Thirteen years is a long time in any life, and yet some people seem to carry themselves through the years with an almost mischievous refusal to surrender to time. When I first spoke with Rosalyne Blumenstein in 2013, she was already a woman whose life seemed to contain several lifetimes: New York nightlife, survival, recovery, social work, activism, filmmaking, performance, friendship, love, and the fierce work of making space for people whose voices were routinely ignored. Born in Brooklyn, Rosalyne dreamed of becoming an actress, and from an early age she was drawn to places that offered theatricality, excitement, and the freedom to experiment with who she could be. She began visiting gay clubs as a teenager and started her transition at sixteen, finding her own way in a world that offered little reliable protection to young trans women. By seventeen, she had left home and was learning to survive in the vivid, often dangerous world of New York’s nightlife, where friendships could become lifelines and chosen family could mean the difference between isolation and belonging.
Those early years could easily have become a story defined entirely by hardship, but Rosalyne’s personality has always resisted such a narrow interpretation. There was glamour and performance, certainly, but also wit, audacity, ambition, and an irrepressible love of being seen. She worked in peep shows, appeared in modelling photographs, entered beauty contests, and performed onstage in spectacular outfits, including a silver corset and matching gloves made by Lynda Roberts, the older woman who took her in and taught her how to navigate the world. The clubs and their colourful characters became part of her education, although the losses were devastating. Friends such as Sugar Belane and Soy, whose lives ended far too early, remain woven into her memories of that era. Rosalyne’s photographs preserve this world with unusual intimacy, capturing not just the glamour of the night but the people, relationships, and fragile communities behind it.
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“I am a 66-year-old woman with a colorful past." Photo: Amanda Benefiel. |
Recovery brought a decisive turning point. After becoming clean and sober in 1987, Rosalyne began building a different future, eventually finding her calling in activism and community work. Through her relationship with Dr. Barbara Warren, she became involved with New York’s Gender Identity Project at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, ultimately becoming its director. At a time when trans people were frequently misunderstood, misrepresented, or simply left out of conversations about LGBTQ+ rights, Rosalyne was not inclined to remain politely in the background. She challenged organizations and fellow activists when transgender people were excluded, even when speaking up created conflict with people she loved and respected. Her commitment extended beyond speeches and demonstrations. She helped develop educational films addressing gender variance, HIV prevention, community empowerment, and the power of language, and she led public programmes that brought trans experiences into wider view when the word transgender was still far from commonplace. In 1999, she received a Courage Award from New York City officials, and in 2000 she became Grand Marshal of the Brooklyn Pride Parade. She also completed her master’s degree in social work, demonstrating that reinvention, for Rosalyne, was not simply an act of survival but a way of opening new possibilities.
Yet there came a point when even a woman as determined as Rosalyne needed to step away from the exhausting business of fighting for recognition within institutions that did not always want to hear her. In 2002, she left New York for California, wanting to recover a sense of herself beyond the public role she had occupied for so long. Her memoir, Branded T, published in 2003, preserved the story of her early life, her years in Times Square, and the realities of growing up trans in an era when survival often depended on ingenuity and courage. In California, she continued to reinvent her professional life, working in hospice care for fifteen years and developing a career as a therapist specialising in addiction, recovery, and trauma. The woman who had once fought to make trans lives visible was now also helping people navigate some of their most private struggles. That movement between the public and the intimate may be one of the most revealing threads in her story: Rosalyne has never been only an activist, only a survivor, or only a glamorous figure in photographs. She has been all these things, and more.
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“I was hypersexual and needed validation all the time.” |
Her life, meanwhile, has never lost its appetite for pleasure. Salsa became what she has playfully called her “drug of choice,” offering a different kind of release through music, movement, and connection. Photographs from her years in California show her in dazzling gowns, walking the GARRAS runway in support of the TransLatin@ Coalition, celebrating with friends, travelling, swimming, hiking during the pandemic, and attending spiritual training at the Esalen Institute with her beloved salsa friends. There is a particular delight in these images: Rosalyne is not simply preserving a legacy or demonstrating resilience. She is enjoying herself. She can be a serious advocate and a woman who loves a spectacular outfit, a beautiful photograph, a dance floor, and the company of people who make her laugh. Her participation in Magnus Hastings’s photographic project, initially titled #GayFace, offers another glimpse of her characteristic directness. Rosalyne objected to a title that she felt erased the distinction between gay identity and the wider LGBTQ+ community, drawing on decades of experience fighting for trans inclusion. The project ultimately became Rainbow Revolution, a small but telling example of her refusal to let trans people disappear behind somebody else’s definition of community.
Since our first conversation, Rosalyne’s personal history has also entered new cultural spaces. Her younger friend and mentee Zackary Drucker brought their intertwined stories together in Icons, an exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2020. Drucker’s photographs of Rosalyne, displayed alongside her own self-portraits, explored beauty, transformation, aging, and mortality, while placing the life of a trans woman who had helped shape an earlier generation’s struggle for recognition into a major art institution. The relationship between the two women is especially meaningful: Rosalyne is not simply a subject being looked at, but a mentor whose experiences have informed and inspired someone from a younger generation. In their public conversation that year, they reflected on photography, beauty, and trans activism, bringing personal history into dialogue with questions about how trans lives are represented and remembered.
