Gloria, 70, Chicago, IL, 2016, from the portfolio To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults
Interview Text
I identify myself as a female. I’ve always identified myself as a female. From a little tot, I knew who I was then, you know? And people say, “How do you, at an early age, know who you are?” I’ve always felt that way so that’s who I am. The men in my family, they were sort of apprehensive about me, but the women were strong. They wore the pants in my family. My mother would tell them, “This is your child, this is our baby, and you’re going to love my baby because you love me.” And that’s the way it was.
My grandmother, my mother’s mother, that woman was amazing. She was there for me all the time. And my mother. My mother was a Jet centerfold model, and a dancer, and she was beautiful. I came up in a household with beautiful women. My great aunt Fannie lived to be 103. She taught school in slavery days when they weren’t supposed to learn how to read. But she went on and she taught school, she became a teacher, and I would go to her house and sit up in her house and we would talk. She would give me words of wisdom. She would tell me, “Baby, you are you and don’t let nobody change you.” And I would sit there and look at her in amazement.
The inspiration for the charm school, I would have to say, was between my grandmother, my mother, and my aunt Fannie. All these women were amazing. They wore gloves, slips up under their dresses. My grandmother would teach me how to sit down at a table, how to break bread. Being raised by these amazing women and learning the techniques to life, that gave me the inspiration when I went to the Center on Halsted and saw these wild women, you know, trans young people, acting a fool and cutting up, and I thought, “Well, maybe they need some help.” And they appreciated me so they came up with the name Momma Gloria. And I said, “Ok, I accept that.” That was them being respectful, calling me their mother. They’ll say, “Oh yeah, this is my gay mother, Momma Gloria.”
I’m a senior citizen. I made it to seventy and a lot of them won’t make it, they won’t make it at all. Because most of them die from drugs, from sexual disease or they’re murdered. They ask me questions like, “Well, Momma Gloria, how did you get through?” I say, “I got through with love from my family and the grace of God.” That’s how I got through. You have to have some stability and you have to have some kind of class, some charm about yourself. I never was in the closet. The only time I was in the closet was to go in there and pick out a dress and come out of the closet and put it on.
