From Miss Rosen’s article and interview with Mariette Pathy Allen for Huck:
“While visiting New Orleans for Mardi Gras back in 1978, photographer Mariette Pathy Allen received the invitation of a lifetime: an opportunity to have breakfast with a dozen crossdressers fully turned out in their finest gowns.
After the meal they gathered around the hotel pool for a group portrait. “As I took my first picture, everybody was looking in a different direction, except Vicky West, who was looking straight back at me,” Allen remembers. “I had an incredible feeling, like I wasn’t looking at a man or a woman, but somehow the essence of a human being. And I thought to myself, I have to have this person in my life.”
Allen’s silent prayer was delivered on arrival: West lived 20 blocks for Allen on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “We became friends, and she was my mentor. Vicky took me wherever she went in her trans world,” Allen says.”