“It’s queer, genderfucking, community-based, and political.” Says sexpert Tristan Taormino in her Village Voice article The New Wave of Trans Cinema.

Taormino writes of two of the newest trans-focused DVDs Couch Surfers by Trannywood Pictures and Trans Entities: The Nasty Love of Papi and Wil, a docu-porn by Morty Diamond. Her article is well-written and honest, as well as optimistic of a strong future for pornographers and audiences interested in transsexual men.

I’m curious about the road we took to get here, because for me, queer porn is more than just for jerking off; it’s a radical movement that concerns self-empowerment, visibility, and validation of how one’s gender/perceived and sexual identity meet. And to display this hot juncture publicly, through pornography, is a political act as much as it a personal decision. (A timeline of social movements in race, gender, and sexuality can be constructed through the lenses of contextualized pornography distribution. But that’s another topic for another time.)

How many pornographic films make their way to the public through film festivals? This is the route of a queer film; one which meets it’s viewers through through word-of-mouth and through enthusiastic audiences packed into non-profit events.

From butch to boi:
In the early nineties, some filmmakers inspired by the graphic depictions of lesbian sexuality found in the pages of On Our Backs Magazine, and distanced by the “Lesbian Porn” (aka Girl/Girl sex) produced by men, staring heterosexual women and distributed for the male marketed, decided to enter the industry and create films for their own queer community. These films usually ran around a half an hour long, and often just featured one or two scenes with a handful of stars. One of the earliest, Suburban Dykes, stared Nina Hartley and Sharon Sharon Mitchell, and showed a butch side to lesbian identity, as did BurLEZk (that’s right, sound it out) which featured lesbian striptease but also drag king performance. San Francisco Lesbians series, delivered real dyke action complete with crossdressing and butch attitudes up until 2002, where SIR Productions took the reign to satisfy the niche with a number of films, including Hard Love and How to Fuck in High Heels, featuring butch performers. Full Load was another film which showcased dyke and trans-identified performers.

From Gay to Queer:
Buck Angel rose to recent mainstream acclaim through a winning charisma and an unabashed sexual appetitive, as well as some pretty eye-catching tag-lines such as “Man with a Pussy”, “Mangina”, and “FTM Pornstar”. With his own video line, website, and titles such as “Buckback Mountain”, his recent recognition as AVN Transsexual Performer of the Year and nominated for a GayVN were well deserved.

However, many pornographers still lay under the radar.

Christopher Lee gave a strong sexual voice to directors and stars alike, with 1998 Alley of the Trannyboys and 1999 Sex, Flesh in Blood, a gothic thriller with a complete cast of color. His work is acknowledged in the Transsexual Porn article on QLBTQ Archives. Showing performers in a number of acts previously not seen on film, Lee gave a cinematic voice to the sex acts of queers, which many found validating and very, very inspiring.

Luke Woodward’s Enough Man (2005) was an explicit documentary that opened many eyes as it toured film festivals; Morty Diamond’s Trannyfags (2003) and the work of Lee and Woodward inspired for Trannywood Pictures to use video to promote Safer Sex practices and education about FtMs. Trannywood produced Cubbyholes (2007), and Couch Surfers (2008). Their work depicts trans guys having sex with each other, and with biological men.

Inspired by films such as “The Hole”, Pink & White Productions‘ director Shine Louise Houston took cinematic formula and visuals from gay porn and translated them to a sexual storyboard for dyke/trans couples. With the focus of the scenes on the performers’ chemistry, gender is often blurred and performers who are post-op MtF or pre-op FtM slip by invisible to the unknowing eye. Asked by a number of mainstream journalists, what made her films any different than mainstream Lesbian (Girl/Girl) films, Houston tackled the question in a mocu-documentary In Search of the Wild Kingdom (2007) where the film asks the question “What is queer porn?” Wild Kingdom won a Feminist Porn Award for “Hottest Trans Sex Scene 2008″ with the performance of stars Papi and Wil.

Morty Diamond took audiences hungry for more Papi and Wil even further with Trans Entities: The Nasty Love of Papi and Wil (2008), a docu-porn that allows the viewer to really get to know the stars; how they identify, how they live and love, and this makes the film hotter by the minute as we come to feel that we know them just as the scenes become more and more intimate. The stars identify as ‘Trans Entities’; in this case the education of gender to people outside of the immediate understanding, and the validation of gender to people inside their own questioning of gender expression and play, becomes apparent.

Trans Love Online
Before you google “Trans Porn”, be warned by blogger Violet Blue — there was a time when google treated the word trans, and dyke, as a bad word. Context is everything, and google was quite offensive when it blocked the word “transgrrrl” but allow “she-males” to pass. Hopefully with Google well trained since witnessed in Blue’s 2007 article, web perverts hungry for trans/queer porn can get their fill through a number of companies.

As featured in Violet’s Article, Red Handed Porn is a website which eagerly welcomes trans folks to apply. Interviewed by Misty last year for Masturbation Month, the site features people from most walks of life through intimate solo masturbation. Similar to Morty’s docu-porn, Red Handed asks the performers questions about their identity, and their experience with porn. It is as enlightening as it is hot.

CrashPadSeries.com is the continuation of Pink & White Production’s 2006 bestseller The Crash Pad. The site features episodes of real couples, of all queer gender identities and sexual appetites through downloadable video and extensive photo sets. GV sells a recent DVD release of the top five episodes from the site’s first season, Crash Pad Series: Volume 1, which was awarded a Feminist Porn Award.

Other queer online sites have featured trans performers, such as NoFauxxx.com. “Porn that Doesn’t Fake It”, No Fauxxx has a strong community feel, a D.I.Y. aesthetic, and some of the cutest genderfucking portrayed in photo sets, ever.

Pssssst… do you want to see some of the old school dyke porn made in the 80s and 90s? Here’s a tip — go to Trannywood Picture’s VOD site, where you can watch Trannywood films, as well as Buck Angel, San Francisco Lesbians, Full Load, and some of your favorite old films that are no longer distributed or available on DVD.

Recently:

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The ‘Trans Body’ and a peek at Crash Pad Series Volume 2: Unlocked
Feminist Porn Award Winners!