One of my earliest movie related memories – from the time I was six or seven – was of parading around the house, hips swishing and purring in my finest Mae West mimicry, “Why don’t ya come up and see me sometime?” I barely remember actually watching the B&W My Little Chickadee on the tube, so mesmerized was I by the platinum blonde goddess, a creature clad in ultra-femme garb but projecting an aggressively male body language and distinctly unfeminine voice – like no one I had ever seen on the screen. Years later I would realize it was my first encounter with a woman like me.
Miss West is my patron sinner/saint for many reasons, but mostly because today’s catchphrases like “genderqueer” and “boygirl” didn’t exist in her time – and she didn’t need them. She did what came naturally to her way down deep inside, no buzzwords required for self-knowledge. I intimately understand why she eschewed monogamy in favor of a fetish for bad boys, rough trade and Hercules musclemen – the ultimate physical embodiment of our 100% male insides, our souls made flesh-and-blood tangible. I know what it’s like to choose lovers you want both to be with and to be, to covertly use sex to sweep aside all awareness of the female form, to lose oneself in a tidal wave of testosterone. Miss West is my fellow undercover agent in the mainstream world, a gay man “passing” as a femme little chickadee, serving as my transgender guiding light.
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Friday at LAFF brought back-to-back screenings of two very different documentaries about how sexual politics and policies within two individual communities come to define these worlds-apart spaces. Sarah Friedman and Esy Casey’s Thing With No Name follows two women in sub-Saharan African villages as they controversially begin a program of anti-retroviral drugs after having been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS. Undeniably beautiful to look at and powerfully poetic in its depiction of a community of women stricken with poverty and sick with a virus that they don’t fully understand, the film ironically and sadly fails at its propagandist mission when tragedies of timing and fate intervene. Meanwhile, Trinidad offers a portrait of the titular “sex change capitol of the world,” a frontier town in Colorado where a male-to-female post-op transsexual rockstar surgeon named Marci is pioneering the art and science of genital reassignment surgery. In tone and content these films couldn’t be more different, but they still constitute a sort of double feature of films about real people living lives impacted by scientific attempts to customize fate.
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