Submission to the Dirty Show - part 1

Over the last few months, I've really gotten into the visual part of this exploration. The more pictures I took and the more I went back to look at them, the more I realized that there is a very clear iconography - a distinct visual language - that I've inherited and that comes through in these pictures. There are certain poses I just think are sexy. A turn of the head, a man's shirt over lingerie, arms and legs at certain angles.

I realize that my body isn't anything particularly interesting, but I also find that I get good response on the chat sites, so something is working. And I believe it's the poses themselves, more than the person in the poses.

With that in mind, I decided I would try to submit some of my pictures to "The Dirty Show".

That decision raised a million questions for me.

"WHO is submitting the pictures? Do I want to use my real name? Will I have to?"

"Do I tell them the artist and the model are the same person? What impact will that have?"

"Do I want soft or hard core pictures?"

"Should I leave the gender of the models ambiguous? Should I maybe STRESS the ambiguity?"

In the end, I decided that I wanted to make a statement about cross dressing. I decided to cluster the pictures in 3 different categories and assign a persona to each. At first, I wanted the names to be gender-ambiguous: Pat, Chris, Lee, names like that.

But then I thought it would be a stronger statement if I made at least one of them clearly a cross-dressed male. So, I decided on the names "Karl" - clearly male, "Chris"-gender-neutral, and "Leigh" - with the feminine spelling. But, I decided to try my best to leave it ambiguous which model in the picture was which.

On top of that, I wanted to create another persona, more clearly a cross-dresser who was serious about appearing feminine. The name I chose was Leila. (The name has roots and meaning in other projects of mine, but I don't want to write about that here.)

So, I spent weeks sifting through the pictures, deciding on materials and sizes, and finally came up with four submissions. I'll post those to the site soon. For now, I just wanted to write about the origin of the project and the reasons for the names.

More soon, I promise!