Monika: In 2022, you attended spiritual training at the Esalen Institute. What drew you there, and did that experience change the way you understand yourself?
Rosalyne: I have been to the Esalen Institute many times, and the tuition is not cheap. But the place is magical. I have learned so many things about myself while being there: the good, the bad, and the ugly. It is a place at Big Sur that is so, so magical. I have so many stories to tell about my experiences there. But one magnificent component at Esalen is that they have clothing-optional bathing in the hot springs at the top of a cliff. As an exhibitionist as well as a spiritual seeker, I love, and have always loved, walking around in the sun or under the moon and the stars totally naked. I used to have perfect breasts and didn’t mind showing them off.
Monika: And how do you feel about your body today, now that you are getting older?
Rosalyne: As I get older, my outer labia are starting to hang a little low [laughs] But I get over it. In fact, I just posed nude one last time for a magazine. I didn’t ask to see the pics as we were taking them, as I wanted to stay confident in my head… the head that says you are only 28, even though the reality is I am living in a 66-year-old body that has been sitting in the sun forever, since she was a kid… Think about the scene in “There’s Something About Mary” when the woman from Florida is taking off her top. [laughs]
Monika: You have described spending time at Esalen with your “salsa sistahs.” What makes someone become a true sister to you?
Rosalyne: This is a challenging question. I am not the easiest person to get along with at length. I am introspective and continuously try to better myself for those around me. I am a loner! There are a variety of reasons, and some logic, behind that. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE PEOPLE. I am just easily annoyed LOL. I have been given wonderful women in my life, and I am so grateful for that. Most of my journey has been with women who don’t have the same history as mine.
|
| “In all honesty, I was planning to end my life during the pandemic.” |
Monika: Have you ever had a close friend who shared a similar history to yours?
Rosalyne: You interviewed one woman a long time ago who had similar experiences to mine. We are no longer friends due to her ignorant politics and, I gather, her desire not to be around people who know her history and her antics. I am the opposite. I am an open book, yet I still have issues with being put in the box they think I belong in, when I don’t fit in any box. Not because my hips are too big. I just don’t fit in any sex, gender, class or age box. I do miss that sisterhood, but I also think… fk her [smiles].
Monika: You often take other people with you to Esalen. What is it like to share that place with them?
Rosalyne: Taking other people with me to the Esalen Institute is a gift: I get to see how they experience that magic. One of my friends had just lost her 97-year-old father before we went. At Esalen she couldn’t stop crying, and I couldn’t help but make fun of her. Of course, on the way home I wound up in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer and anemia… Karma! So when are we going to Esalen, Monika?
Monika: During the pandemic, when so much of the world became isolated and fearful, there are photographs of you hiking, swimming and enjoying life. What did that period teach you about solitude, freedom and appreciating ordinary pleasures?
Rosalyne: My dear Monika. In all honesty, I was planning to end my life during the pandemic. Not because of a deep emotional sadness, but because socializing was the way I balanced my work and play life. I had been working in hospice for almost 15 years, and dancing, friendship and engaging with people were my balance, my drug of choice. I was on my way to Florida to visit my adopted family and did not take the pandemic seriously.
When I flew home around March 26th, I was one of two people in coach. Everyone else was squeezed into first class #morons. When I got home, the woman taking care of one of my cats was not doing a good job. A few days later I had to take the cat to the vet and have her put down, and then go to a death visit where the dog jumped on me and bit me, and I was bleeding all over the place. I still have a scar.
|
| Photo by Zackary Drucker. |
Monika: What went through your mind after all of that happened?
Rosalyne: I was turning 60 in May and I thought, “I’m not doing this.” I started to plan the end of my life. I gave up my other cat and started to get my things in order, e.g., my will, etc. It was sadness. It just was not how I wanted to live, and I couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
Monika: What helped you to hold on?
