Lindsay Morris: You Are You

(Click to enlarge.)

The first proper blog post is always the hardest, or so they say. So many things to write about, where would you start... I decided to present to you one of my favourite projects of the past few months, Lindsay Morris' You Are You.

You Are You is about with a summer camp for non-gender-conforming boys in the US. There, far away from their kindergartens and schools, from bullying and oppression, the boys can wear dresses, put on make-up and "be themselves" in the sheltered environment of their families and nature. Morris documented the camp over the course of three years and took a number of lovely images, floating dresses, kids on an improvised runway, and a lot of bright pink included. 

The pictures have been included prominently in an excellent article in the New York Times magazine, titled What's So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress?. The title already points out: You Are You is not necessarily about transgender children - after all, before puberty gender and sexuality are hardly set in stone. It's more about the fluidity of gender, the courage of some children and their parents not to conform to society's ideas of male and female - and to what these binary opposites are characterised by. You Are You is a fantasy, the utopia of a world in which little boys aren't harassed for heart-shaped necklaces and pink dresses, in which being queer is being accepted, in which, maybe, gender doesn't matter any longer.

Of course, Morris' project is terribly romantic, almost corny - look at that light, the warm colours, that touch of princess life in the waving rose tulle - but then, why shouldn't it be? There are enough bleak, depressing stories about LGBT youth out there, even the most positive of them with that ever so subtle hint of sadness, with a sense of not-belonging. Morris herself states on Slate's Photo Blog: "I'm saying this is a new story. This is not a tragedy." In its own special way, the romanticism is beautiful - just like the depicted kids.

Morris' project inadvertently addresses another, old problem - the whole gender bending only ever catches attention when it is boys dressing as girls. Why do we need a special summer camp for boys who like dresses but none for girls who like cars? Why are drag queens all over the media, but no drag kings? I'd love to see a good photo project on women dressing as men but alas, I haven't found one yet. And hell yes, I wish the world would be a bit more like in Lindsay Morris' summer camp. I'll keep dreaming, looking at her pictures again and again.

All pictures by Lindsay Morris