What's a tranny to do? Unload the kid on his mom? Well, she's dead. But there is a stepdad in Squeal Like a Pig, Kentucky.5 Bree, posing as a missionary lady, agrees to drive the kid to LA, planning in fact to drop him off with his step-dad, which would be the Christian thing to do anyway. So they head off in a beat-up station wagon, giving Bree plenty of time to tell Toby not to put his feet up on the dash and not to use “like” as an interjection suggesting hypothetical circumstances. We can guess - and ultimately we find out for sure - that Bree had a bellyful of middle-class upbringing as a child - but for some reason (because it's funny) she insists on hitting the kid with a shitload of Martha Stewart correctness.

When they enter (shudder) Texas, they pick up a cute hitch-hiker (Grant Monohon). When he and Toby go skinny-dipping, it becomes clear, if it wasn't already, that writer/director Tucker likes ‘em young and hung.9 The kid, like so many hitchhikers with washboard abs, turns out to be a bit of a thief (remember Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise?). He takes the car, Bree's hormone pills, everything, everything except Toby's monkey. Fortunately, Bree's budding feminine charms inspire this trés sweet Indian dude Calvin (Graham Greene10 ), who is more or less the anti-George Bush,11 to let them sleep over at his ranch before giving them a lift into Arizona in the morning.

Calvin is nothing but old-fashioned courtliness, opening doors for Bree and flattering her with little compliments - all the things feminists used to say they hated. The whole bit, designed (naturally) to prove to us that trannies can catch a man, does violence to the awkward, Edna May Oliver12 dignity that Huffman projects throughout the picture. Poor Bree has nothing but her dignity, her standards. No one could want her. She's an old maid schoolmarm, with nothing but her totally out-of-it ways and values to sustain her in an indifferent world.

takes a serious turn for the worse when Bree and Toby hit Phoenix. Bree has said several times that her parents are dead, but it wasn't too hard to guess that she only meant that she wished they were. We meet Elizabeth (Fionnula Flanagan), the umpteen millionth Mom from Hell in gay cinema, and Murray (Burt Young), the umpteen millionth Downtrodden Dad in gay cinema.

Mom is pure evil. Even her hair is evil. When she finds out that Toby is her grandson (something he doesn't know), she flips out entirely. Toby must stay with her, with her! Poor Bree! Mom put her through 18 years of Hell as a child, and now she's stealing her rent boy! Ouch!

Briefly, Toby savors the good life at Mom and Dad's, swimming in their elegant pool, a David Hockney painting come to life. But even in his tiny rent boy mind he knows it's wrong, sort of. It's Bree he loves. She saved his monkey.13 So he tries to get it on with her. To fend him off, Bree has to admit that she's his dad. Toby freaks out, punches Bree, steals her purse,14 and heads for LA. Rather surprisingly, the picture doesn't have the nerve to make Mom totally heartless. Instead, she comforts her poor son/daughter, tits, dick, and all.

Bree makes it back to LA alone, with no one to take her through the operation but her shrink. In contrast to all the gay sentimentality we've seen before,15 it's a wrenching experience for Bree. She's free at last, free of the penis she always hated, but otherwise her life is exactly the same as before. There's no circle of friends, no romance, no exciting career, no fabulous wardrobe. She's as alone now as we assume she's always been.

But then Toby shows up! He's a big success! At least, he has a walk-on in ! She tells him not to put his feet on her coffee table and pretends to be pleased by his film career. As a final Charley's Aunt gag, she loosens the twist-off cap on his Coke for him.16 And so it seems that this will be their life, Bree with her persnickety antimacassar ways17 and Toby as the bad boy she can't deny. I mean, this will be their life for a few years, until Toby's film career ends and he goes back to hustling and dies of an overdose before he hits thirty. But, hey, that's another picture!

1 . I must admit that I blew the title, so to speak. I thought that Felicity and Kevin would be driving a Transam. This picture was not made by people who know or care anything about cars. It wasn't until about four hours after I saw the film that I realized it's about trans(gendered) America. Duh!

2 . For some reason that's never explained (because it's funny, of course), Bree's ideal of womanhood is June Cleaver (right). But what is funny is that the classic guy-as-chick gag, walking in heels, is never exploited, even though Bree always wears heels, and not shorties either. Could Huffman not walk in heels?

9 . I don't know if the camera loves Kevin Zegers, but Tucker sure does. We get endless shots of Kevin sleeping, Kevin in his underwear, Kevin in the pool, etc.

10 . Wouldn't it take just a little nerve to show up at a casting call for a Navaho sporting a moniker like “Graham Greene”? But maybe Graham's dad was a Navaho with an affinity for tortured Catholic novelists, eh?

11 . Calvin is so unlike George that he was in Vietnam. “I've got a half a pound of shrapnel in my leg,” he tells Bree. I'm guessing Duncan Tucker didn't see military service. If you had half a pound of shrapnel in your leg, you wouldn't have a leg.

13 . Actually, this plot point gets dropped entirely, as does another one - the cowboy hat that Calvin gives to Toby. “It makes you look like a warrior,” he tells the kid, although it does not. You might expect the picture to end with Toby going to work for Calvin, roping steers and branding calves, but that doesn't happen.

15 . I forgot to tell you about the tranny party that Bree and Toby crash in Dallas, everybody totally happy with their operation, everyone enjoying a fantastic sex life, etc., etc.

This is cache, read story here