Threads: The Life of Marty Kass (2007)

My first oral history interview was with my Uncle Marty, conducted for a course I took with Gerry Albarelli while I was in the MFA Writing program at Sarah Lawrence. Six months and more than twelve hours of interviews later, I was hooked on oral history, and am forever indebted to Marty for sharing with such candor, reflection and vivid recollection his remarkable stories of life. 

Marty Kass was born in 1950 and came of age in the years leading up to Stonewall. His most intense memory from childhood is hiding in the crinoline lining of his mother’s hoop skirts in 1953. In puberty, he had to wear clothes from the huskies section; his mother told him at age thirteen to stop walking like a fairy, something he figured was tied to the size of his hips, the way they must have swayed. In high school, he dressed to protest, wearing an Army shirt, a self-proclaimed hippie who, when his high school banned blue jeans in 1968, went out to buy a pair to wear the next day. He came out in 1973, out of the closet and into the seventies, a period of, he says, “so much liberation.” He says of coming out that everything he didn’t know before, he suddenly knew; he knew what to wear, if he wanted to be a gay man: Danskin tops, Carmen Miranda hirachis, chokers, bracelets, hot pants, platform sandals, clogs. When he went to the baths in 1976 to get a taste of the real freedom of the seventies, the absolute anonymity of being naked scared him.

Threads, a compilation of stories edited from over twelve hours of life history interviews, is Marty’s story, but it is also the story of America’s closet, of how what it means to come out has changed in the past fifty-seven years. It took Marty thirty-five years to get comfortable in his skin; Threads tells the stories of that journey, particular to Marty, but also telling of the decades he lives through, coming of age in the early sixties, college in the late sixties and early seventies, the liberation of the seventies, AIDS in the eighties and nineties.  

Organized by chronology and clothing, Threads covers Marty's story from birth to now. Excerpts available on request.

In the summer of 2008, I traveled to Cambodia with photographer Nura Qureshi to interview women who had survived landmines for 3 Generations.
3 Generations is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping survivors tell their stories to the world. Nura and I traveled to Phnom Penh and Prey Veng to document the stories of women living with the legacy of violence from the Khmer Rouge regime and the decades of war that followed. Read interview excerpts and see portraits here.

With gratitude to Cambodia Trust, Handicap International, and the Cambodia Handicraft Association, organizations working to support survivors in living and working with dignity.