Debates about transexualism have been predominantly concerned with some form of feminised masculinity. It seems to be more natural and less threatening when men want to become women and thus adopt an inferior social position. The story of FTM (female to male) transsexualism is less well known, although Christie Milliken in the article ‘Unheimlich Maneuvers: The Genres and Genders of Transssexual Documentary’1 details recent documentary films on the topic, as does publications like Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (1993)2 and Loren Cameron’s photo-book Body Alchemy Transsexual Portraits (1996).3 However, a relatively new American porn performer, Buck Angel, has been championing the FTM transsexual cause through his groundbreaking work which challenges the whole notion of a gender binary system and makes us question our own narratives of sexual identity. On film, the literal body of the transsexual becomes marked as a sign of their inner conflict. Documentaries that feature the transgendered subject, such as Sex Change Hospital (Chris McKin, 2007), often show very masculine women and unusual-looking men who do not quite look the part of their desired gender. Part of the pleasure for the spectator is identifying those foibles which ‘give the game away’ because even post-surgery a transgendered identity can remain an ambiguous one. As Milliken writes, ‘in other words, while a transsexual might become an effective representative of the other sex, an opposition between physical and sexual signifiers remains as a reminder of his/her crossing over’.4 Significantly, most MTF (male to female) transsexual porn narratives reinforce a world view that is rigidly gender binary. The transgendered porn subject is typically presented as someone abnormal who fails to pass successfully as male or female, and thus becomes reduced to being only a sexual curiosity or a joke. One of Angel’s stated aims in making porn in the first place is to work against presenting the sexualised MTF as something freakish.
TRAVERSING THE TRANSSEXUAL
In a non-pornographic context (where genitals do not have to be revealed), the irony is that Buck Angel looks so completely masculine there remain no female signifiers to indicate his former gender. His body (especially his upper torso) is heavily muscled and his face looks suitably macho and so in his porn work we have not been cued by errant female signifiers to anticipate a set of female genitalia between his legs (Angel chose not to have the phalloplasty procedure and describes himself as ‘the dude with the pussy’.) In addition, Angel refuses to portray his sexuality as ‘Other’, even in his most obviously gay film Buckback Mountain (Lawrence Roberts, 2007). Here, his male co-stars make no comment on his prosthetic penis or on what is between his legs, and thus he challenges the viewer to accept his transgendered sexual identity as a natural one.
Angel claims to be the world’s first FTM transsexual porn star and significantly his films are not made specifically for transgendered interests, he describes his audience as being primarily gay. In other words, his target audience finds him attractive in spite of his female genitalia (and how bizarre that they would be the group least likely to find images of his vagina sexually stimulating, a fact which is capitalised on ironically in Richard Kimmel’s Schwarzwald (2007)). These ironies form part of the contradictory persona that is Buck Angel, a man who wills you not be interested in his sexual differences, even as he capitalises on making films which feature his unique biological characteristics.
Through his films Angel seems to want to go beyond sexual difference. Not having a biologically functioning penis does not seem to have created phallic envy in him, as seen by his unselfconscious use of a plastic dildo as a substitute penis. Sexually he seems happy to play out a variety of roles and scenarios, at times his vagina is penetrated or he uses his prosthetic penis to penetrate others, or even to masturbate with his own dildo. In a typical Buck Angel film, every performer displays the right of sexual gratification regardless of how this is achieved, how they look, and what props they need to use. And if they are happier not reaching orgasm, that is acceptable too. In focusing on pleasure, rather than mainstream porn’s formulaic necessity and obsession in depicting the ‘cum shot’, Angel’s films offer a sex positive model of sexuality that is all-embracing.
