The thing about Rachel is she's pretty much "right there" in so many of these photo-illustrations that you can't have missed her.  In addition to her having taken the photos that went into the illustrations, she takes some of the straight-up photos.

Rachel: in front of the camera and behind it.  

How she came in to my life is, well - I guess it could be debatable, depending on your point of view.  Your view, that is, concerning your favorite psych-or-other-ology; your view on the soul and/or metaphysics; your view on the brain and its function; your view on emotional development.

What-ever the case, I've got her - or she has me - or we have us - in this thing or state we don't have a reference name for any longer--and have mostly given up wondering whether we need one.   

In popular culture at least, those who exhibit a multiple personality disorder - or dissociative identity disorder  as it's called now- or what-ever it's called now - if it's even a "thing" now - typically don't know they have more than one "person" inside their heads; rather, each "person" believes that he or she is the only one.  The existence of such a disorder is not completely accepted, as there are usually other factors, other mental disorders, involved, not the least convolution of which is that a given patient may be faking it to keep the doctor's attention (like the infamous case of Sybil) which could be a mental disorder in itself.

What we have is knowing the other one is there, lurking about in the back of the mind.  At any given moment, she's there, looking out.  Or I am, depending on who's "primary," for lack of a better word, at the time.  This, anyway, is what we've decided to accept at our way of being.  It's much easier this way, really (except when I'm walking through a department store - too many shopping options!).

She sees herself as a woman, while I'm pretty much a man, though it might be said that we blur those lines occasionally - or maybe the line isn't as defined as we think -- and she took for herself the name Rachel Bradshaw.  Rachel that she adopted all the way back in 1990, and Bradshaw is my maternal grandmother's maiden name which she chose a few years ago.  Rachel is first a spin from my given name - "Richard" - and is also a nod to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, in which the character of Rachel, when we are first introduced to her, doesn't know she's a Replicant.  More on that later.

It's probably obvious to any of you who've met Jake that there aren't a lot of models in these images.  Well, it's true - only two, unless otherwise noted.  The thing about us is that we've been together for as long as we can recall.  Granted, with each passing year there's more time to be recalled, and many of the older memories are fading as the new are overriding, but still, the statement stands.  For a very long time, from those earliest times until fairly recently, I was far from aware enough of myself to have any understanding of what was going on in my head.  At a young physical age my waking mind was simply too new in this life to get it.  Even as I matured (a rather drawn out process, but that's a completely different story) I believed that Rachel was just really just me - albeit "in a dress" -and what I was doing was just this thing that I put on and took off.  There were the instances of new love (or infatuation) in this life when I thought I could "leave that behind," that "this cross-dressing thing" was just a warped sexual outlet stemming from a lack of a "personal relationship," and that having a girlfriend (a "real" girlfriend) would "fix it."  HA.  It took the shock of the end of a marriage for me to do some "serious searching" of my life before I, and she, could realize that there was more to it than just my putting on stockings and heels.  Oh, there were a few moments, here 'n' there, when we almost reached the realization, but never quite.  The difference in the aftermath of marital collapse was finally being able to look over this life and seeing things from the perspective that only the years and the need to understand more clearly can bestow.  I couldn't begin understand my Self until after the crash, much less understand or accept Rachel, or accept that what I thought was "just me" never really was "just me." 

The notion of us being siblings came about during the winter of '05.  Separated since mid-summer of '04, by the time January came 'round, I had an address to hail from, and was busy taking stock of my life by writing it all down.  I was relaxed enough by then from the emotional ordeal to begin putting "her" back together, and she did some writing, too.  One night, and we recall this pretty well, her cursive became different from mine.  Oh, I suppose a handwriting analyst could pick out similarities enough to say that it's probably the same "hand," but it was different.  It slanted back instead of fore; the roundness of the letters was more pronounced; the tails of letters like "p" and "y" had more loop to them; the overall effect was not mine, not Jake's.  She, and I, stared at that script on the page and wondered for some time what the hell just happened.  "Who the fuck is writing this?!"  Then it hit her - me - us: "I'm your sister."  Yeah, just like that - kinda' like a ton of bricks: "I'm not you, I'm not 'Jake-in-a-dress,' I'm someone else - other."  A revelation, of a kind, and more of this life began to make sense.  With that revelation, though, also came a further realization of how my sister, and my lack of understanding her and our relationship, had been detrimental to my marriage, had perhaps colored all our years in fact -- the good and the ill, all tangled up together - but aint that the way of things?  Still, it was only through these kinds of "revelatory" and "introspective" (such high-falutin' words!) moments that I, and she, could begin to rebuild something that would eventually become this life that we have now, and really, it's a pretty O.K. life we lead.  Even a good one.

No, there isn't any explanation of why Rachel is, say sorry, that you'll find on this or any other page.  I could "see someone about it," but I have no want to do so.  Yes, I - we - have pondered various reasons of "why" and we just don't have an answer.  Over the years there have been a few ideas that stuck for a time, but lately we've not really worried much about it.  We are, and that's enough.  In any instance, we've reached our accommodations, and the way we live this life is free of harm to others to the best of our knowledge,  job performance is not impeded, obligations are fulfilled.  

