Boy Parts(42)

I’m almost disappointed by how brief the email is. It doesn’t require a long response, so I just send a boilerplate email.

Good Evening Dennis,

Of course I remember you. Attached is my address, as well as parking and public transport information. Are evenings and weekends best for you? If so – I am free all week.

Irina



I think he’ll chicken out. Suits always do.

I’ve lost steam. The bottle is empty, and a new one is uncorked before I break into the boxes.

At first glance, the pictures of Frank actually don’t stick out at all, except for being a tad more conservative than my output at the time.

You know how every uni has one of those lecturers. Like, they step in front of a PowerPoint presentation and open their mouth, and you can hear knickers dropping all over the lecture theatre.

That was Frank. Frank Steel. Not her real name, obviously. Christened Francesca Leigh, she dropped her much-loathed parents’ surname in favour of something she just liked the sound of, paired with her preferred masculine moniker.

She was from Manchester – a guest lecturer they wheeled in once or twice a term to tell us about feminist photography and Judith Butler and queer theory and shit. I have a distinct memory of her ‘Introduction to Michel Foucault’ lecture, writing ‘I’d let her Discipline and Punish me’ in my notebook. She’d occasionally come in for a few days to deliver one-to-one tutorials. You had to sign up for them – spots always went in a flash. I’d wanted one since first year but didn’t get one till January of second. I bragged, really rubbed it in to whoever would listen. Weird for me. Even me at twenty-one, and I was weird at twenty-one.

Frank had that effect, though. She was shorter than me but not short, she was slim and flat-chested, with solid, boyish shoulders. Very butch — not Stone Butch Blues butch, but getting there. She looked a bit like James Dean, and she leant into it hard. Always in Levi’s and biker boots and a leather jacket. I always thought she was too pretty to properly pull it off, though. She had these huge eyes, big and blue, with eyelashes so long they looked fake, like a doll. I’d try and get her to wear makeup, sometimes, but she’d always get annoyed with me. Frank is the only woman I regularly photographed.

She started it.

I went in for this tutorial. I remember it being first thing on a Tuesday morning, and I’d gotten up at seven a.m. to do my hair and makeup. She looked me up and down and said, ‘Christ, you’re tarted up for this, aren’t you?’

I was wearing this baby-blue summer dress, and a beehive, with my hair loose and curled. I had on that heavy sixties eye makeup I was obsessed with at the time. I was mortified – men don’t usually clock this shit, do they? But she did.

I told her I had a date that afternoon, and she told me I looked like Priscilla Presley on her wedding day, if she was ginger. I think I’d been aiming for more of a Brigitte Bardot thing, but I told her I’d take that.

She sort of negged me. She looked at What would you do to be my boyfriend? and told me it was an incredibly cruel piece of work. She said my other photographs had a pervy feel, and she was almost impressed that such a young woman would come out with something this nasty. She said, based on both the work and my writing around it, I had a contemptuous attitude towards my models. I clearly saw them as interchangeable, disposable objects. She asked me if I hated men, or if I liked men and hated that I liked them so much.

‘At the end of the day, Irene,’ she’d said, ‘and stop me if this is too personal… you’re not making art here; you’re making porn. And you know what? I think it’s interesting to see this kind of work from a young woman. But you could be so much better than this. Fresher. The world doesn’t need more nasty, voyeuristic photography, does it?’ And she went off on one for a bit about empathy – had I looked at Arbus or Mapplethorpe? Or any other photographers who looked at sexuality and strangers with a sensitive lens. Did I exclusively consume the photography of heterosexual men? Because that’s what it looked like to Frank.

‘Have you ever modelled, Irene?’ And then she snorted at herself. ‘I mean, look at you. Of course you have.’

I told her I hadn’t. She looked genuinely surprised. To this day, I have no idea if she was pulling my dick or not. I told her I’d done it casually, for friends, but no agencies would take me, that I was too big to be a normal model, but too skinny for plus size. There was probably glamour and fetish stuff I could do, but…

She waved her hand to stop me, apologising if she’d touched a nerve. I felt stupid.

‘I think it’d really help you empathise with your subjects if you did some more modelling yourself. In fact…’

I have her business card glued into my sketchbook. She took one out of her wallet and handed it to me. She told me about her latest project – photographing LGBT northerners transplanted to London. She needed more femmes. She assumed I was straight, from my photos, but told me with a wink, ‘What the gays don’t know won’t hurt them.’

I stuttered; I’d been with women, I just didn’t make a big deal about it. Frank cut me off and told me not to pull a muscle.

So, I turn up at her studio in Hackney about a week later, after bragging about it to anyone who’d listen. She told me to bring makeup but arrive barefaced. Bring a couple of my favourite outfits, but come in something basic. So, I did. I wore the only pair of jeans I owned at the time and a plain T-shirt. I felt like an absolute fucking clip, and rode the Overground with my head down. I didn’t turn heads, or get cat-called at all, and that put me in a foul mood. It’s annoying when it happens, but when you get used to it and it doesn’t happen – that feels worse.