Loren Cameron, Fell Street, San Francisco, 1981. Photo taken by the author on a visit to Loren Rex Cameron Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University Library.

To yield in the archive is chaotic. One box dense and burdensome with all the wrong receipts, another brimming with false starts. Yet another: duplicates. Sometimes, all you get in a day is one sentence, a thought that won’t let you go until you find the company it wants to keep. For me, the sentence “I despaired to ever belong” hung around. It lay flat on the yellow surface of the legal pad where I wrote it with a longing hand. That was before Loren Rex Cameron died.

In the early 1990s, American artist and activist Loren Rex Cameron (1959–2022) turned to photography to document his experiences as a transsexual man. He made exhibitions, the photo book Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits (1996), and a modest living touring a slide presentation and lecture that archived a transgender rights movement that he helped bring into being. A self-taught artist, Cameron turned to photography to document the layered dimensions of his transition, radicalizing a visual language of transgender. “I began as a photographer the same way I became a man—by just taking my act to the streets and doing it and learning to pass in the process.”¹

In the preface to Body Alchemy, Cameron reflected on the ongoing process of becoming known to himself and others: “I despaired to ever belong.”² Like the sentence that tries to sum it up, Cameron’s process tripped over the past tense en route to a livable future. Even as Cameron was celebrated in his time, his work was and continues to be something of a political traffic jam in the social field of the visual—a form of representation that invites us to stop and think. For Cameron, photography was art form, technology, and practical inquiry: a visual instrument to understand and document his creation of a “beautiful new body image,” as he explains in Body Alchemy. In photography, he could remedy the condition of being unseen and make use of the bad feelings that were attached to that experience. Desire can hover over photography as genre. Images tease the real. We want photographs both to authenticate our experience and worry that they will, an impulse Cameron wrestled with as he deployed his camera to make sense of, track, and share his self-actualization.

An experience of being misread by a photographic encounter led Cameron to learn photography. In 1991, he posed for On Our Backs: The Magazine for the Adventurous Lesbian, whose very title riffed off the feminist publication Off Our Backs. On Our Backs was the first lesbian pornographic magazine and a radical response to the feminist sex wars of the 1980s. Honey Lee Cottrell and Kathleen Aid photographed Cameron for what the magazine proclaimed to be its first transgender story, “Some Girls Will Be Boys,” and published Cameron’s nude image under the pseudonym “Manx.” Even as the sex-positive, feminist porn outlet sought to subvert the objectifying male gaze by centering queer women’s bodily autonomy and pleasure, it failed to account for Cameron’s trans masculinity. In the end, it was the camera’s lens that fixed the misrecognition. As historian Susan Stryker, Cameron’s friend and sometimes photographic subject, put it: “Most non-transsexual photographers don’t seem to really see us—rather, they use us to investigate their own discomfort with what they make us represent.”³

Cameron took a single course in the basics of photography. He learned to print his own negatives and experimented with cameras and lenses as his budget allowed. He used a basic 35mm Pentax K1000 camera and medium format cameras. His photographs record the physical and psychic contours of his gender transformation. Body Alchemy is a personal account of this time: “What was initially a crude documentation of my own personal journey gradually evolved into an impassioned mission.”⁴ His nude self-portraits, taken in the style of physique pictorials, capture the precision of the physical form he sculpted with body building and gender-affirming healthcare. Images of Cameron injecting testosterone and the scars of his double mastectomy mark the labor, process, and care of his embodied self. In a 1996 artist statement, he wrote, “Being drawn to photography as a medium of expression seems only natural for me, given the emotional impact it has had on my life. It has been the most powerful teaching tool for me to date.”⁵ As “the first documentation of transsexual men from within our community,” Cameron imagined Body Alchemy as a form of pedagogy.⁶ He activated photography to self-identify in new and nuanced ways, looking to self-portraiture as a means of self and collective understanding.

Cameron was born in Pasadena in 1959 into one of California’s many esoteric isms: the occult. His aunt, artist Marjorie Cameron, was a devotee of Thelema, a religious order founded by occultist Aleister Crowley to produce a generation of “moon children” with sex-magic rituals. Marjorie Cameron made witchy, apocalyptic paintings, kept the company of L. Ron Hubbard and Kenneth Anger, and drove around Los Angeles in a hearse. A mysterious explosion ended her marriage to fellow Thelemite Jack Parsons, a rocket scientist who worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She remains an enduring cult icon. A family legacy of the occult shaped Loren Rex Cameron’s sense of embodiment as form and container, open to plasticity and transformation. His photo series God’s Will borrows directly from the Law of Thelema, and Body Alchemy—as the title suggests—emerges out of this mysticism.⁷ The body, for Cameron, was but one form of transit through the possible.