I mean, "why" might be the way this brain is wired, if you go for the mechanical view of the universe, or maybe it's to do with the soul -- or souls? -- if you're more inclined to ineffable things.  There may never be any knowing why.  Why do some people wish to have friends but no spouse?  Why are some men attracted to other men?  Why do some feel deeply that they simply must have children?  How much is nature, how much is nurture, how much is epigenetic?  Bright minds among the secular and religious have studied why people are the way they are and why they do what they do for time out of mind, and there are no bright answers.  People are, and we are, what we are.  

Frankly, if more folk would simply get on with the idea of "live and let live" then we'd probably have some less strife in the world.  I won't start on a political economic rant, or I'll never get anywhere else.

Part of this life is that Rachel likes to take the car and get out of town on Saturday afternoons and evenings.  Especially when it's warmer and the daylight lingers, she's taken to the road with the camera along, and several of the photographs in the Heartland section are hers.  What was going to be a fairly simple statement - "some o' them photos over there was taken by my sister" - was the impetus for this exposition, which went way off the rails of simplicity pretty much from the get-go.

A Rachel "selfie" at Fall Creek Gorge (the Potholes)

You might wonder why I/we find it easy to write this - I mean this is pretty deep 'n' personal shit, right?  Well, there are a few of options for the answer to that wonderment: either I/we have reached in this life an emotional state (I hesitate to call it maturity, though it might be) that allows us to consider these things and express them fairly easily; OR it could be that it's just about getting attention.  It could be a bit of both.  

It could be that with so many "public faces" declaring that they are gay, trans-gendered, lesbian, bi- tri- pan- poly- non- or what-have-you, that it just felt like there's no point in not putting up this page when so many other  people's pages are showing that there's more than one way of living a life.

And having said that, we want to acknowledge the decades that the queer community has spent getting voices heard that are beyond the cis/het-norm, espousing and living lives that are just as valid as those of the so-called mainstream.  That it took me-her-us many of those decades to finally be "O.K." with who we are is testament to how that mainstream shaped what was an acceptable "presentation," a real life.  I -- and I say "I" to delineate Jake specifically -- had an early childhood in an aspiring-to-be-middle class milieu in Southern California in the 1970s, when "gay" was a slur, and "lesbian" was hardly even spoken.  "Trans" wasn't even on the radar, and "Bi" or anything else was just as bad as gay if not worse.

Within that milieu, almost everything around me (us) pointed to someone born in a body like mine having a certain way of thinking, a few modes of dressing, a couple of political options for affiliation.  Despite the turmoil of the 60s and early 70s, what I was learning was all pointing toward the "American Dream" as the thing to get on with: the movies, the TV shows, what kids talked about in school, even the lyrics of the songs on the radio or on our record players.  Nothing about popular culture included anything that showed me (us) that we might be alright if we were "different."  That I, Jake, eventually settled on wearing vintage-inspired clothes, complete with hat and tie, was an outgrowth of that, a way of masking the real, felt difference -- being a little eccentric in my style choice was acceptable, and allowed me to "go along to get along" as an apparently cis/het white guy.

I, we, are pretty sure today that there was confusion, even anger, that was rolling around in the ol' brain pan for a long long time, too, because what was wanted by us apparently had no name, was not valid, could not exist within the society at large.  It would take the rise, and uprising even, of many others in the face of so much petty back-lash, to get LGBTQ+ notions out of the shadows and into the world before we could really start to accept that maybe we are O.K.

There are some out there in society who lately decry and single out what they see as a sudden upsurge, or appearance amongst the citizenry, of trans people, and while we don't consider ourselves to fit within that group quite rightly, we do understand that there can be some misunderstanding the reason for this rise in visibility.  And "visibility" is what's important -- 'cause I/we weren't the only ones who for so long didn't have any inkling what-so-ever that not conforming with the cis/het American Dream paradigm would ever be seen as a viable way to live.  It's only been in the across the last 30-or-so years that the queer folk in the vanguard pushed outward enough that being "different" could be seen as viable, and then only in the wake of that leading push could many more people step forward -- or maybe "out" -- and say "Hey, we're different, too."  It's the visibility that is drawing the backlash (and like rants about political economics, I won't go on about the myriad reasons for the backlash) not that there are simply more people who consider themselves beyond the "norm."

I recently had an idea for analogy that might describe how we see ourselves, if indeed one of us is not trans, and that would be we're gender fluid, but like a wave machine:

Rachel here, Jake there: I guess you could say we're "fluid," but that's a fluid that sloshes from one end of the gender spectrum to the other, classic oxfords to pumps, short hair to long, et cetera.

There was once an observation made about me (us) being angry.  At the time I didn't get it.  Now it seems likely that what might have been expressed as anger was the confusion, and the hiding, and the not knowing just what to do about it.  Anger for trying to fit into the "straight white guy" mold.  It might be ironic to say that I can "pass" in society as a straight white guy.  It's also still frustrating how easy it is to do, and how unfortunately necessary it can be -- depending on where we are, who we're around.  We'd prefer to believe that that anger has mostly dissipated with our becoming more at ease in this body.  Oh, we can still swear a blue streak, and frustrations can mount, but for the most part, we're better.

