"I was extremely fortunate to be able to travel to Cuba, and be welcomed by transgender women, most of whom are HIV positive street workers," she said. In 2005, The Gender Frontier won the Lambda Literary Award for best Transgender/GenderQueer book and Allen became unofficially known as the official photographer of the transgendered.Īfter The Gender Frontier, Allen decided it was time to look outside the U.S.
Her next book, The Gender Frontier, published in 2003, captured this ripe moment in the history of LGBT rights - the evolution of political activism, the growing number of trans youth, as well as the protests and backlash. The 1990s marked the beginning of a new era for gender variant people and Allen was there to document the growing political movement. "The only representations of them were in porn shops, or medical papers, where they were presented as people with mental issues."
"It was the book that crossdressers, and other transgender people, had been looking for all their lives," Allen said. In 1990, Allen published Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them, a photography book documenting her decade of travels within this community and the people she met along the way. For Allen to ask crossdressers or trans people to step out so publicly was a matter of trust, which Allen was dedicated to gain. They lost their church communities if the church knew, and kept everything to do with their jobs secret."Īllen used her lens to reflect a more accurate reality - a positive, beautiful, even celebratory picture of a person who had finally found herself. There were many debates about telling their children, and if yes, at what age. When/if they told their wives, many marriages ended in divorce. "Some thought they were crazy and bad, guilty, unworthy.
"Many people I met at that time thought they were the only person in the world that was 'that way,'" Allen said.
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