Coffee Talk: Southern Comfort
Would you provide treatment to a transgendered person?
Join us Thursday, April 3rd at 7 p.m. in Classroom 3 for our last Coffee Talk of the semester!
“SOUTHERN COMFORT is a 90-minute feature-length documentary about the life of Robert Eads, a 52-year-old female to male transsexual who lives in the back hills of Georgia. “A hillbilly and proud of it,” he cuts a striking figure: sharp-tongued, bearded, tobacco pipe in hand. Robert passes so well as a male that the local Klu Klux Klan tried to recruit him to become a member.
Though his home is nestled among tranquil hills dotted with hay bales, Robert confronts a world as hostile to him as if he were an African American in the ante-bellum South. He was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, then turned away by more than two dozen doctors who feared that taking on a transgendered patient might harm their practice.
SOUTHERN COMFORT follows the final year of Robert Eads’ life. Beginning in spring, he falls deeply in love with Lola, a male-to-female. That summer, his mother and father drive ten hours to visit their “lost daughter,” a trip they know may be their last. His final dream is to make it to the Southern Comfort Conference in Atlanta, the nation’s preeminent transgender gathering. Beating the odds, he addresses a crowd of 500 and takes Lola to “The prom that never was.”
The voices in SOUTHERN COMFORT are not only rarely heard, but also are commonly thought to be non-existent. A rare blend of humor, romance, and tragedy, SOUTHERN COMFORT is the first non-fiction film to intimately tell a trans-to-trans love story, set against a disturbing tale of gender bias as it unfolds before the camera.”
