Hey kids, here’s the site:
http://www.atlantapride.org/

Here’s my calendar:

From Southern Voice Atlanta: Leaders of the Pack

ADDAMS IS FAMILY

Transgender star Calpernia Addams looks forward to eating good southern cooking during her turn as an honorary Pride grand marshal.

“I miss the South so I’m going to eat as much southern food as I can,” she says.

Addams is well-known in recent years for her turns in Hollywood, starring in the Logo reality TV show “Transamerican Love Story” and appearances in “CSI,” “Deadwood” and the critically-acclaimed movie “Transamerica.” But she started her career in the South, taking the name Calpernia Addams while performing in Nashville, Tenn.

“I never thought that would become my name,” she says. “Nobody does drag like the South, and after seven years on stage in Nashville and everyone knew me as Calpernia, I slowly got comfortable with it.”

While working at clubs in Nashville, she met Army Private Barry Winchell. The two started dating, and as Winchell’s Army buddies became aware of his relationship with a trans woman, he was increasingly harassed. Eventually he was beaten and killed by fellow soldiers in 1999. The killing inspired the Showtime movie “Soldier’s Girl.”

Addams, herself a veteran of the Navy Hospital Corps, became an outspoken transgender rights activist. In 2004 she staged a sold-out run of the “Vagina Monologues” at the Pacific Design Center in Hollywood, which benefited the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force.

“Transamerican Love Story” on Logo reintroduced her as a household name in many gay homes. The eight-episode show, in which men competed for Addams’ affections through challenges and dates, ended in Calpernia selecting Shawn, a 33-year-old concert promoter, to be her boyfriend. But the relationship didn’t last.

“We’re still good friends, but it didn’t develop into a marriage sort of thing,” she says. “You can award your affections on a dating show, but you can’t award your emotions.”

Since the show aired, Addams has become a fixture at Pride celebrations across the country. She is appearing at prides in Las Vegas, Cleveland, Hollywood and others, but Atlanta will mark her first time as a grand marshal.

Today, someone wrote to me because they were dealing with some tough times, so I sent them a few words about how I deal with the bad moments in life. I thought I’d share the note here, as it pretty well sums up my outlook on things.

Hi ****,

It does hurt when people say cruel things about me, but I learned a kind of strength from my time in the military that lets me take a deep breath, fully acknowledge to myself that it hurts, and just keep soldiering forward anyway. Sometimes, I can even get enough perspective to laugh at just how horrible a situation is. Sometimes, things are just so mean, harsh, dead-on hurtful, disappointing, tragic, terrible, perfectly exactly what I DIDN’T want to happen that it just blows my mind and all I can do is laugh at it.

Even before the military, one time on a hot summer day in Tennessee, my little brother and I were walking along a country road and a pickup truck driving by us threw a paper cup full of melted ice right in our faces. It happened so quickly… whoosh of the truck driving by followed instantly by a slash of cold water and ice right in our faces, the truck gone before we even had a second to react. It was so perfectly mean… and there was absolutely nothing two kids walking alone could do about it as the truck was already far away over the hills… that we just looked at each other and laughed.

I still feel bad sometimes, and feel battered and bruised by things both big and small that people say and do, or even just my general situation. The military saying was, “Suck it up and drive on.” and I tell myself that pretty often. It doesn’t mean I have to pretend that the situation isn’t terrible, or that it doesn’t hurt, or that it’s even going to get any better any time soon. But nonetheless, I find myself slowly getting back up and moving forward rather than letting myself become paralyzed. And usually, once I’m up and moving (emotionally or psychologically), things actually do seem better and I can get back on track to make some positive adjustments.

I wish you all my best, and I hope this might be helpful to you. I’ve never written this out before, so if you don’t mind I’m even going to post it on my blog, but I wrote it for you specifically, I didn’t just cut and paste this into this note. Take care!

Calpernia

http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/transposition/200806/transsexual-author-calpernia-addams-gender-and-sexuality

Hi kids! Psychology Today has asked me to join their list of bloggers, which will be a big responsibility, but one that I welcome. I’ve made my introductory post, aimed at the much broader audience of PT, but look for upcoming posts written in a more “magazine-y” format on topics of interest to me. The REALLY interesting part of this will be reading the comments left by PT readers. Yikes… I’ll keep a Cosmo handy, ha ha!

