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Reeling Film Festival
Filthy Gorgeous: The Trannyshack Story (Dir. Sean Muller)
An audacious, raunchy frolic through the underbelly of San Francisco’s drag scene, Filthy Gorgeous has the best opening sequence I’ve seen in documentary history. A drag queen with an amazing presence and five o’clock shadow lip synchs to the National Anthem, while slowly and teasingly pulling an American flag out of her rectum. This startling introduction is one of the many surprises and political parodies that come from this fabulous drag-punk-rock extravaganza.
Originally started a decade ago by drag queen Heklina to honor the people who’d died from the AIDS epidemic, Trannyshack has evolved into a tour-de-force of politically incorrect performance art, with non-traditional social commentaries on gender, culture and the requisite blow job humor that we know and love.
Edited with a music video style with several clips from Trannyshack performances throughout the years minced with interviews from the performers themselves, both in and out of drag, Filthy Gorgeous is irreverent at times and touching at others, depending on who’s pulling what out of where. The contrast between the performers and their drag personas were often fascinating, due to the fact that they were often completely at odds with one another. Heklina, the emcee and founder, is all business on stage, with a no-nonsense attitude and harsh sense of humor. Offstage, however, he’s contemplative and nostalgic, especially when discussing his battle with HIV. Others, like The Steve Lady, launch into existential quips on his “psychologically mangled” childhood. And Renttecca, who drags her body across the floor in a menacing, slobbering dance to Papa Roach’s “Last Resort,” happens to be an incredibly subdued, genteel man in person, who ruminates on how hard it is for him to fit into dresses with his somewhat stocky figure.
Although short-lived, there are a few interviews with drag kings as well, with clips from Electro the Pop and Lock King and Rusty Hips, who channel masculinities that are often smarmy and John Travolta-esque. There’s also a shocking coupling between three drag kings dressed as priests performing a “sexorcism” on a fellow drag queen with actual anal penetration on stage. What was interesting to me about the Trannyshack performances were the alternative genders that they often created. Rarely was there a realistic impersonation of femaleness, rather they took elements of femininity and dismantled them in order to create an aesthetic that was countercultural and representative of each artist’s version of gender subversion.
Filthy Gorgeous is probably not going to appeal to more than a niche audience, with its trashy aesthetics, scatological stunts and minority status, but it is one hell of an eyeful and a revelatory gander into San Francisco’s deconstructed drag promise land.
Boy I Am (Dir. by Sam Feder and Julie Hollar)
Boy I Am is an intensely provocative look at contemporary trans issues told through the narratives of three FtMs, Norie, Keegan and Nicco. Their sometimes heart-wrenching, sometimes triumphant stories are punctuated by interviews with gender theorists, lawyers, and activists who attempt to clarify and complicate issues surrounding trans identity within the broader queer community and the world at large. The heart of the documentary is the voices from the trans men themselves, who come from racially and economically diverse backgrounds and who beautifully dispel the notions of trans identity as a “cop out” or that they are trying to appropriate male privilege by rejecting feminism and butch lesbianism.
Judith “Jack” Halberstam, a leading gender theorist and author of Female Masculinity offers much inspired critical analysis on the topics of masculinity, how our sexual practices are deeply gendered and the notion of bodily autonomy being a key to self-empowerment. Some of the other queer lawyers, activists and journalists’ interviews seemed a bit lopsided and stoic in comparison to the compelling narratives of the trans men. One woman, who was identified solely as “femme dyke” seemed to gesticulate a lot more than she actually said anything on the topics that were raised, but Halberstam’s words, especially spoken in her lilting British accent, were poignant and articulate, especially when she discussed the idea that one’s body not aligning with one’s identity applies wholeheartedly to queers and non-queers alike. This is witnessed by the huge market for bodily modifications in regard to dieting, lyposuction, cosmetic surgery, bodybuilding, etc. When one desires to chemically or surgically alter one’s body to reinforce gender hierarchies, it is acceptable, but in the opposite circumstance, such alteration is viewed as deviant and unacceptable.
The importance of establishing queer alliances in Boy I Am especially pertains to feminist politics in their ability to reconfigure and reappropriate conventional notions of sex, gender, and sexuality. As Cressida Heyes notes in her essay “Feminist Solidarity after Queer Theory: The Case of Transgender”:
“It is both necessary and troubling to seek out a home as a gendered or sexual being; necessary because community, recognition, and stability are essential to human flourishing and political resistance, and troubling because those very practices too often congeal into political ideologies and group formations that are exclusive or hegemonic.”
Norie illustrates the contradictory realms of community when he discusses the changes his girlfriend had to make as a woman-identified woman and lesbian feminist when he decided to transition. The difficulty for former lesbians being read as straight in order to be with their trans boyfriends is a particularly gripping aspect of the documentary.
The body has always been a site of contestation, especially the female body, and I would argue that the power and necessity of trans identities lies in the very exposure of categorization itself, by highlighting the flaws and fractures that exist not only within gender politics but within feminist and class politics as well. Boy I Am is an exemplary illustration of this, and confounds the rigid gender and identity policing that abounds, and is often not critically examined, in our society.
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