Trans In Amandaland

This is as trans as it gets in Amandaland. This would usually be the opening weekend of Frameline, the LGBTQ film festival. So here’s a homemade queer image. It is a recreation of a scene from “Bound” which I saw at Frameline in 1996 with a sold out house. I also created it to hold down the space for a particular niche—that of the masculine woman. It is a niche I’ve been enjoying as a member of an FB group where proud butches come to show off their suits and their haircuts hosted by the Black lesbian owner of the clothing design company Haute Butch.

A niche that was nearly disappeared by the ultra femme representation in The L Word (which we consumed voraciously for its very hot depiction of glamorized lesbians in L.A played by straight women particularly Jennifer Beals). The reboot even more over the top femme glamorous even with addition of a trans man and soft butch wearing Tomboy X boy briefs. I have a stack of those briefs too, but they are not as real as my Fruit of the Loom traditional tightie whities. Real in the sense of honest to god cross dressing. Because there is power in that realness.

I also hold down this space because in a heteronormative, binary world the category has been eclipsed by the trans movement coming into its own and the pressure on non-gender conforming youth to go the trans route especially girls. Thank-you youtube. Because being neither here nor there is too ambiguous for a culture that demands hard line categorical definitions full of color coded pink and blue children’s toys. A culture that demands that either you’re a man or you’re a woman. Gender identity is a spectrum in my mind, not a box to check. And my belief in reincarnation allows for all kinds of overlap in personal gender issues as you go from one sex to another from life to life. That is the underlying explanation for my state of mind on the masculine nature of my self identification. And I wish to hold this ambiguous gender presentation as an option for queer youth.

Thailand which has become the sex change capital of the world has recently forbidden minors to undergo sex changes because too often the minors in question changed their minds. Hint hint. Minors are defined as age 21 if male and 18 if female.

In Asia the cross dressing person has long had a social position and a label. A category that is also represented in the Native American Two Spirit culture. And I would not be surprised if indigenous Africa also had such a category. This is the information I learned at probably six years old which informed me growing up, gave me a space to occupy and giving me maybe a 10-15 year head start in coming out over my American peers.

Western culture has always had non-gender conforming queer folk as well as oppressed gays and lesbian, but as the largely white gay community became more straight presenting assimilationist and more accepted by society, the rest of the community was pushed aside. Some reinvented themselves as trans with their own story of origin of being persons trapped in the wrong body. I’ve gotten into heaps of trouble with my own community in trying to make my case so this is completely my take. But over time the trans position itself became more receptive of gender as a spectrum of presentations (or maybe they were always that way). So I decided to stake my position within the trans community just to hold down my niche which has its own history and cultural representation even in the West. The butch lesbian manager in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel comes to mind here. As does a character in Orange Is The New Black.

And having created this political trans position as the T in the LGBT alphabet and having that category so recently legally recognized by the Supreme Court decision last week we gender queer people are now all protected ironically enough no matter where on the spectrum we fall or whom we love. We shall see anyway. Happy Pride.

(Backdated to reflect date first posted to Facebook.)

Family Entertainment

"May I speak to the lady of the house?" the caller requested.

As I tried to come up with a witty comeback like "Sorry, there are no ladies here" or "I'm the housedyke will that suffice?", she repeated the question.

"Can I help you?" I said cheerfully, suddenly curious as to what campy consumer item or concern a telemarketer might want to communicate to the "lady of the house".

Castro Theater

She asked if I would take a survey about the entertainment industry. This was a subject dear to my heart, given my five-year stint as a projectionist at local movie theatres of the independent art film variety.

"Do you feel that there are sufficient numbers of family movies today?"

"Sure," I said.

"Do you feel that there are television shows appropriate for family entertainment?" Hmm. That was different. Television was the heart and hearth of American discourse. I smelled a rat and it wasn't Ratatouille.

"By family entertainment do you mean shows that exclude family members who are gay?" I asked nonchalantly.

This clearly flustered her as she read me the clause about how the survey taker was not expected to reveal their opinions about what constituted family entertainment. The name of the group began to ring a bell. Yes, it was one of those creepy Christian media watch foundations, intent on erasing gay characters from public view. I told her I knew what they were up to and wanted nothing to do with them. She seemed relieved to end the call while I felt a small triumph in having implied that her group was actually anti-family.

I had long understood the power of media images. My coming out years had not only been a wasteland of invisibility on many levels, but nothing could quite duplicate the twisted feeling of being heart-poundingly aroused by a rare glimpse of a kiss between two women, and then having one of them unceremoniously dispatched by a felled tree as the other was "rescued" by a man. This was the plot of The Fox, staring Sandy Dennis and Keir Dullea (who also played the lone astronaut in 2001: A Space Odyssey, released the same year). I felt as though my own passions had been summarily choked off.

