Transamerica started here

Back when I was in college as young linguistics major, I took a course called "Cross Cultural Communication" (of course the year I took it, famed linguist and author Deborah Tannen was on sabbatical and 2 grad students taugh it instead - but I digress) and in the class we were studying different speech patterns, dialects etc. Well one day we watched a very interesting documentary which was rich in unique "speech" - the movie was called "Paris is Burning" - at the time I may have found the accents interesting and the discourse funny (I was deeeeeeeep in the closet) but I really couldn't appreciate a film about mainly black draq queens & transsexuals performing in "drag balls" in mid-late 80's New York City.

But with all this Transamerica hype - I netflixed what I consider to be the classic, genderbending, controversial and landmark film that laid the groundwork, very early for movies like Transamerica. You should see it - it is both interesting, sad, funny and deeply tragic . You might actually learn something and see where Rue Paul may have originally came from...

Try it!