Acknowledgements

This was a complex project that required the help and guidance of many people. We would first like to thank the people who made our first exhibition – TransTrans in Calgary in June 2016 – possible. The early archival research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Calgary provided funds to mount the exhibit through a program for interdisciplinary symposia that took place at the 2016 Canadian Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Reed College in Portland, Oregon, also supported some of the research for the exhibition. We would particularly like to thank Nancy Janovicek, who was Annette Timm’s partner in applying for the symposium funding and in organizing the “Spaces of Gender and Sexual Security” workshop, of which TransTrans was a component. The director and associate directors of the Kinsey Institute’s Library and Special Collections, Liana Zhou and Shawn Wilson, were incredibly helpful and supportive, and we were particularly grateful that they trusted us to display rare objects from their collection in our exhibition in Calgary. We are also very lucky to have had the unfailing support of the curators of the Nickle Galleries at the University of Calgary, Christine Sowiak and Michele Hardy. They were there from the very early brainstorming stages of our exhibition, and Michele Hardy expertly shepherded us through various technical challenges to get things mounted. John Hails and Doug McColl did a fabulous job of mounting the exhibit, and Marla Halsted offered critical moral support to Annette in the midst of a jungle of wires and failing computer equipment. We were also thrilled that Melanie Kloetzel was willing to draw on her own research and her collaboration with the Scottish playwright Rose Ruane, to choreograph a fabulous dance performance, “Big Head/Small Neck,” for the vernissage. An image of her kloetzel&co dancers appears in this book. Thanks too to Shawn Bracket and Amy Herr for helping with the filming of the video Carla’s Couch and to all those individuals, particularly Annette’s colleagues and students in the Department of History, who were willing to be part of this project by taking a seat on that couch. We thank Veronica Reeves for being willing to turn Annette’s amateur filming into a much more polished final video. Special thanks to Amelia Marie Newbert and her colleagues, who made it possible for us to go shopping for furniture in Theatre Calgary’s props storage facility and who also provided set-design expertise. We are particularly grateful to the wonderfully supportive members of our advisory committee from the local community: James Demers, Tonya Callaghan, Mason Jenkins, Amelia Marie Newbert, Anne Drew Potter, and Mina Harker. Aaron Devor, Chair in Transgender Studies at the University of Victoria, kindly agreed to write our forward and provided critical advice at key moments. We were able to present our research to precisely the right audience at his “Moving Trans History” conference in Victoria, B.C., and he also led a post-opening round table in the exhibition space, which was enormously helpful in allowing us to think through some of the issues we have explored in this book.

We were delighted to be able to slightly rethink and remount the exhibition at the Schwules Museum (Gay Museum) in Berlin between 7 November 2019 and 2 March 2020. We are very grateful to the museum’s director, Birgit Bosold, and to the director of their archive, Peter Rehberg, for their initial enthusiasm, their conceptual and institutional support, and their efforts to secure generous financial support from the Berlin Senate. The exhibition production in Berlin was expertly managed by Justus Heitzelmann, Mayan Printz, and Tomka Weiß. Maya Guttman was responsible for the beautiful technical installation, and we would also like to thank Kristine Schmidt for help with archival sources housed at the Schwules Museum and Daniel Sander for the press and publicity work that helped bring in a large audience. We thank the Kinsey Institute and the Transgender Archives of Victoria, B.C. for allowing us to reproduce archival images.

A new aspect of the collaboration in Berlin was our work with the filmmakers Sabrina Rücker and Brian Andrew Hose. Their film Carlas Wohnzimmer was produced in close collaboration with the curators and, as Nora Eckert wonderfully details in her contribution to this book, it captures the spirit of our intention to evoke the atmosphere of supportive intimacy that we first intuited from the images we had found of trans women sitting in a 1950s living room. There is nothing like film to bridge the gaps of time, and Sabrina and Brian’s excellent ideas about how to confront present-day trans people with an uncomfortable yet still familiar past helped make the exhibition relevant to a Berlin audience. Thanks too, to Athanasios Karanikolas for recommending these extremely promising artists to us, to the Met Film School Berlin for donating studio space, and to all of the interviewees in the film, who donated their time and shared their emotions with us and our audience.

Neither of the two incarnations of TransTrans would have been possible without the amazing design work of Andreas Puskeiler, who has followed us through all the stages of this project and who was single-handedly responsible for the professional aesthetic of the various incarnations of our exhibitions. We know that this was a labour of love, and we thank him for his patience and resilience. We are also thankful for having wonderful images of the exhibitions themselves to work with, provided by Andreas Puskeiler and by the professional photography services of Dave Brown in Calgary and Paul Sleev in Berlin.

Each of us also incurred some personal debts in the process of conducting our research. Rainer would like to express his thanks to Carolin Pommert for editing images from Das 3. Geschlecht, Katharina Sykora for help in understanding the visual practices of the magazine, Wolfram Setz for the courage to publish a facsimile edition in print, Egmont Fassbinder for makeing rare issues of the magazine available, and the employees of the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft for their support. Alex is very grateful to his interview subjects: Aaïcha Bergamin, Colette Berends, and Jeanne Lessenich (who have since passed away), Henk Asscheman, Margreet Groot, Joris Hage, Jos Megens, Jill Pattiradjawane, and Ms. B. He is also grateful to Walter van Emde Boas, for providing access to his father’s personal files, and to Hilde Bakker for translating the original manuscript of his chapter. Annette would like to thank Katie Sutton for reading a draft of her chapter and Jill Suzanne Smith for the invitation to deliver a keynote talk about Alfred Kinsey at Bowdoin College, an occasion that provided the first draft for chapter 3 of this book. The other participants at that symposium, which celebrated the hundredth anniversary of Kinsey’s graduation from Bowdoin, also provided very helpful feedback. Thanks to Donna Drucker, David Hecht, Dagmar Herzog, Michael Pettit, Marilyn Reizbaum, Lisa Sigel, Whitney Strub, Robert Deam Tobin, and Liana Zhou. Michael would like to thank Florian Sedlmeier, who not only made extraordinary personal efforts to help him obtain some much-needed research materials on a very short timeline but has been an unfailing friend and intellectual interlocutor throughout the entire span of this project. We are all particularly grateful to anonymous reviewer A, who provided excellent feedback and was particularly expert in helping us to rethink the sections on photography and visual imagery in this book.

And finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the University of Calgary Press, particularly Brian Scrivener and Helen Hajnoczky. Brian was enthusiastic from the start and continues to support the book’s afterlife, and both of them have helped us think through the various design challenges that such an image-rich book presents. Melina Cusano created the gorgeous design and was patient with the various challenges of image numbering and placement. The press also found us an excellent copy editor in Kat Simpson, who truly went beyond the call in contributing to the discussion of various ethical and word-choice conundrums and who did her work under the most trying of circumstances. Books like this are very expensive to produce, and we are therefore happy that university presses in Canada are still willing to support such work.