Southern Comfort

Another great documentary shown on HBO's America Undercover series.I found this to be an ultimately sad film.It made me appreciate my own life and glad I am happy in my own skin.I wish these people happiness.....somewhere in their lives.

At its essence, Kate Davis's film, Southern Comfort, is about a transgendered man who is dying from cancer in his female reproductive organs. Southern Comfort is more than this, however. It also deals with the intricacies of the social community that the main character, Robert Eads, has surrounded himself with since transitioning from female to male, details the romantic attachment that Robert has formed with his girlfriend Lola Cola near the end of his life, and examines the dynamics between Robert and his genetic family. More than this, Southern Comfort engages in a discourse on human sexuality that serves to enlighten the audience viewing the film on the realities of transgendered life in the backcountry of the Deep South.

I've watched this film dozens of times. It's an extremely powerful work. The timing of the filming, the choices and direction, and the rural country aesthetic are worthy of the title. I'll be watching it again soon.

As a 48 year old black woman with a multiracial background, I know a lot about diversity and I always love learning, the good, and the bad because you know who and what to stay away from. This documentary was very beautiful, yet very horrific because the treatments Robert received was horrific! Can you imagine being turned down by 2 dozen Doctors because of how you identify?! The movie / documentary touched me on so many levels. You care for the people, you care for what they are going through, By the end of the documentary/movie, it hits you these are REAL PEOPL AFFECTED! Not characters playing a role, that this actually happend to them!

Set in the verdant yet somehow stark landscape of rural Georgia this film opens with the female-to-male transgendered subject of the film, Robert Eades, stating: `This is Bubba country.' And he is SO accurate.

This powerful film profiles transgendered people in very poor and very rural Georgia. Most of them are faced with poor or non-existent medical care by `professionals' that are, more often than not, embarrassed by their patients. These are people that are just trying to find a little happiness for themselves and receive what should be basic human rights -- and time and again they are denied those rights.

While the name of the film is "Southern Comfort," that is also the name of the annual transgender conference/convention held in Georgia. The subjects of this film survive from one day to the next for the few days each year when they know that they are not alone. As Robert states: `For once we outnumber THEM.'

Robert is in the nearly unbelievable position of being a man dying of ovarian cancer. He was unable to receive proper medical care because of the ignorance and uncaring of the doctors that were available to him. They all seemed to feel that he would be an embarrassment to their ‘medical practices.'

There are horrific examples of surgical horror stories and botched operations -- with the ghastly scars to prove it.

The interviews with the families of the subjects of the films are especially revealing:

The son of Robert Eades (from when he was a woman) can't quite keep straight whether to refer to him as a man or as his `mom.' But it is clear that he loves him deeply.

The father of Robert says: `I had a dream that my daughter would marry a man that would be President of the United States.' Never imagining for a moment that his daughter could be president. Because in his narrow and limited mind women cannot be president just as women cannot be men. He refused to have his face shown when he was interviewed.

What shines out above all else in this transcendent film about a man's life is the wisdom, wit, humour and charm of a man who the system failed. Remarkably, a man that showed no overt bitterness right up to his death in a hospice.

Lola Cola -- Roberts partner and a male-to-female transgendered person -- closes the film by saying: `Nature delights in diversity ... why can't human beings?'