One can imagine what he might have said about the Paul Revere Memorial Association that restored the Paul Revere House at 19 North Square in Boston and opened it to the public in 1908.

The house was restored not to resemble the house the way it was during the period of Revere ownership, 1770-1800, but to resemble the house from a century earlier. The partial third floor where Revere’s five children may have slept was reduced to an attic and 18th-century windows replaced with 17th-century windows.

Dan Tham’s video of Patrick M. Leehey, research director of the Paul Revere House, captures the controversy surrounding the Paul Revere Memorial Association’s restoration of the house.

Loren

Gunner Scott

At first, transgender political activist Gunner Scott hesitated to give us an interview. The media so often bungle trans coverage that it’s not hard to understand why.

Take Rita Hester’s case, for example, which continues to resonate with Scott more than a decade later. Hester—a transgender woman—was stabbed to death in Allston, Mass., in 1998. Her murder is still unsolved.

The media identified her as male, even though Hester had been living as a woman for 10 years.

“I still hold her in my heart,” said Scott, the executive director of Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition, which, for the past 10 years, has aimed to use political channels to end discrimination against the transgender population. Every year, he calls the police and asks for updates.

“Her case did not get the same attention as other people’s did,” he said.

Other ways traditional media outlets mess up: Asking privacy-invading, personal medical questions (i.e. “Have you had surgery?”) and publishing addresses of transgender crime victims (which can lead to additional violence). Scott said it’s important to be attentive to these nuances within the transgender community; he can disagree with an article but still find it respectful if it’s reported with tact.

And while the transgender population has historically been lumped in the LGBT group, there can be differences in their needs. For one, the larger public has more difficulty understanding the transgender community. Being transgender has to do with a person’s gender identity and not with sexual orientation; sexual orientation is about who a person is attracted to.

Part of Scott’s job is to be an advocate, but even he has reservations about his image appearing in mainstream media outlets.

“I do the next day worry about getting on the train and being in my neighborhood.”

Scott, who has been threatened before, has “passing privilege,” which means he resembles a man. This makes it easier for him than, say, a 6-foot tall transgender woman.

“Being trans is a process,” he said. “For some of us, we struggle our whole lives. It isn’t just a lifestyle choice. It’s a struggle.” Scott has come out twice; the first time he went back in the closet and didn’t come out again until his 30s. One of the biggest misconceptions is that “people just wake up one day and decide they’re transgender and they transition within a week, or the next day,” he said.

Another is that transgender people want to cause trouble. “We for the most part want to put our heads down,” Scott said.

Alyssa

The video interview we obtained with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of Harvard’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, symbolizes an issue for journalists, especially journalists traveling across country day after day, week after week, in a van. E-mail requests for interviews are not always answered. So when we arrive in a town or city for a day or two, before moving on to the next town or city, we can either accept no answer to our request for an interview as a “No” or visit the person’s office with the hope of scheduling an interview. Not having heard from Professor Gates, we visited his office on a Monday morning and explained our desire for an interview to a Dubois Institute receptionist who seemed intrigued by our Twain trip project. She said we were in luck. Professor Gates had his weekly visiting hour from 1 to 2 p.m. that day. We departed for a quick lunch, returning before 1 p.m. We were second in line, behind an African-American Harvard student from Atlanta. We chatted with him until Prof. Jones arrived around 1:15. When our time came, Prof. Gates invited us into his office, learned the purpose of our visit and politely told us he wanted to speak first to all of his waiting students. He encouraged us to leave our video equipment in his office until our turn came. When we returned to his office to interview him he explained his desire to control who video interviewed him—he has many requests—and questioned the ethics of how we wound up in his office (his visiting hours, he said, were intended only for his students). He said he planned to reprimand the receptionist who informed us of his visiting hour. He then answered our three questions, the first of which is captured on Dan Tham’s video.

Video by Dan

Matthew and Emily MacMillan in their Twain-trip T-shirts

It’s Sunday, Oct. 23, my first day off from the Twain trip. I’m spending it in Scituate, Mass., with my wife, Nancy; younger daughter, Laura; son-in-law Mike MacMillan; and their three children.

Infant Joy (who is a joy), 3-year-old Matthew and Emily are celebrating Emily’s 4-and-a-half-year birthday with special fudge swirl ice cream and six toppings (to take a photo of Matthew and Emily in their Twain trip T-shirts required first scrubbing their cheeks and chin clean of fudge swirl layers).

I also visit my 93-year-old mother, Rae Whitney Ghiglione, who has been living in a second-floor studio apartment at Sunrise, a Cohasset, Mass., nursing facility, for 15 months. She has adjusted well to what could have been a traumatic change.

Rae Whitney Ghiglione from her glamorous days in show business

Following my father’s death in 1966, she spent 44 years living alone, most of it in a tiny Sherman Oaks, Calif., house with an assortment of animal-shelter mutts. But on April 6, 2010, she was found by a housekeeper after surviving two days on her kitchen floor. She was barely conscious.

Then came three months of hospitalization and physical therapy. She moved cross-country to Sunrise and, with the aid of a walker, immediately joined in all activities, from morning exercise classes to field trips to church services to drawing classes to nightly movies.

She has meals at a table of eight—seven women and one man—known for laughing loudly and staying late. From her days as a TV singer and her beauty, she has gained the nickname “glamour girl.”

But there are reminders of mortality. An aide gives her 13 pills each morning and evening. Occasional falls require visits to a nearby hospital. The latest occurred when she bent over to pet Harley, Sunrise’s somnolent, sad-eyed pooch, and broke her neck.

Doctors did not recommend surgery because of her age. So, after knocking on her apartment door, I find her napping on her bed, flat on her back, her neck immobilized by a 4-inch-wide, black-and-white brace.

Sensing my sadness at seeing her in the brace she explains how she is adjusting. She describes an easel-like contraption that allows her to continue to play bingo. “It works fine,” she says.

She remains philosophical about her condition, including memory loss. She endures the neck brace without complaint. “No point,” she says, “in doing anything else.” When she thinks she hears me address an aide by the wrong name, she laughs, “No name is the wrong name around here.”

Loren Ghiglione