Four Sexy Men Who Were Born Women

From:  Queer Click

As a follow-up on last week's post about Balian Buschbaum, we've put together this list of four other transmen who we'd happily go to bed with. Seriously though, some of these transformations are absolutely incredible. Plus, you'll be happy to know that in spite of the fact that he passed through Cher's birth canal, we've neglected to include Chaz Bono in this list. We think Chaz is attractive and everything, we just thought we'd give some other people a bite at the apple, you know? Enjoy!

 1. Buck Angel

First up is porn actor and producer Buck Angel. Buck has won all sorts of awards in the adult industry and pioneered a completely new genre, to boot. He was the original "Man with a Pussy." Plus, let's be totally honest, he's one of the sexiest daddy-types we've seen around here.

 Buck Angel (born 1972) is an American female-to-male (FTM) transsexual, adult film producer and performer, and LGBT icon. He is also founder of Buck Angel Entertainment, as a vehicle to produce media projects. He received the 2007 AVN Award as Transsexual Performer of the Year, and works as an advocate, educator, lecturer and writer.

 According to his website, Angel was a pronounced tomboy as a child and adolescent. Born in the San Fernando Valley area of California, his gender atypical behavior during childhood was generally accepted at home. But, once his secondary sex characteristics began to develop around[ age 16, his home life became increasingly tense. After a suicide attempt in high school, his parents sent him to therapy. It was in his therapy that he admitted, for the first time, that he felt like a man. The information was not well received and according to Angel "They were going to put me in a mental institution." Unaware of the existence of treatments for gender dysphoria such as hormone replacement therapy, he lived for years as a female, during which time he took drugs and drank alcohol. Though he was profitably employed as a professional model, he has stated that he was generally dissatisfied with his identity and existence, and "was not loving life".

 Angel began to produce and star in his own line of adult films (Buck Angel Entertainment). As he had not had any genital surgery and still possessed a vulva, he created a unique niche, calling himself "The Man With a Pussy".

In 2005, he also became the first FTM to be featured in an all-male porn film produced by an exclusively gay porn company. This was the Titan release Cirque Noir. He is considered as the pioneer of an entirely new genre in gay porn films.

Also in 2005, Buck performed in Allanah Starr's Big Boob Adventures, directed by transsexual Gia Darling, which included a pornographic first: a filmed sex scene between a male-to-female transsexual (Allanah Starr) and a female-to-male transsexual. For that performance, Allanah was nominated for two AVN Awards including Transsexual Performer of the Year and Most Outrageous Sex Scene.

In 2008, he had a lead role in Buckback Mountain that earned the film two nominations for "Best Alternative Release" and "Best Specialty Release" at the GayVN Awards.

In September 2008 he flew to London, where British artist Marc Quinn began a life-size sculpture of Angel, to be included in the sculptor's upcoming global tour. The finished sculpture has been and shown all over the world.

In October 2008 Angel appeared in director Ed Powers' book NAKED about the adult film industry. He filmed a sex scene with porn star Wolf Hudson for the accompanying documentary film NAKED, produced by mainstream photographer Justin Lubin.

In 2010-12 he created an award winning series about trans male sexuality called "Sexing The Transman XXX".

Between 2006 and 2010, Angel appeared on various talk shows including Howard Stern, Tyra Banks, Maury Povich and Secret Lives of Women in the US, the Morning Show in the UK, and the Jensen Show in the Netherlands.

In February 2010, Angel spoke at Sex Week at Yale University and was also invited to speak at a Master's Tea. In June 2010 Angel spoke at IdeaCity10 in Toronto.

In 2012 Angel created a dating website for transgender men called BuckAngelDating.com. He said he did this because “there was still no special dating site catering to the unique needs of transmen.”

 2. Ian Harvie

Next is comedian Ian Harvie. Harvie began is comedy career opening for Margaret Cho and has had his own talk show and comedy tours. To be honest, we're not overly impressed with the stand-up we've seen, but he's still pretty damn sexy.

