’ll find the Portrait Room, just a few steps beyond the Closet. Here are icons of a metamorphosis that I’ve quietly undertaken, living out their afterlives. Inside and outside my life in photographs, I’m in the process of becoming someone formerly-known-as. In the studio, I cloaked my obstinate, shifting body in histories of saran wrap and shiny brocade to keep it from distracting me from longer-term concerns. I can’t say these pictures solve my problem with gender dysphoria, or my yearning to be Out, so much as they enact and memorialize it in archival prints and gilded frames. The walls and tapestries might whisper secrets to you: “hot-glue tears aren’t really a metaphor,” they say. So too, might the accessory-laden pictured noble dead: “my false lashes are terribly uncomfortable,” “these boxers are plucked from a forgotten poem in some public bathroom,” “this packing tape is not just for show…” I pray you [[don't]] take their grievances to heart!

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