FIGURE 19.1 Capitalising on the uncategorised: Angel’s films and the marketing of sexual ambivalence
For instance, let us take his directorial debut, The Adventures of Buck Naked (2004), which offers a variety of scenarios designed to stimulate. The style is gonzo with limited camera angles that are often crudely framed. It opens with Angel undoing his fly to reveal a large plastic dildo in his pants. A series of extreme close-ups photograph this rubber member as if to signify its virility, but there is no attempt to disguise the fact that it is a toy or to conceal where it joins on to Angel’s skin. It is treated exactly as if it were a real penis, and performer Kitty even puts a condom over it before performing fellatio in close-up. It is a classical porn shot with a twist, because we know that it’s a fake penis but our eyes make us believe momentarily that a real blow-job is taking place. Indeed the point of the Angel film is to privilege the fake, to endow it with a hyperrealism so that Angel’s artificial penis becomes better than a biologically functioning one.
Cut to a long shot that reveals female performer Kitty’s rather impressive tattoos and piercings which signify her as ‘alternative’ in her own way as Angel. When she walks over to a blanket, the camera follows Angel’s bobbing dildo obsessively before she sits astride it. Angel’s penetrative shots obsessively focus on vagina/dildo activity without the standard cut-away shots that would normally locate the performers in situ. In fact, it is impossible for the viewer to work out exactly how Kitty is lying in order to achieve the shot. Even though objectively we know that Angel can feel almost nothing penetrating Kitty with the dildo, the repeated intercutting showing images of his flushed face privileges his pleasure and allows us to suspend belief and feel his sexual mastery of the situation. It also allows female spectators the opportunity to imagine what it might be like to adopt the traditional male role of penetration.
At some point Kitty just seems to disappear out of the frame and we get more close-ups of Angel’s erect and bobbing dildo which we note is held firmly in place by his tight pants. Seemingly satisfied with his penetrative display, Angel immediately throws the dildo down and begins to masturbate, and extreme close-up shots display his testosterone-enlarged clitoris. (In the FTM porn film we learn that transmen prefer to handle their clitoris differently, they ‘jill off’ exactly as if they were handling a miniature penis.) This contrasts with mainstream porn, where performers do what looks good rather than what feels pleasing.
In the next scene, a fellow transman, Bear Bud, performs a long masturbation scene. Because he is not as masculine and macho as Angel, despite the fact that he sports a moustache and a beard, he does not pass for male quite as successfully. Nonetheless, he is given a large amount of screen time and we note how he masturbates a dildo even though we know that he can get no direct stimulation from it. After making his point, he pushes the dildo aside to reveal his clitoris underneath and then a series of extensive close-up shots detail his masturbation efforts. Kitty appears and puts his dildo back into place and performs fellatio on him. The power of this scene lies in Bear Bud’s ability to mimic the imagined effect of being the recipient of fellatio and the practised mannerisms in which he handles his dildo. The film blurs the boundaries of real and imagined pleasure and asserts his right to feel comfortable performing both with a dildo and as a ‘dude with a pussy’. The viewer is left unable to identify which signifiers are significant and which are empty.
This scene of ambiguity is replaced by a sexual sketch in which Angel is penetrated by ‘Dykeboy’, which offers an opportunity to depict the effect on Angel’s already enlarged clitoris. Dykeboy dons black rubber gloves and helps him to masturbate by teasing Angel’s clitoris to full size through his fingers. The skin is framed by the black gloves, emphasising Angel’s assets and again it is treated like a small penis rather than a part of female genitalia. The irony is that although Dykeboy is a biological male, for most of the scene his penis hangs down limp and he fails to get an erection, demonstrating again that Angel’s dildo cock is superior to Dykeboy’s real one. (Not that a failure to ‘get wood’ is a problem in an Angel film, male performers slap erotically with their penises if they are unable to penetrate.)
In scene four, Angel is depicted masturbating in an open air scene. In contrast to Bear Bud’s performance jacking off a dildo, Angel uses a dildo only for penetrative masturbation. It’s part of the elasticity of his sexual identity that in one scene a transman can insist that a dildo must stand in for his penis, and then in another it is just a sex aid for better masturbation. Much of the scene is filmed in long shot and Angel often covers up much of his genitalia with his hands, a feature that would be avoided in mainstream porn. As viewers we are encouraged to identify with the primacy of the performer’s need to experience orgasm rather than expecting camera angles that would cater better for our scophilic pleasure.