That there has been some much-looked-for (and probably still too rare) "representation," visibility, of queerness in widespread media helped us and others, certainly.  The advent of things like blogs, where people could post some of themselves as they saw fit did too.  It's true that seeing someone who is not part of the cis/het norm having a life on TV, or reading about them in a book, does make a difference -- and while what we do here in our little slice of the world may not get much visibility, there is the chance that our "representing" could touch one other person in a positive way and that's good enough reason to do so.

Our little bit of representation saw Rachel doing some paint work in New Jersey, initially, heading back to work instead of Jake.  That "my" co-workers were fine with "her" was encouraging.  Later, since our 2022-2023 academic year (or some year or other), Rachel has gone back to Purdue's theatre to take pictures during Wednesday night photo calls for our productions, and has mostly taken up the job of being on-hand for strikes.  The idea of "representing" a life outside the cis/het norm really wasn't an impetus at the beginning when Rachel just wanted to do something with her time, but it's grown beyond that.  As the majority of the people we're around at work (or even at a favored coffee house) are students (being as we work at a university an' all), "representing" a life that's not strictly within the cis/het norm has taken on some import, something that even came up in conversation with a colleague recently, who told us that Rachel has not only been fairly readily accepted in the department, but there are even some students who are pretty "fond" of her, happy to know that it really can be O.K. to be "different," that it's not just representation with other students.  We've come to see doing so as a reason to keep on keepin' on.  Like a sales rep turning 10% of contacts into sales, if just a couple of students take away a positive impact from us, then we're doing well.

Above left: Rachel watching preparations before photo call for Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, 2023 (photo by Madeleine Yang).  Above right, doing a fake pre-show speech before photo call for Bright Star, 2024 (photo by Photographic Melodie).

ANYway -- let's get along, shall we?

Call her Flauxrence: while the only thing "real" in this image is Rachel, this was the "look" during a lip-sync event at Purdue Theatre in the late fall of 2012.  The local chapter president of Alpha Psi Omega wanted the group to do something more fun than selling bottles of water during perfomances, and thought having a evening of people performing to their favorite songs was likely to garner some turn out, both from perfomers and audience.   Rachel really really really wanted to do "No Light, No Light" from the Florence + the Machine album Ceremonials.  The evening went off pretty well for everyone, including her. 

As for the above image, the background is "made up from whole cloth" as the saying goes; there weren't really any "rock 'n' roll" lights for the show. 

And please, don't knock the lip-sync.  Forget Milli Vanilli - it's really more like performance art.  The difference is Milli Vanilli's producer said it was those two poor shlubs on the album cover who were doing the singing; Rachel doesn't make that pretense, even as  she's  perfoming the song - ergo, why I'm calling it performance art.  And, yeah, it's work.  Hot, sweaty, it'll-take-it-out-of-you work if you're doing it right.

If there was a market for it, she'd be performing when-ever she could.

Hey, what about more on Rachel in Blade Runner you say?  It was mentioned earlier, after all!  Yes, Blade Runner, and for that matter Chinatown, both of which had what might have been more profound impacts on this life than was realized when first viewed.  These two films were first seen in the mid-80s, on a LaserDisc player (remember those?), Blade Runner 'cause Harrison Ford and sci-fi, Chinatown 'cause the 1930s and all that historic fiction stuff.  

Blade Runner's Rachel, when we first see her, doesn't know that she was not born, but grown (or fabricated) as an experiment (and what an experiment!) for Tyrell Corporation (there's more thoughts about that on Jake Ponders n'at), and the film narrative does, or can, spur questions of what it means to be "human."  At first watch it was a little confusing (even with the much-derided voice-over) but what a movie to be confused over!  We watched it at least three times in a couple of days.  As the story became clearer, it must have seeped into the unconscious some, 'cause looking back, choosing the name "Rachel" seems apt for someone asking questions of what having a life really means.  Looking back, Blade Runner landed at a good time in this life, too, as this brain was finally mature enough to start wondering about those kinds of questions.

And since Chinatown got mentioned, we'll go ahead and say it was likely the film that put down the roots of questioning how society is constructed, how the patriarchal capitalist system functions for some better than others.  ("He owns the police!")  It would be decades before any real inquiry grew out of it, certainly decades before we'd use terms like "patriarchal" and "capitalist," but that Chinatown was there way back is without doubt.  It was also the movie that helped cement the idea of hiding behind the cis/het norm guy-guise in the suit and tie, and Blade Runner's Deckard helped in that, too, with that character's costume design.  As with Blade Runner, it was seen when the brain was capable of at least taking in notions, at least unconsciously, about "larger things" than high school class work.

Jack Nicholson's character, by the way, J.J. "Jake" Gittes, prompted the nick-name I've used (when wearing the suit) since 1990!  But that is so another story.  Yeep.

And with that, we're going to stop.