 Ian Harvie is an American stand-up comedian who often references being a trans man in his performances

 Harvie knew he was transgender at a very early age, but didn't have a language for his gender identity at the time. Ian came out as queer at nineteen and later as transgender at age thirty-two. Harvie grew up on Beaver Pond in rural mountain town, Bridgton, Maine until the age of twelve and has two older brothers Rob and Jeff. He cites early comedy influences The Carol Burnett Show, Flip Wilson, Rich Little, Hee Haw, Laugh-In, Dean Martin Celebrity Roast, and Saturday Night Live.

 Harvie began his stand-up comedy career in January 2002 at a small comedy club in Portland, Maine. Three months later he began performing at a sister club in Boston, Massachusetts. Harvie moved to Los Angeles, California in June 2006. By November 2006 he began touring with iconic comedienne Margaret Cho as her Opening Act. Cho cast Harvie as a permanent member of her off-Broadway burlesque comedy revue: Margaret Cho's: The Sensuous Woman.

In April 2007, Harvie began producing and hosting his own self-titled comedy/talk show: The Ian Harvie Show at Los Angeles music and comedy club, Largo. The show is a similar format to other late-night talk shows but with guests who are all LGBT or connected to the LGBT community. Previous guests of the show include Margaret Cho, Leslie Jordan, Jane Lynch, Alan Cumming, Jorja Fox, Suzanne Westenhoefer, Kimberly Peirce, Rex Lee, Selene Luna, Jenny Shimizu, Buck Angel, Garrison Starr, Sabrina Matthews, and Erin Foley.

From October 2006 through October 2009, Harvie toured comedy clubs and theaters around the world with Margaret Cho. In 2007 Harvie appeared on Logo as part of Wisecrack Outlaugh Festival on Wisecrack. Harvie performed on Logo again in 2009 on One Night Standup Episode 6 and on ABC's late night television series, Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen in the 2009 season.

In November 2009 Harvie began his solo headlining career and took his one-man show Parts Sold Separately, which features humor about sex and gender, played the Melbourne International Comedy Arts Festival in Melbourne, Australia in April 2010. In January 2011 Harvie performed his new solo show Balls OUT with Ian Harvie at SF SketchFest in San Francisco, CA.

In September 2010 Harvie and fellow sober comedians Felon O'Reilly and Amy Dresner began a three-person comedy group and traveling around the US with their collective recovery-based standup comedy show titled Laughs Without Liquor, the We Are Not Saints tour. The road show and tour is currently being filmed by Filmmaker and Director Bobby R. Poirier and is set to be released Summer 2011.

 3. Loren Cameron

Loren Cameron. Photographer, author, activist, and all-around dreamboat. His pictures pretty much speak for themselves.

 Loren Rex Cameron (born 1959) is an American photographer, author and transsexual activist. His work includes portraiture and self-portraiture which consist of lesbian and transsexual bodies in both clothed and nude form. Cameron's photography captures images of the transsexual body that "provide an affirming visual resource for transgendered people and to demystify the transsexual body for the non-transgendered viewer."

 Loren Rex Cameron was born in Pasadena, California in 1959. He moved to rural Arkansas in 1969 after his mother's death, where he lived as a self-described tomboy on his father's farm. By the age of sixteen, Cameron identified both sexually and socially as a lesbian and encountered homophobic hostility in the small town where he lived. At this time, Cameron quit school and left his home to travel the country seeking work as a construction laborer and other blue collar employment. In 1979, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where he identified socially with the lesbian community until the age of twenty-six, when he confronted his dissatisfaction with the female body with which he was born. Cameron's interest in photography coincided with the beginning of his physical changes as he documented his own physiological transition from female to male at this time. Despite his lack of formal training, beginning in 1993 Cameron studied the rudiments of photography and began to compassionately photograph the transsexual community. Since 1994, he has given lectures on his work at universities, educational conferences and art institutes. By 1995, Cameron's photographs had been shown in solo exhibitions in San Francisco, Minneapolis, a Los Angeles.

