Miro/Miranda... Will Transgender People Be The Last To Be Granted Equality?

Today I heard a radio report that even Mormons are rethinking their doctrine of vicious homophobia and working, at least tentatively, towards making amends for all the sorrow and pain they caused by financing the hateful and bigoted Yes of 8 campaign in California. In the last 4 years, the country has made unprecedented strides towards welcoming the LGBT community in as equals-- or at least the LGB community. T is for "transgender" and, for most Americans-- perhaps even for most gay people!!!!-- that's one step beyond. There's always one step beyond.

I had a very special Valentine's Day date this year, my old friend Rickie Lee Jones. I took her to Ink, the restaurant opened last year by America's most creative young chef, Michael Voltaggio. And she turned me on to a friend of hers, actor/director/writer Frank LaLoggia, best known for the films Lady In White and Fear No Evil. Either the video above or the video below will give you a glimpse into LaLoggia's current project, Miro/Miranda the story of a transgender person, the HAPPY, musical story of a transgender person.

No class of people are more marginalized and despised in America than transgendered people. It scares the daylights out of others and often provokes violent reactions. The first I ever heard of it was just before I went to college when I read a new book by Hubert Selby, a book about my hometown, Last Exit to Brooklyn. What the hell? I had never read anything like that but I sensed just what Georgette was because a year or two earlier I told my parents I thought I was attracted to boys. A few days after that revelation, my mother calmly introduced me to Michelle, her hairdresser, a low-drag queen with an exaggerated, effeminate persona. Eek! That wasn't what I was attracted to. My mother assumed that's what it meant to be gay. It put me off for a decade!

And then there was Stonewall, 5 years after Selby's book came out, a month after I had given up on my warlike country and moved overseas, transvestites and transsexuals had had it and we're going to take it any more and beat up some abusive cops and started the riot that led directly to gay liberation and the equality agenda that Obama finally evolved into backing. No one deserves to be left out in the cold-- and certainly not the crazy brave souls who started the whole thing. And I think work like LaLoggia's film is going to move that along in a big way even more important than legislation.