Rosalyne: I met with Zackary Drucker’s then-boyfriend, now fiancé, who read my astrology. He told me to hang on until December 2020. So I did all the things I needed to do to stay afloat. And in December of 2020 I once again reinvented my social work practice and my life.
Monika: What made you doubt that things would work out professionally?
Rosalyne: You see, I didn’t quite believe that anything would work out. I had been interviewing for different work for years, and after my second interview I believed they had googled me and thought, “We are not hiring this woman.” That is my belief. And during the pandemic, you had to interview online. And from 55 to 60, as I believe I said before, I let my hair go silver. But when I was interviewing for work online, I felt that it looked like “Grandma needs a job,” so I colored it dark again. Marvel Rex is an amazing astrologer. I never really believed in that. However, he read my astrology twice, and both times things happened exactly as he said.
Monika: In 2020, Zackary Drucker’s Icons placed your image and your personal archive inside the Baltimore Museum of Art. What did it feel like to walk into a museum and see your own life transformed into an art-historical narrative?
Rosalyne: I was very excited to see my history come to life. Unfortunately, because of COVID, it was viewed only online. Another opportunity to humble my ass and keep me in check, I think. Mz Drucker is one amazing human being, and I am so happy to have her in my life.
|
| “Life is real, and it is also smoke and mirrors.” |
Monika: Zackary has described you as a muse, mentor and important foremother. What goes through your mind when someone from a younger generation tells you that you changed the direction of her life?
Rosalyne: It is truly an honor to be of service to any individual. I know that we all have the power to place mustard seeds of hope and joy into other people’s lives. For me that is one of the gifts of being a clinician and therapist: planting seeds with others. I may never see the true fruition of what our conversations have accomplished. But to know that I have the talents to assist in that way makes me feel that this life is all worth living.
Monika: Icons also brought questions of beauty, aging and mortality into the same visual conversation. Has your definition of beauty changed over time?
Rosalyne: Although I deeply believe beauty is internal, someone from my kind of background may place more emphasis on the shell. The shell I currently live in has been around for 66 years. It has been beaten, battered and abused. Not in a literal sense in regard to violence from others, but I have lain in the sun forever, pushed myself fiercely, and challenged my body when I was young by introducing it to artificial materials to change the shape of my breasts and face, etc. And now I pay the price.
Monika: Some people say that a woman who has had cosmetic surgery is somehow less authentic. What do you say to that?
Rosalyne: I always say this: you can repaint your house, redo the kitchen, upgrade your basement, and no one says that is fake. You can go to the gym and work out and build muscle, and no one says that is fake. But if a woman gets breast augmentation, immediately her breasts are fake. Again, I have reconstructed myself using education, informal education, cosmetic surgery, hair coloring, the gym, nutrition, etc. Life is real, and it is also smoke and mirrors. Beauty is thus internal. And as I have worked clearly on my outside, my inside needs to be right-sized… loving, generous, caring, compassionate, healthy, joyous, mournful, etc.
|
| "There are many times when I feel butch." |
Monika: How would you describe your personal style? Do you follow any specific fashion trends, or do you have go-to outfits that make you feel confident?
Rosalyne: I get my style from my mom. Outfits were very important to her. IF ONLY… if only I hadn’t spent so much money on clothing my whole darn life, I could be a millionaire by the time I retire. But unfortunately, clothing has played a huge part in my life. RuPaul said it best: we are born and the rest is drag.
In my last photo shoot for CANDY magazine (a magazine I never saw until Zackary showed me), the photographer said, “Go put some clothes on.” I told him I had never heard a man say that to me before!!!! Every change I made, he said I had such style. That doesn’t make up for the dis he threw at me by telling me to put my clothes on LOL.
Monika: By the way, do you like being complimented on your looks? Do you find it easy to accept compliments, or do you struggle with believing them?