After his mother’s death in 1968, Cameron left California to live on his father’s farm in Dover, Arkansas. At age twelve, he wrote to the Janus Society, an early homophile organization and publisher of the homoerotic magazine Drum, asking for advice on transsexuality. Someone from the organization wrote back, assuring him it was both real and possible. This was an important and lasting affirmation for Cameron, but without family support or resources, he could not yet act. Homophobia and bullying forced Cameron to drop out of high school. He left home at age sixteen, was frequently unhoused, and worked blue-collar construction jobs to survive. In 1979, he bought a one-way bus ticket to San Francisco.

Cameron arrived West to an out gay culture in full swing, although Harvey Milk had just been murdered and the HIV/AIDS crisis was coming. San Francisco boasted multiple dyke scenes—working class, leather, yuppie, hippie. At first, Cameron identified as a lesbian-separatist and lived in a communal lesbian-separatist house on Fell Street. There were bars and periodicals, consciousness-raising groups and play parties, but Cameron hadn’t found his thing or his people. As a transsexual man, he endured rejection and a denial of his felt self. Once again he had to remake the possibility of home. This feeling of isolation would drive his art practice, which relentlessly generated community even as he often felt outside of it.

By 1985, Cameron began to identify as transsexual. He was at the first meetings of Female to Male International, a San Francisco support group turned newsletter and organization founded by self-taught archivist Lou Sullivan in 1986. As a gay transman, Sullivan was so invisible to the medical establishment’s emergent diagnostic schema that he evaded classification. He longed to be counted among the deviant and fought the doctors whose refusal to pathologize him was functionally an act of disappearance. Sullivan considered his death in 1991 of AIDS to be a perverse victory: “I took a certain pleasure in informing the gender clinic that even though their program told me I could not live as a Gay man, it looks like I’m going to die like one.”⁸ Among his activisms, Sullivan was a peer counselor for the Janus Society. Although perhaps he wasn’t literally on the other side of Cameron’s 1971 query postmarked from rural Arkansas, some mystical path connected these transmen in the expansive space-time of community.

Loren Cameron (third from the right) marching in the first openly transmasculine contingent at San Francisco pride, 1994. Photo taken by the author on a visit to Loren Rex Cameron Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University Library.

In 1994, Cameron marched in the first openly transmasculine contingent at San Francisco pride, carrying a handmade banner that read “FTM TRANS PRIDE.” Cameron annotated a snapshot of the march: “I made the banner and invited FTMs to join me.”⁹ Of this moment of embodied protest, Cameron recalled, “Each one of us had to take a stand about our identity.”¹⁰ It shares an affinity with his photographic practice—enduring the discomfort of taking up space against a lesbian and gay culture that sought to deny and diminish trans life.

Cameron’s archive is housed at the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University Library. It contains boxes of prints and negatives; correspondence with publishers, art galleries, and fans; his rigorous tour schedule and reviews; family photographs; and a few personal items. His papers have been collected alongside other historically significant materials about the queering of sex, sexuality, and gender, including the On Our Backs archive and personal papers of Cottrell. The proximity of Cameron’s archive to lesbian image culture reflects a tense commingling between transgender historiography and occlusion—a conceptual knotting felt experientially on the ground. We know that the conditions of collecting and the shaping forces of archival consolidation tend to mirror the networks, contacts, exclusions, and evolutions that compose a social and political world. In that way, it is both right and wrong when thing rub up against each other, just as they did before settling into storage. Affinity and proximity are erratic consorts in the archive. Our job is to ask questions about how things get sorted the way they do.

The Cameron quote I clung to, “I despaired to ever belong,” was not tucked away in the archive but rather hiding in plain sight in the pages of Body Alchemy, which was languishing on my own bookshelf. I cannot tell you when or where I purchased it. A guess might be the old Bluestockings on Allen Street in the East Village or the long defunct lesbian-feminist bookstore where I worked in Northampton in the late 1990s while a Women’s Studies (as it was called then) major at Smith College. I was always a collector and amateur archivist, anxiously chronicling the present. I can’t remember a time when Body Alchemy wasn’t on my bookshelf, crammed between Jack Halberstam and Del LaGrace Volcano’s The Drag King Book and Mariette Pathy Allen’s The Gender Frontier, waiting for me to pay attention.

