As soon as I returned to New York after a month in Cuba, I thought only about getting back on a plane. I didn’t want to lose the momentum of travel and discovery or sink into the trap of a comfortable life. But I trudged through two more years of paying my dues in New York, visiting Cuba again in 1998 and 1999 to satisfy my wanderlust.
In 1999 Bebeto came to me with an idea. In the past year there had been a series of murders in the transgender-prostitute community in New York. Rather than order an investigation into the crimes, the AP had heard that Mayor Giuliani had decided the community wasn’t worth the city’s resources. An AP reporter wanted to explore the idea that transgender prostitutes were society’s throwaways. It was my first long-term assignment, my first opportunity for a real photo-essay.
Transgender prostitutes in the Meatpacking District in New York, 1999.
In the beginning, the reporter and I ventured out together in the Meatpacking District to make inroads into the seemingly impenetrable world of transgender prostitutes. We traveled with a local organization that distributed condoms and information on sexually transmitted diseases on the neighborhood’s busiest weekend nights. I never took out my camera. Once we made some initial contacts as a team, I decided to venture out on my own, and for weeks I went out almost every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night—often without my cameras—and hung around the Meatpacking District like a groupie, trying to gain the women’s trust. I was the only white girl among a tribe of Latinas, blacks, and Asians, and they were skeptical of my intentions. Finally a woman named Kima, who walked the then desolate streets in front of what is now the fashionable Pastis restaurant, invited me to her apartment in the Bronx projects. “Be there around midnight. You can hang out with us and then come downtown to work with us.” I asked if I could bring my cameras. She agreed.
I showed up at Kima’s with chocolate-chip cookies and milk. I’m not sure what I was thinking, bringing chocolate-chip cookies and milk to an apartment full of transgender prostitutes who lived on drugs, alcohol, and fast food—but I didn’t want to arrive empty-handed, and I didn’t think it was ethical to bring booze. (I later learned otherwise.) A handful of women were there, injecting themselves with black-market hormones, drinking, dancing, getting made up. They let me shoot whatever I wanted. For five months I spent almost every weekend with Kima, Lala, Angel, and Josie. As I gained their trust, my photographs became more intimate; time allowed me to see things I hadn’t before, like when a tough guy who looked as though he had strutted out of a Snoop Dogg video would gently comb his transgender girlfriend’s hair in the dim light of a street lamp while she waited for her early morning clients.
One night I went on my first date in months, with a musician who played the saxophone in a Cuban band. Around 1 a.m. he walked me home along Christopher Street to the corner of West Tenth Street. We looked down at our feet and kicked our heels around in circles as we made meaningless conversation. Finally he kissed me.
Minutes had gone by when I sensed a group of people too close to us. I opened my eyes and saw shadows dancing around our feet.
“IT’S THE PHOTO LADY!”
It was Kima and Lala and Charisse and Angel—an entire posse of the trannies. They screamed and laughed, and they got closer and closer to me and the poor musician. “Woohoo, you go, girl!”
The musician was confused: “What did you say you did for a living again?”
“I’m a photographer.”
“And these are your friends?”
“Yes, I guess.”
The kiss ended there.
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WHEN IN THE BEGINNING OF 2000 I got an invitation to go to India with a family friend—a business professor who was taking his students abroad for a field study that had virtually nothing to do with any of the subjects I was interested in photographing—I considered it an opportunity to leave New York for good. I asked the Associated Press if they thought I might be able to get work in South Asia, and they responded encouragingly. At the time, I had no idea if I would really stay. But at that point in my life I didn’t think that far in advance; I didn’t wring my hands over seemingly enormous decisions. I just saw the door and went through it. That was the case with moving to India. It would turn out to be the last time I lived in the United States.
Indian men bathing on the streets of Calcutta at dawn, 2000.
CHAPTER 2
How Many Children Do You Have?