Valentine Road: the King murder's final stand

Marta Cunningham's new documentary Valentine Road takes an up close examination of the February 14, 2008 murder of the 15-year old from Ventura County, Larry King, by a 14-year old schoolmate of King named Brandon McInerney. McInerney shot King twice at near point blank range while they were in a computer class together and King died 2 days later. The case became a national cause celebre on the subject of school violence, especially against gay students and was featured on the cover of Newsweek Magazine and in virtually every mainstream media outlet. The 2011 trial of McInerny ended in a controversial hung jury but eventually, the accused ended up in prison on a plea bargain. The documentary, co-produced by HBO, proved a big success at the Sundance Film Festival, and will be showing on HBO sometime in October, 2013.

Valentine Road starts by going back and forth between the particulars of the two main figures of the film. Larry King, a petite, feminine gender-variant child who was given up for adoption, raised by unsupportive adoptive parents, and was living at a foster facility for teens at the time of the murder. King started crossdressing at school several years before their death, including heels, girl's jeans, jewelry and makeup and endured daily taunts and bullying from other students. Furthermore, several close female friends of King explain how their friend confided they wanted to be called "Letitia" and was identifying with a more transgender identity than gay boy.

McInerney was raised by an abusive dad and drug-user mom and the film, unlike some news accounts, doesn't pull punches in showing his violent side, including close circuit unprovoked attacks of other students at school and his increasing obsession with Nazi skinhead imagery. While Cunningham is moved by McInerney's background and clearly has issues with him being tried as an adult, she never backs off from his ultimate culpability or tries to soft pedal the racism and homophobia ingrained in Brandon, his girlfriend and much of the community they lived in.

At the same time, the film deftly interviews several teachers at the school, one of whom (who was also in the computer lab at the time of the attack) was clearly an ally/confidant of King's. She controversially bestowed the teen with a green dress, which was brought up in the trial as a supposed way she encouraged unacceptable behavior in King. Another of King's teachers spouts ignorant views about queer kids for the camera and pretty much dumps culpability for the murder on the victim. What makes the documentary quite remarkable is the degree of access Cunningham received from those in Ventura County both sympathetic to King's plight at the school and those who seem positively callous as to what the bullied teen experienced. In an outrageous scene, after the trial a number of jurors (middle class, white women all) gather together with Cunningham for a coffee klatsch to guilelessly discuss why they voted to acquit McInerny. As Cunningham explained in the 'Q&A,' most of the persons she interviewed didn't take her seriously since she was a straight woman of color, seemed to have no agenda in making the film and came off as a bit of a soccer mom herself. Several of these sequences with apologists for McInerny go beyond cringe-worthy into profound exposes of ingrained racism, and cultural homo/trans phobia. Balanced with this is the story of King's teacher (the one who gave the dress) who was, in effect, blamed and railroaded by the school district and is working at Starbucks as the documentary is being filmed.

What I truly appreciated about the film is how it firmly rebuts the trope that "two young men's lives were ruined (equally?) by this event." (something I've heard often repeated in media and online) In a stinging final scene about his fate, Brandon is seen celebrating his high school graduation in prison, wearing a cap and gown, warmly surrounded by his family and prison officials as he's bestowed his diploma. He will be paroled sometime in his mid-late 30s. Cunningham ends the film with a shot of King's small grave marker (later replaced by a larger, equally misgendering one) and explained she wanted a clear contrast between the two teens' fates who, while they both underwent difficult childhoods, one has a possible life ahead of him while the other's is irrefutably over. Cunningham at least fights (not always successfully) the urge to inexorably link the murderer and the victim of his hate crime, a pitfall many such documentaries fall into.

As powerful as Valentine Road is, there are still a few shortcomings which, viewing the film as a trans person, made me uneasy. She never really goes too deeply into how King was made into an iconic gay matyr even though it's pretty clear relatively early in the film that Letitia King was a trans girl and not a gay boy. She does a good job showing some of the warped logic used by the defense team to basically paint King as a 'sexual predator and bully' but doesn't really discuss how one of the defense attorneys was an out lesbian (and said so in court) while she was presenting a defense which hinged heavily on gay/trans panic, which is illegal in California. I also felt with all the talking heads in the film, at no point was any perspective given about what trans teens actually experience in school or how difficult it is to even identify as trans. And ultimately, both in the credits and 'Q&A,' Cunningham continues to use male pronouns and the first name Larry for Letitia King. When I questioned her about this at the showing, she replied "it might have to do with the fact he was dressed as a boy when he was murdered."It's a curious explanation since, in cases like the Jorge Steven Lopez murder in Puerto Rico (another murdered "gay teen"), media coverage ignored how Lopez was presenting as a woman at the time of their murder and still categorized it as the murder of a gay boy. I sometimes felt Ms. Cunningham didn't have a lot of understanding or perspective about trans teens or how their issues are frequently misrepresented as gay issues.

Its insistence in misgendering apart, Valentine Road is a powerful, disturbing documentary all the more amazing it's made by a first time director who doesn't come from a filmmaking background.  Once shown on HBO it will no doubt become the definitive statement on this trial and, for the most part, we're lucky it's so cogent and thoughtful and resists falls into clichés. Valentine Road is skillful at balancing personal tragedy with explorations of messed up social norms, bigotry and, especially, how so many project their own issues onto a horrific situation like this. And speaking of that, what concerns me at this juncture is how her gravestone (and the documentary) still read "Lawrence King," which means a trans girl is going to be further misgendered in perpetuity. It's hard for a non-trans person to understand how that is a fate equal to death for many trans people, and a legacy no trans teen should have to imagine.

WIldness: gentrification as an art installation

Wildness is a recent documentary which premiered at LA Outfest last May, showed at last year's Frameline Festival and South by Southwest but is only now playing the US LGBT festival circuit in a broader way. It's directed by queer artist Wu Tsang, (who uses male pronouns on his website) and written by Tsang and Roya Rastegar. It concerns an old school Latino gay bar, The Silver Platter, on the edge of LA's MacArthur Park (where someone left the cake out in the rain) but, in recent decades, has specifically become a gathering place for trans Latinas. It's a complex film (or really, several interwoven films) together with a meta aspect of self-critique as befits Tsang, who is primarily a performance and installation fine artist with some impressive credentials.