The film ends with a number of bonus features which serves to demonstrate Angel’s sexual prowess in a variety of situations. There is a frenetic double dildo scene with Lina Ramone. Another scene offers extreme close-up shots of Angel’s vagina when Kitty is depicted giving cunnilingus. Not only does it emphasise the length of his clitoris, but at one point Kitty actually gives performs fellatio on it exactly as if it were a penis. There’s also some S/M role play in a scene with Bridget where Angel initially penetrates her using his dildo, then takes it off and masturbates her with it manually. Finally, Angel is depicted in long shot dressed in leather and masturbating with a Hitachi magic wand.
Throughout the film, the viewer is offered a wide range of scenes involving Buck Angel as penetrator, and penetrated, and a dildo that we are encouraged to identify with as a substitute penis can in the next moment be thrown down and discarded or used as a sex toy. It makes it impossible to for the viewer to identify the source of Angel’s sexual obsessions because he uses what Louise Kaplan describes as ‘perverse strategies’ to deflect his true intent.5
BLACK QUEENS AND PHALLIC FEARS
Through the extra-sexual functions of Buck Angel the viewer is free to identify sexually with whichever role they choose. Recent psychoanalytical theory has finally acknowledged audiences ability to identify across a much wider range of positions than previously thought. As Laura Kipnis asserts:
A psychoanalytically-inflected theory of fantasy suggests the mobilities and complexities of identification and proposes that pornography viewers can imaginatively identify with any aspect of the pornographic fantasy scenario or all of them: with any characters, action, detail, or even with the form or sequence of the fantasy.6
A film that very knowingly uses Buck Angel’s porn persona is the gay avant-garde music spectacular Schwarzwald, directed by Richard Kimmel. Apart from being a part celebration/documentation of the NYC gay event known as The Black Party, a framing story set in the Black Forest uses mythological characters to represent archetypes which are largely oedipal in nature. Ironically, Buck Angel plays a biologically-born male, The Black Prince, who is castrated and raped at the command of his mother, thus becoming a ‘woman’ who is forced to go around in a blue velvet dress and is initiated into perverse rites by a number of animal men to be reborn as a sexual being. It is a reversal of Buck Angel’s real-life quest for transgendered transformation, and fully makes use of the intertextuality of Angel’s ambiguous sexuality.
The film has no dialogue and makes use of old-fashioned screen cards and some borrowed clips from silent movies to convey information. The fantastic environment of the Black Forest with its animal men, is contrasted with the equally bizarre environment of the club and its pulsing soundtrack and floor shows. Significantly when Angel behaves sexually with the Wolf-Man he meets in the woods, his mother punishes him for his transgressions by instantly castrating him. This act is symbolic of one of the earliest sexual dilemmas to be experienced by young boys (fear of the phallic mother) and significantly the Black Queen is shown as the aggressor with black phallic stripes across her face. Barbara Creed re-read Freud’s case-notes on the famous case of Little Hans whose sexual curiosity (especially about his mother’s genitals) led him to experience neurosis. Creed defines the ‘phallic mother’ as a source of terror; ‘it is more likely that the boy endows the mother with a penis retrospectively, after he becomes consciously aware for the first time that she might castrate’.7 It is interesting that through the fairy tale allegory (albeit with adult themes) Schwarzwald consciously grapples with these deep-seated childhood fears. Fortunately, Kimmel provides a cathartic sexual display and a happy ending to dispel any neurosis invoked. It is only after Angel survives a man’s worst fears (castration) that he effectively becomes free and is able to tear himself away from the Black Queen.
