Part One: Buck Angel

“It’s too bad people feel that the genitals make you that gender. It’s totally ridiculous.” – Buck Angel

I was first turned on to Buck Angel by Keith Webb, co-owner and vice president of Titan Media, a gay studio in San Francisco well-known for their buff, burly models, leather fetish and condoms-only safe sex policy.

Researching a story on condom use in the straight industry versus policies in the gay industry, I mentioned I was also working on a piece about transsexual porn. Like most heterosexual people, I still had a tendency to confuse gay with transsexual, so Webb was trying to set me straight (pun intended).

“Let me tell you, it is not gay,” he laughed. “Gay men do not want to watch chicks-with-dicks. It’s straight men that want to watch it.”

Further along in the conversation, he added, “You know, we are the first gay studio to use Buck Angel. There’s chicks-with- dicks and now, the new thing is guys-with-pies – Buck Angel is a female-to-male transsexual. He was born a woman, but he’s become a man, but he still has a vagina.”

At that moment, my mind couldn’t quite comprehend what I was being told. I’m sure I asked Webb if Buck was a biological guy that had his penis removed and a vagina constructed, but otherwise keeping his male characteristics. He repeated himself a second time, until I finally got it.

That’s what happens when you try to explain Buck Angel to people. It takes them awhile to get it.

For my tranny porn story, I did end up featuring Buck, who was relatively new to the adult business at the time. This interview, conducted in May 2006, came at a time when Buck was still having great difficulty breaking into porn. No one in the “mainstream” adult industry was even sure there was a niche for Buck, though there was growing demand for male-to-female transsexual porn.

Since then, I’ve interviewed Buck several times and found him to be remarkable in many ways. Aside from the typical (if you can call it that) story of being “trapped inside the wrong body,” his life is truly stranger-than-fiction.

Prior to transitioning, Buck had a taste of the spotlight as a female high-fashion model during the 80s, for Elite Model Management and Z Agency, out of London. In the biography on his website he said, at the time, he was miserable and living as a woman was, at best, painfully difficult.

Two years after surgery, in 1998, Buck married professional dominatrix Ilsa Strix. Their unconventional relationship and break-up was chronicled in a January 2006 Rolling Stone article, entitled ”The Mystery of Larry Wachowski”.

Wachowski, co-director with his brother Andy of the blockbuster “Matrix” movie trilogy, met and fell in love with Strix after seeking her services as a professional mistress. Both she and Wachowski left their marriages to be together and, in 2003, appeared at the Cannes Film Festival. Afterwards, the pair became reclusive as rumors of hormone therapy and sexual reassignment to become a woman swirled around Wachowski.

Award-winning author Stephen Elliott wrote an insightful rebuttal to the Rolling Stone article and the way it portrayed both transsexuals and BDSM culture, which was posted on Huffington Post.

Buck has since remarried to Elayne, a well-known body-piercing artist. After producing a few releases with Robert Hill Releasing, Buck started his own production company, Buck Angel Entertainment. One of his videos, titled “V is for Vagina” is a thinly disguised dig at the Wachowski Bros’ film, “V is for Vendetta.”

A lot has been written about Buck, and I’ll quote Gerry Visco, from the New York Press, “At first, I wasn’t sure whom this human hybrid was meant to appeal to – women, men, gays or straights. But when I met Buck in the flesh, I discovered he oozes sex appeal. He’s also smart healthy and funny.”

Honestly, I couldn’t agree more.

JC: You’re pretty unique in the transgender genre?

Buck Angel, female-to-male transsexual porn star: Basically, because I’m the only one. I’m female-to-male transsexual and basically, I go by ‘Buck Angel, the Man with the Pussy.’
I don’t really consider myself a transsexual so much anymore; I kind of use that more for marketing. I would say I basically live my life as a man – I just happen to have a pussy.

JC: It’s so weird to talk about the topic because it’s difficult – I don’t know what’s politically correct and I don’t want to sound like an ass.

