One night in 1989, Hunter Reynolds, then a 30-year-old artist living in New York City, made himself up at home with the help of a friendly drag queen.
He was intrigued with the results: his handsome face embellished and transformed, neither man nor woman, like an androgynous cabaret star in Berlin during the Weimar years.
He tossed on a tweed coat and headed out to various art-world events. Friends didn’t recognize him, so he pretended to be a performance artist visiting from Los Angeles.
As a gay man and an artist, Mr. Reynolds was already interested in exploring the limits and the possibilities of gender. As a gay man recently diagnosed with H.I.V.