Happy Valentines Day!
For those of you in loving relationships, this may be an exciting day to honor and celebrate your love, while it can be rather disheartening for others. I am blessed to be celebrating this day with a lovely partner whose kind words of encouragement have helped me get through many challenging moments. As a transgender person, I always believed that transitioning meant that I was destined to be alone for the rest of my life. After all who could possibly love someone as freakish as me? I was also under the mistaken belief that I would have to leave behind almost all the friends I had known before, certainly the straight ones. Not only have I experienced true love with someone who loves me in part because of, not despite, being transgender, but I also have the love of old friends to go along with it. Through the process of transitioning I was faced with the enormous challenge of loving myself in a minefield of cultural hate and contempt and through this self-love, allowing others to love me as well. We all experience this in some way, especially due to the destructive influence of advertising, however it did feel particularly intense as I was transitioning.
Two years ago in the wake of the Prop 8 fiasco, my wife and I had an opportunity to create a short film about our relationship. We were part of a wonderful collaboration between London-based photographer Gideon Mendel and the UCLA World Arts and Cultures Department called “13 Love Stories”. This series of short films coupled with a photography exhibit profiled 13 LGBT couples and families, traveling to exhibitions and schools throughout southern California.
As explained on the http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaMotWHRjxs&feature=channel_page
Watch our video here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/UCLAAGHC#p/u
http://www.youtube.com/user/UCLAAGHC#p/u
” target=”_blank”>http://www.youtube.com/user/UCLAAGHC#p/u
