Bill emerged from the bedroom naked except for that backward baseball cap, which must be covering a balding head, and I found his self-consciousness endearing. He turned off the overhead light, and under the lone lamp next to his brown corduroy sofa, he took off my clothes and beheld my body with wonder in his face. I felt beautiful then, just as I was, as he proceeded to take my penis into his mouth. That duality didn’t intimidate me, but I did close my eyes to feel instead of see, no images in my mind except for the dark ache of pleasure. When we reversed positions and he closed his eyes, I wondered what images of me blurred together in his mind.

Bill let me take pictures after as he lay sideways on his own couch, relaxed and trusting. I wondered how aware he was that his naked image, his languid eyes alluding to the aftermath of coitus, could someday end up in a gallery or a magazine. Maybe he figured he was far enough away from my world that no eyes he cared about would ever see him exhibited.

“You’re the perfect first experience,” he said as he dropped me off outside my apartment. “You’re you, but you’re also more beautiful than any woman I’ve been with.”

I spent hours turning Bill’s words over in my mind, as I continued to have more dalliances with a seemingly endless stream of men I met online, who became both the subjects of my photographs and instruments through which to gauge my womanhood. If I were more beautiful than any woman he’d ever been with, I wondered if this made me a woman in his mind. Where did my manhood end and my womanhood begin? These were questions that drove my subsequent dates, where I compulsively took pictures of myself and those men, but also asked bystanders to take pictures of us together, as I began to insist that I needed to see guys in public, so I could figure out whether I looked like any woman in pictures with them. I also asked the men themselves to take pictures of me, asked them to pose me how they wanted so I could understand the angles and mannerisms they found desirable. Though we chatted online, Bill and I never did get together again after his wife came back into town.