The film reveals a lot of different manifestations of male lust, although there is no standard porn cum shot. Rather, it revels in the idea of sexuality, and shows that someone’s gratification can come in many different ways – from being covered in hot candle wax, being beaten, or being forced to receive a large dildo. Some of the hard-core scenes are softened by frenetic editing using images from German expressionist cinema and Disney pop pastiche. For instance, a fisting scene is inter-cut with images of flowers and mythological figures on horseback to help legitimise this quest for pleasure. In this sense, the film can be considered what Richard Dyer calls a ‘gay heritage film’ in that it uses historical persons (like Merlin) to insist that homosexuality has existed in some form for centuries (the film titles state that men have always danced the naked tribal ritual). Dyer has described how such films serve to rewrite history to encompass the queer spectator; ‘in this perspective homosexual heritage cinema is about envisaging homosexual men among the attractions of pastness’.8 Schwarzwald goes further by allowing for various forms of sexual pleasure to be seen as legitimate ones and part of the ‘sacred ritual’.
FIGURE 19.2 Transgendered and transgeneric excess: sexual and stylistic experimentation in Schwarzwald
Kimmel uses the motif of the burning forest fire (the sacred circle) to symbolise burning passion that also redeems. In the club the fire is made analogous to the burning candles that sit on the bare stomach of a bound man, who becomes a willing sacrificial victim (molten candle wax is poured all over his body). Although Schwarzwald contains a few hard-core scenes of sexual activities such as fisting, the camera angles privilege scenes that focus on S/M activity or full-length shots of scantily-clad muscular bodies. Indeed, the men are so masculine that they effectively practise homovestism to become a caricature of maleness. And the film, with its parade of various personalities and animal-men reminds us of the many varieties of homosexual men – from queens, leather men and flaggers, and, of course, the ambiguous figure of Buck Angel himself.
After some transgressive sexual acts are seen in the club, Angel beats a man as he is given fellatio by another man, and after he has shown his capacity for violence, he regains his masculinity and becomes crowned and hailed as the Black Prince. It’s a reminder that part and parcel of masculinity is bound up with violence and aggression, and even the sexually ambiguous like Angel can be a man if they are prepared to be aggressive enough.
CARNAL CONCLUSIONS
It is telling that the main character in this gay promotional film is a transgendered man, and that the transgressions are staged so the emphasis is on theatricality rather than sexuality. Laura Kipnis reminds us how often porn (contrary to expectation) does use such theatrics to impart its message; ‘pornography holds us in the thrall of its theatrics of transgression, its dedication to crossing boundaries and violating social strictures’.9 Buck Angel quite literally crosses all kinds of psychoanalytical and gender boundaries in this role, and it is all in the name of entertainment. Schwarzwald is so frenetic and full of meaning, it leaves us quite literally dizzy.
The fact that Buck Angel is a porn star must mean that there is something stimulating and reassuring in the porn narratives he creates that are relevant to us. Perhaps the male porn viewer (most of Angel’s fans are men) is tired of being expected to identify with the standard same-sex porn star and wants a creative sexual space and permission to be different. Angel’s films certainly provide a lot of safe- and better-sex instruction, and Angel’s strong personality encourages the viewer to feel it is possible to revise sexual strategies. Angel is very much a pioneer at the cutting edge of porn, and it’s important to remember that his sexual transgressions are our gain; he kindly consented to the interview which follows…
Marcelle Perks: What kind of fans do your films attract?
Buck Angel: My fan-base, surprisingly, is around 80 per cent gay men, although over the last year there’s been a large influx of females becoming interested in my porn who can be bisexual, gay, straight whatever.
Is that surprising for you?
No, because I think it’s not so much about my genitals, it’s about me as a man and I’m macho. Gay men are attracted to that and so I attract more the leather/fetish men. I do have another kind of fan-base, people who love what I’m doing and think it’s great, but they’re not really into pornography so I have fans who actually don’t watch my films.
You’re one of the first FTM transsexuals making porn; what do you want to achieve?
One of the reasons why I started my porn is that I didn’t want somebody to make the kind of ‘freak porn’ they do a lot with transsexual females. I wanted to start a movement in a positive way and show that guys like me are not just freaks, and to represent something different, to show a positive outlook on sex, sexuality and gender.
