Buck Angel Discusses Portrayal of Transgender People in Media

Hollywood Journal

Actor/filmmaker Buck Angel discusses the portrayal of transgender people in the media and how he believes it has positively changed over the years.

Transcript

00:00Here's the deal, what I believe.

00:02We're people.

00:04We have the same lives as everybody else.

00:06We don't do like weird things that other people aren't doing.

00:09We do the same things that everybody else.

00:11So representing us in a family show where we just have families and we have lovers and

00:16we have friends, I think those are really important kind of shows to make about us because

00:20what it does is it shows to the world that we are just like everybody else and don't

00:26fear us.

00:27When Hollywood, because they will, start to give us the opportunities to write our own

00:31movies, to write our own scripts, to write our own TV shows, to be in our own TV shows,

00:35you watch how much will change because it will because we'll be represented as people.

00:47Trans portrayal in media has not always been positive and one of the reasons why I created

00:51my own platform in pornography because in pornography it also was not a positive representation.

00:56I am an elder in a sense of the community.

00:59I transitioned over 20 years ago and because of that, my perspective is a lot different

01:03of what's happening today.

01:04We have people being okay, just being able to be gender fluid, being able to be, there's

01:09just a wide variety of things.

01:11When I transitioned, there wasn't anything.

01:14Fast forward today, I'm an old guy who's like, wow, things are moving forward.

01:20But then you have the younger 20 year olds who are like, things aren't moving so fast,

01:24you know.

01:25Again, right?

01:26It's always like that.

01:27When it's generational or, you know, when you see, I see so much change, especially in

01:32the last five years.

01:33I understand why cisgender people have been representing or playing transgender people

01:39because there haven't been a lot of transgender actors out there.

01:43Now, fast forward to today, we have a lot more transgender actors, but the system hasn't prepared

01:50itself for it.

01:51And in order for that to change, transgender people need to step up and start to represent

01:57within Hollywood.

01:58And I think that we are starting to do that.

01:59I'm always the guy that tries to find the positive.

02:02As far as I'm concerned, when films are being made with transgender people in it, and hopefully

02:07a representation that's positive, what does that do?

02:10It educates the world on transgender people.

02:12That's with any minority or any group of people.

02:15When you start to put them in film, which is huge, film reaches the whole world, you

02:19now get to see a representation of somebody you might never have seen before.

02:23This is why it's dangerous to represent a specific kind of person in a negative way, because

02:28transgender people have been represented negatively throughout history of film.

02:33We are now in a position to change that negative representation into positive representation, and that's

02:39what I see.

02:40I see something positive happening, not anything negative.

Category

Transcript

Be the first to comment

Recommended