At first glance, it may seem like photographer Lissa Rivera leads a familiar trope of being the woman who “wears the pants” in her relationship with BJ Lillis.

Lillis, studying for his PhD in American History at Princeton, is quiet and reserved—a quality that, even in 2017, is more likely to be attributed to a lack of masculinity than considered thoughtfulness. It is for this reason that Lillis often uses the word "spectrum" to describe himself, because society isn't always kind to those who identify as gender fluid—much less a man who is actively opting for femininity. “I use masculine pronouns, I have a male body,” Lillis explains, “but I also enjoy being feminine.”

In a conservative culture that cleaves severely (and sometimes violently) along gender lines, the notion that a man “demotes” himself into a realm of femininity is one that Rivera aims to address in her new exhibition, Beautiful Boy, opening June 1 at ClampArt in New York.

Lissa Rivera

Beautiful Boy began in early 2014, when Rivera and Lillis were still just platonic friends. (The pair became romantic while working on this project together.) In a moment of profound vulnerability, Lillis revealed to Rivera that he was gender-queer and during college had mostly worn feminine clothing. He admitted he missed that freedom. It was a secret lifted, but for Lillis, who had intellectually explored gender-fluidity as a student at Wesleyan, there was still the question of what his gender identity meant for him.

Rivera, who also works as the associate curator for the Museum of Sex, felt she could help Lillis explore this crossroads. “I wanted him to be free, I felt it was awful and unfair that there was so much of him that he felt that he couldn’t be,” she says. Indeed, sitting for Rivera helped Lillis realize there was definitive point where he and his gender would settle, but it would be on a spectrum—forever an exploration. “There’s a spectrum of gender identity… different ways of expressing masculinity or femininity, and what the project has helped me do is let go, experiment, move around and feel comfortable in different ways of being feminine and masculine,” says Lillis, adding: “It’s just as much about her relationship to gender and femininity as it mine.”

Lissa Rivera

Lissa Rivera

Rivera, who had often felt she didn’t fit prescribed notions of femininity, agreed. She says she struggled with social rejections, particularly in high school and in past relationships. "It alienated me,” she admits thoughtfully and cautiously, some of those scars still tender. “I’m very feminine and I love glamour…[but] I have a lot of what would be considered ‘masculine traits’ in my personality. I feel unconventional in my own gender.”

Rivera’s photographs, which draw inspiration from the likes of Man Ray and Hannah Höch, as well as the Golden Age of Hollywood, feature Lillis’s androgynous body, fluid in gender and emotion, going either way and never settling on a definitive point, except perhaps, the entire spectrum. The photographer explains that women have been allowed to embrace masculine things, even masculinity, in a way that’s become normative: pants, short haircuts, having a career. Yet, the pendulum of men embracing the feminine without homophobic backlash simply does not swing the other way. “It was something that really intrigued me,” says Rivera. “Femininity has a lot more weight than masculinity, in terms of what people are allowed to explore…There’s a line there, for male bodies.”

Lissa Rivera

Men are, Rivera says, constantly pressed into choosing suffocating (and often hyperbolic) ideas of masculinity, and are socialized to believe anything signifying care or softness is feminine, and therefore beneath them. The message is everywhere, from “man” candles in camouflage (the only way to enjoy a well-scented room) to “man” soaps and body washes (lest the very act of bathing makes one’s sexual orientation become suspect). It’s no accident that most of the media’s narratives around men embracing grooming fall into tropes of the “metrosexual”, “coastal elite”, “flamboyantly gay”, and “European”—anything but normalizing the complexity of masculinity. And with the current political climate, it feels as though America is still centuries away from where other countries are, with gender, sexuality, fluidity and the illusion of binaries.

The timing of Beautiful Boy couldn’t be more right, or more necessary. The national and political conversations around the role of gender, sex and all the spectrums in between are finally coming to the mainstream. But so is the hate and vitriol for anyone daring to step out of the unforgiving binaries that so many unquestioningly accept as fact.

Lissa Rivera

For those who seek to move beyond ignorance, to be a part of the discourse, it can be difficult to know where to begin: how not to be offensive, especially for the cis-gender, heterosexual population, who’ve largely not had to think about these issues until now. There’s the hope that Beautiful Boy, for its creators, can help facilitate a conversation by being an accessible—and visually arresting—entry point.

The political conversations at the center of Beautiful Boy are important to Rivera and Lillis, but they also point out that it is—most poignantly—an intense exploration that is deeply personal. “I see the work as being personal first, political second. It has to be that way,” says Lillis. “For me, it’s just been incredibly liberating because I was really struggling when Lissa and I met, to understand my gender identity and where I would fall on the spectrum.”

For Rivera the relief is mutual, and hard won. “I feel that I finally have a place of comfort in my life, in a relationship, where I can be myself without editing, or being afraid. We don’t put up parameters around our work…we just go.”

Lissa Rivera