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photo by Matteo Trisolini
More than a hundred people, a who's who of the New York "genderqueer" scene, partied at Toys in Babeland in Soho to celebrate the release of Trannyfags, a new porn movie. The event marked not just the premiere of an independent erotic video (which was actually shown first at MIX Fest, a lesbian & gay experimental film and video festival, in 2003), but the debut of an identity and a community most people know little about.

Just when you thought that queer identity couldn't get any more complicated or more fabulous, you can welcome a new cutting-edge identity to the already crowded field of butches, queens, bois, femmes, twinkies, lipstick lesbians, bears, transmen, transwomen, and plain ol' queers. Trannyfags are female-to-male (FTM) transgender people who identify as fags and lust after love, and fuck other guys. Those other guys could be FTMs or "bio men." "Bio men" is shorthand for "biological men," men who were assigned a male gender at birth, as opposed to men who were assigned a female gender at birth. Lots of folks, including me, find the term bio men, while useful, also problematic, since it values a biological determinist model of gender, i.e., you are what your genitals and your birth certificate say you are. Many prefer to use the term non-transgender men to identify those boys who got blue hats and booties in the maternity ward.

Writer-photographer-musician Morty Diamond, an energetic, quirky cross between Andy Warhol and a young Paul McCartney, didn't dig the standard-issue pink ensemble he got 28 years ago, and he came out as transgender at the age of 24. He had always been unhappy with the dearth of porn featuring transmen, and no wonder: The complete collection of such fuck films can fit in a backpack. Plus, the only smut-meisters to delve into the territory of transmen getting it on with bio men are Christopher Lee, best know for his underground flick Alley of the Tranny Boys, and Buck Angel of transexual-man.com (whom Diamond credits with paving the way for his work).

A self-described transman with faggoty tendencies and an avid fag-porn watcher himself, Diamond decided he wanted to produce and direct a trans fag-porn video. He had just moved from the Bay Area to New York when he began pre-production for Trannyfags. He searched for the next gay