 Loren Rex Cameron's photography and writing was first published by Cleis Press in 1996. Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits, documented Cameron's personal experience of transition from female to male, his life as a man, and the everyday lives of transmen he knew. Body Alchemy was received with much positive acclaim and became a double 1996 Lambda Literary Award winner. It remains his most well-known work to date, though he has since published other photographic works.

Cameron's images have been exhibited in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, in Santiago, Chile, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Sao Paulo, Brazil, and in Mexico City, Mexico. They have been published in numerous books such as Transgender Warriors (Leslie Feinberg, 1996) and Constructing Masculinity: Discussions in Contemporary Culture (Routledge, 1995), as well as in various magazines. He has also posed for photographers such as Daniel Nicoletta, Amy Arbus, and Howard Shatz.

Cameron lectures throughout the United States at universities and other venues, including Smith College, Harvard, Cornell, Brown, the University of California at Berkeley, Penn State, and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In May 2008, Cameron presented his work at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. On television, he has been profiled on the Discovery Health Channel's LGBT-themed one-hour special Sex Change: Him to Her, on the National Geographic Channel's "Taboo" Sexual Identity" series. He has also been interviewed in the magazine, The New Yorker. Cameron's photographs document the lives and bodies of both transsexual men and women, providing positive, beautiful images of transgendered people. His first published works (Body Alchemy and Man Tool: The Nuts and Bolts of Female-to-Male Surgery) consists largely of self-portraits, FTM body modifications, and portraits of other female to male transsexuals. More recently published work is a diverse and unprecedented representation of both female and male transsexuals, portraits and classical nudes (Body Photographs by Loren Cameron Volume 1 and 2, and Cameron Correspondence 1997-2003, Taller Experimental Cuerpos Pintados 2003).

A current photographic project focuses on the sexuality of gay FTMs.

4. Ryan Sallans

Ryan Sallans is an LGBT activist and public speaker who has published a memoir and made appearances all over TV. He's only 5'3, but some of us have quite the soft spot for shorter guys, don't we?

 Ryan Kim-Scout Sallans (born Kimberly Ann Sallans; 1979) is an American LGBT rights advocate and out trans man. Ryan began his transition from female-to-male in 2005. He travels the nation speaking to professionals, college audiences, and youth about what life is like being transgender and how health care is changing.

In addition to his career as a public speaker, Ryan has been featured in magazines around the world. He shares his story about his struggle with an eating disorder and how he came to terms with his gender identity. He has been featured in Closer Magazine, the Salina Journal, The Reader, and NewsNetNebraska.

Ryan has also been a guest on Larry King Live! in 2007 and 2009 and talked about his gender transition and his status as an out trans man.

 In 2005, Sallans began undergoing a physical and social gender transition from female to male. He had a bilateral mastectomy with nipple grafts performed the beginning of May 2005 before beginning hormone therapy in June. During this time he was featured in the LOGO documentary, Gender Rebel, which captured him at the beginning of his transition. In July 2005, a Nebraska Court granted his request for a name change and he legally completed his transition in October 2005, when he had his gender officially changed on all of his legal documents including his birth certificate. Ryan also underwent bottom surgery in the form of a hysterectomy in 2006 and a metoidioplasty in 2008.

Since 1999, Ryan has worked as a trainer and speaker on issues surrounding eating disorders, body image and wellness. He first began including transgender issues in his presentations in 2007, shortly before completing his gender transition. Since then he traveled the nation sharing his transition story with universities and communities, as well as helping professionals establish better comprehensive care and understandings surrounding LGBTQA issues. He offers a wide range of issue-based presentations that an be broken down into "University" and "Professional" presentations.

In April of 2012, Sallans' memoir, "Second Son: Transitioning Toward my Destiny, Love and Life" was released. The memoir explores Sallans' struggles as a child in Nebraska, his fall and recovery in college as an anorexic female, and his transition in the Midwest. It gives readers insight into the struggles and triumphs Ryan has encountered throughout his experience as an out Midwestern trans man.