About Me

Adapted from my Personal Statement for MFA in Production/Directing programs:

The greatest obstacle I have faced in my 40-year struggle to attain career success happened before I was born. Somehow, my genes determined that, despite having XY chromosomes, I would develop like a woman.

Consequently, I was raised a boy, but I physically developed into a woman; I am intersexed. Disability is not an objective quantity, but a consequence of one’s inability to meet personal standards set by one’s society. As such, I proudly and gladly contribute to the diversity of filmmaking as a disabled queer woman.

As a writer, director, and producer, I deliver feminist and anti-racist messages through culture, while also inserting intersexed people as appropriate. For example, my novel Twelve Nights with Viola & Olivia, and More (2023) (see LITERATURE) includes an intersexed man living during the Italian Renaissance. I will do much more in future years.

Although I recently entered my 60s, I wouldn’t be the filmmaker I am without my three graduate degrees and years of life-experience. For example, my limited TV drama series The New Countess (see SCREENWRITING) incorporates what I learned about Early Modern European social history through research toward a proposed dissertation, and what I learned about intersexed development in graduate school, not to mention that it grew from a play I wrote while earning my M.S. in Women’s Studies.
Even the way my unique queer heroine Countess Olivia uses lawyer-like tactics of logic, argument, bargaining, negotiation, and diplomacy to achieve her goals — a reversal from the usual use of rampant violence and war in fantasy stories — comes from my practicing law for ten years, as well as what I learned about how European women of all classes exercised power under an overwhelmingly patriarchal social system.

Beyond being intersexed, I am the product of a multi-cultural working-class family. My father was discharged from the U.S. Navy after 20 years of honorable service with 100% mental disability in 1971. Consequently, my childhood never really happened, as I had to deal with my bipolar father all my life, while also supporting my working mother after my father emotionally abandoned her.

Being unable to achieve financial independence, I was forced to rely on my parents’ financial assistance all my life, and I always had to satisfy their demands so they would continue supporting me. I became a lawyer because my parents agreed it would be a good career for me. I earned a B.A., M.S., and sought a Ph.D. because my parents wanted me to become a college professor. However, none of us then realized that these were careers I could never achieve.

Even now, I rely on my parents (1934-2019, father; 1930-2021, mother), receiving public assistance while living in the home they left me, and spending their remaining retirement savings. It is not much.

As an intersexed person, I have been a leading advocate for “the queerest of the queer” for nearly 30 years. For example, I persuaded The Montel Williams Show to produce the first-ever nationally-televised program on adult intersexed people in 2002, and was the lead guest. I have served on the boards of many LGBTQ+ organizations, I was a founding member of the Minnesota Lavender Bar Association, and was a columnist and contributing writer for LGBTQ+ magazines in Minneapolis-St. Paul from 1996 until leaving for graduate school in 2001.

As an intersexed film director, I will be in a category with an approximate size of one. With your help, the number of intersexed film director will not be zero.