Hipster Wildness promoters (Tsang is second from left)

The film starts out with a highly self-conscious narration of the bar speaking for itself in the voice of one of the trans women who frequent it. The narration talks of the bar's history, the women who find their relaxation away from being marginalized, waxes poetic about the neighborhood, culture, queerness, etc. At no point does Wildness or its credits explain who wrote this narration (I'm assuming Tsang and Rastegar) and, for what's ostensibly a documentary, quite a bit of commentary is snuck into  this aspect of the film. It segues into a fairly traditional documentary portrait of "look at the gender variance... isn't it fascinating" in much the same way Diane Arbus or many others have previously done. We meet the bar's owners (an older latino man, his gay son, the son's lover and the older man's cis daughter, who is essentially the manager).  A telling moment is when the owners, other than daughter, say they're kind of uncomfortable the bar became increasingly frequented by trans women and how they liked it better when masculine gay men were their customers. The trans women from Mexico and elsewhere in Central America are shown doing lip syncing, (of course, putting on their makeup) sharing laughter and letting their hair down. Most are skewed older, except for a 20-year old trans woman who is one of the main camera subjects.

But 10 minutes into the film, it takes a sharp left turn and Wu Tsang is introduced as the film's central figure. The queer, androgynous Tsang moves from Chicago to LA, is looking for community and decides the Silver Platter is it. It's from here that the film veers heavily into New Journalism. As I mentioned in a prior post, New Journalism was pioneered in the 60s by Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Truman Capote and others as a genre of non-fiction with a stylized and fictional coating to it where the author and their search for answers becomes one of the main characters and core of the work. It breaks through a false assumption of documentary impartiality but can also make a documentary subject so personal and shot through the filter of the artist/writer/filmmaker that it starts to resemble fiction (which can also make it highly entertaining). In fairly short order, Tsang gloms onto the club and convinces the owners (who, I'm sure saw Tsang as a young, very educated queer hipster with connections to white club kid dollars) to give him and three of his cis friends Tuesdays at the Silver Platter for an ongoing party night which they name "Wildness." It quickly becomes an upscale queer/performance art scene celebre but with zero connection to the trans women who inhabit the club the other six nights. The other three people who run the club with Tsang seem to lack any identification with the seedy trans space they're pretty much cannibalizing for its coolness quotient. Tsang keeps focusing on the idea of "safe space" for these trans women with little thought that what he's morphing the club into is something they can neither afford or really ever likely to belong to.

Within a few months, the club becomes fabulously successful but also a harbinger of gentrification to come. Eventually, the LA Weekly wants to do a story on it (pretty much the uber-hipsters' death knoll that's sure to flood it with college kids, celebrity scene tourists and suburbanites). In a painful to watch section, gay columnist/club slug James St. James drones on mindlessly about the "trannies" at the club and you can palpably hear the queer clubbers and their wannabe allies leering at the "Mexican transvestites... har, har." The article in the LA Weekly not surprisingly turns out to be a nasty piece of transphobic objectification droning on and on about trannies, he-shes and shemales. Tsang is outraged, waging an internet campaign against its social activist author, Sam Slovick and finally forces Slovick to apologize to him. The film never really asks what Tsang's part was in this debacle nor clarify if Slovick and the paper ever really apologized to the women at the club or its ownership (which, while they didn't like the tone of the story, seemed to be glowing in the piles of money rolling in from "Wildness" nights).


Along the way, Tsang gets involved in some of the internal politics of the club and naively questions whether their hyper-successful evening of artsy hipness is throwing the equilibrium of the space off-kilter (duh... something which the trans women clearly express in a guarded way even if they're curious about the interlopers). Ultimately, flush with success, the Wildness team rent a storefront next door and try to open a legal clinic for trans women. It's a good gesture, but I couldn't help thinking they were doing some kind of penance for potentially stealing this space from the women... one of the few for trans immigrants in LA. I won't tell the outcome of the story but, needless to say, the Silver Platter is still there, hugely more expensive than it used to be, and it you look on Yelp, it's all younger white kids talking about the transsexuals and "transvestites" and the now pricy drinks. Yup, it's pretty much become an 'Africa USA' kind of "watch the trannies" safari (there are other spaces like this, such as Lucky Changs in NYC and AsiaSF in San Francisco... overwhelmingly for cis well heeled patrons to ogle at trans women of color).  I suspect this film was ultimately good publicity for The Silver Platter after all. As so often happens with gentrification, the earlier outsiders/developers who move into the minority space make initial attempts to "honor" the history of the neighborhood before the drink prices shoot up to 4 dollar signs.


The film shines in its capturing the environment of the neighborhood, the moment in time (2008), the sounds (it has a great salsa and electronica soundtrack) and, when it allows the women to speak for themselves, can be quite moving. It also has a certain level of self-examination about Wildness, its cultural and trans appropriation... but never probes too deeply or bothers to ask what queerness really means for these women and if there really is an LGBTQ community which unites because of Wildness (which the film tries to limply suggest). This makes it perfect for LGBT film festivals which love to believe such sentiments as they show films about gender variant people of color yet overwhelmingly cater to cis, white, middle-class patrons who very likely know few trans people much less trans latinas).


I walked away from seeing "Wildness" with WILDLY mixed feelings about Tsang. He tries to posit himself as "one of The Silver Platter girls," but considering he doesn't speak Spanish and his work has been seen at the Tate, Whitney and umpteen Biennials, I'm skeptical about him blending in with impoverished trans women from El Salvador who are in the US without papers. He clearly loves the women and cares for their well being but the film never really delves into what they think of him, his continually filming them (the film suggests a fair number are afraid of the INS finding them), his gender presentation much less his friends (who sound nothing if not condescending towards the women).