Erupting in the activist wake of The Transexual Menace, Queer Nation, and ACT UP, self-determined trans representation like Body Alchemy both reflected and propelled a historic wave of trans aesthetic and cultural production. Cameron’s visual art and activism from the early 1990s to the late 2000s profoundly shaped autonomous and self-determined transgender representation in the United States. In chat rooms and print publications, at dance clubs and drag king performances, Cameron’s images sparked satellite scenes for predominantly white transmasculine cultural production. Body Alchemy won the inaugural award for Transgender Literature at Lambda Literary in 1997, in a field that included Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors. A photography book is an unusual choice for a literature award, and it suggests the difficulty of trans as genre, a spilling over of containment in the moment of its hesitant inclusion. In fact, the Lammy’s inclusion of a transgender category was another hard-fought battle against trans-exclusionary practices perpetrated by mainstream lesbian and gay politics, from the culture wars to the legislature.

In those days, images of trans people by trans people were virtually nonexistent in art and other contexts. Fetishistic and stigmatizing representation from the anthropological to the artistic—photographs in particular—have reinforced a cis-centric “medical gaze,” as theorist Ben Singer puts it, reifying the tacit naturalness of cis, able-bodied white subjectivity.¹¹ Kate Bornstein elaborates: “Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus among many others have all trained their lenses on the transgendered figure. Never have the transgendered seriously photographed their own. Not until Loren Cameron, that is.”¹² In medicine, textbooks historically have pathologized gender difference, using starkly lit, objectifying images to lend evidentiary weight to the diagnoses. While the violent capture of the medical gaze made the camera an agent of sexological authority, Cameron deployed his camera to deepen the visual textures of trans life. He fought to wrest control of his image and cultivate an oppositional stance to the gaze—be it male, medical, or lesbian.

Cameron embodied this stance in the many works in which he directly addressed the camera. For Singer, the power of this move is in the moment the “photographic subject looks back, and talks back” so that “the viewer cannot hide behind the fetishistic unidirectionality of their look. Their privilege of seeing without themselves being seen has been subverted.”¹³ Cameron’s self-teachings bore out as expressions of self-identity in action. He used a remote shutter-release bulb to take his self-portraits, a practical technique for someone who primarily worked alone. He chose to make this assistive technological device visible in the resulting photographs because, he explained, “Its presence serves as a metaphor: I am creating my own image alone, an act that reflects the transsexual experience as well.”¹⁴ Cameron made tangible that which often eludes the camera’s eye: the felt and processual labor of the hand in self-fashioning and becoming.

Sometimes, the urgency of the 1990s feels like a long time ago—our hirstories so close yet so distant.¹⁵ As readers of the near past, how can we tune into the complexity of identity as it scales history and politics? When Cameron reached for his camera to give evidence of his experience, to borrow feminist philosopher Joan Scott’s formulation, image culture was not synonymous with digital surveillance, social media, and leaky data. In her endorsement for Cameron’s first exhibition, Our Visions, Our Voices: Transsexual Portaits and Nudes in 1994, Kate Bornstein, wrote “Our Visions, Our Voices needs to be adapted for a book or even a CD-ROM.”¹⁶ Her enthusiasm for widely circulating nude photographs of trans people to home users on personal computers suggests the techno-political risks of vulnerability and exposure walked apace with an urgent need for radically affirming and accessible images of trans life—a need that has evolved yet persists.

In many things, Cameron was an early adopter. In 2001, he self-published an electronic book, Man Tool, an intimate chronicle of gender affirming surgeries. Man Tool owes its form to the newsletters and classified ads that made queer publications platforms for both recording and sustaining community. It also harnessed the internet as a community resource and mutual aid field, anticipating the trans message boards and YouTube confessionals that, in the intervening decades, have eclipsed “Do It Together” subcultural networks.

