Page 24 - AVN September 2015

WHO’S WHO
INTERVIEW | | By Mark Kernes
Jonelle Brooks Breaks Out
With ‘Kaitlyn Gender,’ she enters parody realm
playing her, and we made sure it wasn’t offensive, but it’s a
parody so it has to be funny.
“Nothing that I did offended me, but I can’t speak for
other trans girls; they may have been offended, but you
have to be able to laugh at yourself a little bit,” she added.
“We did a lot of the early transition things, like trying
to tuck your dick back, trying to walk in high heels …
it addresses things we all went through early on in our
transitions.”
The basis of the script was the interview Caitlyn gave
to ABC’s Diane Sawyer, with her male alter ego, “Juice
Gender,” fielding the questions, and Jonelle and the rest of
the cast acting out the scenarios being discussed.
“We took some liberties with the timeline, obviously,
and the age of the character,” Brooks explained, “so
there’s lots of like, for instance, we talk about how Kimmy
Kockdashian [played by Angelina Castro] and I were close,
and how she helped with the transition, and I believe from
what I can understand, that goes into a flashback of the
actual scene. How it might end up being
different from how it was discussed originally, I don’t
know, but everything was supposed to be playing off
that interview.”
One of the scenarios has Brooks walking into the
“wrong” bathroom, standing at a urinal and realizing,
“Oh, I’m in a dress; maybe I shouldn’t be in here,” and she
indicated that much of the dialog, especially the interview
with the Diane Sawyer character, was ad-libbed after the
cast had discussed what they felt their characters would
say in the situations presented.
“I’m a pretty good improviser, so we just played off of
each other,” Brooks said.
Kaitlyn Gender is the most complex role Brooks has
attempted. Although she’s been in the adult movie
business for about three years, she hasn’t appeared in
many movies, all of which so far have been of the gonzo
or all-sex variety, although that’s about to change, she told
AVN.
“It was exhausting. I shot for 11 days straight, and
I thought it would be easier, but halfway through it, I
wondered what I had done,” Brooks said in early August.
“But I powered through it. I shot for Evil Angel—Joey and
Francesca, Grooby, She-Male Strokers—it was busy, it was
fun, it was good.”
Brooks has several box covers to her credit already, most
notably Tranny Hoes In Panty Hose 2 (Devil’s Film) and a
couple of volumes of Sammy Mancini’s She-Male Strokers,
but her main contact with fans has been through her
website.
“I used to update it constantly, but I haven’t been
keeping up with it recently, to be honest,” she admitted,
“but it’s something I’ll be focusing on as I’m revamping
my career, I put so much time and energy into updating
my website for so many years and I felt so drained from
it physically and creatively that I just lost interest in it.
That’s something that I need to reevaluate and see where I
want to take it next.”
After a short burst of movies in 2012, though, Brooks
felt she needed to step away from the adult industry and,
in her word, “recharge.” As part of her vacation from porn,
she let go of her Twitter account, which had nearly 13,000
followers. But having thought long and hard about where
she wants to go in life, she’s decided to jump back into
adult “full-force and fully committed and fully involving
myself in every aspect of my career.”
Part of her change was to sign up with publicist Erika
Icon and with musician-turned-director-turned-agent Phil
Varone’s V Agency. “I’ve been jumping in with both feet,
working quite a bit more.”
AVN asked Brooks about when she first felt that she was
actually a woman.
“I grew up on a farm, raised sheep and hogs all through
my childhood,” she recounted. “I have five acres, so that
takes up most of my time, but in my teens, I worked in
many gay bars as a drag queen, and I found that I always
wanted to stay in drag all the time, I was more happy in
drag, and I guess I had to do some self-evaluation of what
that meant in terms of the real world, not just nightlife.
And I came to the realization I was trans and not just
someone who dressed up for a nighttime job.”
For most of the four years she’s been in adult, Brooks
has supported herself through her website and doing
“super-shows” for the Cam4 webcam company, but “other
than that, I just take care of my land, and I have horses
and pigs and chickens, so that’s my other passion. Yes, I’m
a farm girl. People think that’s pretty strange to hear, but
that’s kind of what consumes most of my life.”
Those who’ve seen Brooks in movies have been
impressed by how she moves, and she told us that much of
that ease comes from early training in ballet.
“I studied ballet from the age 8 till 21,” she advised.
“It was my first college major. I don’t think I physically
could do a ballet performance anymore. ... I know they
say there’s muscle memory and everything like that, but
I think at this point in my life, it might put me in the
hospital.
“But thanks to my training, I think I have much better
body awareness as to angles, what looks good,” she added.
“I’m very graceful. I understand lines and what that looks
like to other people, so when it comes to posing or even
in a video, how I angle myself to the camera, I’m just very
body-conscious from dancing for so long, and it’s also
kept me very fit and I have a very disciplined outlook on
physical fitness.”
As for the future, Brooks wants to get further grounding
in adult production before she considers taking a spin
behind the camera.
“It’s not something I would want to dive into,” she
cautioned. “It would bother me to have the feeling that I
wasn’t capable of producing something that I believe in
and could be proud of, so I would want more experience
participating as a performer, and then eventually see
myself on the other side of the filming.”
Kaitlyn Gender: Based On a Not So True Story will be
released on September 24 by Trans500 Studios, and
distributed by Pulse.
the past year or so, explicit movies
It’s taken a couple of decades, but over
featuring transgender performers have
made a giant leap from the familiar
four-scene transsexual beauty queens/
babysitters/nurses/Asians/Latinas/
cheerleaders/whatever model into movies
featuring TGs in actual character roles.
The way was paved by director Nica Noelle
back in 2012, who directed Forbidden Lovers
for TransRomantic as well as titles for her
new Mile High Media studio, TransSensual.
Grooby Productions and partner Third World
Media added to the shake-up with Shemale
Secret Service, Tranny Chaser 2: Confessions
of a Pool Boy and Transsexual Housewives of
Hollywood, with Devil’s Films adding to the
wave its new parody The Tranny Bunch.
Trans500 Studios has taken that
revolution one step further with its
upcoming release of Kaitlyn Gender: Based On a
Not So True Story, a humorous look at the life
(and imagined loves) of America’s
best-known transgendered person, Caitlyn
Jenner.
The move has generated a bit of
controversy in the trans community.
“I went down to Miami for a week, and
we shot the whole DVD then, for Trans500,
and since then, it has come out in the
social media world, and there’s been some
people who don’t necessarily agree with the
content,” said transgendered star Jonelle
Brooks, who plays the titular role. “I guess
parodying Caitlyn Jenner is apparently off
the table and off-limits. No one else is, but
she is—but someone was bound to do it, and
it’s a trans person doing it, a trans person
24 | AVN.com | 9.15