Transamerica
I saw Transamerica last night. It was playing at the Century in Evanston, so I bought a ticket online and went alone. I’m glad I did, because I couldn’t really fathom speaking after seeing it.
I’ve always felt a little out-of-the-loop on the transgendered community. Sure I played dress-up when I was younger. And even now I occasionally put on a skirt and paint for hours for fun. But I’ve never once felt like I was anything other than a man in a dress.
Perspective is something I try and gain when I don’t understand something. For instance, quantum physics is, for the most part, a big yawning black hole of information to me. It was only when I saw a three part documentary about it, where they had many people explaining it in many different ways, that is started to make the slightest sense.
I’ve not turned into a quantum physicist, but I know just barely enough about the concepts to understand what the buzz is about. I didn’t have any perspective on the subject matter before, but now I do.
It’s been the same way for me and the TG community. The very few TG “friends” I’ve ever had, only some folks I knew a long time ago, entered and left my life pretty quick. I’ve never been friends with someone who is TG. Never.
I’m not really sure why that’s the case, or if I’m at fault for anything, but I feel like that part of the queer community is somewhere out there, but I’m not invited. Not that I should be of course, but I have gay, les, and bi friends up the wazoo.
From what I have known of TG folks, it seems to be an incredibly hard journey that seldom tends to be the discussion of the hour unless you’re somehow on the inside. There’s absolutely no fault in that, but it does seem to leave a chasm in the GLBT community that nobody talks about often. Or at least nobody I’m listening to…maybe I need my ears cleaned and my eyes opened.
A-ha, eyes opened. There it is. Perspective, my original point. I don’t have any on the TG community, so when a movie or a book or anything comes along, I try and pay attention because my call for acceptance is, for better or worse, a part of their call and vice-versa. They are a part of my community, and I am a part of theirs in MANY peoples’ eyes.
Together but distinctly seperate. Isn’t that odd?
Transamerica brought me from tears to laughter and back again more times that I can count. It’s a film with both funny moments and strikingly painful ones. There are some antics that are a little bit stretched thin, and some moments when I wish I could have paused the movie to figure out why I was starting to cry.
It was a roller coaster. One I haven’t been on in quite some time.
I left the theater in a daze. On the way to the Purple line stop I tried listening to some music on my iPod but it annoyed me. I was on complete auto-pilot. Somehow I found myself in the shampoo aisle in the Dominick’s at Howard and Clark. I knew I needed shampoo, but I can’t remember how I got there. I shouldn’t have exited the train at Howard because I live at Morse, another two stops along the Red line.
After checking out and stepping back out into the cold evening I ended up walking home along Clark. I couldn’t hear anything. I could barely see. But scenes from the movie kept playing through my mind, over and over again.
There’s still many questions I have to ask myself about what I saw last night in that movie theater. But the fact that even now I’m still running it through my mind is proof-positive that it was an incredibly good movie. Perhaps even the best that I’ve seen in a very long time.
Perspective. It’s still something I’m missing about a lot of things in my life. But just knowing that is good because it means I know what I have to work on.