I’m going to try to have a post up every Wednesday to start with. We’ll see how it goes, and I hope you’ll check them out along with me!

PLEASE look out for the upcoming comedy “Tranny McGuyver”, starring my good friend Willam Belli (who also writes one of the funniest blogs I’ve ever read in my entire career). If you pause this trailer around the :15 mark, you may see a certain Amercia’s Transsexual Sweetheart in a green bolero jacket and Jerry curls, being pimped out by the uber hot Darryl Stephens

And the original hilarious pilot for the film:

Don’t miss the music video for Matthew McPeck’s Rock n Roll Remix of Stunning, too!

Ok, so somehow a lot of the cheering didn’t come through on this recording… it might have been near a speaker or something, so alot of the ambient noise got filtered out (yeah, that’s it! Ha ha) And yes, my butt looks a LOT less appealing in this video (shot from way below) that it looked in the photos shot from the side. But wow, I had a great time, and the crowd really warmed up toward the end, and on into my second song ("I Look Good").

Thanks to AZ1577 of Denver

So back in the mists of time, when I was a child, I read A LOTTT. I had few friends, and few traditional entertainments because of my restrictive religious upbringing. Luckily, I took well to reading and there were years when I read almost a book a week. I remember in particular reading while walking down the halls in grade school one week, one cowboy boot with a detached sole flopping with every other step, ”The Mouse And His Child“ in hand.

The book’s epigraph is by W.H. Auden:

The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

If you know me at all, you’ll guess that there’s some dark component to all this… Well, aside from being a bit of a melancholy child with a sixth-sense for encountering the dark side, I don’t know how I lucked out in finding this book when I was a young kid, but I did. I credit many of my finds to a cache of discarded library books in a storage room that was also used for square dancing and other indoor PE activities. Since I was forbidden to dance, I got to sit on the sidelines, which were lined with box after cardboard box of books removed from the library. Another excellent, mind-shaping find was ”Black and Blue Magic“, which I hope to review another time.

So, The Mouse and His Child is ostensibly a book for young teens, I think. It has occasional full page dark monochrome charcoal and ink-wash illustrations, but for the most part it’s 244 pages of 1.5 spaced 12 point Stemple Garamond type. But this book is harsh and heavy from the get-go, in ways that most children’s books of the time were not.

When the book opens, we meet a windup toy consisting of a mouse father who swings his little boy around and around in a circle by the hands. They “awaken” to an immediately reserved, quiet self awareness on Christmas Eve in a classic toyshop, when the clock strikes midnight and allows all the toys permission to speak. But this isn’t a sweet Disney kind of toy consciousness. It’s much more “Twilight Zone”, with the imperious wall clock sounding a tenuously granted witching-hour permission to communicate, implying that at all other times the toys could only stand still, self aware, staring at each other in silence and anxiously awaiting leave from above. They toys, it is revealed, are all self aware but unable to move unless they are “clockwork” windups. The windups can only move in their windup way, just as if they were only regular toys… no climbing or running or facial expressions or anything except the mechanical motion of their clockworks until that winds down.

So within the first few pages, we understand that they are fearful conciousnesses trapped in frozen, mechanical bodies with no control over any aspect of their physicality. Terrifying. Now, ”The Velveteen Rabbit“ was in a similar situation, but somehow that book never seemed to communicate the sense of the rabbit feeling trapped in his own body the way “The Mouse and His Child” does. Moments into his awakening, the mouse child realizes he will never have a mother and becomes overwhelmed with despair, so real tears begin to stream down his frozen face, bringing rebuke down from the wall clock and the other toys. I was HOOKED. This was unlike any other children’s book I’d read and I wanted to know what would happen.

Click READ MORE to read the rest of the review!

Click HERE to Read More..

Wow, I had a great time at Denver Pride 2008! I rode in the parade, met TONS of fans at the Logo booth to sign autographs, and then performed ”Stunning” and ”I Look Good” in the gorgeous Denver Amphitheater for a totally packed house of screaming fans!

Photos courtesy of the fabulous Donna Rose (Donna Rose Blog / Donna’s Denver Pride Photo Album)