Real Girl
2008 color video, 3:22 min.
This video more fully introduces my two drag personas, Sunny & Benny. Sunny is a lavender-coifed hyper-feminine girl-next-door. Benny is a city guy with style, a sort of shy charm, and hormones bubbling to the surface. In this video, Sunny works the phone answering to a mystery caller’s desires absently as she busies herself with a transformation he’ll never see. The video engages the idea of “realness” in a coded exchange of a gendered body (images and fantasies of this body) for money. Real, live, amateur bodies have a competitive edge—but the promise that the real thing will imitate the fantasy is essential. What Sunny and Benny know that the caller doesn’t is that their bodies are made-to-order and the “real” thing can never be accessed.