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Today, anyone holding a cell phone has a camera in their hand. Communication and documentation have become blissfully, disturbingly seamless. Cameron taught himself to use a camera to resolve a crisis of visibility—at a time when crisis meant not enough. He fought against the erasure of trans people, describing transmen as “virtually invisible,” and he called out gay and lesbian culture for perpetuating the exclusion. Our Visions, Our Voices, Cameron’s first photo exhibition at 848 Community Space in San Francisco in 1994, spoke to the politics of his practice. He annotated his photographs with narratives drawn from his photographic subjects, including their personal accounts and reflections on their image. “When I photograph transsexuals, men or women, I ask about their histories. I know they have labored to arrive at the place where I’ve found them.”¹⁷ Even as the photograph stabilizes a moment in time to construct a truth-effect, Cameron’s practice resisted the notion of representation as a closed-circuit. He visualized the technology, annotated the image, and amplified the space-time of community. So many people attended the opening reception for Our Visions, Our Voices that a second opening had to be scheduled, a testament to the desire to gather and witness trans representation.

With Our Visions, Our Voices and later Body Alchemy, Cameron produced the foundation for a lecture and slideshow that he toured around the country—from urban centers and art spaces to college towns in rural America—educating the public about trans history and culture. Cameron cobbled together a living this way for many years, along with gig work as a massage therapist and personal trainer. Without stable employment and housing, the emotionally taxing labor of educating a hostile public became unsustainable. There was no separating Cameron—his physical self, his spiritual being—from the work. After all, it was his literal body image on the line. Jules Gill-Peterson describes the violence of extraction demanded of trans cultural producers this way: “Something that mixes self-censorship through silence with the arterial hardening that comes from a lifetime of being let down.”¹⁸ In time, Cameron withdrew from public life.

News of his suicide in November 2022 at age 63 confirmed a fear we didn’t dare speak aloud. I had been looking for Cameron for a while, at first helping out my dear friend Ariel Goldberg, a photo historian and critic whose curatorial ethics in organizing Images on which to build, 1970s–1990s prompted the search.¹⁹ A busybody and devoted gossip, I got to work. Postmodern porn star Annie Sprinkle hadn’t crossed paths with Cameron, despite belonging to the same loosely organized queer and feminist sex-positive community in San Francisco; she called photographer Leon Mostovoy, who said it had been a long time. Over and over, the story was the same. Cameron’s close friend, the activist and author Jamison Green, told me they used to talk a lot about burnout—the effort and exhaustion, the resentment and abandonment. I called Cameron on the telephone, but the number was disconnected. Susan Stryker, a close friend of his and mentor of mine, knocked on the door of his last known address in North Berkeley. No one answered. She checked death records at the county clerk. Nothing. He was still alive then. It was a messy adventure of queer telephone. A friend at my Twelve-Step meeting said he might know somebody who might know something. A colleague who had gone to graduate school in Berkeley said Cameron was her massage therapist. Another person remembered running into him at the grocery store. I was enjoying the search, the excuse it gave me to ask everyone, “Do you know who Loren Cameron is?” Young people mostly hadn’t heard of him, but many knew his style of trans photography—an idealized white masculinity—because the 1990s are trending. Cameron’s legacy persists today as an expansion of artistic possibilities for those wrangling the marginal into the livable.

For too long I let my own copy of Body Alchemy collect dust. I now see that I neglected Cameron’s photographs, thinking them not serious enough, not properly artwork, but merely representation. I filed Cameron’s photographs away as a necessary if aesthetically meh phase in all political projects. It is wrong to parse photographic concept and function this way, to separate the image into either being or doing. While this binary may be a boring thought exercise—to categorize work as either artistic or political—it is also a dangerous one. Cameron’s images deployed representation like a weapon, as a means to dismantle a cis-centric gaze. The camera was his social and political instrument to reflect onto others his desire to be seen and known. His intention was definitive: “I wanted the world to see us.”²⁰

Our job is to reckon with image culture, its purpose and place in our movements. I now understand that Cameron’s practice constituted a set of image-actions that allows us to see the imbrication of photographic being and doing. Holding apart and taking together art and technology, he embodied a spiritual and felt practice, crafting an image for us to see and keep an eye on. In making a picture, he conjured a world.

Jeanne Vaccaro is Assistant Professor of Transgender Studies and Museum Studies at the University of Kansas. She is co-founder of the NYC Trans Oral History Project and co-curator, with Jennifer Doyle, of the exhibition Scientia Sexualis, opening at ICA LA in 2024. Vaccaro thanks Ariel Goldberg and Susan Stryker for friendship in and out of the archive.