I picked up this story and movie trailer from the Advocate.com: The film is called Turning with Antony and the Johnsons and centers around Antony Hegarty and other transgender and androgynous artists:
" It started as part of the 2004 Whitney biennial, when Hegarty joined forces with Charles Atlas, the filmmaker behind The Legend of Leigh Bowery, to make Turning, a stage show that featured Hegarty singing, while various women, many androgynous and transgender, like Hegarty himself, climbed on stage. The women stood on moving platforms as video cameras, guided by Atlas, captured close-ups of their faces and projected them on giant screens. Hegarty describes it as a “hypnotic journey through this panorama of different meditations on feminine presence.” After bringing Turning around Europe and Hegarty’s homebase of New York in 2004 and 2006, a film version debuts Friday night at Manhattan’s IFC Center for a week long run."




 

"In the film, many of the women describe feeling connected through their associations with the nightclub world or other facets of city life that introduced them to like-minded people who allow them to be the women they’ve always desired to be. One transgender woman speaks eloquently of shedding her skin and bravely entering into a new identity. “It’s being asked of us as a species to undergo a radical transformation in the way we see ourselves and our relationship to the world,” Hegarty says. “The stakes have never been higher, we’ve never been more alienated in terms of having a sense of our impact on the natural world.” Both Turning’s director and star believe now couldn’t be a better time to bring Turning to a larger audience. “Charlie was reminding me that Turning was done in 2004 and 2006 which was in the depth of the Bush years. There was a strong sense we were swimming against the tide at the time and there didn’t seem an end in sight,” Hegarty says, pointing out that the stage show opens with a booming speech from Martin Luther King, Jr. Says Atlas,“I’m thrilled we’re releasing it when there’s a glimmer of hope coming back to our society." For more information on Turning, click here.

Uniquely German Gender

In 1972 Liza Minnelli headlined Caberet, a Bob Fosse directed movie about a female girlie club entertainer in Weimar Republic era Berlin who romanced two men while the Nazi Party rose to power around them. One of the other main characters was actor Joel Gray who entertained in partial or total drag.  Not drag as we know it in America but a German form of the era.

Recently, Bettina Rheims "Gender Studies" which essentially again presented a German look at androgyny and gender..not drag this time but still unique. Compare the pictures.

Take a look at one of the examples to your left.

For more go here.

Do you know "Art"

The "Art" I'm talking about is the "Art of Purging".
As I write on my book projects (I'm a hoarder of words), I discover aspects of my past that I have totally forgotten. What's that saying "I have forgotten more than most people know?"  In my case I'm pretty sure I've forgotten more because of my age!
For whatever reason all of the sudden I began to think about "purging". If you don't know, the term refers to the disposal of your feminine articles.

Looking back on the process, I came up with about three possibilities of how purging worked:
1.- Private. You took it upon yourself to throw your stuff away.
2.- Semi Private. You tossed a portion of your things out for someone else to see and kept the good.
3.-Total Dispersal. You took all of your feminine belongings and heaved them out of your world for someone else to see.

Regardless of the method one overriding memory came through to me-euphoria! I truthfully never purged much and never totally but the mere act of stuffing some of my girl stuff into trash bags and sending them to the trash was symbolically wonderful. I had finally faced the monster, beat her like a drum and was ready to resume a total masculine existence...Yeah right!

My fondest memory of a purge was when a friend of mine cleared out his storage unit of feminine contraband and gave me the pick of what I wanted which included my first real set of breast forms.

Of course the "tragedy" of purging is it doesn't work in the vast majority of cases. The euphoria and the great resolve to to separate one's self from the gender confusion departs quickly.