Wildness, the documentary, ultimately churned up a lot of feelings for me about race, class, gentrification, trans vs. queer vs. gay and even what gets to be defined "art" and what isn't. Personally, I loved seeing the performances by the trans women and drag queens and found myself cringing at the 25-years-on Pyramid Club ripoff fare offered up by Wildness and its craaazy, 2008-and-still-punky habitues. What I valued most from the film was the questions and contradictions I felt it (inadvertently?) posed while most of the narration and ongoing soliloquies by Tsang I found self-consciously earnest and motivated by his inner fear of  coming off as an appropriative artist jerk. In the end, he seems like a nice, sincere queer person but really, androgynous or not, yet another artist explaining the 'transgenders' he got to know. I kept feeling this story would have been better told by another filmmaker who could have given real, honest perspective about the cultural and class tectonic jolts suggested in Wildness without being the film's pivot point.

Laurence Longways: Xavier Dolan in transland

Montreal wunderkind director/actor, Xavier Dolan, who had a cult/festival hit at the age of 20 with his initial feature-length film, "Je Tue ma mere" (I killed my mother) is back 3 years later with "Laurence Anyways" an exploration on becoming an outsider and its impact on relationships. Dolan centers the film on 30s-ish academic/poet Laurence and his passionate relationship with Fred(erique), his bipolar filmmaker girlfriend. Starting sometime in the late 80s, their tempestuous, sexy and fun-loving relationship goes on a roller coaster ride when  Laurence, seemingly out of nowhere (to Fred), starts to ID as a woman. Fred, boho as she is, still wants to be in a relationship with a man and is blindsided by the news. Thus begins a 2 hour and 48 minute explosion of alternating music video imagery to 80s/90s tunes and neo-French nouvelle vague intensity as the couple and their families have one argument in spat out Qubecoise French after another.

Xavier Dolan:
Hipper, queerer and more accomplished than thou.

Why Dolan set the piece 20+ years ago is never entirely clear. It may be he wished the subject of being trans to be more transgressive and forbidden in that pre-Internet time, which is curious because it's not as if it's really much better accepted today and, in many ways, he doesn't really seem to understand the context of trans in the 1980s terribly well. Or maybe he just liked the music from that era (think "Fade to Grey" by Visage and you get the picture) and decided to frame his story in that era. Laurence (Melvil Poupaud) goes through a period where he's distracted while teaching class  and sits in a graveyard while listening to his Walkman. Fred (Suzanne Clement) who, prior to the disclosure, seemed hyper and over the top in love with Laurence. This is shown by several (interminable?) scenes of their having fun together, involving Fred spontaneously bursting into snippets of goofy operatic soprano and getting it on together in a carwash. Initially, she is overwhelmed by her boyfriend's gender admission and leaves 'him.' Upon spending a few days with her bourgeois and gauche family, she longs for Laurence and returns. She buys Laurence (in French the name is used for men and women) her first wig and pushes her to present as female while teaching at school. Yes, Laurence is Julia Serano's classic archetype of 'pathetic trans woman' (as opposed to the sexy deceiver trans woman) and appears in one ghastly outfit after another forever trapped in a world of people smirking at her and looking hopelessly out of place.

Clueless, pathetic trans woman, Laurence.

And this is where the film goes kind of haywire, especially for its era. Laurence's first day teaching "en femme" is more of a genderfuck than something anyone trans from that era would do. She wears a too tight women's suit, heels and short skirt and makeup, but makes zero attempt to do anything with her hair... especially bizarre because pre-transition Laurence obsesses over her female student's hair in class. Laurence views the day as "revolutionary." As someone who's been through this experience (and was also a teacher... albeit of children not young adults) I can tell you that political expressions of power are the last thing someone going through this would feel and this struck me as a clear outsider's projection onto Laurence's situation. An objectification of what that achievement/travail would mean.

Laurence's first day at school ensemble... am I passing yet?

And indeed, for all the queer-positive charge of the film, it actually falls back on a lot of old school transsexual film tropes—transition being about selecting clothes (incompetently) and putting on teenage slut makeup. She has one mention of self-loathing at not being able to look in a large mirror. There is virtually no other aspect shown to her transition other than a 1 second reference to being on hormones and having electrolysis (which is usually a huge ordeal for most trans women). No real exploration of her feelings about her body, her facial hair, her head hair, her nose, shoulders, hands, much less penis. And, because a male actor is playing the role, Laurence's look (other than rather ratty looking extensions) never really progress or evolve past this first day at work. Moreover, Poupaud shows little evolution of Laurence in terms of expressed gender through the decade covered film. He shows her awareness as an outsider, but little to nothing about the PTSD or profound experiences one has in transition. Poupaud the guy at the beginning of the film is practically interchangeable with Poupaud playing someone who's been on hormones, gone through many hours of painful electrolysis, and lived as a women (much less a trans woman) for a decade. While he's a clearly a good actor, he seems somewhat miscast for the role and unsure in which direction to take it.

Warning: Possible Spoilers
Eventually, Laurence is laid off by his school administrator while his gay male co-worker, and blousey cis woman teacher buddies remains silent. In another curiously chosen scene, Laurence, just after the firing, is hanging out at a clearly blue collar men's bar (pretty much the last place someone in her situation would go). A Quebecois redneck starts to hassle her, they get in a fight and she wanders the streets dazed with bloodied face. She calls up her sophisticated French mom (played by Natalie Baye, French acting icon and favorite of Truffaut) who wants to help "her son" but is afraid of her endlessly-tv-watching hubby's intolerance. At the same time, Fred loses a key job opportunity with a US film company because of her choice of partner and the relationship goes down a dark hole. Fred is disgusted by the lack of sex and being seen as an outsider and stuck with a freak in a relationship, goes dolled up to a big film industry party by herself and hooks up with a slick businessman with whom she starts an affair.

Where are we going with this?

