Calpernia Addams
- "Calpernia" redirects here. For other uses, see Calpurnia.
Calpernia Sarah Addams (born 20 February 1971) is an American author, actress and activist for issues regarding transsexual people.
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Life
Addams was born and raised as a boy in Nashville, Tennessee in a strict Christian fundamentalist household. Addams enlisted in the United States Navy as a teenager and served four years as a field medical combat specialist. She was stationed first in the Middle East during the Gulf War and later at Adak, Alaska. Afterward, Addams returned to Nashville and began performing in a drag burlesque revue. She also began to compete in pageants for drag performers. During that time she also began to live full-time as a woman. Having played fiddle since childhood, she played fiddle in various celtic and traditional music bands, some of which was published on compact disc.
The 2003 film Soldier's Girl is based on a tragic event in Addams' life. In 1999, Calpernia Addams began dating an Army private named Barry Winchell who was training at the nearby military base, Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Winchell was harassed by fellow soldiers when rumors of his amorous relationship with Calpernia Addams began to circulate around the army base. After various soldiers taunted and pressured Winchell about his relationship with Addams, two soldiers conspired, and one of them murdered Winchell in his sleep on the Fourth of July 1999. , Private Calvin Glover plead guilty to murdering Barry Winchell. Winchell was apparently murdered because Glover and fellow soldier Specialist Justin R. Fisher detested Winchell's romantic relationship with Calpernia Addams. Glover was court-martialed and sentenced to life in prison. Fisher reached a plea agreement on lesser military charges and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
Addams was thrown into the national spotlight after Barry Winchell was murdered. Some political groups attempted to make his murder an issue about the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy regarding sexual orientation. However, both Winchell and Addams appear to have considered their relationship heterosexual. The New York Times article title 'Inconvenient Woman' refers to the manner in which some political groups attempted to portray the relationship between Calpernia Addams and Barry Winchell as "homosexual", so they could exploit Winchell's murder in order to protest U.S. military policies. Because Barry Winchell considered himself a heterosexual man, and he and Addams considered Calpernia Addams a heterosexual woman, the New York Times showed how the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" activist groups manipulated their personal relationship to suit not necessarily relevant political means and ends.
The media scrutiny Addams endured because of her romantic relationship with Barry Winchell convinced her to become an activist for more positive portrayals of transsexual women. One irony of Winchell's murder is that the consequent media and political sensation and exploitation gave Calpernia Addams celebrity and provided opportunities for her to pursue a media related career. In 2002, after briefly living and working in Chicago, Addams moved to Los Angeles, California (Hollywood). During the same year she also received vaginoplasty surgery. She and her friend Andrea James, who she met in Chicago and who is also a well known activist, co-founded Deep Stealth Productions, a media production company devoted to creation of educational materials for transsexual women, general cinema production, and activism for positive and accurate portrayals of transsexual women and men in cinema, television, and other media. Addams is also an actress, who has garnered some small roles and consulting engagements in various mainstream films and television. She was a script consultant for the 2005 film Transamerica and also appeared in a small role in the film, playing the fiddle. Addams has also been honored with various awards for her activist work, toward eliminating violence and discrimination against the LGBT population.
Her 2002 autobiographical book, Mark 947, was excerpted for an anthology of notable transsexual autobiographies in 2005.
References
- Calpernia Addams, Mark 947: A Life Shaped by God, Gender, and Force of Will (Writers Club Press, 2002). ISBN 0-595-26376-3
- Jonathan Ames (ed.), Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs (Vintage, 2005). ISBN 1-4000-3014-5
- David France, "An Inconvenient Woman," New York Times Magazine, 28 May 2000, page 24 ff.
External links
Categories
Transgender and transsexual people | American film actors | American entrepreneurs | People from Tennessee | United States Navy sailors | 1971 births | Living people | Women in the United States military