Equally damaging was my viewing of Lenny, as audience members audibly voiced their disgust saying "eeeww", as Valerie Perrine stroked the bare breast of another woman. I was sixteen at the time. I understood, in that moment, that it was my desires they were judging and was offended, but also forewarned. I saw The Fox after college, on the retro art house circuit; the two together were it for images of lesbian sexuality, until the '80s. Had it not been for a late night viewing of the 1966 movie The Group, during my senior year of high school, in which Candice Bergen wears a fetching bowler hat and is seen arriving at a party with a stern German woman in a suit, I would not have known how deliciously, subversive a lesbian identity could be.

Thus it is my generation and older who tend to be loyal to the annual gay film festival, as we make up for those damaging years with queer positive films. Were the Christian groups to evolve from their fetishizing of the gay community as the denizen of perverted flesh, they would be surprised at how family oriented "gay entertainment" has become.

How about a Bollywood inspired romantic comedy, complete with a closing dance number, involving the entire family, celebrating their lesbian daughter's coming out kiss? Nina's Heavenly Delights offered exactly that, plus a startling mix of Indian culture fused to a Scottish locale, from British director Pratibha Parmar. Indians in kilts with Scottish accents! This director had wowed us before and the Castro Theater, where her film was being screened, was sold out.

At the Q & A afterwards, one woman asked why there was no love scene after the kiss scene. (After all, we still wanted our pound of perverted flesh.) The director sighed.

"That's what we have The L Word for," she said. Then went on to explain that she had taken the film to India to show to a mixed audience and it had been very well received as it had been in England, too. Though she didn't spell it out, her intention had been to give us back our families by telling a story that would not alienate the family members she hoped would watch the film. While at the same time the supportive characters in the film, especially the mother reflected real life positive experiences.

Supportive mothers turned out to be an enduring thread in the 10 programs we saw over the eleven days of the festival. In the short My First Time Driving, a mother congratulates herself for guessing that her teen daughter is gay, then finally allows her to borrow the family car to take her girlfriend on a date. Equally satisfying was Kali Mama staring a folksy, sari clad Indian mother who sets out to seek justice when her gay son is beaten up by a much bigger Anglo classmate. Her ferocious physical response to the bully's mouthing back at her had us cheering.

Even Internet identities are interrupted by motherly figures, as grandma inadvertently shows her face on the porn site of a web cam girl in the Chinese/Taiwanese film Spider Lilies. The seemingly naive gamine carries on provocative relationships with unseen viewers, inciting them to pay for more, while offline, the object of her love, tattoos designs on the skin of those looking for identities. (This Friday night show was not sold out. "I guess tattooed Asian girls aren't in this year," I commented to Catherine.) It was a visually arresting film. I was particularly enamored of the tattoo artist with her long hair tied impatiently into a ponytail and her stylish jackets and pants.

Most poignant was the documentary Red Without Blue in which a pair of twins both turn out to be gay, but one twin decides to change sex as well. At first the mother (who also comes out as a lesbian) refuses to accept either of them as family, but then comes around. The remaining brother also has adjustments to make. The film captured emotional revelations about gender and family that stayed with me.

Meanwhile, in a screwball comedy of unexpected outcomes, Out At The Wedding, turns our fears of family rejection on its head as the heroine dodges valiantly to avoid telling her family the truth. Comedy is hard to pull off and I feared that I would find the mix-ups endlessly annoying, so was pleasantly surprised by this fun romp filled with sassy one-liners and up-ended stereotypes.

A mother's acceptance of her teen daughter's identity is progressively integrated into the movie Itty Bitty Titty Committee, during preparations for a sibling's wedding, with the line "I've read the lesbian handbook from cover to cover and it says nothing about no make-up".

If anything the gay community was far more interested in the power of love to unite families than the Christian community could hope to compel by driving us out of their vision of family entertainment. And though a few shorts and docs were devoted to holding our own in the face of the Christian Right, we had largely moved on. Queer film makers were not only intent on telling stories of healing family relationships, but of love bridging far more challenging cultural divides as showcased by The Bubble in which a Palestinian and an Israeli are lovers.

The festival itself provided us with the village atmosphere to renew our queer family ties. The hours I spent waiting in line were not wasted as I people watched from my perch sitting on the footboard of my folding scooter. (To insure a place early in line, I commuted by express train up the Peninsula, scootered the five blocks to Market Street, hopped on the T Line of the Muni Metro and was in my spot an hour and a quarter before showtime, waiting for Catherine who would bring dinner on her way from work.)

