by ERIK PIEPENBURG
Published: July 28, 2011 Reprinted at keystothecloset.blogspot.com
FOR someone whose only acting experience was playing a Boy George lookalike in a high school production of the musical “The Wedding Singer,” Harmony Santana is having an incredible year. Ms. Santana is making her big-screen debut in Rashaad Ernesto Green’s coming-out drama “Gun Hill Road,” which had its premiere in January at the Sundance Film Festival. Last month the movie made a splash on the gay film-festival circuit, opening Outfest in Los Angeles and closing Newfest in New York. It opens commercially in New York on Aug. 5.
Harmony Santana, a transgender actress, stars in the new film "Gun Hill Road."
Laverne Cox a transgender actress with a role in a new movie.
But when Ms. Santana goes to sleep at night she does so not as a buzzed-about young starlet but as a resident of Green Chimneys, a group home in Harlem mainly for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth. Ms. Santana, who says she is in her early 20s, has been living full time as a woman only since last year.
She is the latest performer to join the tiny pool of openly transgender actors who are finding a place on screen. Her small cohort includes Candis Cayne, who appeared in the film “Stonewall” and the television series “Dirty Sexy Money,” and Laverne Cox, a reality-television star with a role in the coming Susan Seidelman film “Musical Chairs.” The most recognizable female-to-male personality today is probably Chaz Bono, the child of Cher and Sonny Bono who, while not an actor, is the subject of the documentary “Becoming Chaz.”
Cross-dressing on film certainly has a long tradition, dating to the silent era when Fatty Arbuckle and others put on dresses and wigs for laughs. And Oscar nominations have been given to actors who played transgender characters, including John Lithgow (“The World According to Garp” from 1982), Jaye Davidson (“The Crying Game,” 1992) and Felicity Huffman (“Transamerica,” 2005). Hilary Swank won an Academy Award for her role in “Boys Don’t Cry” (1999).
But transgender actors are for the most part left to watch from the sidelines. It doesn’t help that in some people’s minds being a drag queen and having a transgender identity are the same thing.
“I have such respect for drag queens,” said Ms. Cox, who has been living as a woman since the late ’90s and competed on VH1’s “I Want to Work for Diddy” before starring in a VH1 makeover reality show, “Transform Me.” “But what is troubling about the mainstreaming of drag, and people conflating drag and being transsexual, is that people think this is a joke. My identity is not a joke. Who I am as a woman is not a joke. This is my life.”
Ms. Cox said that many casting directors don’t know what they want when a script calls for a transgender character and think she looks too feminine to convincingly play someone who was born male. To her dismay, she said, she finds herself “in auditions with drag queens a lot.”
The heyday for transsexual actors on the big screen may have been the late ’60s and early ’70s. The director Paul Morrissey helped introduce America to Andy Warhol’s transgender “superstars” like Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn, subversive heroines in art-house hits like “Flesh” and “Women in Revolt.” Jon Davies, the author of the book “Trash” (2009), about Mr. Morrissey’s 1970 film of the same name, said the visibility of transgender performers in that era coincided with a mainstream vogue for pornography and exploitation films, and the attention paid to sexual identity after Stonewall.
“There was an idea that if you could show as much flesh as possible, you would be guaranteed good box office,” he said. “I think it was a period of realizing how incredible these actors were at selling or performing these identities that they had fashioned for themselves.”
For “Gun Hill Road,” Mr. Green said, he conducted an extensive search to find the right actor to play Vanessa (born Michael), a shy teenager trying to live openly as a girl while dealing with a disapproving father (Esai Morales) and a supportive mother (Judy Reyes). Mr. Green knew the role would be hard to cast: the actor had to look 16, convincingly convey a Hispanic background and play a transgender character without what he called “significant female development.”
“I looked at attractive gay males who might have had experience with drag to see if they might be able to portray the character,” Mr. Green said. “But they didn’t have the essence I was looking for. There’s a difference between someone who’s pretending to be female and someone who actually believes they are.”
He discovered Ms. Santana at the Queens gay pride parade. “She said she was at the beginning of her transition, which was like, ‘Bingo,’ ” Mr. Green said.
During an interview recently at a cafe in Harlem, Ms. Santana spoke about growing up in New York as a transgender teenager, much like her character.
“At one time I hated my father so much because he would always fight with my mother about me,” she said. “I would hear them through the cracks in the door that I shouldn’t be playing with my little sisters and doing girl things.”
Like Ms. Santana and other transgender actors many of the performers who appeared in Mr. Morrissey’s films led less-than-glamorous home lives. “In that period they were celebrities, but they were living in extremely poor conditions, hand to mouth,” Mr. Davies said.
Today the transgender people themselves are divided over self-representation. At last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, a movie called “Ticked-Off Trannies With Knives” was criticized by some transgender advocates as demeaning. In a phone interview the film’s director, Israel Luna, who is gay, called the film a “trans-ploitation revenge fantasy.”
“The only times you see trans anything represented is either in a documentary, and they’re usually depressing,” he said. “You also see transgender people as victims getting beat up and murdered. I wanted to make a not-so-serious film that would appeal to a larger audience.”
Mr. Green said he is also hoping for mainstream appeal. He has an advocate in Ms. Cox, who described Ms. Santana’s character as communicating “something that’s really unique to trans women.”
“What a difference it makes when an actual trans person plays the role,” Ms. Cox added.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 7, 2011
An article last Sunday about transgender actors in film misstated the decade that the transgender actress Laverne Cox began living as a woman. She has been doing so since the late 1990s, not the late 1980s.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/movies/new-roles-for-transgender-performers.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=transgender%20performers&st=cse
No comments:
Post a Comment