BA: Let me just tell you right now, there is nothing politically correct for me. You can call me anything, you can say anything and if I have a problem with it, I’ll tell you. It’s part of what I’m doing – it’s just the way it is…

JC: So, you just always wanted to be a man?

BA: It’s the same old story that you hear. You know, we grew up in the wrong body, we never felt like the way we were. Basically, the same story – I never felt comfortable being a woman or a girl or in that body. Even growing up, my parents treated me like a boy. They called me a boy’s name. I played all kinds of sports.

Until I got to be a teenager, and then they’re like, oh-ho-ho-ho, wait a minute – you gotta start acting like a girl!

And I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’

That just spiraled me into a bad situation mentally because I was like, ‘Wait a minute. I’m a boy and I have to wear a dress.’

And that escalated into a bad situation of drugs and alcohol abuse until I got into my mid-twenties and decided, you know, if I don’t find a way out of this, I’m going to commit suicide – I was that desperate to be a man. I just could not be living as a woman anymore. It was not comfortable.

So, I had a sex change in my late 20s and basically, it’s been going great for me since the time I started my first hormone shot. That was where I needed to be, you know. I needed to be the man that I am. Without that situation, I would not be sitting here.

JC: And you made this difficult transition…

BA: Like I said, it was life-threatening for me. I was on the verge of suicide. I was very uncomfortable with myself for many years and it was a life-threatening situation for me. I had to make that change. And I did. I found out how to do it and when I did it, 15 years ago, it was not trendy. It was not ‘everybody’s doing it.’ It was not like just go find a doctor. It was very difficult for me to find a doctor. The surgeon I went to had never even operated on a guy like me before. My hormone doctor had never dealt with female-to-male transsexuals; he mostly did male-to-female transsexuals. But like I said, I just went and I did it because I was determined to do it.

I think there is a reason for me to be here today, for me to go through all that pain and all of a sudden do what I’m doing and be where I am today…

JC: When you talk about having the surgery; you didn’t have complete surgery, though.

BA: Men like me, female-to-male transsexuals can have what’s called “bottom surgery,” penis surgery; yes, they can.

But I have to let you know, and a lot of people get upset when I say this, but I’m the kind of guy that puts myself out there for reasons that there might be other guys who might feel the same way and not be able to express it. I don’t feel that the penis surgery is up to my standards.

I’m a perfectionist and I feel like, if I’m going to have a penis, the penis better work, the penis better be able to make pee through it. I want to cum through it. I want to get a hard-on through it. All those things are impossible to do with the penis surgery today.

You know, you can have a penis, basically put on, and then you have a penis there, but it doesn’t really work. It doesn’t work like a man’s penis. It has all these different things you have to do to it, and it doesn’t aesthetically look like a penis.

So, why am I gonna spend $50 to $70 thousand on something like that? That just makes no sense to me.

I’m perfectly comfortable having a pussy. Really, honestly, it does not make me any less of a man. It’s too bad that people feel that the genitals make you that gender. It’s totally ridiculous.

JC: Right; because in your mindset, you’re a man.

BA: I’m a guy. I have a billion dildoes I can strap on if someone needs to get fucked; that’s not even an issue. My hard-on can stay all night long; you know what I’m saying? And if my partners are okay with me having a pussy, which many times they are, then they can fuck my pussy. So, I have a lot more options than a “regular” guy.

Actually, it’s amazing because you can’t even imagine the amount of emails I get from guys that say they fantasized about men like me their whole life.

And I think, ‘Wow!” They’ve never been able to write that down ever in their whole life, and now their able to send me emails telling me how they fantasized about a man like me. It’s just, to me, that’s just incredible.

In Part Two, Buck discusses his struggles to be accepted as a porn star, why it was important for him to be part of the industry and his recent success and accomplishments. Visit Buck's membership site at www.transsexual-man.com

Photo used by permission of Buck Angel.