Actress-Filmmaker M.C. Brennan has exciting news. After her transgender teen comedy, Dramatis Personae, won an Outfest Screenwriting Lab fellowship and was given a staged reading—with Exes and Oh’s auteur Lee Friedlander directing Nip/Tuck’s Willam Belli in the lead role—things are really heating up.

“The Outfest experience led to a lot of interest from producers and now I’m in the process of preparing to direct the script as my first feature! There are some really exciting folks who’ve expressed an interest in being a part of it, and hopefully over the next couple of months…those pieces will fall into place.”

The Arizona native, who’s lived in San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles, began making short films while still in high school, while she was acting in local theatrical productions, commercials and 1985’s gender bending flick Just One of The Guys. The multi-talented trans woman has covered sports for Phoenix’s LGBT Echo magazine, designed posters for Dr. Demento, written over 150 songs and recorded five full-length albums.

Lately, Brennan has been experiencing a cinematic career revival. Her first full-length screenplay, The People’s Choice, won several awards, she appears in 2007’s lesbian Itty Bitty Titty Committee and Jana Marcus’s acclaimed photographic celebration of trans lives, Transfigurations (currently showing at Seattle’s Gender Odyssey Conference).

Brennen says she’s particularly thrilled with the reception her latest screenplay, Dramatis Personae, received at Outfest. “It’s very exciting and very flattering. [The Outfest Screenwriting Lab] was, by far, the most knowledgeable, most supportive environment I’ve ever experienced.”

Based loosely on Brennan’s own experiences, Dramatis Personae—which Brennan describes as “Pretty In Pink meets Hedwig and the Angry Inch”—revolves around a transgender high schooler from the wrong side of the tracks, and her riches-to-rags, new kid in town love interest.     

Disappointed with “what passes for teen comedies today,” Brennan reminisces, “We had...the great John Hughes movies like Sixteen Candles…[that] spoke to the real truth of growing up and finding yourself…[and] had at least some queer subtext.  I wanted to write a very funny, borderline filthy teen comedy that put the queer characters front and center.”

The screenwriter—who once wrote a four-book series spoofing secret agent archetypes, then co-founded the satirical Loon News and contributed to Comic News—finds inspiration in her own life.   “From an early age I recognized the cosmic absurdity of my situation, and I think the ability to laugh at myself and at life’s little ironies is one of the reasons I’m still on this nutty planet.”

As a great venue for confronting controversial issues, Brennan contends it’s critical to have more trans comedies.  “You can get away with saying serious, important things in a comedy that would never fly in a drama…Humor can be a kind of ambassador for people, giving them a way in to understanding things and identifying with characters…they would never have understood otherwise.”

Identifying as “just an average middle-aged woman trying to get by,” Brennan says she recognizes, “I got here in a different way than a lot of the women I know. [And] I don’t forget where I’ve come from.”  

When she was younger, the bisexual Brennan says her relationships with women made things more complicated.   “It’s enough of a challenge to get people to understand the concept of being transgender…when you try to explain same-sex attraction, it’s really confusing…you’re back to square one, trying to guide people through the differences between gender identity and sexual orientation.”

“I needed to own it or it would own me,” say Brennan about being openly trans.  “It’s more comfortable for me to get it out there.  If the script is good, that’s really all that matters. The beauty of words on a page…is that it’s beyond gender and sexuality. It’s the ideas that count.”

Brennan believes the trans experience provides a unique perspective. “Trans artists, trans people, are changing everything. While the specifics of our journeys belong to us…our experience isn’t so different from the dilemma everybody faces at one time or another—to be true to themselves. The yearning for authenticity and meaning in a homogenized world is universal.”

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.