Not a girl, not yet a woman

You know how sometimes things in your life seem to happen in bunches. I think this is often referred to as serendipity, although that’s not the correct definition. Like, for example, when you learn a new word and then suddenly you see and hear it used everywhere.

Well, lately my life has been all about she-males. See, it all started last week when we got the movie “Saint Jack” in the mail from Netflix. This film is based on a Paul Theroux book of the same name, and even though Theroux is typically considered a writer who appeals to men (a la Hemingway or Bukowski) this book of his is one of my all-time favorites. Even before watching the movie I was torn about it because I cannot friggin’ stand Peter Bogdanovich but I love, love love Roger Corman, who produced the movie, and of course I love the book.

The story is about a laid-back American who lives in Singapore and runs a whorehouse. Now, there is not a whole lot of talk about lady-boys in the book, but that is one of the things Singapore is famous for. So, in the movie, which had a pretty small budget, almost all of the peripheral characters are real people playing, essentially, themselves. This is one of Corman’s trademarks.

Anyway, this means that a lot of the prostitutes in the movie are not women at all, but trannies. This is pretty interesting because neither Christopher nor I had any idea until we were watching the commentary special feature.

Worst drinking game ever: Watch the director’s commentary of “Saint Jack” and take a shot every time Peter Bogdanovich uses the phrase, “This was real”, “These people were real,” “This was a real building,” or “He/she was a real …”

Even better drinking game: The first person who notices an actress with both breasts and a penis (and you can most definitely see this, if you look closely) gets to drown their subsequent misery in an entire bottle of the booze of their choice.

So just a few days after we watched this movie, Christopher and I were out for a jog when we came across a sign for a new bar opening up here, called — wait for it — TANK TRANSGENDER BAR.

This is quite curious, I thought to myself. I mean, we live in a very small town, essentially in the country, for one thing. Secondly, Korea is a verrrry male-dominated, masculine society. Unlike in Thailand or Malaysia, most of the time you can’t even get a Korean to admit that there is such a thing as homosexuality, so the idea that something like a transgendered community could exist in our tiny little town just sort of blew my mind. You know, Koreans use a lot of English in their advertising, and most of the time it’s pretty bad English — misspelled, or misunderstood or just plain misused, like the fact that the building we live in is called Beverly Hills 2. So I thought maybe it wasn’t really a transgender bar — maybe they’ve used the wrong word here or something.

It is definitely a transgender bar. And they have a floor show, which my friend Jaynie described as “educational.”

I haven’t been yet, but you can read someone else’s experience of the place here. And there are pictures.