On the final night, with the multiple lines wrapping around the block in both directions depending on what level of membership you could afford or not, a friend spotted me from the Gold line and shouted o out "Ben is here" as she followed her line into the theater. Ben was my recently discovered lesbian cousin from Thailand whom I had never met. Just then an Asian woman walked by in the opposite direction.


"Are you Ben," I asked.

"No," she said, giving me a friendly, scrutinizing look before hurrying off.

"You can't ask every Asian woman who walks by if they're Ben," Catherine commented. Why not, there were only a handful on the whole street, surely we were all related. After all, we had just celebrated Catherine's birthday at a nearby restaurant where another birthday party was being celebrated at the next table. Not only did one of our friends know people at that table, but one of their party was the ex-lover of another friend in our group.

As it turned out, the Asian dyke did indeed know Ben and when she got inside the theater, delivered the message that someone was looking for her. The first friend came to find me and took me to meet her. Ben happened to be visiting from Bangkok that week with her girlfriend. She was equally pleased to see me, having met my father just before returning to Thailand six years ago. We had time to get acquainted before the organist ended his repertoire with the traditional refrain of "San Francisco Open Your Golden Gate"....

The closing night film stepped right past the usual feel good queer identity films of year's past, with the message attempted by Itty Bitty Titty Committee, a story of 20 something, radical feminists who installed political art and defaced property with spray painted slogans. The audience seemed a tad confused by this criminal behavior.

During the Q & A, a man asked the director if she was aware that her film might prompt young people to blow things up. Another viewer objected to the numerous images of characters smoking cigarettes onscreen. My how parental we had become. There were also questions about the cheating in a long-term relationship.

No one asked about the motivations for the politics of the film. It was almost as if we had forgotten we ever had politics bigger than gay rights. The feminist sentiments expressed in the movie were right out of the '70s and included my own objections to marriage as a patriarchal construct. In the modern context of the film, it all seemed hopelessly outdated. We're they making fun of us? I wondered, or did young lesbians still dissect the patriarchy as part of their queer identification process?

The director was just a decade younger than me. These were the issues that had been part of her coming of age, she explained, but having become disillusioned by the whole scene, she decided to make a feminist fable. Thus the unlikely successful outcome of the climax and a happy ending for all.

One friend thought it entertaining, but ultimately pointless and stupid, while another agreed with me that the politics needed to include the degradation of the planet to update it. Still many of us saw a glimmer of a much-needed return to radical political thought. Not so much to blow things up, but to inspire a larger vision of change. It was good enough. Good enough to sustain me for the year.

Report From the Queer Cinematic Front

This year's pride celebration was the refuge of even our straight brethren. Heck if you don't like the direction the country is going you can always party with us and have a fabulous time. Our yearly retreat to the silver screen of the Castro Theatre, was particularly fruitful.

Transgender was in, I could see as I leafed through the festival schedule. In its 29th year the San Francisco gay film festival was quietly embracing the full spectrum of queer possibilities. With little fanfare the festival title had been changed from 'gay and lesbian' to The San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival. This was long overdue considering that it was ten years ago that the pride parade was renamed to include bisexual and transgender.

It is never easy to select which films. I was excited. How would gay filmmakers present our life in these difficult times? So spoiled were we by the increasing number of gay characters on HBO and two all queer sit coms of our own, would the film festival still transport us?

Judging from one of the showcased films, Happy Endings (soon to open at a theatre near you), gays and lesbians have earned a niche in middle class life. In this ensemble cast, the lesbians are attempting perfection in child raising and a gay couple (their best friends) are obsessed with the paternity of the child in case it turns out to be the product of one of their sperm donations. Harmless stuff of screwball comedy, but decidedly not gay. Not for me. This was a straight film with a straight lead character and gay people thrown in for a hip twist as they exemplify coupledom and child raising. Our talents are wasted here. Why compete in a straight paradigm?

More interesting was the world of a male to female transsexual just a week away from the surgery that would finalize her transformation. (One of the actresses from Desperate Housewives has the lead role, which is sure to evoke interest). Transamerica will open in mainstream theatres to deliver a story of the journey to self in the context of family relationships. Perfunctorily detailed, yet suspenseful and poignant, the audience is not asked to engage in the confusion of gender dysphoria, but in the character's determination to undergo the journey. Catherine and I were uplifted by the courage and nobility of this quest for integrity. This hero's journey was what being queer was about for us.

In Screaming Queens, Susan Stryker, a transgender historian brought us the little known tale of San Francisco's gay rebellion in the Tenderloin. A few years before drag queens fought back at the Stonewall bar in New York and launched the gay movement, there was a cafe in the Tenderloin called Compton's where the queens hung out. One night it was raided by police and a riot ensued. For the first time queers could see how powerful they could be as a group.

