To some Larry Kramer is best known as a playwright who created the likes of The Normal Heart about the early days of the AIDS crisis, to others he’s the author of the controversial novel Faggots, while to many he’s best know for his AIDS activism, helping set up organisations such as the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT UP.

Now the Tony Awards has decided to honour 77-year-old Karmer, offering him the Isabelle Stevenson Award as part of the 2013 ceremony, which takes place on June 9th. The gong, named after a former president of the American Theater Wing, recognises a theatre practitioner who’s made significant contributions to humanitarian or charitable causes.

Kramer was at the forefront of the AIDS battle in the 1980s – few histories of that time fail to mention him – fighting to ensure the US government approved drugs that could help, in the face of bureaucratic apathy and a President who simply didn’t seem to care. Since then he had taken up other gay rights battles and never shied away from a fight he though was worth taking one.

A restaging of The Normal Heart in 2011 won three Tony Awards, including Best Revival, and is now being made into a movie by Glee creator Ryan Murphy, with the likes of Julia Roberts, Taylor Kitsch, Matt Bomer, Mark Ruffalo and Jim Parsons set to star.

We’ve become used to the fact that if a film or TV series has a transgender role, the person cast will be gender conforming (i.e. identifies with the sex assigned to them at birth). One of the more high profile cases recently was the TV series Hit & Miss, which launched a large search for a transgender actress, but then cast Chloe Sevigny as a woman born with male genitalia.

However now it’s finally happened – a film has cast a transgender actor in a transgender role! The film is question is the rom-com Boy Meets Girl, which now has transgender actress Michelle Hendley as its lead after a US wide hunt (Hendley was discovered thanks to a Skype audition). The movie is currently seeking funding via Indiegogo, where it’s hoping to raise $95,000 to make it a reality.

Here’s the plot description: ‘Boy Meets Girl is a tender, human, sex-positive romantic comedy that explores what it means to be “real”: to live and love authentically to the truth of one’s heart, regardless of the sex or small town you’re born into. Our story focuses on Ricky, a beautiful twenty-one year old transgendered girl living in Virginia with dreams of becoming a fashion designer in New York.’

Eric Schaeffer will direct, who’s previously made the likes of If Lucy Fell, which starred Sarah Jessica Parker, Ben Stiller and Elle Macpherson.

The director commented to Queerty, “I’m passionate about breaking the mold of sexual and emotional convention in the pursuit of creating more unity in our increasingly fractured world. Being a ‘straight man,’ albeit one who admits to many things most straight men don’t, and living my life with a colorful spectrum of sexual and emotional tastes, desires and behaviors that don’t always seem to be accepted, I feel a duty to portray characters in my films who, like myself, admit to and accept without condition the parts of themselves and others that can be best described and must start being labeled as one thing and one thing only: human.  That is why I make any film.  That is why I am inspired to make this one.”

Find out more over at Indiegogo. [Read more…]