Was it a difficult decision to opt for a sex change?
For most of the transsexuals I know – whether it’s female-to-male or male-to-female – we all basically feel not quite right. It was very difficult for me throughout my life to understand that I felt like a guy but nobody could explain to me that I was really a man. It got to be a life-threatening situation for me literally, I tried to kill myself; I was homeless on the streets as a drug addict, constantly trying to sabotage my life until I realised I could literally physically change my gender. I still get quite emotional thinking about it, even though I’ve had sixteen years since my sex change. It’s hard to explain that to people who’ve never had to live in that situation, but when you finally get the opportunity to fix this kind of birth defect, the whole world opens up. I can still remember my first hormone shot.
Why did you opt not to have the phalloplasty operation to turn your vagina into a penis?
I always wanted to have a penis because I thought that’s what I needed to complete my surgery. Then I did research and talked to guys who had had the penis surgery and opted not to. If they could make me a penis that is going to be able to get a hard-on and that I can pee through, then I probably would have opted to do it, but they can’t make a functioning penis like a biological man. The world makes everybody believe that it’s what’s between your legs that defines you, and my message to the world is that it’s just not true.
I can imagine some transsexual men might feel embarrassed about their vagina, but you almost seem to have embraced your vagina in your films.
Prior to me coming to terms with my vagina I was very embarrassed about my body and would have to get drunk and stoned to have sex with women (before I only had sex with women). I was very stone butch and wouldn’t let girls go down on me. I wouldn’t be penetrated and would orgasm by rubbing against a lover. But I had this kind of epiphany when I just thought my genitals are always going to be here, so I had to change my attitude towards myself and my body. My porn work has helped me tremendously to become comfortable with my sexuality.
In your films I was expecting your sexuality to be portrayed as something freakish, but it wasn’t like that at all. In The Adventures of Buck Naked, you present the dildo in your pants exactly as if it was a penis. It’s obviously fake but you don’t hide that.
Yeah, I do because I see it as an extension of me. My strap-on is part of me, it’s just not attached to me. When I put it in my pants it feels very natural. I’m a really lucky person because I can have a penis if I want, or a vagina and my penis can stay hard all the time! I can also still have an orgasm. That was one of the other reasons why I opted not to have the phalloplasty surgery because you have a fifty per cent chance of losing your orgasm capability. I’m a very sexual person and I could not even imagine not having an orgasm.
In the films, as soon as you take your trousers down, no one comments on the fact that you don’t have a penis.
That was the whole point of the movie, for it to be as natural as possible. Going back to the commenting thing again, which I’ve done in some of my movies, it does sort of add to that freakish element which is what I’m trying to stay away from. I want to show that men with pussies are no big deal.
On film, your clitoris seems to be very large.
That’s definitely from the hormones. I remember being very self conscious of my vagina when I was younger. It was already a little larger than the average clit, but with the testosterone hormones it grew to the size of my thumb – which is pretty big!
It looks like a small penis.
Yeah, well the clitoris and the penis are made from the same material in the womb. It just grew larger after the testosterone injections and it continues to grow. My hormone treatment is for the rest of my life and I have to have injections every two weeks. I see changes in my body even now after doing it for fifteen years.
Transmen seem to masturbate completely differently. You play with your clitoris as if jacking off a penis. Is this deliberate?
I think it’s deliberate and a lot of transmen feel their clitoris is a small penis to them. That’s how they get off on it. It makes them feel more masculine as opposed to masturbating more like a female (however that is – I don’t really know). More than fondling it, they rub it up and down the shaft just as if it was a penis and it makes them feel comfortable about what they have there.
In The Adventures of Buck Naked, your clitoris was filmed exactly as if it were a penis – I’m thinking of the shot when Kitty is sucking it.
