Jessica Helfand, senior critic in graphic design at Yale University and author of Scrapbooks: An American History (2008), says, “When you feel an increased sense of vulnerability, what can you do to steel yourself against the inevitable tide of human suffering but to paste something in a book? It seems silly, but on the other hand, it's quite logical” (Gambino 2009).
Vulnerable certainly describes the people who, in the mid-twentieth century, created the contemporary LGBTQ+ community. One notable manifestation of that vulnerability are the scrapbooks of trans-related photographs and ephemera lovingly compiled by a trans woman named Denise in the 1960s and 1970s. Denise's scrapbooks were donated to the Louise Lawrence Transgender Archive (LLTA) by Taryn Gundling, professor of anthropology and transgender studies at William Paterson University. Denise gave them to Taryn sometime around 2008 at a support group meeting in central New Jersey. Denise, who was...
