“Red Without Blue” at OutFest

OutFest is going really well! Every day and night, there are films to see and events to attend where we can meet other filmmakers and creative professionals. The only bad part is, my strict diet has been suffering due to the availability of delicious catering from some of LA’s finest restaurants.

Tonight I saw “Red Without Blue”. It was really moving, and I left the theater thinking hard about issues like family bonds and love. It is excellent, both stylistically and in content, and I hope you will click the links below to get tickets and see it.

I’ve been sorely disappointed with most trans-focused documentaries that I’ve seen, as I will explain below. “Red Without Blue” has none of those problems. The filmmakers can tell you what it’s about better than I can:

RED WITHOUT BLUE is the groundbreaking documentary about the indestructible ties of family. This visually arresting film chronicles the close yet sometimes strained relationship between identical twins Mark and Alex as Alex undergoes a transformation into a woman named Clair…

RED WITHOUT BLUE, whose title refers to the colors the twins wore as children to distinguish between the two, provides a heartbreaking, but ultimately optimistic look at the tribulations of growing up gay and transgender in rural Montana and maintaining strong family bonds in the face of adversity…

“An addictive documentary that captures our contemporary sexuality and all its heartbreaking dilemmas.” Jesse Hawthorne Ficks, The Guardian, Release Print…

Andrea and I got to meet Mark and Claire briefly at Frameline31 in San Francisco, which is one of the cool things about going to film festivals. They were not at the screening here in LA last night, but they will be at the screening coming up on Friday, July 20th at 5:00pm! Yes, that’s right before our sold-out screening of “Casting Pearls” in the Girls’ Shorts program across town at the DGA at 7:00pm.  So click the links below and get tickets to “Red Without Blue” on Friday, July 20th at 5:00pm and then try to get any remaining tickets for the Sunday, July 22nd 12:00 Noon Girls’ Shorts program screening of “Casting Pearls”. How often do you get to see the people who made and performed in a film right there in the theater with you! =) If you go, tell the “Red Without Blue” people that Calpernia sent you!

Links:

Tickets for “Red Without Blue” Friday, July 20th at 5:00pm

Tickets for “Casting Pearls” (as part of the Girls’ Shorts Program) Sunday, July 22nd at 12:00 Noon

What are some of the pitfalls that “Red Without Blue” managed to avoid?

So many trans-focused documentaries focus on the process of transition… Most have the required blood-drenched surgical porn for everyone to cringe at and the freaky transition fetishists to get excited by. Most have the shots of the transitioner:

• Jamming their feet into ridiculous 5″ high heels and painting their nails Jungle Red as they talk about how they hope the wife will become their new lesbian lover
• Musing about how their johns will pay extra if they “don’t get it cut off”
• Being “outraaaageously faaaaaabulous! OMG!”

This is mostly due to the camera always being in the hands of cluelessly fascinated straight people, or gay/lesbian people who think they understand because they really liked “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”.  I suppose you can tell that I get a little angry about some of the things I’ve seen, ha ha. I’m going to experiment with being a little more honest about these feelings in the coming months, so let’s see how that works out.

By way of example, here is a review I wrote of the trans documentary “American Beauties”, which can be watched here:

http://www.groovefilm.net/transgender.html

The filmmakers actually responded well to my criticism, which I know all to well is a difficult thing to do. As a vain artist, I am usually stricken to the core by any spotlight on my flaws and have to struggle to see (well considered) criticism as the valuable tool that it can be.

“American Beauties” review by Calpernia Addams

I just watched the documentary “American Beauties” on your website. I applaud the filmmakers’ attention the the trans community, and their interest in giving a voice to some transwomen. It’s well produced and the women participating are charming, but I will give my honest reactions here as someone who is both a member of the trans community and working in the media with an awareness of its impact on our community.

“American Beauties” is unfortunately another documentary which immediately presents the ideas of transsexual and prostitute as going hand-in-hand without ever a question that there’s any separation or difference between the concepts, and only wavers from this focus on any significant level to look at the sexual interests of the subjects. There is not even the suggestion of the idea that there are any other options besides prostitution for transsexual women, or that most people would consider turning to sex work for self-support as a tragic last resort if it were their loved one making that decision. While it does “document” the factual involvement of these women in sex work, there is no context or mention of the fact that this is unusual, which would be relevant because transsexual women are very rarely represented at all in media, and more rarely still are they shown outside the role of prostitute, punchline, psycho or noble victim. I speak in this letter to the filmmakers, and I hope you will forward it to them.

