The interview is in two parts (below), and it’s about 20 minutes long. Cynthia Loyst and I chat about my transformations, straight men who are attracted to transsexuals and about my upcoming play I was Barbie at SummerWorks 2010. Brendan Healy, my director and the Artistic Director of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre joins us later in the interview, too!

The show originally aired on Friday, June 4th. Big thanks to Star Network and CP24 for having us on, and for supporting queer performance!

…”real men” (a detective) lusting after a cartoon woman in Disney’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit…

…photos of me modelling as Jessica Rabbit for anatomy artists at the Cameron House (2007). FYI- the dress is very painful to wear because of how small the corset makes my waist, and the sequins dig into my flesh.

Vari Hall, York University

The lecture is in two parts, and it is about three hours long.  The first half is called ‘The History of MtF Transbodies 1900 – Present.’  It is a narrative that I have constructed to show how transbodies and identities have historically been constituted in different ways by a series of “authorities” including psychoanalysts and activists as well as pornographers.

The second part of the lecture is ‘The Eroticization of the MtF Transsexual by Heterosexual Men.’ It looks at how porn has constructed and commodified trans bodies and identities.  It also examines the ways in which meanings are ascribed onto bodies and how meaning, itself, becomes eroticized. 

The course director is Dr. Frances Latchford, Associate Professor, School of Women’s Studies, School of Arts and Letters.
Time: 2:30-4:30(lecture) and 4:30-5:30(tutorial Q and A)
Location: Founders 203

photo by Tony Fong, courtesy of Fab! magazine

(this article originally appeared in my T-Girl column in Fab! magazine, Toronto’s Gay Scene Magazine, 2005)

I’ve had sex with two professional athletes, a movie star, two TV personalities, the CEOs of two Fortune 500 companies, four guys who worked for the Mob, a string of strippers, many male models, a bunch of bodybuilders, loads of nightclubbing suburban guys and even a few crackheads – all of them straight.

When I parade into a gay nightclub hanging from the tanned, bulging arm of one of these men, heads turn and eyebrows arch. Cliques of queers throughout the party wonder why these guys want so desperately to be with a tranny if they are supposed to be hetero. I tell them that when it comes to tranny-lovers, there are several types…

1. The Porn Aficionado
He’s spent whole weekends fantasizing over the impossible female bodies represented in porn. Then he goes to a club and sees the 36DD-24-42 tranny exposing her store-bought body parts on the dance floor. Concluding that a body like that is built for sex, he assumes that this silicone dream girl is wilder and hornier than anyone from the pages of Hustler. So what if she has a cock? She looks like Pamela Anderson’s over-the-top friend.

2. The Anal Addict
His opening line usually begins: “One time my girlfriend did this thing to me…” He explains that while getting a blow job, his girlfriend’s fingers went straight up his straight behind and into the male G-spot. It was the best orgasm of his life, and soon he was shopping for a respectably-sized dildo at Seduction. Then he started eyeing the shemale escort ads in the back pages of eye Weekly – behind his girlfriend’s back, of course.

3. The Submissive
He longs to be dominated by women, but in his mind, a cock symbolizes power. One day, his libidinous, subservient mind came up with the equation: woman + cock = powerful woman. At the next fetish party, he crawls around on all fours, ignoring his regular dominatrix, searching for his new tranny mistress.

4. The Player
He’s either rich, famous or extraordinarily hot, and he’s done everything you can do with a woman, not to mention two or three of them. He’s had porn stars, twins, acrobats, lesbians, the girl next door, librarians, maybe even a nun. Now he’s looking for a new thing that can get him off. Light bulb moment: chicks with dicks!

5. The Outlaw
Guys that just got out of jail, street trade and crackheads often end up rubbing elbows with a few T-girls. Social outlaws tend to hang out together at the fringes of society – places like Sneakers, Cawthra Park and the corner of Jarvis and Maitland. Inevitably, some will fall for each other. But the tranny will never know if he really likes her, or if he’s looking for a place to crash and needs help to pay off his dealer.

6. The Fetishist
In exactly the same way that people can fixate on inanimate objects like soiled women’s panties and stuffed animals, some straight men become lustful for dick as if it were a fetish item. To this type, the tranny isn’t really an exotic woman with a cock. She’s a cock that has tits instead of a hairy chest when he looks up. He’s liable to ignore the rest of her body while he fixates on the object of his obsession. This guy usually ends up paying for sex, and rightly so!

8. The Guy Who’s Just Cool With It
He’s probably been around trannies so long that we’re no longer unusual to him. He just thinks of us as regular women and that’s how he wants to treat us (i.e., he’s getting on top, but hates it when we get too clingy). This is the kind of guy a lot of trannies want to be with. The downside, of course, is that he always ends up missing the pussy.

I was obsessed with the David Lynch films Inland Empire and Mullholland Drive when we shot this. I was definately trying to channel the feeling of some of those female characters in this shoot …also, a bit of Helmut Newton and Bettina Rheims… Thanks to an awesome team for realizing the mise en scene and production elements so fully.

Directed, Produced by Matthew Santoro
Photography by David J. Romero
Styling by Patrick Vimbor
Camera and lighting by Dave Reudelhuber
Vinyl and spandex dress by Marty Rotman of Northbound Leather