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“I have never found myself to be beautiful.” |
Rosalyne’s 2024 oral-history interview for The Outwords Archive added another substantial layer to that record, gathering memories and photographs that span nearly five decades. Among them are images of her teenage self at the Deuce in Times Square, her early recovery, her work with the Gender Identity Project, her appearance in Rosa von Praunheim’s documentary The Transexual Menace, and her years of public advocacy. There are also the more intimate moments: a photograph of her dancing with her father after he had opened his door to her again, memories of friends who were lost, the women who helped her survive, and the pleasures that have sustained her. Together, these fragments reveal something more compelling than a straightforward chronicle of achievement. They show a woman who has repeatedly had to begin again, without allowing the difficult chapters to define the whole story.
And so, after thirteen years, we meet again. The world around Rosalyne has changed dramatically. The language has changed, trans visibility has expanded, and a new generation has grown up with possibilities that were difficult to imagine during her early years in New York. Yet the struggle over who gets to belong, who gets to tell their story, and whose lives are considered worthy of being remembered continues. Rosalyne has witnessed these changes from several vantage points: as a young woman making her way through a world that often offered her little mercy, as an activist who refused to accept exclusion, as a therapist who has spent years helping others find their footing, and as a woman whose photographs now form part of the cultural record. I am delighted to welcome her back, not simply to revisit the past, but to discover what these thirteen years have meant to her, what still makes her laugh, dance, argue, and dream, and how she sees the world today.
Monika: Rosalyne, you look absolutely wonderful. Thirteen years have passed since our first interview, and honestly, you have not changed at all. What is your secret?
Rosalyne: By profession, I am a clinician! In reality, I am a 66-year-old woman with a colorful past. In my years of watching the telly, I have heard beautiful women with gorgeous hair, great bone structure, 32 white teeth, and a great figure say they didn’t find themselves attractive. And I would think, “Get the fk outta here” [laughs].
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| On the beach in 2026. |
Monika: And what about you? Do you think of yourself as a beautiful woman?
Rosalyne: I have never found myself to be beautiful. I know I was, and have been, striking, but sometimes I feel it is an odd, non-contemporary style of beauty. As I look back on some of my old photos, I think, “Wow, not bad.” And now that we can take selfies, I only have around 20,000 on my phone, as I keep trying to get the right shot where my face doesn’t look too long or too crooked, or my mouth isn’t too small, or my smile isn’t weird. [laughs]
Monika: Photographs and selfies aside, you clearly still put a great deal of thought into how you present yourself. Where does that come from?
Rosalyne: My profession as a clinician doesn’t care what I look like. But my history, my past, my past professions, my internal competition with a society that has certain regulations stating what an American beauty is, and again, my past, all play a role. Well, I still put great energy into looking a certain way. In 2015, I let my hair go silver slowly. The gift of allowing my hair to grow out was not running to COVER UP the grey, the aging process, the truth of my mortality. I didn’t call it grey; I called it silver sparkle. When it looked good, I got so many compliments, especially from women of color.
Monika: And what about the reactions you received from men?
Rosalyne: I got comments from men I dated. They would say, “I saw you from afar and that body was amazing… And then I saw the hair color and was confused about your age.” When it looked good, it was great, and when it didn’t, I looked haggard [laughs]. But there was a sense of freedom.
Monika: You said there was a sense of freedom in letting it go silver, and yet you eventually colored it again. What changed?
Rosalyne: In 2020, during the pandemic, I was an essential worker, and I was looking for other work and interviewing on Zoom. I looked at myself and said, “It looks like Grandma needs a job” [laughs]. So I colored it again. It was a very difficult time. I was turning 60, I was looking for work, and I felt like I wanted off this planet. Working in hospice with no socializing on the dance floor was killing my spirit.
Monika: What changed for you after that?
Rosalyne: Instead of killing myself, I colored my hair and reinvented my social work practice LOL. Those were better decisions. The years from 60 to 65 were amazing, even with all the ignorance living in this world. I truly blossomed. So, to answer the original question, I had two facelifts [laughs]. I live in this condo, and sometimes it just needs a bit of a paint job or a restoration of sorts! In addition, I am vain, but I am accepting. In my 40s I wrote in Branded T, “I am becoming wrinkled.” Well, bitch, your biceps now look like your ex’s testicles (the skin texture, that is).
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| In 2026. |
Monika: When you look at photographs of yourself from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s today, what do you see in that young woman that perhaps you did not recognize at the time?
Rosalyne: My dear Monika. As a child, I had a mother who believed in me so much and loved me until her death. So I thought my shit didn’t stink. I went from being someone who was fearful but knew she had talent to sitting on the stools of the Gilded Grape at 16, so unsure of myself. I was hypersexual and needed validation all the time.
In the ’70s and ’80s, drugs kept me going. But that young woman had little belief in herself. It breaks my heart to see that, with all the potential I had and without the guidance of an adult, I ran amok. Every time I go back to NYC, I visit all the old haunts to remind myself, “Girl, nothing stopped your skinny Olive Oyl from Popeye the Sailor Man ass.”
Monika: And what would you say to that young woman today?
Rosalyne: Look where you have been, and look where you are now. And be grateful. And, like Edith Piaf sang in French, of course, NO REGRETS.
Monika: Tell me more about the 1980s. What were they like for you?
Rosalyne: In the mid-’80s, I entered heavily into the sex industry, and I felt I always had to be the top moneymaker because I had secrets. That unhealthy competition killed me but also gave me opportunities to change my life. I got clean and sober in the late ’80s, 1987 to be exact. Twelve-step programs said it was all about change. So I got blue contacts, dyed my hair from red to blonde, and bought college sweatshirts. I didn’t yet quite know how to do the internal work, but I certainly mastered the external work. So looking back, again, through all of it, I am filled with a sense of gratitude and accomplishment!
END OF PART 1
All photos: courtesy of Rosalyne Blumenstein.
© 2026 - Monika Kowalska
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