Rosalyne: Last night it was 92 degrees in my bedroom without AC. I was plopped in my office, looking back at YouTube videos I was in (since you have me focusing on my history). I hated the way I looked and sounded, and critiqued, critiqued, critiqued until I thought, “I need some therapy right now” LOL. If I look good and someone says something, I am glad they are seeing what I see. If I don’t feel or look good and someone compliments me, it annoys me!
Monika: Did you ever feel pressure to meet a certain ideal of femininity, like I did by trying to look like the women around me?
Rosalyne: Many women fall into this idea of what beauty is and what femininity is. So women with different cultural backgrounds are definitely challenged more when it comes to the idea of beauty and femininity. There are many times when I feel butch. My primary default is sneaky sexy. And when I am in the salsa world, it is absolutely “you be a ho with class” sexy. I may look like a hoochy momma, but I am not there to steal your man, just to dance with him for four minutes. I have noticed fewer looks directed at me lately, and I don’t know if it is because I am 66 or because everyone is trained to be absorbed in their technology, aka their iPhones. I think I said this before! [smiles].
Monika: You look absolutely fantastic yourself, of course, but I am asking this question thinking about other women as much as about you. Many of us feel the pressure to “pass” as women, and even after surgeries, society keeps judging us. How do you personally deal with the outside world’s expectations, and what would you say to women who feel they are never feminine enough?
Rosalyne: Tell the world fkem if they can’t take a joke. It has always been about my presentation for me. But I always get a glimpse of that little lad who started me in this world, and I have come to love that part of me. No matter what I look like, I know who I am.
|
| “I get my style from my mom.” |
Monika: And how do you cope with the way society still talks about this topic?
Rosalyne: All the noise in society over the past decade about what people actually think about this topic just reminds me how much ignorance is alive and well and living in humans. It brings out the worst in me and in what I wish for them. It doesn’t bring out my best sides. No matter what I do to myself internally or externally, life is lived a day at a time. And when I am right with my world, I am right with me… and when I am not, I know… this too shall pass… I hope!
Monika: I remember the time right after my transition: it was pure euphoria. My closet is still full of dresses and shoes that I literally bought by the dozens back then, and I must have tried on hundreds. I felt like I had to make up for all those years that were taken from me. Did you feel the same way?
Rosalyne: I began this journey at 16, so I have lived my whole life as Roe, Roz, Rosalyne, aka Rosalynda. I was fornicating with men as Roe at 16, and at 23, when I had an extra hole to feed, I fed it and fed it and fed it. Right now, not so much. [sighs]
Monika: Speaking of how we present ourselves to the world, there have also been quite a few opportunities to represent trans women publicly. You appeared in Magnus Hastings’s Rainbow Revolution after objecting to the original title #GayFace because of your long history of fighting for trans inclusion. Looking back, do you think that disagreement ultimately created a more meaningful project?
Rosalyne: Magnus is such a talented man, and he was more connected to drag culture when we were introduced. But he did have Candis Cayne on one of his book covers. I love Candis. Not only because she is beautiful, but also because she is smart and a firecracker. And that hair. But she is more connected to that world because she is an actress. So I wanted to appear in the book, and I think Magnus really appreciated my feedback. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But I am going to say what I think needs to be said and take the risk. Again, I am naked in a book. Hmmm, maybe I need a shrink!
Monika: GARRAS fashion shows have also brought you together with younger trans people while supporting the TransLatin@ Coalition. What does it mean to stand alongside people whose battles are different from, but connected to, those fought by earlier generations?
Rosalyne: That whole fashion show thang is a lot of work. Not easy. And I am self-centered at times, wanting to look my best. But it gives me the opportunity to be around those kids, celebrating a night that is so important on so many levels. Last year was my last walk. But I am a clinical consultant and supervisor for TLC, overseeing their graduate intern program. So much fun, so much work.
END OF PART 3
All photos: courtesy of Rosalyne Blumenstein.
© 2026 - Monika Kowalska
No comments:
Post a Comment