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In the Atlanta-based independent short film Bad Waitress, he's playing an androgynous lesbian love-interest role. He may even stop the testosterone injections for eight weeks to appear less masculine for the shoot.
Turner met his current girlfriend while playing a lesbian drag king in the gender-bending comedy Wizzer Pizzer at 7 Stages in Atlanta last May. Atlanta actress Alison Hastings and Turner hit it off quickly. Going out, they say, felt natural to them. Hastings has dated both men and women. "My dad says I'm 'homoflexible,'" she quips.
Hastings says she might have found it more difficult to date a transsexual man who had more trouble passing, but that's not a problem in her relationship with Turner. "To most of the world," she says, "Turner and I are a straight couple -- and we are."
Once, she admits, she slipped and called Turner "she." Before Turner began the injections, the pair were out at a show, and Turner wasn't feeling well. After a friend asked if he was all right, Hastings recalls, "I said, 'Yes, she's just having her period.' It's very strange when your boyfriend is having a period."
Hastings helps enhance Turner's manhood not just socially, but biologically. By himself, Turner has a hard time inserting the 1.5-inch needle intramuscularly into his buttock, but Hastings has happily taken over the job. "When I tell my friends about it, I say, 'I'm making a man.' It's kind of a joke, but it's also true."
Turner has become something of a transgender ambassador. He serves as Exhibit A during lectures to college classes and post-performance Q&As.
"His art makes people feel challenged, but also invited," Emory theater professor Vinnie Murphy says of his protégé. "Boy, do people feel free to open up after his shows."
In an effort to make transgender people more visible and better understood, Turner maintains a personal full-disclosure policy. He tells college classes, "You can ask me anything. You can ask me how I have sex." The hands immediately go up. "How do you have sex?"
But he also finds himself having to educate people in transsexual etiquette. "It's not OK to just ask a transsexual, 'Have you had surgery?' or 'What do your genitals look like?' You can talk to me about those things, but other people won't react the same way. Sometimes they ask me that question and I feel like asking, 'Well, what do your genitals look like?'"
So far, Turner doesn't want to take the physical refinements any further. He's considered upper-body surgery, but finds his chest is flattening as he works out. He has neither the interest nor the money to undergo phalloplasty or procedures to create male genitalia. (For some reason, he's less than thrilled about having surgeons cut open his labia and insert silicone balls to make them resemble testes.)
"Medical science has progressed a lot further with male-to-female surgery than female-to-male," he notes. "They can make a great scrotum but not a very good functioning penis. The Kia of penises starts at upwards of $25,000, but if you want to donate nerves from your arm, it's up to $70,000."
Legally, he's still a woman. To change gender on one's Social Security record, the federal government requires a physician's letter that states sex reassignment surgery has been completed. "I'm a lucky trans person in that I don't feel like my body is wrong. But most trans people don't feel that way."
Turner continues to use his body as raw material in his art. He may have to alter or abandon earlier pieces, like Underground TRANSit, but he'll have new discoveries to impart. Currently, he's writing a book about his changes called Becoming a Man in 127 Steps. He performed excerpts from it and his earlier work at Emory in March -- ironically, in an appearance cosponsored by the Center for Women at Emory for Women's History Month.
As an artist who tours often, Turner doesn't expect to have the short-term flexibility or the financial means to settle down and establish a family in the "normal" way. "Getting married might be a problem, unless I go to Massachusetts and have a gay marriage. I was born in Texas, and you can't change your gender on your birth certificate there. So I can't get into the straight club all the way."
"I'm not sure what my future is going to look like," he acknowledges. "In some respects, I think I'll always be in transition. As an actor, will I get male roles, or will people always want to cast me as trans guys, or women who are hot in a masculine way? Would I trade the really fun part of being trans and getting people to think differently, just to be a normal guy? The value of that is not to be underestimated."
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Spruce Pine Alien Festival @ Spruce Pine Alien Festival
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Robots, Rockets, & Rovers @ The Schiele Museum of Natural History and Planetarium
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Double Trouble Improv Comedy Night @ CATCh
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AllMachines
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AllMachines - Raymond Forklift
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Street Stories 11
Secrets and legends behind Charlotte's long and winding roads
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Get Out of theWay! 1
Brian Robinson -- the mover who stranded a house on Providence Rd. -- is back on the streets
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Sniper School 1
Private camps teach just about sniper skills
