An uproar erupted earlier this year when Peggy Munson (lesbian author of Origami Striptease) was censored at the annual San Francisco Lambda Literary Award finalists’ reading.  Her section was cut because organizers deemed a gender bending sex scene “straight.”  Unfortunately, Munson’s  (myspace.com/peggymunson) experience isn’t an isolated occurrence—even in San Francisco.  Trans filmmaker Raymond Rea says his The Sweet New was rejected from this year’s Frameline Film Festival after panelists reportedly declared it “not queer.”

Rea (myspace.com/densityoverduration) teaches at San Francisco State University’s cinema department and has been producing film and theater for over a decade. His recent films include Wanted, Straightboy Lessons and The Sweet New—a feature that follows three generations of an Italian-American family, drawing parallels between transsexualism, emigration and other human transitions.  

Rea says he was surprised at Frameline’s reaction, since the film’s main protagonist is trans.  “They also [mentioned] that two out of three generations in the film were flat out heterosexual, which I can understand. Still, I have to wonder if the third generation had used gay male or lesbian characters if this would have been a better fit.”

Finding commonality with Munson, Rea argues,  “The censorship of her DVD
was much more overt, but [it’s] linked to the Frameline panel’s notion that for something to be obviously queer it would have same-sex content. For ‘trans’ content to be acceptable—it seems to need to either focus on transition or focus on a queering of transsexuality.”

In response to their experiences, Rea created “Not Queer Enough,” a night where trans and bisexual writers and filmmakers will showcase work that examines “how the G and the L respond to the B and the T.”

Held July 27 at San Francisco State University’s Coppola Theater, “Not Queer Enough,” featured Rea’s film, Munson’s censored DVD reading, and work from trans authors Julia Serano and Max Wolf Valerio.  Also presenting was Amy Larson, founder of Chasing Amy Social Club, bisexual activist Gina de Vries and author Clare Marie Myers, reading about her experience as a bisexual scooterist in a pack of Dykes on Bikes.

As a filmmaker, Rea says, while he’d like to see LGBT venues open to work by queer artists even without queer content, LGBT film festivals, are “under enormous financial pressure to provide obviously-queer content
and ‘trans’ content that’s easily intelligible as queer by gay and lesbian audiences. As a producer, I can understand those financial pressures, and I don’t necessarily think that GLBT festivals are doing the wrong thing by responding to their audience.”

Rea thinks that lesbians and gay men have difficulty accepting bisexuals because they “assume the homosexuality of any one who’s had any kind of homosexual encounter. Frankly, so does the straight world.”

He says ‘straight’ trans folk’s place in the LGBT community is “the $64,000 question. If you’d asked me
ten years ago, I would’ve told you that we didn’t and don’t belong in the broader queer community, that you can’t have your cake and eat it too.”

Rea left the queer world for years, but he’s reconciling with “the side of myself that still feels a little queer every single day.  I think straight-appearing trans folk [do] belong in the broader queer community, when and if we self identify as belonging there.  It’s that simple.”

If gay and lesbian communities want to accept bisexual and transgender individuals, Rea says, they need to recognize, “If they attach a B and a T to their name, they’re including some forms of heterosexuality.  If you’re uneasy with this—drop the B and the T from your paperwork.”

Trans writer, Jacob Anderson-Minshall, co-authored Blind Curves, the first in the Blind Eye Mystery series, available now. Contact  or visit Anderson-minshall.com for more information.