Film focuses on transgendered struggles

Julien R. Fielding

As "Southern Comfort" begins, Robert Eads tells the camera with some amusement how a member of "Take Back Georgia" asked him to join this group positioned just to the right of the Ku Klux Klan.

With his pipe, cowboy hat, sunglasses, Southern drawl and weathered face, Eads looks every inch a good old boy. But, he tells us, not everything is as it seems.

Truth is, Eads came into the world as Barbara, the only daughter born into a line of boys. And although her parents dressed her in gloves and stylish dresses as she was growing up, she always felt conflicted.

"Those were my cross-dressing years," she explains.

Following societal dictates, Eads eventually got married to a man she said she could tolerate. But questions of self-identity and gender arose even stronger when she became pregnant. After her divorce, Eads entered the gay community and with her female lover lived next to her parents. But Eads still felt confused. She wasn't so much a lesbian as a heterosexual male in female form.

After much consideration, Eads decided to become in body what she was in mind. So, despite strong opposition by her family, she underwent surgery and began hormone treatments to become Robert.

But life is not without cruel irony. Even though she had asked for the removal of her reproductive organs, the last part of her femaleness, doctors convinced her otherwise. Her assent eventually would prove fatal.

Eads developed terminal ovarian cancer.

"The last part of me that's female is killing me," she says.

On July 20, director Kate Davis appeared at the Mary Riepma Ross Film Theater in Lincoln to discuss her documentary about the prejudice and opposition facing the transgendered. Although the film was made for a specific community, Davis said she has been surprised at how much the film has been embraced by all audiences.

Much of the credit for this universal acceptance, she said, belongs to the film's subject.

"He was a very private person," she said. "But he decided that maybe his death could be turned into something positive. We became very close during the shoot. We would laugh and cry all the time. After he died, I was torn up. I didn't look at the footage for about six to nine months."

A producer, editor and director for more than two decades, Davis said she always has been sympathetic to those treated as outcasts.

Her theatrical feature-length documentary "Girltalk" explores the world of three abused, runaway girls. And as a producer at A&E Television Networks, she has worked on documentaries such as "Anti-Gay Hate Crimes," "Untying the Straightjacket," "Hooked on a Dream" and "Transgender Revolution," a project about the transgendered's fight for civil rights.

It was through the latter project that she came to know Eads.

"I was at a female-to-male convention in Maryland, when I met Robert," she said.

Because he was dying, Davis knew she had to work quickly. Instead of relying on a large crew, Davis shot much of the footage herself using a Sony digital camera. "It was very minimal," she said.

From April to December, Davis visited Eads' trailer in Toccoa, Ga., seven times, each time promising to be the last.

The story started out as an examination of the prejudices faced by the transgendered - Eads often was refused treatment by physicians who were worried what other female patients would think - but eventually broadened its scope when a relationship developed between Eads and Lola Cola, a male-to-female transsexual.

"Southern Comfort" blossomed into a universal tale about love, loss, friendship and courage.

This very human portrait even ended up affecting Eads' estranged father, who after seeing the film realized that no matter who we were "we are all human after all."

"Southern Comfort" will be broadcast next year on A&E.

Film focuses on transgendered struggles was originally published in The Daily Nonpareil on 26 July, 2001. © Council Bluffs Daily Nonpareil LLC