Guys who wear dresses?!?!?!

9/10/2014

First post of this semester!

For my self directed project I will be concentrating on gender, in particular trans gender. I hope this will be a challenging topic and push my skills as an illustrator.

Before I decided to choose trans gender, I went through a bit of phase of not knowing what aspects of gender to investigate. My first choice was to do a reportage on the bouncers of Derby, i quickly realised I couldn't get past the idea that this would just be a set of pictures of men standing outside various nightclubs, so I ditched this idea. My second choice was to do a reportage on the local police force. After sending a letter to the chief constable outlining my idea, I waited with baited interest for his response. Unfortunately I'm still waiting for his response and time was running out for me to get started on the project.

This was around the time I started to think about trans gender rather than the female genders in the above examples, (my original idea). After a bit of research on the internet I found out about a club in Derby named, The Attic.

The Attic is a swingers and adult film club. On a Monday and Friday they have a T-Girls day. That is, transvestites come to the club and entertain the punters who turn up during the day.

I cautiously arranged a meeting with the manager if it would be alright to come along along and have a chat about my project.

And thus, this was the fateful day that I met Gillian, aka Graham.

She showed me round the club and to be honest I wasn't sure this was going to be an appropriate topic for an illustration project, although I was enlightened to what a 'Glory Hole' was and what went on in the room called 'The Maze'.

After chatting to Gillian however, the idea hit me. I wanted to do a reportage on her and any other T-Girls that would be interested. I wanted to get a glimpse into her life as a cross dresser and what her relationship was with The Attic, but also an understanding of her real self i.e. Graham.

Graham is married to a woman, his 2nd wife, whom I have yet to meet.

My initial idea is to do a series of illustrations of Gillian and another set of Graham, hopefully lifting the veil of this taboo subject.

Photos to follow!