Once we parted ways, I asked my classmate if Ben always looked that way and she said yes, pretty much, a piece of knowledge I wrestled with. I didn’t even know the possibility of Ben existed, someone who challenged the boundary between perception and reality in terms of gender. That dormant memory awakened in me, of walking down the street late at night in a black velvet dress, of being approached by men in a car and pretending to be, no, being a woman to escape. I’d dressed up as a girl, played a girl, been mistaken for a girl since, but Ben gave off the aura of a young woman in public, all the time, a possibility I never considered until I met him.

I knew about transgender women like Christine Jorgensen and Renée Richards, had even seen that trans Playboy model interviewed on a talk show, maybe on Donahue. But I didn’t recognize myself in those women because, apart from being white, they all seemed to deny their past in a way that didn’t resonate with me. Meeting Ben was the first time I considered the possibility of exploring what it meant to be perceived as a woman without needing to be one, to embody womanhood without needing to relinquish manhood.

Ben buzzed my studio the following Thursday night.

“Did you get here okay?”

“It was fine,” he replied. “I can always take care of myself.” I heard a hint of Southern in his husky twang, which made me think of him as a modern version of Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire.

“I hope no one bothered you,” I said as I asked him to stand on a spot while I set up my camera. South Boston was not the safest part of town, and there were a couple of Irish bars between my studio and the T station.

“I got bothered just how I wanted.”

I asked him whether he told guys who hit on him that he was a boy, which seemed strange to say, as I looked through my viewfinder and was reminded of his impossibly slim, almost prepubescent figure, his doe eyes, his full lips, all enhanced with a healthy dose of makeup.

“I don’t pretend to be anything I’m not.”

I set up a bright yellow backdrop and began to photograph him; the background complemented the large pink flower he wore in his hair, which in turn matched his bright pink lipstick. Ben told me how men approached him on the street all the time, and he always introduced himself as Ben. If he thought a guy was cute, Ben would invite him to do something together.

“It’s fun to turn them,” he said into my lens. “You should try it sometime.”