TEA 2015 Transgender Erotica Awards

Grooby presented the TEA 2015 Transgender Erotica Awards last night and it was a really fun time. Thank you shoutout to Telly Lopez-Fu for the hook-up for a most excellent evening! It was really nice seeing people come together so nicely. Grooby were very gracious hosts, offering a big welcoming tent. I liked that they even gave credit to artist Fang Ling Lee who designed the custom TEA awards trophies. Grooby are a class act.

Jujubee, wearing a red sequin number and big hair, did one of the best MC jobs I have ever seen at an awards show: vivacious, irreverent, and witty, while moving the proceedings along. Morgan Bailey and Hudsy Hawn did red carpet interviews in bright sparkles and shiny rubber respectively. Hudsy Hawn also performed, as part of the Stockroom sponsorship of the event.

I’ll just touch on a few of the awards most likely to be of interest to Blue Blood readers. OG FTM activist superstar tattooed hottie Buck Angel sponsored and presented a new award for Best FTM Scene and talked about how remarkable it is to see tables full of FTM performers now. If you like teen idol boy bands, there were a lot of young FTM performers and scenesters at the event who could give you Propaganda flashbacks. Or Justin Bieber comparisons for the younger set. Blackula, also known for his alt photography, won in the Best Scene Producer category. James Darling won Best FTM Performer for the second year in a row. (If you like punk rock boys, James Darling is even hotter in person, if that is possible.) I was introduced to two creative new sites I had not seen before by a couple of the presenters. Tempest is the star of TS RockDolls and Odette Delacroix told me about Futanaria which features actual live action special FX futanari.

Other luminaries in attendance included Aiden Starr (who apparently can make eating a hot dog look erotic and raunchy), Scarlet Starr (no relation), Stockroom’s Johnny White, April Flores, sexuality educator Sunny Megatron (whose hair looked gorgeous!), producer Ken Melvoin-Berg, photographer/house mother Laura D, and photographer Ashes Wednesday.

The awards have a new name this year. This is actually the 7th year of the awards show. It just used to be called the Tranny Awards before it was called the Transgender Erotica Awards. I kind of like the term tranny because it is inclusive and doesn’t specify whether one means transsexual, transman, transvestite, etc. Identity is so personal and there is such a range of how one can feel about the gender component.

But language evolves. The internet offers a wonderful ability to realize that we are none of us alone, no matter how unusual we might have felt before the digital age. On the flip side, sometimes people who would have been comrades pre-internet can get into divisive squabbles over issues like whether shemale or transgender or mangina are good words or bad words. I think the linguistic jury is still out, but I hope that, while thinking about the benefits and dangers of certain word choices, people remember a certain sense of community.

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Posted by Amelia G on February 16, 2015. Filed under Happenings, Headline, Images, Personalities, Sex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry