Anjali Ameer Makes Indian Movie History

Like here in the States, Bollywood has also used male actors to portray trans women

This is old news, but when the bilingual film (Tamil and Malayalam) Peranbu (it's Tamil language title) debuts later this year with Indian film superstar Mammootty in the lead role,  it will have for the first time ever in the history of Indian cinema a trans woman playing a female role.

The person tapped to make that Indian cinematic history is Anjali Ameer   Born in Kerala into an orthodox Muslim family, transitioned in her teens and kept her trans status non disclosed as she started her modeling career until she was dropped from a TV show.  

"Acting was a passion for me," said Ameer in an India Times interview. "As a kid, I used to take part in youth festivals. I feel that acting is the best I can do to bring out my personality."  

The model was suggested to director of the movie Ram by Mammootty, and  Ameer is thrilled to be in her first film with one of India's greatest and most well known actors.

"It was a great experience working with people like Mammootty and director Ram," said Ameer.  To get a character with such a team was a great learning experience.  Initially I was intimidated, but Mammootty encouraged me throughout the shoot."

Ameer also made it clear she doesn't want to be considered just a trans artist.   She is an actress who just wants to try her luck in Bollywood and if a great role comes along, she's ready to play it.

Whitewashed Stonewall Movie Tanks At Box Office

'So when Stonewall the whitewashed trans history erasing movie comes out, save your hard earned T-bills.   Just say no to erasure and whitewashing of the undeniable trans and person of color influence in what went down on a sultry June 1969 night that changed the course of American history and started a human rights movement,'
-TransGriot,  August 5, 2015

Roland Emmerich's Stonewall opened last weekend, and it not only received overwhelmingly negative reviews, it spectacularly tanked at the box office.  It made only a measly $112,414 from 127 theaters.

Heh, heh, heh.  Looks like the movie going public and the critics have spoken.  The disaster film king made a real life cinematic disaster, and Emmerich needs to stop trying to make excuses for it..

Note to Hollywood, next time don't be so quick to erase people of color and trans folks from an event we helped jump off.   If you had centered the movie around the real life history of it, the money you made would have been exponentially more than the paltry sum you did make on opening weekend.

The Stonewall Rebellion was not a planned Fire Island gay action as the movie tried to depict it as.  It was a spontaneous reaction by trans people, butch lesbians, drag queens and other denizens of the Stonewall Inn on that sultry June 1969 night fed up with repeated harassment from the NYPD as the Fire Island gays cowered in their closets.

The historical record backs that up.  

The gay rights revolution was jumped off by the peeps the Fire Island 'good homosexuals' reviled and who had nothing to lose by fighting the powers that be.

Deal with it.

Hollywood has done many movies based on historical events, most recently Selma. and for the most part they stayed true to the historical story while taking mild dramatic license with it.  

Stonewall was a straight up crime against history that could not be allowed to stand, because it sought to erase trans people and people of color from the seminal historical event they jumped off.  

It's also not an accident that white gay men like Larry Kramer rushed in to try to defend the indefensible erasure.   Who's crazy now, Larry?

As the child and godchild of historians and heir to that distinguished legacy of trans activism, I'm doing the happy dance because Stonewall tanked at the box office.

Next time you want to do a movie about an TBLG historical event Hollywood, ground it in the actual history of the event you're trying to put on the silver screen..  

Soon To Be Released Stonewall Movie Is Whitewashing And Erasing Trans History

When I first heard about a Stonewall movie project coming out of Hollywood, my first thoughts were "That's nice, but I hope they don't whitewash the damned movie".

Now  the initial trailer for the Roland Emmerich directed film Stonewall has come out, and it's worse than I feared.  The screenplay written by Jon Robin Baitz focuses on a fictional white gay man from Kansas named Danny, who moves to New York and is shown during the course of the movie to eventually become radicalized enough to throw the brick that triggered the rebellion and subsequently a movement.

As for Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson?  They are just minor characters in this film.  

Seriously?  The mother of the trans rights movement, who jumped off Stonewall and along with Marsha played a major role in fighting for the recognition of gender variant people as the nascent movement was forming in the wake of the Stonewall rebellion is a minor character?  

That's some bull feces.    But here's the trailer.



Umm, naw boo boo kitty, that's not how it went down, and as long as Miss Major is alive, I'm not letting that fictionalized whitewashed trans free Stonewall narrative even gain a foothold because it's a crime against history and disrepectful to Sylvia, who i had the pleasure of meeting in May 2000.

The reality coming from multiple witnesses to the original event say that it was Marsha P Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, butch lesbians and other gender variant persons of color who jumped off the riot in 1969 while the Fire Island gays were still cowering in their closets.

Even Ray Hill, who is one of our Houston human rights icons and who was one of the early Big Four Gay leaders along with Harvey Milk, Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings, has told me that Stonewall was a trans and gender variant POC led uprising.

So when Stonewall the whitewashed trans history erasing movie comes out, save your hard earned T-bills.   Just say no to erasure and whitewashing of the undeniable trans and person of color influence in what went down on a sultry June 1969 night that changed the course of American history and started a human rights movement,  

TransGriot Note:  If you're pissed off about this trans erasure and whitewashing of LGBT history in this movie project, here's a documentary movie project about Marsha P. Johnson's life called Happy Birthday, Marsha that is in production and raising money for its completion.

'Game Face' Trailer

Fallon Fox  has been telling me about this upcoming documentary for a while, and now the official trailer for this Michiele Thomas film has come out.

The documentary movie is entitled Game Face, and features Fallon Fox  coming out as a trans MMA fighter and Terrence, an Oklahoma  collegiate basketball player who happens to be gay.

The film follows both athletes during their coming out process, and sheds light on the obstacles LGBT sports players deal with throughout their career..

'Passing' Trans Masculine Documentary

One of the things the world definitely needs to see and hear are the voices of trans men of color.

Just as the modern trans feminine narrative since 1953 has been dominated by the voices and stories of white trams women, the story is unfortunately the same for trans men of color.

Passing: A Short Documentary is a film by Lucah Rosenberg Lee and J. Mitchell Reed that focuses on the lives of three nondisclosed Black trams men.  The film explores what life is like living as a Black man when no one knows you are transgender and how each of them now perceives their own journey with gender after many years of being interacted with by the world as a biological man.

It will also explore how cultural attitudes towards race are central to how transgender men of color experience their maleness in today’s society because their experiences are different from the experiences of white trans-men.

The documentary film has been completed, and the Passing team is on a second Indiegogo campaign with a $3500 goal to raise funds to take it to multiple film festivals, pay for music licensing fees, and cover travel expenses for two of the actors to travel from Houston and New York to attend the premiere




Hope you hit that fundraising target, and hope I get to see it at my local H-town filmfests like Worldfest and QFest Houston..

'Boy Meets Girl' Has A Trans Actress...

Playing a trans woman..

This indie romantic comedy directed by Eric Schaeffer is the story of Ricky, a young Southern trans girl who deals with friendship, romance, transphobic hate, and all the other gray area issues that trans peeps have to navigate while working to get accepted at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology.

It stars Michelle Hendley in the role of Ricky, and she had an interesting route she took to get this role.  Schaeffer found her courtesy of her YouTube video, and OUT magazine interviewed them both in this article..  

Boy Meets Girl will be in limited release in February, and hopefully I'll get to see it.

Speaking of seeing things, here's the trailer

Dallas TransVisible Screening Today

If you 're looking for something to do in Dallas later today, you may wish to head to the Texas Theater and check out the documentary TransVisible.

It depicts the life and advocacy story of Los Angeles based Latina trans activist Bamby Salcedo, and the movie was produced by Dante Alencastre.   

The free event is starting at 4:00 PM and the featured guests at this screening of it are Bamby and Dante.  There will be a question and answer segment once the movie concludes and a reception with light snacks.

You will have to have a ticket to pick up food from our vendor, but TICKETS ARE FREE. Be sure to order yours online today! https://www.eventbrite.com/e/transvisible-bamby-salcedos-story-with-guests-bamby-salcedo-and-dante-alencastre-tickets-13915384289
You can also congratulate Bamby (along with Janet Mock) for being named by Colorlines Magazine as one of the 14 Women of Color Who Rocked 2014.

The Texas Theater is located at 231 W. Jefferson St. in south Dallas, and hope y'all give Bamby and Dante a nice Texas welcome and large crowd for it.

MAJOR! Needs Your Help To Win IndieWire Project of The Month

The voting for the IndieWire Project of The Month for October has started and is agonizingly close at this writing with MAJOR! trailing by three votes.

The balloting closes at 5 PM EDT (2 PM PDT) today so help Annalise and StormMiguel get another step closer to making this documentary film a reality and win the creative consultation with the Tribeca Film Institute by casting your ballots in this poll. 

I've already done so because y'all know how much love I have for Miss Major and think the world needs to hear and see her story play out on the silver screen.   

So please do your part to make it happen and shart this post with your friends.

MAJOR! IndieWire Project Of The Month Voting Has Started

You helped MAJOR! get funded.  You helped it win IndieWire's October Project of the Week.  Now the voting has started on IndieWire for October Project of the Month, and you once again get the opportunity to help Annalise and StormMiguel get another step closer to making this documentary film a reality. 

The voting for October Project of the Month has started and will happen until 5 PM EDT (2 PM PDT) on November 1. It only takes a few seconds and doesn't cost you anything, so please consider it. We need all hands on deck to ensure that MAJOR! emerges victorious once again.

If MAJOR! wins October Project of the Month, it means that Annalise and StormMiguel get a creative consultation with the Tribeca Film Institute!     

Seattle And Portland Screenings Of 'Still Black' This Weekend

In the interest of journalistic integrity I do wish to disclose that I'm proud to know one of the transmen featured in it and the director of this award winning documentary.

But for those of you in the Portland and Seattle areas, Dr Kortney Ryan Ziegler is headed your way with his groundbreaking film 'Still Black A Portrait of Black Transmen'.

The screening is a collaborative effort of Gender Odyssey and Sister Sinema  with partial proceeds going to the Gender Odyssey Scholarship Fund.

The Seattle screening is scheduled for Saturday, May 11 and the Portland one on Sunday, May 12, so use this link to purchase tickets for one excellent film spotlighting the lives of six transmen.

here's hoping for sold out screenings on both nights and y'all show Dr. KRZ some love.

Trans Francisco Documentary

This 2010 documentary by Glenn Davis delves into the lives of several transwomen in the San Francisco Bay Area.   It features Miss Major, Cecilia Chung, Kayla, Tiffany Woods and Theresa Sparks

Skip The Makeup's Gina Morvay wrote a review of it when it debuted back in July 2010. 

Since then Trans Francisco has been screened at LGBT and trans film festivals around the world, and you can get more information about the award winning film at its transfrancisco.com website. 

Trigger alert for discussions of graphic sexual assault and anti-trans violence

Trailer




Kayla discussing her relationship with her parents




Alexandra Cruz



Cecilia Chung



Miss Major

Dyssonance: Cloud Atlas Is A Film For Us

You know I enjoy my Arizona homegirl Dyss' thought provoking posts because she has the same talent of not only fearlessly and intelligently saying what needs to be said, but at time occasionally pissing you off in the process. 

In this post she discusses the just released Wachowski sibling film Cloud Atlas and adds her observations about it. 

This won’t make much sense to a lot of people, but Cloud Atlas is Our Film. And there isn’t a trans person in the film. But truly, this is a movie that is as rich and complex and deeply moving as the lives of Trans people, and it carries forward with so many themes that it resonates soundly with transness in a way that it id challenging to describe.

It is a movie for those who love, and for those who are loved. It is a film for those who struggle, who wonder, who hope.
It is awesome, and if you haven’t started making plans to see it, then you really should start to do so now…

This post definitely deserves to be signal boosted, and you can read it here.

'Wildness' To Premiere At SXSW

Wildness is a feature length film by Wu Tsang that celebrates a four decade old Latino trans bar  in Los Angeles' MacArthur Park neighborhood called the Silver Platter.

It debuts at SXSW and Wu Tsang was interviewed by Colorlines

  

'The Danish Girl' Stalled

Two years ago I wrote about Nicole Kidman being slated to play pioneering transwoman Lili Elbe in the biopic The Danish Girl. 

Filming was supposed to start last month for the $15 million movie but unfortunately it has hit another production snag as another actress has pulled out of the film.   

The Danish Girl is being produced by Kidman's movie production company Blossom Films and has been plagued by casting and financial problems.    

Kidman originally approached Gwyneth Paltrow to play the role of Lili's wife and fellow artist Gerda Gottlieb, but she was too busy and passed on it.   Charlize Theron took the role, but had to pull out due to scheduling conflicts.   The role then went to Rachel Wiesz,  and now she has pulled out of the production as well.

Kidman is still determined to make this movie happen, but has to go back to the casting drawing board.

Nicole, here's a suggestion.   Maybe you can hire a trans actress like Candis Cayne or Jamie Clayton to play the role of Gerda.  It's worth a shot.