Feb. 1, 2000
Insult and injury
As journalists struggle with
gender issues, murdered Pfc. Barry Winchell's girlfriend mourns
her loss
By Steve Friess
It was, in almost every way, your typical boy-meets-girl
stow. They met in a bar. He timidly admired her auburn hair,
her green eyes, her figure. She in turn was attracted to his
buzz cut and his quiet and calm demeanor.
Their shared background in the military got
them talking, but it was chatter about everything from family
to dreams for the future that kept the conversations going,
sometimes all night long. The Nashville preacher's girl wasn't
crazy about how much Bud Light he drank, but his full acceptance
of her, as she was, helped overshadow that concern.
"He made me feel like a woman," she says in
a voice kissed with a Tennessee twang. "That was so wonderful
to me. It's what I look for in life."
All that changed last July when Calpernia Sarah
Addams came home from work one night and learned via the television
news that her boyfriend of four months had been bludgeoned to
death in his Army barracks at Fort Campbell, Ky. Immediately
their conventional love affair became a distracting, complex
sideshow to the media circus surrounding the murder of 21-year-old
Pfc. Barry Winchell.
Addams, 28, is no ordinary woman--which has
confounded some journalists covering the murder. A male-to-female
preoperative transsexual and former Navy medic, Addams works
as a lip-synching entertainer at a gay club in Nashville, about
55 miles from Fort Campbell. Because she is still a biological
male, she says, Winchell considered himself gay. And it was
Winchell's homosexuality, of course, that landed his slaying
on the front page of the nation's newspapers.
That spotlight also hit Addams, who was fully
aware of the precedent she represented. The American public
knew of other gay soldiers slain in homophobic fits and had
even filled theaters for Boys Don't Cry, an acclaimed film about
the 1993 murder of a transgendered Nebraskan. Still, a combination
of these elements was new and could be combustible. "I knew
immediately that my being a transgendered person would add a
Jerry Springer-like angle to this stow," Addams says. "I didn't
want to shame or humiliate Barry's memory.... I didn't want
to see the headline `Drag Queen Lover Tells All.'"
Yet as nonsensationally as Addams behaved, the
transgender angle nonetheless complicated the otherwise straightforward
stow of a dead gay soldier failed by a military policy intended
to protect him. Reporters struggled to describe--within the
confines of TV clips and newspaper sentences--the relationship
between a soldier who considered himself a gay man and a preoperative
transsexual who considers herself a woman.
"How do you show that [Winchell's murder] was
a hate crime if his girlfriend is referring to herself as a
she? Why would someone be enraged by this guy having a girlfriend?"
asks journalist Monica Whitaker of The Tennessean, a Nashville
newspaper. "When I interviewed Calpernia, I always referred
to her as a she, and I wrote it that way. But after I discussed
it with my editors, I had to go through and change it to he
in the stow to keep it clear.... It's not clear-cut."
Transgender advocates disagree, insisting it's
"really very simple," in the words of Alan Klein, a spokesman
for the transgender advocacy group Gender-PAC. Klein calls the
media's handling of Addams "the second horrible thing that happened
to her," pointing to a December 9 New York Times piece that
referred to Addams as a female impersonator. Other reporters
put quotation marks around her legal name, Calpernia.
But Addams acknowledges that while she wasn't
pleased with some of the coverage, she understands the confusion.
Even she referred to herself as a "female impersonator" when
talking to The Advocate, later concurring that it's unclear
what one would call a person who considers herself a woman,
is biologically male, and performs as if she were a drag queen.
"It's the media's job to get complicated information
across in an understandable format, but it's not my job to make
it easier for them," she says defiantly.
Now that the attention is subsiding, Addams
says she has time to grieve. Winchell never spoke of the intense
harassment that preceded his death. Instead, as young lovers
do, they spoke dreamily of their futures.
She sobs as she recounts how profound a loss
she has suffered. Many male-to-female preoperative transsexuals
enter relationships with closeted gay men who use them as a
"bridge into homosexuality," she says. When they cross that
bridge, though, they usually leave.
"It turned out, Barry liked me as I was," she
says, crying. "It really hits me that Barry was a rare and wonderful
find, somebody I could really look forward to malting a relationship
with. And now he's gone."
###
Go
to list of Advocate stories
Go
to list of Publications