Laurence is found by "The Roses" a queer-dream family of old ladies, queens and young gender variant boychick who live in what looks like a victorian ballroom. It was almost impossible to tell if they were supposed to be trans women (which is where I felt Dolan was kind of going with it) or that this was an older generation of queer/faghag alliance. In any event, you'll either think they're a hoot, a total tired cliche from another era or both. There should be a big, flashing neon sign... Laurence finds her queerness... vous comprenez? Without giving too much more of the plot away, Fred moves to the burbs, gets married, has a kid while Laurence writes her first acclaimed book of poetry and paints a brick pink on Fred's upscale house to remind her of "them." There are several more get-togethers and breakups for the next 90 minutes.

The Roses: everything's a giggle and a swish

The film is, IMO, just too long for it's own good. One 'could-be-cut' scene after another slows and dulls the film. And the visuals, while often beautiful, have a lot of commercial work/music video stamp about them: backlit snow/flower petals/particles floating in the air, a butterfly coming out of Laurence's mouth (butterfly, get the symbolism, get it?), bleak landscapes and a huge cascade of water enveloping the suburbanized Fred as she reads her ex-lovers poetry. It's very pretty but you've seen it before in many car ads. And I'm not even mentioning an oddly chosen scene where guy-in-a-dress Laurence meets a trans man (played by yet another cis male actor) who passes perfectly, has a hot girlfriend and lives in Laurence's dream destination (an isolated Island off the coast of Newfoundland) and recreationally uses opium to numb his boredom.

A pink brick... je me souviens

This isn't to say the film doesn't have it's powerful moments. Best of all is a scene in a working class coffee shop during brunch. An old bag waitress starts making entitled, offensive remarks about Laurence until Fred literally explodes into a amazing soliloquy of outrage which goes on several minutes. You can feel the entire world pushed back during her fiery declaration and it's a truly revolutionary decree of "I'm mad as hell" and a sign of Clement and Dolan's talent. Some of the Rose Family sequences, campy/hokey though the family is, seem right out of "Shortbus" in the queer sisterhood category and the truism, "when your family rejects you, find a new family." There are some interesting exchanges between Laurence (10 years later) and a publishing company pr woman who is interviewing her for her new book. They have a cis/trans dance of entitlement and defensiveness which felt familiar to me in some of my interactions with certain cis women of my own age. And there is the performance of Suzanne Clement, who is abosolutely brilliant at finding Fred's many shades of crazy and obsession. She carries and, in some ways, takes over the film and often seems to overpower her fellow actors especially Poupaud (which could be an insightful show of character, but sometimes feels as if Fred, not Laurence, is the title character).

10 year on, Laurence is still wearing powder blue
suits specially tailored to make her shoulders look bigger

Is Laurence Anyways (recently aided in finding distribution by Gus Van Sant) a classic of trans/queer cinema? Well, it sure has its moments and images (maybe too many?) It's either a film which has a rather old-fashioned, naive view of what being trans is like or really just doesn't care that much and is using being trans as a chosen cataclysmic event to throw the relationship into chaos and issue revolutionary queer decrees. (**Warning: amateur therapist theory coming**) I kept feeling Dolan views Laurence and Fred as two sides of himself: the outsider queer poet and the tempestuous insane filmmaker, meh. For a 23-year old who's produced three full-length feature films, he has a lot to be proud of, so I can accept some heavy-handed symbolism. It's audacious filmmaking if not always thoughtful about its title character. And I suspect many queer young people Dolan's age will love this film's passion and it will provide their generation's view of what it meant to be trans (for white academics... back in the 80s-90s... anyways). The film, which won a Queer Palme d'Or at Cannes 2012 will be featured at many LGBT film fests in the coming year. You've either been forewarned or tantalized by the prospect.

Being Emily: Third person disguised as first

"Being Emily" is a new young adult (YA) novel by Rachel Gold which tells a year in the life of a mostly pre-transition trans girl living in small town white bread Minnesota. It joins such other recent YA titles as "I Am J" by Cris Beam, and "Almost Perfect" by Brian Katcher which also dealt with the experiences of trans teens. It's being marketed with the tagline how it's the first YA novel to be told from the specific perspective of a trans woman character and, compared with "Luna," the best known work in this niche (which is completely told from the trans girl's sister's viewpoint), it's somewhat true...  but more about that later.

No Johnny come lately
Gold is a cis lesbian who has a unique connection to trans issues. She was the former girlfriend of a trans woman who was well known in 'the community' from the early 2000s... an academic named Emily Hobbie (her nom de plume) who was later briefly seen in the film "Beautiful Daughters" being interviewed by Eve Ensler. Together, Gold and Hobbie founded an online forum for younger trans women called "GenderPeace." To many trans women it was like a second home, albeit a wildly dysfunctional one which, along with the love and support, was often filled with screaming matches, hissy fits, heartbreak, sexual creepiness and middle school drama. It finally self-immolated back around 2006 and eventually morphed into a another site which was also geared towards younger trans people called "TrueSelves" (which Gold and Hobbie have no connection with). So, much like Cris Beam, she is an LGBT member, has a deep personal connection to trans issues and people and is someone who is highly motivated to help and understand trans teens... and 'get it right,' all wonderful characteristics for an ally and partner. The question being, how does this background translate into someone who can necessarily get into the first person perspective of a trans teen?

Rachel Gold with her favorite YA book

The book centers around two characters. Emily (whose assigned birthname is Chris) who's a 16-year old trans youth still completely closeted and living in boy mode, on the school swim team. Stuck living with a dad, mom and little brother, Chris/Emily's main gender outlet is playing World of Warcraft as female characters. The other central figure in the novel is Claire, Chris' cis girlfriend. She's an outsider who wears all black, is bad at doing the girl thing and is a kind of rogue Christian into the Gnostic Gospels rather than Young Life. The story accelerates when Chris can no longer keep painful trans issues to herself and confides her pain in a believably clumsy way to Claire. At first, Claire is shocked and has serious questions about whether they can stay together. She wonders what it says about her sexuality and is skeptical about ever seeing her athlete boyfriend (albeit a sensitive one) living as a convincing woman.

Reflections of a trans girl?

