What I'm Sitting On

Last September, I sailed to Alaska with my family and came home certain I hadn't scratched the surface. So I built a two week, entirely self-funded photo intensive back to Southeast Alaska, and put a call out on social media for portrait work in the ports I'd be visiting.

James's mom, Peggy, saw it. She told me James had booked a summer contract in Skagway, playing the lead in a hundred-year-old outlaw melodrama called The Days of '98. I already knew James, I'd watched him play Mark Cohen in Rent back in Cleveland months earlier and hadn't stopped thinking about the performance. The second I heard where he'd landed, I knew the exact shot I needed.

James hadn't even finished exploring the town yet. I already had the whole portrait built in my head: the kid from Cleveland, in full costume, standing in the middle of Broadway, snow capped mountains and a whole valley behind him. Not just a costume photo. The shot that frames this exact moment in a young artist's career, the one I can already see myself hanging next to a future photo of him standing on an actual Broadway stage in New York, years from now.

We sat down over a beer at Skagway Brewing Company for the interview, and as James talked about wanting to move to New York, I could feel the whole idea sharpening in real time. Then, a few days later, on the Ghosts and Good Time Girls walking tour, Trixie Turner turned to the group mid-performance and announced, half brothel-girl bravado and half proud kid calling home, "Eat your heart out, I'm working on Broadway, Mom and Dad!" I hadn't said a word to her about the shot I was planning. The town just kept handing me the theme.

I'm sitting on a full gallery from this one. James in character on a boardwalk that hasn't changed much since 1898. The tombstone that lives in the theater lobby now, stolen and re-stolen by rival clans for decades before someone finally gave it back. A hotel guest ledger with the real Soapy Smith's signature still in it, suspiciously tidy for a man with his reputation.

And underneath all of it, a town I didn't expect. Skagway has one of the most out and proud queer communities I've run into on this whole trip, drag bingo on the first Thursday of every month, a Pride event that packs the brewery, and a saloon with a lot more history than its brothel-era reputation gives it credit for.

This is the kind of story I go looking for and rarely find, a real person, a real place, and the one true detail nobody else would have thought to notice.

Full photo essay coming soon. For now, this is what I'm sitting on.