Screeming Queens Q & A

Their efforts were not recognized, explained the director, because there was no gay movement to recognize them. Only afterwards were gay groups beginning to form. During the Q & A at the screening, the now retired police officer she had interviewed came to the stage in his wheelchair. An audience member asked why he chose to speak up given the sentiments of his fellow officers. He spoke slowly and with effort. "As a member of my church, I just felt it was the right thing to do," he said. A startling revelation for these times and not one we expected.

The German coming of age story, Summer Storm, offered another gay journey with it's story of a teen hopelessly in love with his best friend and having to resolve their different paths. He does it without killing himself or suffering excessive trauma from his peer group. He even cracks a joke. A positive story of self-acceptance that includes a tender love scene worthy of any teen drama. Beautifully shot with high production values, it would be distributed in Europe by Warner Brothers, but in America only a little known distributor would pick it up, possibly not even for a theatrical release. When asked why, the director apologetically described the political climate in America today.

"I'm sorry, but this is what I see," he said, "As I traveled across the country I was very alarmed by the oppression by the religious right. This country used to be progressive, but not any more." Talk of the impact of the religious right on our lives makes me livid and I immediately want to buttonhole the nearest Christian and ask "how could you let this happen?" But we're not talking Christians here; we're talking about a group that more resembles the Klu Klux Klan without the scary outfits. We shouldn't need a German visitor to tell us this.

From Canada we were offered Eternal, a lesbian vampire movie to fulfill any hysterical homophobic right wing vision, but not nearly campy enough to be fun. My real objection to this Eyes Wide Shut, slick, horror flick was that it was cruel and heartless. The vampire was too eager to consume her victim in her greed for the blood that would give her eternal life. Why have eternal life for it's own sake? In my experience, the reward of the lesbian vampire - the initiator- is to facilitate the surrender of the 'victim' to forbidden pleasure. The lesbian vampire as change agent.

Forbidden pleasure is questioned in Tropical Malady, an unusual offering from my home country. Unlike any Thai movie I have ever seen, the film sets up a sweet love story then sends the lead character into the jungle by himself for the entire second half of the film. There he experiences what appears to be a complicated allegory for desire and is consumed by a tiger.

Castro Theater

Europe, too, is far ahead of us in exploring sexuality as a bridge to more expansive thoughts. From post-Milosevic Serbia we got Take A Deep Breath, one of the few films we saw without a happy ending. When asked why not, the director explained that the relationships in the film were political metaphors for a fractured country and Serbia was a country hard put to find happiness. What a concept! What if someone made a relationship picture to express Bush's America? What a tale of deception, lies and betrayal that would be.

While the father was predictably homophobic in the Serbian film, what was refreshing was the reaction of the mother upon learning that her daughter is gay. She smiles with emerging delight and gives her blessing. "Nobody has found a recipe for happiness yet," she says. Meanwhile she herself is divorcing her philandering husband.

Men, it seems are offering a poor partnership in the middle years of many women's lives. In the British film Gypo, the husband is taciturn and brutish, endangering the life of a young immigrant woman who has offered his wife love and affection. This stripped down film complies with an unusual set of anti-Hollywood rules established by the Danish Dogme95 society. It is cinema verite at its strictest, with hand held cameras, and no additional lighting or music. The severity of these rules strip nearly all the atmosphere from the scenes, but it still manages to offer surprising narrative development.

In the Finnish film Producing Adults, a potential husband slips his girlfriend an RU40 pill to get rid of a baby she wants, but he doesn't. She is befriended by a woman doctor who may just prefer women given that her own boyfriend is a lay about slob. Here again a mother is ecstatically happy that her daughter brings home a woman rather than a man. It takes the better part of the movie to figure out if this film will actually have gay content, but it grows on me and the pay off is delicious. So deft is the invitation of the doctor, so sensuous the response.

It is the Spanish film Sauvigne that really takes a lesbian relationship to a new level of emotional exploration. The lesbian director of the film plays the lead herself. She has been at the Festival before with her prize-winning film Costa Brava and the theatre is packed.

In this story our endearing, self-deprecating, heroine vies for the attention of an actress turned director to produce her play. The director is intrigued and with the advice of her theatre critic husband, persuades our heroine to restructure the entire play in order to explore her own grief over the death of her daughter. The characters are rendered with such maturity and self-observation that it is entirely believable when the mix of creative collaboration, lesbianism and grief reaches an unusual catharsis. This to me, is what queer cinema is capable of.

Film Fest Gang

For us the film festival was a return to our roots, to a psychic history that reminds us of our strengths, our transformative powers, our grit and resilient humor. Happy Pride.