Lesbian Feminists and A Young Trans Woman, Too: A Reflection on Donna Gottshalk’s Brave, Beautiful Outlaws Exhibit From Afar
by Jess St. Louis
This morning, I was scrolling through my Facebook feed, and came across a friend sharing an article about a new photography exhibition in New York City, Donna Gottshalk’s Brave, Beautiful Outlaws at the Leslie — Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. As I looked further, the exhibit has also been covered by the New York Times, and W Magazine — and through each article, I can see more of the collection. I won’t be able to see the exhibit because I don’t live in New York City. I live in Greensboro North Carolina, a beautiful and complicated mid-size city in the middle of the state.
I immediately clicked on the article, because I love beautiful photos, lesbians, history. But what made me come more alive, excitedly texting friends of mine, was the fact that this collection and show didn’t only document lesbian feminist history and cisgender lesbian women who are like and not like me and moments in history I have read about but not seen. It includes photos of Myla, Donna’s sister, who came out as a gay man and transitioned to a woman who got older. To see lesbian feminism, the 70’s, and at least one trans woman in the same paragraph, same description, feels rare, and slightly unheard of. But it’s not, and it wasn’t. Some of our people chose us back.
I look at the photos and see parts of myself in them, see the legacy that I have come from that I never participated in but clearly shape me. Resistance to feminisms and feminist leaders that work to exclude us and exclude our people, whether we’re the lavender menace or lesbian trans, butch, or femme women looking to be supported by our comrades and sisters and communities. The fashion and ways we hold our bodies, button ups and denim jackets, beautiful necklaces and rings, post up against walls, the self portraits of ourselves on top of our beds fully clothed in a t-shirt and jeans. I know that look. I’ve done that myself. In millenial Instagram lingo, we might call that self portrait a thirst trap.
But to see those lesbians along with these photos of a young trans woman, Donna’s sister Myla before she transitioned strikes me. There are two so far that I have found amongst the articles. Myla is different than me, curly hair, skinny but see parts of my story that aren’t in the stories of the cis lesbians, too.
The first one, she is naked and her body looks a little despondent and tightly wound, as she leans against the corners a room, where the walls come together. Her head and shoulder are arched over, her face is flat towards the ground and there is a checked out look to her face and her hand is covers her genitals. It makes me think of dysphoria and shame, of bodies that we inhabit but that we struggle with. It makes me think of my relationship with my trans girl clit, my strapless. How I often want to hide it away.
The other one, Myla is wearing someone named Mary’s dress. It is a simple, dark colored dress, with a floral ribbon in the middle. She is laying on a couch with a white lace covering, her body and arms are open and wider. She looks somewhat relaxed and somewhat tense, offering a little bit of a side eye to Donna’s lens. I know that look too, the flat chest and but the ways our bodies can open up when our bodies inhabit clothing that feels like it fits better than the ones we grew up wearing and were socialized to wear. My first dress was a mostly purple with some green fabric underneath and between the breasts elastic cotton dress. It was similarly simple and was one of the first things I enjoyed looking at myself in.
But alongside the beauty and the magic, there is grief in these photos too. Myla passed away from an AIDS-related illness in her 40’s. I am over half her age. She explained more to Kerry Manders, the author of the New York Times article about the exhibition:
The photos are tinged with mourning and mystery. She’s been holding their memory for decades, “fiercely protective” and unwilling to “subject them to scrutiny, judgment and abuse” from the outside world.
“Understand, people didn’t care about them or my pictures of them back in the day,” she said. “I had to.”* Seeing her own death on the horizon, she doesn’t want her queer comrades to die with her. This exhibition invites us to fathom their beauty, their bravery, as well as her love.
“These people were all very dear to me,” she said. “And they were beautiful. These pictures are the only memorial some of these people will ever have.”
*Emphasis mine.
The tradition of queer grief is long. We have too many loved ones that we have loved and lost way too young to suicide, the AIDS epidemic, poverty, prisons and jails, anti-queer and trans and misogynist and racist hate violence. But there is the grief also for the loss of stories, the loss of feeling connected to legacies and histories that are ours, too — that have either been erased or told only one story about, as if lesbian history and art and culture is inherently transmisogynistic. That story is simply not true, even if transmisogynist and anti-trans feminists continue to argue otherwise, that lesbian culture is just for cis women and is under attack by girls like us.
To know that photos of trans women like Myla’s are in the exhibition, alongside a lesbian feminist history that is often ignored, means so much to me as a feminist lesbian trans woman. It’s an important reminder of the power of framing: which people put in the frame, and who’s often left out; which stories make it in, which ones are left out. And I am both glad and heartbroken for this memorial, that we get to see these stories, because they remind me that we are not alone, that there is another past and future for us.
