About

I love scrolling through the sweetness that is #t4t pictures. My eyes teary, chest full, the sense of something about myself—hard to articulate but still felt—being shared across distances. #T4t arrives via Craigslist, Tumblr, and via very long Twitter threads where couples, throuples, and polycules upload themselves posing cheek to cheek or arm in arm or in those awkward selfies where one is kissing the other while trying to take the shot. Unlike most images of love, desire, and relationships that populate our online connected worlds, these t4t shared images (of amateur quality at best) are composed of all trans folks. That’s right, trans for trans lovers. [...]
With a genealogical approach, in this essay I wish to cast my gaze backwards to examine this dilated form of trans for trans in the “old media” formats of the analogue photographs, drawings, and scrapbooks that one can find in archival holdings and which comprise that most precious project of personal collecting.