Transsexual characters in Literature (or movies)

[Odelay]

I'm not trying to hijack the HA Book Club thread here, but I was curious to find few or no mention of titles which had transsexual characters in it.

I was recently reflecting on the fact that I read John Irving's The World According to Garp some 25 years ago. It was actually published in 1978! To me it was groundbreaking because there were some significant TS characters and themes in it, especially around transitioning. In fact, the ending (which is really an epilogue so I'm not spoiling anything here) has Garp's son meeting a pre-op TS and marrying her after her transition. The movie version of Garp (with Robin Williams) isn't bad either, although they truncate the story by not including the epilogue scene. John Lithgow's character as the former Philadelphia Eagles Tight End who becomes a transsexual is memorable. I can vividly recall the one scene where s/he visits Garp and complains about how the hormones she is taking are killing her.

Another gender transformation story I enjoyed was Robert Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil from 1987. This one has a twist as an old decaying multi-millionaire self-funds a brain transplant for himself and happens to wake up as a gorgeous woman as that turned out to be the transplant body. Then he/she figures out how cool it is to be a woman and have sex as a woman.

On the movie end I can think of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, The Crying Game, and of course, Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Anyone else see or read anything "fictional" with similar themes?

[timxxx]

Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr
The book & film.
The book is great.
The transvestite is played by Alexis Arquette but l would forget the film, it's crap.

[LG]

See also:
http://www.hungangels.com/board/viewtopic.php?t=2006

[Odelay]

See also:
http://www.hungangels.com/board/viewtopic.php?t=2006

Thanks LG. I was trying to use search to find previous threads but I never caught this one. I enjoy reading through these old threads.

[Kabuki]

Yellow Hair 2 is a Korean film featuring post-op model Harisu. You may want to check it out. I actually own the film. You don't need to view the first film by the way. The story and characters are different for Yellow Hair 2. You can find the dvd at http://www.hanbooks.com/

From the beginning of the film's shooting, "Yellow Hair 2" has attracted a lot of the public's interest because the hot transgender model Ha Ri-soo appears as a transgender woman in the film. However, for those who expected a lot of nudity and hard-core sex scenes, this film might be pretty disappointing. Ha doesn't appear in any sex scenes and only a few sex scenes are shown throughout the two-hour movie. It is because the movie does not focus on the sex life of a transgender woman but on her life in general.

The movie is divided into several sections. Each section starts with a subtitle on an empty screen and each character's narration, which are mostly so awkward and crude that it feels like the narrator is reading an adolescent girl's diary.

There are two women and one man. One of the women is Y (Shin I), a convenience store clerk who wants to become an actress but is sexually abused by her vulgar manager. In her life is another man, the shop owner, a mid-aged pervert who peeps at her through a hidden camera. The other woman is J (Ha Ri-soo), the transgender, a quick service deliverer in the daytime and singer at a live club at night. She falls in love with a baseball player but leaves him after facing his parents' tenacious opposition. And there's a man named R, who wants to be a documentary film producer and films everything he sees with his camcorder.

[Rory]

Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography

"It is the story of a young man named Orlando, born in England during the reign of Elizabeth I, who decides not to grow old. He does not, and he passes through the ages as a young man ... until he wakes up one morning to find that he has metamorphosed into a woman -- the same person, with the same personality and intellect, but in a woman's body. The remaining centuries up to the time the book was written are seen through a woman's eyes."

[francisfkudrow]

Poppy Z. Brite's "The Lazarus Heart" (a sequel to "The Crow") has a transgendered primary character if I remember correctly.

[Staci Kane]

I can confirm that at least four of the main characters in The Fellowship of the Ring are, in fact, transgendered.*




*May or may not be true.

[partlycloudy]