Geek therapy
Shortly thereafter, Chris is carted off to a rather blasé male therapist to deal with his issues of depression (but still not out to the parents). Still reeling with regrets about revealing 'the secret,' Chris doesn't trust the confidentiality of these sessions and stays clammed up. It all changes when the regular shrink has a family emergency and his colleague, a woman therapist named Dr. Mandel takes over the session. Surprise, surprise, she's a gender therapist member of WPATH. (That these two therapists would, in any way, be connected or even in the same building seemed wholly implausible, but...) Within one session, Dr. Mandel coaxes the truth of her client's situation wryly using World of Warcraft analogies to gain trust, and she will continue to see Chris as a client (inexplicably, almost immediately accompanied in these sessions by Claire).

Events further heat up when Chris (a frequent visitor to GenderPeace under the online name of Emily) links up with Natalie, a trans girl who lives in the classier northern burbs of the Twin Cities. She's living as a girl 24/7 and has been on hrt for several years. Chris drags Claire along to meet her and they're both blown away by Natalie's 'normalcy' as a teen girl and develop an ongoing friendship with her and her very accepting mom. In short order, Natalie also shares some extra 'mones with Emily who clearly idolizes her and sees in her a possible future manifested. Emily becomes motivated to make surreptitious regular forays into wardrobe building and female presentation with the assistance of Natalie, Natalie's mom and Claire, all done behind Emily's parents' back.

The mall rat blues
In the best scene in the book, Emily, presenting as female (including a wig she was gifted by Natalie's mom), goes by herself to a mall in another town and walks around empowered by her seeming ability to pass. This explodes when she is caught going into a woman's restroom and is harassed by a neanderthal security guard. For me it was the scene which most captured the vividness, sometime absurdity, potential humiliation and heightened awareness of transition and one's awkward first steps out. It very nearly reads as a separate short story within the larger novel.

Boo hoo, Kristy McNicol, where are you?
Not to give too much away, but once Emily's transness is inadvertently revealed to her parents, one parental unit is fairly neutral while the other goes ballistic. Emily's life is immediately under clamp-down. Her ties to Dr. Mandel are severed and she's given over to her initial shrink who is revealed to basically be a clueless reparative therapist. At no point does the book fall down the "Emily runs away to Minneapolis, becomes a street kid and starts turning tricks" hole, nor is there a heart-warming school assembly where she gets a standing ovation ala ABC Afterschool Specials or gets voted prom queen (as a trans girl in Canada just did). Being Emily mostly takes a very "wait, be patient, listen to the therapists, plan ahead" kind of mindset to literary transition.

So is Being Emily an convincing portrait of being a trans teen? I give it mixed marks. Gold, for all her love of gaming culture, doesn't really seem able to capture the teen brain nor voice. It feels as if it's written by an adult and one who hasn't been around the online trans community for quite a while (Gold has stated in an interview that the bulk of the book was written around 2004). There were numerous speeches which read as coming from grown up people, not teens. Claire, who while a highly intelligent and thoughtful teen girl, at one point has a theological discussion with herself about being trans which, I felt, totally dropped any pretension at portraying a young person and sounded like something a theological post grad would write. There are bizarre dumps of Trans 101 exposition and references in the book which sounding more like statements a middle-aged transitioner would say (referencing Joan Roughgarden??) The teen's speech, other than some stiff World of Warcraft mentions, has little reference to other teen cultural phenomena and, in this, feels generic and even stilted in a way which did remind me of AfterSchool Specials.

Whoopsie, my bad!
Perhaps more bizarrely is how many trans faux pas were in the book. At several points the teens talk about 'sex changes' and refer to trans women as "T-Girls" (a term I've never heard a trans teen girl use to refer to herself). The word 'transgender' much less 'trans' or 'trans*' is never mentioned... it's always transsexual. Rather hilariously, Emily meets a trans woman group facilitator who "transitioned 20+ years ago" and "went to Europe for 'the surgery.'" Whoa, this is speech directly from the post-Christine Jorgensen era nor is it at all factually likely. The endocrinologist reads a letter from Dr. Mandel and right off the bat proscribes both Spiro and Premarin to Emily (an hrt which is virtually never prescribed anymore). No mention is made of blockers nor of putting her on anti-androgens first. I can't believe this manuscript was actually reviewed by anyone knowledgable about transitioning in 2012 as a young person and often felt like a twisted time travel back to 2002-2003. An awful lot has changed since then, even in small town Minnesota.

Warning: possible spoilers

There are bizarre lapses in the story... at one point teenager Claire makes and pays for a therapy appointment for Emily with Dr. Mandel. Claire is even brought into Emily's earliest therapy sessions—which is just absurd... that a therapist is going to trust another teen with confidential highly sensitive matters about their client was a jolt of unreality, the kind that teen readers notice in a second. The right-wing security guard believing or caring that Emily was in the women's room of the mall as a "swim team prank" and that parents weren't notified is likewise completely unbelievable. These and other unfortunate events were a distraction.

As to the book actually portraying a first person account of a trans girl, I'm afraid Being Emily didn't quite work for me either. I never felt Emily's voice truly expressed the profound highs and especially low lows of what it's like to be a transgirl teen in the midst of male puberty. I can recall a number of moving posts on GenderPeace from such girls which, in several paragraphs, contained more anguish, obsessive detail, small joys, euphoria, sexual frustration and raw power than I read in all of Being Emily. Moreover, while I understand Gold is coming from her viewpoint as a partner and friend to trans women, there is, IMO all too much of Claire in the book.

Claire: theologian, black wearer, outcast, girlfriend

Move over rover, let the cis girl take over
As with so many other trans books written by non-trans authors, there always seems to be a need for that cis person character who's fighting the trans person's battles and interpreting what being trans means. One who's ultimately more articulate about trans issues, stronger and more mature than the trans person. So by this, we're basically saying how non-trans readers, at heart, really can't connect directly with a trans experience and require a 'folks like us' character to relate to. Moreover, the cis Claire is given more of a real and full-blooded persona than the trans Emily whose personality can be largely summed up as "a boy who wants to be a girl." 'There is no there there' (thank you Gertrude Stein). This is where I found Brian Katcher's book, "Almost Perfect" a better written, rounded and, ultimately more perceptive and gripping view of a trans girl's life (even if she isn't the main character). Go figure, and it was written by a cis, straight man who didn't even run a trans forum!

