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When I set out to become a writer, I followed a pretty straightforward course: I wrote. I did this privately, and without much hope of publication. I understood the writing part - or, at least, I understood that by writing I was working toward understanding the writing part. What I wasn't much good at was finding anyone - other than a few patient girlfriends - who had any interest in what I wrote. My work fell somewhere between the literary quarterlies that consistently rejected me and the newspapers that stubbornly wouldn't hire me - a gap that I imagined to be uniquely mine.

Were I to employ gender as a metaphor, I'd borrow a term that a cross-dresser I know uses to describe where he fits in: I was between the binaries. I was the writing equivalent of a five-o'clock shadow and a bra.

Unfortunately, this analogy can't bear much scrutiny. Editors were not interested in me. But they tended not to want to beat me up. Uncertainty about my career was not so painful that I ever cried myself to sleep, or ran away from home, or mutilated myself, or attempted suicide. My notion of being a writer was bound up with who I was, but, as dimensions of self-identity go, it didn't have anything like the deep complexity of gender.

Speaking of which. As I write, I am sitting beside someone who is dressed, with shimmering conviction, as Marilyn Monroe in the "Two Little Girls From Little Rock" scene of Gentleman Prefer Blondes. In a famously breathless whisper she tells me that she's female. That I find her kind of sexy inclines me toward the somehow ridiculous hope that she's telling the truth.

Not that anything is going to happen between us. For one thing, I'm on assignment. I am here, in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with the photographer, Nigel Dickson. The two of us thought that a convention of cross-dressers would be interesting. In this, we have not been disappointed.

For another, I'm married - although I am being flirted-with by someone who in the right light could pass as Lorelei Lee, and this is a temptation I've never imagined being called upon to resist. I've never been so close to such red cushions of lips and such black-winged swaths of eye-liner. It's impossible not to wonder what such Hollywood blondness feels like.

Of greater concern is her husband. He is sitting right next to her - a mere left-hook away from me. The three of us are backstage, watching Nigel Dickson adjust the height of his lights for a portrait he is taking of one of the participants in the Fantasia Fair's annual talent show. The combination of Lorelei's airy whispers and the steady gaze of the man to whom she is married are making me nervous - although the threat of the husband's proximity is, if not diminished, certainly complicated by his red gown, high heels, and striking resemblance to Jane Russell.

A modern city is a complex layering of time, and so inherent is this texture to Toronto it often goes un-remarked upon by its inhabitants. It seems too obvious to be mentioned - and yet it is the city's central characteristic. New office towers rise beside Victorian homes and storefronts; faded ads for blankets can be seen on old brick walls next to billboards for cell-phones; recent immigrants - from Nigeria and Vietnam, from Ethiopia and China, from South Korea and India -- sit next on subway cars to people whose families first came to Toronto to escape the Highland Clearances, or the Irish potato famine, or the American Revolution, or slavery; a concrete expressway passes over the spot where fish were sold on a wooden wharf. And on a quiet, middle-class street in Toronto's west-end, a skeleton is discovered by a surprised work crew - half of it under the old, dark earth of long ago, half of it under the grey of a modern city sidewalk.

Toronto's history can't be easily read by strolling through its streets. Pedestrians curious enough to stop and consider such things often wonder why the biggest and most centrally located statue in Queen's Park is an equestrian memorial to a King. Tourists are perplexed by a lighthouse that now stands, overgrown and forgotten, far from the shore of the Toronto Islands. And in the autumn of 2007, a visiting English tourist watched two archeologists at work in a cordoned-off, downtown site. When told that she was looking at the foundations of Toronto's earliest brick residences and that they would be paved over once documentary photographs had been taken and the site's artifacts had been extracted, she remarked, "If this city won't preserve its past it will never be able to grow old."