BEING PAULA CAMP
WHEN I PULLED INTO THE YARD of Paula Camp’s elegant Victorian home, a tall figure started marching toward my car.
“Hello and welcome,” said Camp, wearing a gray hoodie, rubber boots, and black jeans. “I’d shake but my hands are pretty sticky.”
It was a crisp fall day at Carriage House Ciders, the fledgling business Camp started in 2020 out of her house in Benton Harbor, Michigan. She’d been pressing apples all morning. As I breathed in the sweet, fruity air, Camp showed me giant pallets of heirloom apples, with names like Arkansas Black and Newtown Pippin, and demonstrated the processes of pruning, pressing, and filtering. Finally, she led me to a barrel room, where she and a friend hoisted a giant bucket of the golden juice and carefully poured it into a heavy oak cask.
I quietly pulled out my phone to capture the moment. Camp looked up with a hint of self-consciousness.
“Monica, I’m afraid you’re not catching me at my most feminine,” she said with a fluty giggle.
I laughed back, but I could tell she wasn’t entirely joking.
See, these days, Camp takes her femininity very seriously. But not long ago, it was something she was terrified to acknowledge. That’s because, for most of her 73 years, people knew her as Paul Camp, who served as the Chicago Tribune’s exacting restaurant critic and ascendant lifestyles editor through much of the 1980s.
Camp has largely stayed out of the public eye since quitting the newspaper three decades ago, even as she remained in publishing and raised a family with her wife, Mary Connors. So when many of Camp’s old Tribune colleagues discovered her transition — through LinkedIn and Facebook profiles showing a familiar face with stylish long hair and lipstick — it came as a shock.
They told me they remembered Camp as an ambitious and inspiring editor, but also as an arrogant and macho boss with a ferocious temper. Looking back, Camp says she deserved her reputation but that it came from a secret she kept closely guarded. “My anger spasms were driven by being ‘forced’ to be something and someone I was not,” she told me. This turmoil dogged her through three marriages, a series of high-risk career moves, and four therapists before Camp finally came to terms with her inner struggle and began to transition six years ago.
Camp says Connors, her wife of 33 years, “showed me the true meaning of love by staying at my side even though I put her through hell.” Connors is also standing by her as Camp delves into her new business in a new field in a new state, a venture she’s taking on as “an elderly trans woman,” as the former food critic bluntly puts it.
Over five months, Camp and Connors sat for a series of interviews and follow-up conversations by email and Zoom. Our talks got raw and honest, even painful, yet the
