LOS ANGELES—It's taken a couple of decades, but over the past year or so, explicit movies featuring transgender performers have made a giant leap from the familiar four-scene transsexual beauty queens/babysitters/nurses/teens/Asians/Latinas/strokers/whatever model into movies featuring TGs in actual character roles.
The way was paved by popular director Nica Noelle, whose Forbidden Lovers, released in 2012 via her Transromantic studio, told the story of a guy trying to introduce his trans girlfriend to his parents. Grooby Productions and partner Third World Media added to the shake-up with the past year's releases of Shemale Secret Service, Tranny Chaser 2: Confessions of a Pool Boy and Transsexual Housewives of Hollywood, with Devil's Films adding to the wave with its new parody The Tranny Bunch. Noelle now has a new studio, TransSensual, which continues to release story-based trans movies.
Now Trans500 Studios has taken that revolution one step further with its upcoming release of Kaitlyn Gender: Based on a Not So True Story, a humorous look at the life (and imagined loves) of America's best-known transgendered person, Caitlyn Jenner—and the move has generated a bit of controversy in the trans community.
"I went down to Miami for a week, and we shot the whole DVD then, for Trans500, and since then, it has come out in the social media world, and there's been some people who don't necessarily agree with the content," said transgendered star Jonelle Brooks, who plays the titular role. "I guess parodying Caitlyn Jenner is apparently off the table and off-limits. No one else is, but she is—but someone was bound to do it, and it's a trans person doing it, a trans person playing her, and we made sure it wasn't offensive, but it's a parody so it has to be funny.
"Nothing that I did offended me, but I can't speak for other trans girls; they may have been offended, but you have to be able to laugh at yourself a little bit," she added. "We did a lot of the early transition things, like trying to tuck your dick back, trying to walk in high heels—I was stumbling across the street in downtown Miami in heels and stuff, but I thought it was fun. I can walk in heels, but he [director Josh Stone] wanted a lot of wobbly-leg type things, and I thought it was fine; it addresses things we all went through early on in our transitions."
The basis of the script was the interview Caitlyn gave to ABC's Diane Sawyer, with her male alter ego, "Juice Gender," fielding the questions, and Jonelle and the rest of the cast acting out the scenarios being discussed.
"We took some liberties with the timeline, obviously, and the age of the character," Brooks explained. "For instance, we talk about how Kimmy Kockdashian [played by Angelina Castro] and I were close, and how she helped with the transition, and I believe from what I can understand, that goes into a flashback of the actual scene. How it might end up being different from how it was discussed originally, I don't know, but everything was supposed to be playing off that interview.
Brooks added, "I think people are a little too sensitive and trying to be a little too politically correct. At the end of the day, it is porn and it's supposed to be made for enjoyment, and it's light-hearted and it's not meant to offend; it's not meant to be vicious or anything like that."
One of the scenarios has Brooks walking into the "wrong" bathroom, standing at a urinal and realizing, "Oh, I'm in a dress; maybe I shouldn't be in here," and she indicated that much of the dialog, especially the interview with the Diane Sawyer character, was ad-libbed after the cast had discussed what they felt their characters would say in the situations presented.
"I'm a pretty good improviser, so we just played off of each other," Brooks said.
Kaitlyn Gender is the most complex role Brooks has attempted. Although she's been in the adult movie business for about three years, she hasn't appeared in many movies, all of which so far have been of the gonzo or all-sex variety, although that's about to change, she told AVN.
"It was exhausting. I shot for 11 days straight, and I thought it would be easier, but halfway through it, I wondered what I had done," Brooks said in early August. "But I powered through it. I shot for Evil Angel—Joey and Francesca, Grooby, She-Male Strokers—it was busy, it was fun, it was good."
Brooks has several box covers to her credit already, most notably Tranny Hoes in Panty Hose 2 (Devil's Film) and a couple of volumes of Sammy Mancini's She-Male Strokers, but her main contact with fans has been through her website.