Opening a door
Does that mean Being Emily shouldn't be included in the library shelf (or e-reader) with the growing list of YA trans-themed titles... absolutely not. It's still an important addition to school and public libraries as a possible open door to the subject matter for those trans, trans-curious and wannabe allies who don't like their YA fiction too down and dirty. A fast flowing read, it's ultimately a much more optimistic work than the harrowing, intense (and more literary) "Almost Perfect" or "I Am J" where trans kids are tossed into mental health facilities or homeless shelters. There is an important place for books which make transition not seem like a living hell, and viewed as something which is attainable and can ultimately save lives and bring true groundedness and humanity. Ultimately, as I've concluded in far too many other reviews in this blog, Being Emily is yet another earnest yet somewhat misfired attempt to represent a trans life but it doesn't compare to trans people, especially youth, speaking out themselves. For those wanting to learn about trans issues first hand, you'd do better off looking through the hundreds of trans teen videos which proliferate on YouTube. In all their messiness, sometime bitchiness, youthful narcissism, insecurities, joys and trans OCD, it's first person trans girl real style not cis style.

http://beingemily.com/

Hit and Miss: a "glock with a cock"

My name is Mia, I kill people and have
a penis... but I can learn to wuv you.

Paul Abbott, the award winning producer of two hit, stylish British series, Shameless and State of Play, describes how his new series "Hit & Miss" (in the US on Direct TV) came about:

"Two projects were on my desk: one about a transsexual mother of five, the other about a hitman. The trouble with the first was the way the penis became an obstructive prop – it seemed that was all there was to talk about." One day I thought: why can't we have a story about both? Why not have a pre-operative male-to-female transsexual hitman (or hitperson) who discovers she is a father after her ex-girlfriend dies of cancer and puts her in loco parentis of a dysfunctional family deep in the Yorkshire countryside."

The series' main writer, Sean Conway explains, "It's a story of a character who has been a man, wants to become a woman, realises she's a father, wants to become a mother." There you go, instant series. To play Mia, 'the transsexual,' they hired Chloe Sevigny, an obvious choice because a) she played a trans man's girlfriend in "Boys Don't Cry;" b) she'll do pretty much anything in a film as evidenced by the real life blow job she gave in the indie disaster "Brown Bunny;" and c) she has considerable hipster, indy cred. As the producer Abbott stated, "She looks like a bloke and she’s allowed herself to look like a bloke." When asked who would like "Hit & Miss" Abbott replied with a straight face, “Everyone who likes a glock with a cock.”

My name is Paul Abbott, tv producer
and like a transseuxual contract killer,
I HAVE A PENIS!

As with Abbott's other series (which use the international HBO/AMC style of filmmaking... cool yet detached and sometimes incongruous music scores, moody camerawork, and plenteous mumbled ironic humor) Hit & Miss looks and sounds good. When nasty violence occurs, you know the firearms will make that post-modern silencer sound effect, will feature no holds barred gore and, because it's an actress doing the killing, will leave many geek viewers (and younger feminists) tweeting about the lead character being "kick ass." And so she is. For someone who looks about 120 lbs, at one point she beats the crap out of a tough guy who looks about 7 inches taller and easily 100 lbs. heavier.

Mia when she was a dude with
her real woman girlfriend

Basically we are told that hitman Mia gets a letter from her deceased ex-girlfriend (probably a hooker) who gave birth to their now 11-year old son (who looks and acts more like an 8-year old). This boy, Ryan (who has Mia's birth name) lives with older half-siblings—a very hardass teen girl Riley, her brother Levi, and an oblivious younger half-sister, Penny. After their mom's death, they stay in a ramshackle farmhouse in a run down rural area of Yorkshire where Riley is trying to keep them together and out of the hands of Child Services.  Mom has bestowed guardianship of the four children to Mia. And here, the series resembles a few previous productions... TransAmerica (trans woman's kid comes back to haunt and redeem her) and Three Men and a Baby and umpteen other comedies where males who are viewed as completely unsuited towards mothering are expected to take care of vulnerable and emotionally wounded children (with a little bit of Lord of the Flies thrown in). Evidently, a series where a trans woman is just being a mom wasn't flashy enough (or male enough or good for enough laughs?) so the contract killer aspect was needed to give it a two-spirit contemporary edge. In the first episode, she mostly sits to the side, smokes a whole lot of cigarettes around the kids, tells her birth son that school isn't important and her big act of motherhood is beating the bloody crap out of the much bigger guy who might be threatening them. No wonder many trans women lose custody of their children in real life... you call that kind of behavior maternal?!

OMG, Chloe Sevigny's got a... got a... grossss!

Within the first 3 minutes of the first episode, we also get a shower scene of Mia au naturelle shortly after offing someone and, sure enough, her 'obstructive prop' is dangling in plain sight. What was it like for Sevigny to walk around on set with a prosthetic penis? “It was horrifying,” said the actress. “I cried every time they put it on me. I’ve always been very comfortable being a girl, so it was hard to wrap my head around the fact that someone could feel so uncomfortable in their own skin.” When asked in a BBC interview why they felt the need to show Mia naked (featuring said penis) Sevigny somewhat embarrassingly explained, "that was the producer's way of reminding people that she is still a man... and it was provocative, which Paul's productions are."

Mia shows Levi some motherly tough love

As with some other recent wannabe hipster productions (like horror film "Let Me In," which I previously reviewed at Skip The Makeup) quite a big deal is made of how a trans woman still has a whooole lot of aggressive dude juice inside them waiting to get out. Mia violently wrenches back Levi's arm when he sasses her... (it's like "whoaaa, new mom is one... tough... dude"). As the series' head writer explained, Hit & Miss is mostly about Mia's transition from an inherently violent and cold-blooded man (seemingly incapable of empathy) to a woman who wants to nurture. At one point, after meeting the 4 kids she's now responsible for, she almost backs out of a potential hit because of her concern the target might have kids. Abbott makes it clear... men (remember, Mia still has A PENIS) want to kill, women want to nurture. Yes, I know, it's terribly post-modern and not in the least gender normative (sic).

