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White Southern Masculinity and Southern Comfort An Interview with Kate Davis larry vonalt Kate Davis’s film Southern Comfort focuses on the last year of Robert Eads, a fiftytwo -year-old female-to-male transsexual, who is dying of ovarian cancer. Although the film, winner of the Sundance 2001 Grand Jury Prize for Feature Documentary, describes the difficulties Robert had in getting treatment for his cancer because of his sexual nature—he had not had surgery on his genitals—the film paints a larger canvas of the lives of the transgendered in the South. Indeed, it depicts a sense of white southern masculinity that is both strongly old-fashioned and wonderfully skewed. What can a documentary about the transgendered tell us about white manhood and masculinity in the recent South? The film demonstrates that Eads and his friends are shaped by many southern notions of manhood and womanhood even as they consciously reject some parts of what their culture tells them about what men ought to do and to be. Eads behaves graciously, even chivalrously toward his lover, Lola. He embraces his role as mentor and corrector of the younger men in his circle. He drives a truck, smokes a pipe, respects women, and prizes his family—almost stereotypical southern male traits and practices. On the other hand, Eads and his friends are painfully aware that nothing about gender is as obvious as it seems. They are conscious of the disdain or outright hostility that many of their neighbors feel toward them and provide support for each other because in many cases their own biological families do not. The film demonstrates a central thesis of this collection of essays: in the South men are made and are not just born that way. Robert Eads lives in a mobile home in rural northern Georgia and, like his neighbors, has a strong interest in fishing and hunting. His attire—a black Stetson , black shirt and pants—echoes that of Richard Petty or Johnny Cash and re- flects his social environment. In the film he tells how a member of the KKK he met at the local Wal-Mart thought he would “fit right in with the boys.” But the “boys” Robert really fits in with are Cass and Maxwell, both of whom are also white southern female-to-male transsexuals. Robert refers to them as “brothers” and members of “his chosen family.” Although younger than Robert, both Cass and Maxwell, like those raised in the South who have been taught to respect their elders, treat him as if he were an older brother or even their surrogate father. Cass says that Robert’s friends call “him Daddy Robert because he takes care of everybody.” Being a parent plays an important role in Robert’s life. Of the trans-males in the film, he is the only parent . He says of his parenthood, “I knew that God intended me to be a parent so I found a man I could deal with and married him and had two wonderful sons.” His older son visits him during the making of the film and relates Robert’s philosophy of life: “Being true to myself is everything that Mom has taught me. Had I gotten married I’d have chosen Mom to be my best man.” Being true to oneself is difficult but even more so for a man like Robert who found himself in a woman’s body. Being pregnant and a man became for him “the worst and the best of times.” Robert believes that the only time he wasn’t “true to himself” as a man was when he was married to his children’s father and “felt like a homosexual.” Although he lived for a number of years in what appeared to be a lesbian relationship, Robert never felt like a lesbian. Like any good old southern boy, Robert says, “I was just a man that loved women. I like women; I always have.” To change their bodies to represent their true selves, transmen and transwomen undergo considerable surgery. Robert, Maxwell, and Cass all had a form of mastectomy to reduce their breasts and took testosterone to increase their masculine attributes, especially facial hair—all three have beards. Robert, however, did not have genital surgery or a hysterectomy and is dying, as he says, because he has cancer in “the only part of me that is still female.” Robert’s certainty about his manhood creates difficulties for himself with...

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