On April 30, 1997, Ellen DeGeneres stumbled out of her television closet, declaring her Sapphic desires to a startled Laura Dern. As the phrase "earn a toaster oven" lodged permanently in the lesbian lexicon, Ellen became the first openly gay lead character in prime-time history. The episode was seen by 42 million viewers, almost twice the number that watch ABC's current megahit, Desperate Housewives.
Afterward, queer culture mavens were gleeful. But as a transsexual woman, I was jealous. It was suddenly okay to have an ordinary, likable dyke on a silly sitcom, but trans characters were still hackneyed stereotypes. When given space to vent in The Stranger's Queer Issue that summer, I eagerly tossed chilly water on the party. (My shrill, self-indulgent screed can be found here.)
Ellen's sitcom quickly fizzled, but in the eight intervening years, we've entered a big gay media world. From Will & Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy to The L Word and Brokeback Mountain, we've seen a healthy variety of vehicles featuring leading homos. We've even been treated to an excellent portrayal of a trans man in Boys Don't Cry. But the best movie featuring a leading trans woman was Hedwig and the Angry Inch. And as much as we were all warmed by the story of the punk rock victim of a botched East German sex-change operation... It wasn't quite what I'd been waiting for.
Transamerica, the debut film from writer/director Duncan Tucker, features Bree Osbourne, a pre-operative transsexual woman played with abundant humanity by Desperate Housewives' Felicity Huffman. Bree is a modest woman living in a cinderblock apartment in a poor neighborhood of Los Angeles. She scrapes out a living washing dishes in a Mexican restaurant while she saves for expensive genital surgery. She lives a lonely "deep stealth" life, and doesn't want anyone to know she was born male. During an interview for authorization of her final operation, she admits her only friend is her therapist.
One day, Bree receives a phone call from runaway street hustler Toby (Kevin Zegers), her 17-year-old son from a long-forgotten tryst. Her therapist insists Bree must confront him face-to-face before she'll sign off on the surgery. Bree flies to New York, posing as a well-intentioned church lady, intending to bail the indifferent Toby out of jail and race back to L.A. But after she sees his life up close, she can't leave him alone. His dream is to become a Hollywood porn star, so Bree agrees to get him there, but secretly plots to leave him in his Kentucky hometown with his stepfather.
Thus begins a surprisingly conventional American road movie, stuffed with familiar plot devices and one-dimensional supporting characters. But Tucker keeps the parent-child relationship sharp in the foreground. Bree and Toby have become manipulative deceivers in order to survive; they spend the 3,000 miles between New York and L.A. testing boundaries, tentatively trusting each other, and then blowing their incipient friendship apart with lies. It's a difficult story told with levity and piercing wit.
Huffman clearly aced her homework, and her exceptional performance is the reason to see Transamerica. With deft skill, she shows us the stress that results from constantly working to conceal the past. Bree is intensely self-conscious about her behavior, always doubting her ability to mingle unnoticed. Slight movements belie her efforts—she sticks her pinky stiffly in the air while sipping tea and torques her limbs tightly as she sits. Yet often, Huffman lets the stealth mask slip to reveal the delightfully witty nerd that Bree has always been. My life story isn't much like Bree's, but Huffman's work reflected the essence of my experience so acutely I often felt like I was looking into a mirror. Huffman, working with Tucker, has brought richness and depth to a transsexual woman in film at last. Bree is no trans Ellen. She's much more compelling.