One day without 'mones and Mia's
punching holes in the wall!

Moreover, at one point Mia can't find her hormone pills (films never even have their trans women take anti-androgens, just plain old hormones) and she keeps clawing at her face as though a beard is ready to sprout and she's going to turn back into a real man, even to the point of putting some subtle makeup on her like it's 3 o'clock shadow. At another point in the first episode, they actually have a dog come up to her in the street and start excitedly sniffing her crotch. No doubt it's that unstoppable male musty smell eating through her panties. Yup, those obstructive props sure force their way into a scene when you least expect it.

Poochie smells Mia "packin' heat"

As to where Hit & Miss is going to head in its 6-part run I cannot say having only watched the first episode. It's pretty obviously pointed towards a buckets of blood showdown with the big bully, a Crying Game "dick reveal" and Mia's growing acceptance of herself as a 'new woman' and that she can be nurturing. Not to mention lots more nasty hits. Any of this sound familiar? Which isn't to say Hit & Miss isn't worth watching. Sevigny does a reasonably good job in the main role with her usual moapy-eyed dolefulness (the northern accent comes and goes) and I thought some of the kid actors, especially Karla Crome as Riley, bring a good mix of wildness and vulnerability to their roles. If you liked La Femme Nikita (the film, not the gawd awful tv show) or Alias mixed with British working class white trash, nastiness and grit then Hit & Miss might be highly entertaining. As a show which says anything about a trans experience other than as a sensationalist plot gimmick, it's  a washout.

Note: for the moment anyway, Direct TV is showing the first episode of Hit & Miss at this link:
http://youtu.be/gjcCVIYk0ac

Facing Mirrors: No, being a trans Iranian is not a bowl of cherries

Eddie on the Run

Facing Mirrors is part of the exciting new Iranian cinema which is flourishing and offering subtle social criticism despite being created within the shadow of religious fundamentalism. First time woman director and co-writer, Negar Azarbayjani, has woven a powerful and sometimes even humorous  tale which, like the recent Iranian masterwork, A Separation, deals with complex intertwining issues of women's roles in society, familial bonds and craziness, class structure, crushing bureaucracy, manhood and religion. But at the core of Facing Mirrors is the story of Eddie, a trans man who can no longer live in his country, especially under the crushing impact of his powerful, wealthy father, who is disgusted by his trans son and wishes to marry him off (as a woman) to a cousin.

Rana wonders about her strange passenger

Eddie's life becomes intricately woven with that of Rana, a single mom whose husband is in prison for the long haul after his embezzling business partner left him with insurmountable debts. She supports her son and herself by driving a cab (she only picks up women customers), a gutsy and pretty much unheard of occupation among Iranian women. Eddie (sometimes also known by his birth name of Adineh) is on the run from his dad and older brother, and gets picked up by Rana as he's escaping from a fight. He flashes her a ton of money to drive him to a border city away from Tehran where he can wait for his passport to be processed. He intends to return to Germany where he lived for a while, began his transition and was previously on T before getting lured back to Iran under false pretenses and trapped by his father. Rana clocks Eddie as a scary female thief. (he's is mostly dressed in vaguely homeboy style with closely cropped hair) She wonders where he got all his money and expensive jewelry (which belonged to Eddie's late mom and he sells to fund his transition and escape) and his very "unladylike" behavior. While Rana is a rebel in her own way she's, at heart, of a lower, likely less educated and much more conservative class than Eddie. The first half of the film is a kind of harrowing yet sometimes funny road film, with Rana and Eddie as opposites each, in their own way, societal outcasts and alternately annoying and learning about one another.

Eddie's version of a hijab

The second half of the film returns to Tehran and, without giving too much away, further involves Eddie's attempts to leave Iran and escape capture. He lives with Rana and her adorable son, who is much taken with the surrogate dad (who he, however, obliviously refers to as 'auntie'). Eddie also tolerates Rana's tart mother-in-law who makes his life miserable with endless misgendering. Facing Mirrors expertly captures that moment in binary transition when one isn't one nor the other, being called out for one's birth gender with all-around general suspicion that a freak is in their midst. It captures the pain and longing for escape from body, past and place. How there is "no one to go back to yet no clear destination either." Eddie is ultimately sad that, despite his money, he hasn't experienced any of the love Rana has in her life and the kind of profound connection she has with her husband.

Director Azarbayjani (l) and actress
Shayesteh Irani "Un-Edied" (r)

Ms. Azarbayjani and the film's producers were in attendance at the screening I saw and said the core of the story came from a trans woman the director knew when they were teens but that she developed the script with a trans man at the center of it and merged it with a script the co-writer, Fereshteh Taerpoor, had about a woman cab driver. The two lead actresses, relative newcomers Qazal Shakeri as Rana and Shayesteh Irani as Eddie are both brilliant (Shakeri, the producer's daughter, was originally and continued to be the set designer as well!). No, Irani is not trans and, as the director was very eager to point out, looks totally different in real life (in other words, she's a 'regular' woman). They are very nearly matched by Nima Shahrokh Shahi as Eddie's brother, giving a brilliant performance of a man torn apart by intense familial obligations and his love for his younger sibling.

There are a few soft spots in the film. At no point do the filmmakers mention how, in Iran, in order to have SRS one legally requires the permission of one's family (even if you transition as an adult). Eddie seemingly has zero contacts with other trans or queer people in Iran. For a gutsy, upper-class person who grew up in Tehran, he seems a little too isolated. There were also a few points of melodrama towards the end where I thought the film veered into a slightly simplistic "poor lonely transgender guy" sentimentality while it tried hard to have the audience's sympathy. But these are minor complaints for a film with so much emotional truth. If nothing else, it shows how trans people are not "widely accepted" (as the Internet trope goes) and their lives are very much as difficult as gay men and lesbians encounter in a traditional Islamic republic.

