July 10, 2007
AFS Docs in Progress: Best Kept Secret
In a lot of ways, Trinidad, Colorado isn't so different from other small towns. They've got a population of 9,000, the local economy is transitioning away from once-prosperous mining and ranching, and Christ is Lord.
But Trinidad, like many of its visitors, has a little something extra: Over the past forty years, six thousand people have traveled there to undergo sex-change operations. Dr. Stanley Biber secretly began performing genital-reassignment surgery, or GRS, in 1969, hiding his records from the nuns at the Catholic-run hospital. Not surprisingly, townspeople freaked when they found out about Dr. Biber's 'special' surgeries, but Trinidad's strapped-for-cash hospital needed the income, and the community grew to accept Biber and his transgender patients.
Biber kept at it until he was 80 years old (!), when he handed his practice over to Dr. Marci Bowers. Recently, two former patients of Dr. Bowers moved to Trinidad to open Morning Glow, a recovery facility for recent GRS recipients. This isn't sitting so well with the more conservative residents of Trinidad who, in these increasingly fundamentalist times, are thinking that maybe they don't like the transladies so much after all. To make the town's politics even more complicated, a pile of new wealth from Trinidad's growing natural-gas industry is bringing gentrification to the once-sleepy town. Between the influx of damned soy-drinking New Yorker subscribers and the indignity of living in "Trannydad", a few folks are dismayed about the path Trinidad is taking. Best Kept Secret examines Trinidad's history as a sex-reassignment destination and takes stock of its present and future standings. Most of the community remains cool with Dr. Bowers and her sex-reassignment wizardry, but can Trinidad cope with its, um, womanly pains if the Morning Glow ladies succeed in establishing the town as a "trans mecca"?
AFS Docs In Progress: Best Kept Secret
Tuesday, July 10th
Austin Studios Screening Room
7-10pm, Free (attendance limited to AFS members)
Post-screening Q & A with filmmakers PJ Raval & Jay Hodges
[Info / Tickets]
[Trailer]
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Would it kill Austin Film Society to do something for non-members like Time Warner Cable does with movies in the park?
It's like - what's the point of having a film society if you have to be rich to join it?
i hope that's a joke. it costs 20 dollars for a YEAR LONG membership. and its a NON-PROFIT, where as time warner is NOT A NON-PROFIT.
they give away 150,000 bucks a year in grants to texas filmmakers and teach free film camps to the at-risk middle schools and high schools, not to mention are ran by a very small staff, so give me a break dude
Agreed, guest #2. As a film lover, an AFS membership is the best $20 you can spend. ($20 is freaking CHEAP. That's much less than a night of drinking, for some Austinist staffers.)
Membership gets you into AT LEAST one free screening a week (the AFS Essentials series, which is always awesome--and at $4 a shot the membership pays for itself in a month), not to mention free, cheap, or priority access to plenty of advance screenings, premieres and other events.
I actually upgraded to the (still cheap) $40 membership this year 'cuz it gets you access to more good stuff. Well worth it.
If I remember correctly from seeing another doc, Dr. Marci Bowers herself had her reassignment surgery done in Trinidad as well. She used to be a doctor somewhere on the east coast I believe and then promptly moved to Trinidad to take over Dr. Biber's work. I think it was mentioned that a lot of her own staff doesn't know she had the surgery done in the same facility years ago.
Trinidad is also famous in the skateboarding world for having an excellent concrete public skatepark. I've visited it twice and it's one of my favorite skateparks in the world...
http://tinyurl.com/2ugsxe
Seth
Just a note, Marci actually did not have her surgery done there in Trinidad.