Divas of San Francisco: Portraits of Transsexual Women

For the last five years, David Steinberg has been photographing transsexual women who frequent San Francisco's Divas Nightclub and Bar, the most prominent transgender club in the U.S. With this collection of intimate, revealing photographs, Steinberg honors the individuality, diversity, and fierce integrity of a group of people who are alternatively ignored and fetishized, but rarely acknowledged and appreciated for who they really are. These 59 full-page color portraits of transsexual dancers, bartenders, lip-sync performers, disc jockeys, regulars and visitors reach beneath an often glamorous surface to present a broad spectrum of remarkable women in all their complexity -- their joy, sadness, strength, uncertainty, toughness, vulnerability and, most of all, their courage in embracing the core of who they know themselves to be in the face of a misunderstanding, frightened, and often hostile world.