I personally feel that it’s damaging both to young transwomen who often look to the media for their first ideas about the possibilities of transition, and to the public who rarely have a balanced view of the subject, when transwomen are shown through the implied filmmakers point of view that “of course they’re sex workers, and that’s where we looked for our subjects because that’s what they all are.” “They love being prostitutes.” etc etc etc. The women in your documentary seem like smart people, making their own decisions, but if you set out to make a documentary about transsexual prostitutes, my question would be, Why? There have been so many portrayals already of this meme in movies, tv and docs. If you didn’t intend to make a film specifically about trans prostitutes, were you even aware that you were focusing on this group when finding subjects? Did you look for trans women in other careers? Professor Lynn Conway, a transsexual pioneer whose work helped to create the modern microchip, maintains a gallery of some notable transsexual women who have found success as doctors, lawyers, authors, academics and entertainers (among other things): http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TSsuccesses/TSgallery1.html

None of the subjects selected here identify with any conviction on camera as “women”, which is certainly their decision, but this unbalanced representation of transpeople who do not feel they are women will be unfortunate for the majority of transwomen who do. People outside the trans community are going to see trans faces unanimously calling themselves “gay men” and follow suit, identifying transsexuals as “gay men” when most every transwoman I know (most of whom work regular jobs and live normal lives) would be devastated to be called such.  The immigrant angle could perhaps be a reason to delve back into the oft explored world of transsexual prostitution, but aside from the cast being multiracial, there was no mention of specifically what culture they came from except for Kosal’s. There was no mention of what obstacles the women faced specific to their cultures (aside from the uninformative “my parents were traditional Chinese, conservative”—tell me, a non-Chinese person, what that means), when or if they immigrated, or what effect their culture had on their decisions. No mention of the difference between being trans in their country of origin vs. in the USA. Non-white stories are represented here, which is good, but after reading “We enter the secretive, often misunderstood world of immigrant male to female transgenders”, I was expecting that angle rather than a straightforward presentation of interchangeable “growing up tranny” stories followed by shrugging exhortations of the high-income sex-work lifestyle. The first three documentaries covering the transsexual prostitute idea to come up in a web search are good examples of the source material that is later spun into the countless hooker portrayals in film and television:

Downtown Girls: http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/downtown_girls/index.html

I Don’t Want to Be a Boy: http://www.planetout.com/popcornq/db/getfilm.html?1767

Taxicab Confessions 7: http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/taxicab10/archive.html

Unfortunately, the subjects of “American Beauties” are tragically ignorant about even the basics of vaginoplasty (“they cut it off”, “you’re just left with a hole, what’s the use of that?”, “Even if people think you’re a woman, you still know what you are.”) Modern sexual reassignment surgery/genital reassignment surgery/vaginoplasty involves reshaping the genital tissue to form a vagina while keeping most of the nerves intact. While nerve damage is possible in any surgery of this magnitude, most transwomen I know report orgasm and pleasurable sensation during sex. It might have been interesting if you had researched vaginoplasty beforehand and asked the women things like “Did you know that modern sex changes do not involve cutting off your penis, but rather creating a working vagina with the existing tissue?” Instead, we have the women repeating inaccurate information with no contextualization (such as narration or text) to reveal the interesting fact that they are uninformed or wrong about a surgery assumed by most to be a major consideration for transsexuals. That would have been interesting… Why don’t these women know basic information like this? Instead we have “sexy transsexuals who love being prostitutes reassuring the public that they are gay men who never want to get rid of their one special trait — a penis.” It confirms stereotypes of ignorance, predilection toward sex work, “gayness” vs. womanhood and the notion held dear by the fans of transsexual prostitutes everywhere: “They want to keep their penis and use it on me.”

Some information about vaginoplasty: http://www.tsroadmap.com/physical/vaginoplasty/index.html

Regarding the subjects of the film, they seem like bright, happy people doing their best in complex lives. Their choices are their own, and as an activist, researcher and transwoman myself, I am aware of the circumstances that often push transsexual women toward sex work. In a world where we are rarely included in so-called “respectable” circles of social privilege and almost universally portrayed as sex-objects-for-hire, it can be tempting for women with no resources to finally succumb to the honking, dollar-bill waving “johns” desperate to slake their craving for penis packaged in the barely-tolerable-to-their-heterosexuality female form of a transsexual woman.

But I do look to filmmakers, who have studied the craft of storytelling perhaps alongside journalism and other information/organization disciplines, to be aware of the impact of the images they shape and present to the public. The surface of a film can be exotic and surprising, because the viewer assumes that what they are seeing is “it”, the true information that can shape their view on a subject about which they will otherwise hear very little. A filmmaker can take this opportunity to dig in a little deeper, though, and help the viewer understand that what they are seeing is part of a larger heterogeneous whole. Here there is no indication that we are hearing a nearly unified point of view from four representatives of a group that is not shared by a great many other members. No indication that information being presented by people the viewer must suppose to be experts on the subject is incorrect (re: vaginoplasty).

Jordan B. ( email here ) was working with the Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team the last time I spoke with her and may have more information for you specifically relating to API trans issues.

Again, I appreciate your efforts to reach out to the trans community, but I can’t personally recommend this film for the reasons I’ve listed above. 

Calpernia Addams