Rana and Edie

The producer, Fereshteh Taerpoor, explained how the film has won numerous awards and accolades at the 10 film festivals at which it's played in Iran but has yet to be given a commercial release. They seemed hugely moved by the enthusiastic packed house reception the film received at Frameline 36 at San Francisco's Castro Theatre (it's coming soon to festivals in Utah, LA, Denver, Phildelphia, Dublin, Melbourne and Sydney). Facing Mirrors is a not-to-be-missed work which, while ostensibly doesn't contain any romance, is very much all about love, connection and the deepest kind of understanding.

Sexing a highly specific kind of trans man

The Buck starts here

Sexing the Trans Man, Buck Angel's new documentary about the sex lives of trans men has been shown at a handful of queer-related film festivals, most recently at San Francisco's Frameline Festival 36. For the most part shot in LA and Toronto, it's well worth seeing on two immediate satisfying levels: 1) it adds to understanding about trans men's sexuality especially how medicalized transition impacted this aspect of their lives; 2) It's a documentary about trans men made by a trans man... and, for the most part, they're allowed to speak for themselves. It's comprised of an extremely bare-boned structure: prolonged talking head shots of the person being interviewed by Buck (with occasional reference to him and his porn career), and quick vignettes of some of the younger men masturbating, and touching themselves. There are a couple of brief couples scenes involving trans-guy-on-trans-guy-action.

Ian Harvie: sexy trans man preppy

Some of the persons Angel interviewed fall into the trans man celeb category: rocker Lucas Silvera (formerly of the Canadian band, the Clicks) and stand up comic Ian Harvie. A few of the younger interviewees are involved in trans guy porn (a subject which, curiously, isn't really discussed in the film). Two couples who have girlfriends are interviewed (one with his girlfriend by his side, obediently  listening to him). A trans man bear and his trans man partner who are constantly pawing one another during the interview explain how they have a kind of 'friends with benefits' relationship... buddies who love to get it on together. There's only one trans man of color who's interviewed, a rather jolly trans sissy, who vaguely speaks about his sexuality. In general, trans men of color are sadly under-represented here.

Cho & Luna expound on... life with trans guys

Two of the most exposed interviewees in the film are Margaret Cho and her close friend, fellow stand up comedian and actress Selene Luna. Both have been in relationships with trans men (Cho is well known for her 'obsession' with them) and add witty rambling on their perspectives on having sex with them. The pixie-ish siren, Luna, gives a looong account of a 'stone' (doesn't like to be touched) trans man she was involved with who never liked to show his body. While both are fun to listen to (for a few minutes) they take up a large portion of the film. I couldn't help wishing that time would be better spent speaking with more trans men (both pre-and post-transition) and those with more varied experiences.

Lucas Silvera touching his junk
(which he's perfectly happy with, okay!)

And here's where the film kind of falls flat. There are some important members of the trans guy community it doesn't even start to include. There are zero 'no hormones' trans men and trans masculine people and no discussion of their bodies, lives and decisions and how that impacts their perceptions of themselves and their lovers' relationship to their bodies. Also ignored are trans men who had some form of genital surgery. Instead, we get a monologue from Lucas Silvera (who is 'non-op' in terms of bottom surgery) about how he's researched it and the surgeries aren't very good. Okay Lucas, that's your opinion, but how about letting trans men who did get a phalloplasty or a meta actually speak for themselves and their experiences? What, they don't count?

Gropey bear and lil' sex buddy

The film's production company is mirthfully called "I love my pussy productions"... a cute name, but it's kind of like "Original Plumbing" magazine. Is being non-op being somehow made more 'queer privileged' than trans men who've gotten bottom surgeries? Not a terribly inclusive opening statement. Moreover, there is no discussion about possible issues like how hysterectomy/oophorectomies might have impacted their sex lives not to mention the subject of T and the cessation/continuation of periods. Nor is there any attempt to speak with trans men who have previously given birth to find out how that experience might have impacted their sex lives. At the beginning of the film, a warning is stated that the film is not politically correct. Okay, but that doesn't excuse important subjects being ignored in favor of cis celebs taking up 20 minutes of the film.


It's also very clear, from Angel's selection of interviewees, that he wants to emphasize trans men who ID as gay. Easily 2/3rds of the interviews seem to revolve around, "I didn't use to be into guys, but I went on T and now I want to get it on with men." At one point in the film, it even seemed like Angel was prompting someone to go in that direction. Yes, it's his film (and as I understand, that's kind of his sexual preference these days) but he only really talks with 2-3 trans men who are primarily into women, not to mention what their relationship is with women's bodies. That can either be seen as breaking through barriers or trying to reinforce a specific narrative at the expense of others.

MJ: Cub scout wants to

have sex with you.

Another interesting moment for me (as a trans woman... maybe not the intended audience) was when MJ (the uber-cute, young trans guy) relates how he gets so turned on he neglects to inform his cis male partners that he's trans. All right, certainly his choice, but he mentions doing this one time right before he removed his underwear with little or no mention of any concerns he might have had about facing rejection or even violence. In light of how many trans women are accused of this very narrative (the so-called "Crying Game" legal defense of those who've murdered trans women) his little tale left a sick taste in my mouth. It makes these situations almost into porn fantasies and removes some of the reality all trans people face when dealing with ciscentric expectations of body norms.

These concerns aside, Sexing the Trans Man is a breezy (yes, curiously enough), often entertaining tour of some trans men's sex lives and shows some potentially instructive images of how these trans men like to be pleasured. As one transmasculine friend of mine said, "but it's not raunchy enough for porn and not serious enough to be educational." For a documentary, it's hardly an in-depth, thoughtful discussion of the subject exploring multiple viewpoints but, thankfully, it's all with people who are trans men or had sex with them and not burdened with "experts" or academics explaining it all to us in Gender Studies 101 gobbledygook. Happily, it's closer to a midnight movie than an academic filmic treatise. And honestly, it's a Buck Angel joint, so who would expect or want otherwise?

Postscript: It's important to note that I saw the "mainstream public consumption" version of this film and not the XXX version which is also being marketed. It evidently leaves out some of the hotter footage which is included in the XXX version.