The name was a Craigslist joke. In personal ads, transgender people used "original plumbing" to indicate they hadn't had surgery. Amos Mac and Rocco Kayiatos took the phrase, stripped it of its clinical overtones, and turned it into the title of the first magazine for trans men made by trans men. Original Plumbing launched in San Francisco in 2009, and the first issue — themed "Bedroom" — sold out before it was even published.
Mac, a photographer whose work would later appear in the New York Times and Vogue Italia, and Kayiatos, a hip-hop artist who performed under the name Katastrophe, decided early on that the magazine would have a planned ending: exactly twenty issues, no more. Over a decade, those twenty issues documented trans male life with a tone that was smart, funny, sexy, and utterly without apology. Janet Mock, Silas Howard, and hundreds of trans men appeared in portraits and interviews that pushed back against the media's obsession with transition narratives and surgical details.
The final issue arrived in 2019, followed by an anthology published by Feminist Press: Original Plumbing: The Best of Ten Years of Trans Male Culture. Jill Soloway called it revolutionary. Michelle Tea called it life-saving. Jacob Tobia called it a testament. Mac went on to co-write No Ordinary Man, a documentary about jazz musician Billy Tipton that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and to write for the Gossip Girl reboot on HBO Max.
Original Plumbing is gone now, by design. But what it built — a decade-long archive of trans male joy, beauty, and stubbornness — will be here for a very long time.
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