It’s deliberate because it is sucked and played with that way. Sometimes in my head it feels like a penis and sometimes it feels like a vagina, I guess it just depends on the mood I’m in. When we’re turned on and I want to talk nasty, sometimes I say – ‘Now suck my cock!’ Kitty sucked me and it turned her on too.
From your chest upwards you are completely male and so are your legs, but there’s this inverted V from your vagina to your stomach that on film always seems completely female.
I’m just trying to change the way the whole world thinks about masculine/feminine. Even though you think of me as male, the minute it goes to the one shot between my legs the mind just shifts back to female. Many people have said to me that that part of my body is very female.
Previously you’ve described your film style as gonzo. If I was there behind the scenes, watching the film, what would I see?
A very natural environment, first of all we always sit down and talk a little bit and make everybody comfortable on my set. There’s no attitude or making fun of somebody if they’re not getting a hard on, it’s always very natural and as fluid as possible. If I don’t have a good rapport with somebody and feel sexual energy we pretty much won’t shoot because I really think you have to have that sexual interaction with each other for that to come off on film.
In regular hetero porn it’s all about the men having a long, hard dick but in real life a lot of men watching it don’t have this, and could feel threatened. In your films there are always lots of different sexual possibilities…
My movies aren’t made specifically for transgendered people; what I’m trying to do is show is that we all have different sexual fantasies and ways of feeling turned on. People need to understand that whatever turns you on, as long as it’s safe and consensual, you should just go ahead and do it and not worry about what other people think about you. You’d be amazed at how your sex life could blossom into something that you could never even imagine.
In The Adventures of Buck Naked, Dykeboy plays with a floppy penis. I found it liberating that your performers didn’t have to have a completely hard penis in the standard porn style.
If you look at most porn, guys have rock hard hard-on’s the whole time and that’s not natural, they’re all on Viagra or some type of drug. No man holds a hard-on like that. They do go on and off and that’s a natural thing. I did make that a deliberate thing, to show, you know what, we’re still having a good time. I got a lot of complaints about that, but I don’t really care, I just wanted to show a more natural, sexual environment.
And also it didn’t really matter how you got off, whether you used a sex toy or masturbated or had sex with someone else, everything was possible, that was the feeling your films left me with.
That’s really what I wanted to show. I know lots of people in the porn business who work for these multi-million-dollar porn companies and they have a formula they do. I just go in with my camera and I want everyone to actually really have an orgasm on film, whatever it takes to do that, and to show that there’s so many different ways.
Buckback Mountain is beautifully filmed, especially the nature shots and your co-star Enis is very good looking.
He’s a really great guy; he’s very bisexual and we were totally into it. We had a great sexual experience. I’m very proud of that film.
Buckback Mountain is a real feel-good gay cowboy film. What’s been the reaction so far?
It’s a film that has never been done in porn. Whether it’s gay, straight or whatever, it’s a very unique film that’s getting great reviews. That was the whole point, I wanted it to be feel-good porn. I just wanted it to be a natural kind of thing happening between two guys and one just happens to have a vagina (laughs); no big deal!
When you have sex with the boss, he seems to have a problem coming and I liked the fact that it was just about him getting off.
He was camera shy, to be honest with you. It’s interesting how men and women want different things from porn films. Men want to get off and they don’t like to wait too long for that for that situation to happen, whereas women like to drag it out a little more, with more foreplay, and more things going on.
What I liked about Buckback Mountain that it was possible to achieve orgasm through any means. When you have sex with your male lover you do completely different things and most of the time he hits you with his penis.
Exactly, there’s a basic script there but it’s all filmed naturally and that’s why I like to have guys who are genuinely turned on by each other. We try not to be conscious of the camera being there. It was hot that day and it’s harder when you’re a man to perform.
You give a very animalistic performance as a porn performer. How do you portray that?
Most of the time I’m pretty horny on the set! When we start filming I’m ready to go. I pump myself up for that. I like wild, nasty sex and I think especially gay guys like to hear that whole bbrrr grunting! Being verbal that way adds to that nastiness and more male way of raw sex.
