So if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you might know that this weekend I had my first gallery opening last night!

SideQuest Gallery in Oakland is doing a Femme 4Ever show for the next month, and I was asked to be a part of it. I'm still fresh to photographing people, but I really wanting to use this as an opportunity to remind folks that femme is more than white, cis, curvy women, but a huge variety of folks. I also contributed to a femme zine by Sonya Mann which you can see here.

Many of my femme inspirations when I was young weren't white cis women, but androgynous dandies, genderfucking men, and people playing with drag in different ways. Yet I feel a lot of femme representation I've come across (anywhere except tumblr) can be pretty narrow. While masculinity seems to be fine for people to play with, femmeness is still kind of pushed aside, scorned, made fun of and made invisible.

I had hoped for it to be a 12 image project initially with femmes I adore like Mattie Brice, Toni Rocca, Virgie Tovar, Jetta Rae, and Cinnamon Maxxine, but it was a busy couple of months and hard to schedule. I still have my fingers crossed though, and I'm so grateful to the models I did get to photograph so far for sharing of themselves and their time! Once I've expanded this, my hope is to show it as a collection again, maybe even at the same gallery.

Each photo is displayed with a written statement from the model about what femme means to them. You can see the images and the statements at the end of this post.

The framed images are for sale and will be available for pickup after May 11th, when the show is over. They're $60 each - $12 goes to the gallery, $12 goes to me to cover the frames/printing, and the rest goes to the models as a thank you for their initially unpaid labour (they also got all the images from the shoot for their use). 8X10 signed prints will also be available for $10 each plus shipping and handling.

If you're interested in a framed image, please contact SideQuest Gallery at sidequestgallery@gmail.com.

Want a print? Email me at miss.kitty.stryker@gmail.com.

Are you femme identified, in the Bay, and want to be a part of this project? Also feel free to email me at the above address!

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