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Asking and Telling
Movie about real-life beating death of Army private provides closure for his transgender girlfriend
By Lawrence Ferber
Not many love stories end with one partner’s head being bludgeoned - especially when the love was pure, functional and healthy. But that’s how Army Pfc. Barry Winchell and drag performer Calpernia Addams’ all too short romance was cut short.
Winchell was beaten to death with a baseball bat as he slept in his Fort Campbell, Ky., barracks because fellow soldiers thought he was gay.
Winchell died in July 1999 at age 21. Pfc. Calvin Glover was sentenced to life in prison for murdering Winchell, and Spc. Justin Fisher was sentenced to 12 1/2 years in prison for goading Glover and lying to investigators.
Their real-life story is depicted with aching honesty, sublime performances and immense respect in Showtime’s original movie, “Soldier’s Girl,” which premieres May 31.
Winchell (Troy Garity) becomes romantically involved with Addams (Lee Pace), a beautiful transgender performer at Nashville’s gay/drag club, The Connection.
When Winchell’s fellow soldiers find out, he’s ostracized for being “gay.” Eventually, Winchell is murdered by a mentally unstable roommate, Fisher (Shawn Hatosy), and an impressionable, homophobic new recruit, Glover (Philip Eddols).
And Addams was left alone, robbed of the one true love she knew.
The trip “Soldier’s Girl” took to the screen began when producers Linda Gottlieb and Doro Bachrach read a news account of the incident in May 2000. Horrified and captivated, they approached Addams to discuss the rights to her story.
At the same time, Oscar-nominated gay screenwriter Ron Nyswaner (“Philadelphia”) contacted Winchell’s parents, Patricia and Wally Kutteles. Nyswaner eventually teamed up with Gottlieb and Bachrach.
For Addams, who was officially brought onto the production as a consultant, several concerns arose immediately when it came to how the story would be told cinematically.
“No. 1 was to honor Barry’s memory, because he was an amazing man, and he deserves that,” she says. “No. 2 was that most of the time transsexual women in film are a punch line or gross-out or burlesque caricature, and I just hate that. [The film ultimately] depicts a sexy showgirl, that was really what I did, and doesn’t exploit that or make it ridiculous.”
To direct Soldier’s Girl, the producers approached Frank Pierson, the gay-savvy screenwriter of “Dog Day Afternoon” and director of HBO’s “Citizen Cohn” - a biopic of gay New York politician Roy Cohn - and “Dirty Pictures,” about the controversial 1989 exhibit of gay artist Robert Mapplethorpe.
Pierson, 78, says he was haunted by the script.
“Scenes would pop into my head, and I could see ways they would play out,” he says.
Troy Garity, handsome son of Calif. State Senator Tom Hayden, eventually won the role of Winchell. A fresh Julliard graduate, Oklahoma-born Lee Pace landed the role of Addams.
“I didn’t think I’d be able to pull it off,” Pace says of his first inclination about the role. “Thank God they were smart enough to do a costume test; they had a guy design a look. It kind of put everyone’s heart at ease.”
To prepare, Pace studied female mannerisms and spoke extensively with Addams herself on the production’s Toronto set. As for the role’s physical aspects, deep-voiced Pace took vocal lessons and was outfitted with prosthetic breasts and hips, which took anywhere from four to eight hours daily to apply.
“It cost us just about as much [for the prosthetic breasts] as it would have to give Lee the operation,” Pierson says. “But I don’t think Lee was interested in that.”
Pace, who sprouts facial hair rather quickly, also required midday shaves and makeup reapplication.
Addams testifies to the film’s realism in its depiction of Winchell, herself and their relationship. Eerily accurate sets of the club she worked in and her apartment also brought the memories flooding back.
“Troy Garity’s performance, just looking at the love in his eyes and the fearlessness of those actors,” she says. “The love scenes and the kissing was dead-on passionate and real. Some parts of the movie I had my eyes closed or covered … It’s incredibly painful, difficult.
“But walking around those sets, it gave me a little bit of closure,” she says. “It magically let me go back in time and revisit those spaces and say goodbye to Barry. I didn’t get to do that in real life.”
Since the events depicted in “Soldier’s Girl,” Fisher came up for parole eligibility. He was denied clemency by the military court.
Winchell’s parents have devoted time “to get the military to deal with [gay] issues,” Pierson says. “[The Kutteles] are using the film for that purpose as well.”
Addams relocated to Chicago “to go underground a little bit and finish up my transition,” she says. “I started a little production company to publish and promote [her memoirs] and some videos to help transgender women with issues like voice and makeup.”
And she has established a relationship with Winchell’s parents.
“I was really nervous about interacting with his mother,” Addams says. “Even outside of issues of sexuality and gender, I was dating your son, and then he was murdered. So it’s really awkward, but she’s a psychiatric nurse, and she’s dealt with a lot of people in difficult situations, and she’s really open to me.”
Addams first met the Kutteles at Nashville Pride in 2000, then again at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where “Soldier’s Girl” was aired.
“I’ll never forget it, but in the auditorium she leaned over and said to me that she was nervous and hoped that we weren’t mad at her because of who she was,” Mr. Kutteles said. “She thought we didn’t want anything to do with her … that we hated her.
The military’s policy regarding gays - and its soldiers’ behavior - is brought into question by “Soldier’s Girl,” but Pierson sees the film first and foremost as a story of “two people falling in love with each other.”
Regardless, its undeniable impact pushes the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” question into even the most quintessentially middle-American homes.
“It’s a tough situation,” Addams says. “On the one hand, the military does have to have a sort of different lifestyle - a little more control, a little more institutionalized, because it’s their mission.
“But the reality of it is there’s a lot of lack of supervision,” she says. “Massive alcohol use on base. Ridiculous policies like ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ which everybody agrees don’t work … There’s a lot of fatal flaws within a system that is supposed to be doing good.”
Joe Crea and Mike Fleming contributed to this story.
MORE INFO
‘Soldier’s Girl’
Premieres May 31, 9 p.m.
Showtime
www.sho.com