"I used to update it constantly, but I haven't been keeping up with it recently, to be honest," she admitted, "but it's something I'll be focusing on as I'm revamping my career, I put so much time and energy into updating my website for so many years and I felt so drained from it physically and creatively that I just lost interest in it. That's something that I need to reevaluate and see where I want to take it next."
After a short burst of movies in 2012, though, Brooks felt she needed to step away from the adult industry and, in her word, "recharge." As part of her vacation from porn, she let go of her Twitter account, which had nearly 13,000 followers. But having thought long and hard about where she wants to go in life, she's decided to jump back into adult "full-force and fully committed and fully involving myself in every aspect of my career."
"I have done a lot this year, for Jim Powers at Devil's, Joey Silvera at Evil Angel, Rodney Moore, and on a recent trip to L.A., I shot with just everyone," she sighed contentedly. "For a while, I was staying exclusive to Shemale Club—they were my first; I submitted pictures to them and they said, 'Come on out to L.A.; we'd love to shoot you,' and I was there for a week and shot a lot with them and they offered to produce my website—but I was new to the business and took advice that might not have been in my best interests, but now that I have new representation with Erika Icon and Phil Varone's V Agency, I've been jumping in with both feet, working quite a bit more."
AVN asked Brooks about how the realization that she was actually a woman came about.
"I grew up on a farm, raised sheep and hogs all through my childhood," she recounted. "I have five acres, so that takes up most of my time, but in my teens, I worked in many gay bars as a drag queen, and I found that I always wanted to stay in drag all the time, I was more happy in drag, and I guess I had to do some self-evaluation of what that meant in terms of the real world, not just nightlife. And I came to the realization I was trans and not just someone who dressed up for a nighttime job."
For most of the four years she's been in adult, Brooks has supported herself through her website and doing "super-shows" for the Cam4 webcam company, but "other than that, I just take care of my land, and I have horses and pigs and chickens, so that's my other passion. Yes, I'm a farm girl. People think that's pretty strange to hear, but that's kind of what consumes most of my life."
Those who've seen Brooks in movies have been impressed by how she moves, and she told us that much of that ease comes from her early training in ballet.
"I studied ballet from the age 8 till 21," she advised. "It was my first college major. I don't think I physically could do a ballet performance anymore. It's just so demanding on your body that after dancing for 15 years very hardcore-involved, five days a week, six hours a day, I just don't know if I could go back to something like that. I know they say there's muscle memory and everything like that, but I think at this point in my life, it might put me in the hospital.
"But thanks to my training, I think I have much better body awareness as to angles, what looks good," she added. "I'm very graceful. I understand lines and what that looks like to other people, so when it comes to posing or even in a video, how I angle myself to the camera, I'm just very body-conscious from dancing for so long, and it's also kept me very fit and I have a very disciplined outlook on physical fitness."
Since Brooks commutes to Los Angeles from her home in Florida, community is very important to her, and she was happy to find like-minded people near her home.
"There's a small LGBT community that I am relatively active in near where I live," she said. "Occasionally, if a bar calls me and asks me to perform, I will do it, and I'm happy to volunteer my time, most of the time, for pageants and things like that, and I'm more than happy to come in and perform for them or judge contests or things like that. With the community here, these are the people I grew up with, so it's not about money; it's more about camaraderie and just seeing people that helped me in the beginning to become the kind of person I am today, so I do enjoy seeing those people. It's not a large community, but there is a community."
As for the future, Brooks wants to get further grounding in adult production before she considers taking a spin behind the camera.
"It's not something I would want to dive into," she cautioned. "It would bother me to have the feeling that I wasn't capable of producing something that I believe in and could be proud of, so I would want more experience participating as a performer, and then eventually see myself on the other side of the filming."
Kaitlyn Gender: Based On a Not So True Story will be released on September 24 by Trans500 Studios, and distributed by Pure Play Media.
