TORONTO — Chastity Bono never liked having her picture taken.
As Becoming Chaz — which arrives at the Hot Docs festival Friday — explains, the daughter of Sonny and Cher Bono disliked being on her parents’ ’70s variety show and in the spotlight because she was uncomfortable in her own skin.
But 2 1/2 years ago, when she began taking hormones to transition from a woman to a man, Bono sought out the cameras, asking filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato to document the process and the intimate moments that accompany it.
“That’s one of the profoundly interesting aspects about this whole story,” Bailey, co-director of Becoming Chaz, said. “On the one hand it is about someone changing gender, but on the other hand it’s about change in so many other respects, and one of the most profound changes in Chaz is seeing him go from someone who’s incredibly uncomfortable about his celebrity into someone who suddenly sees a purpose in it . . . .
“He’s able to turn something that’s excruciating into something that he feels is able to help other people.”
Becoming Chaz opens with Bono — sporting a white undershirt, beard hair and tattooed arms — describing in a relatively deep voice how he hated his body since puberty and felt like a man trapped inside a female shell. His ideal body type, he says, is that of actor Michael Chiklis.
Cameras follow Bono as he undergoes breast-removal surgery, gets his name and gender legally changed on his government ID to Chaz Salvatore Bono, and takes hormone shots to ignite a process that one doctor calls “essentially a second puberty.”
He also meets with family, volunteers in a support group for parents of children who are questioning their gender and attends a convention for transgender people, where he considers getting sex-reassignment surgery.
“There was nothing that we couldn’t film. Nothing was off-limits,” said Bailey, who first met Bono when they worked together on the doc The Real Ellen Story, about the obstacles Ellen DeGeneres faced when coming out of the closet.
Cher appears throughout the film in an interview in which she explains that she didn’t want to see Bono in-person because she feared it would be too overwhelming for her. The most traumatizing part of her child’s gender transition, she says, was she called Bono’s voicemail, heard her old voice and realized she’ll never hear that voice again.
Cher and Bono eventually see each other at the end of the doc when he attends the premiere of her latest film, Burlesque.
Bailey said when they first started filming, they didn’t think they would need an interview with Cher. But as they got further into the project, they realized “that this is a very important parent-child story.”
“Yes, it’s Chaz’s transition, but any time a child changes their sex it’s a big deal for the parents and so we realized that Cher really had to be in it,” he said from Los Angeles.
Also seen in the doc is Chaz’s girlfriend, Jennifer Elia, who has a hard time dealing with his physical and emotional changes. The testosterone shots Bono takes makes him more aggressive and short-tempered, and at one point Elia says on camera that she misses the “old Chaz.”
“The other thing about transgender is that we think: ‘Oh, it’s all about the person who’s changing their sex.’ No, it’s not,” said Bailey.
“It’s about a mother who’s losing a daughter but gaining a son and it’s about a girlfriend who’s losing a lesbian lover but gaining a boyfriend. I mean, these are radical changes, so the people around Chaz, they have to transition in their own way.”
Becoming Chaz premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and will air on the OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network in Canada on May 15. Immediately following the broadcast, Rosie O’Donnell will host a one-hour special with Bono, Elia, the filmmakers and other transgender people and their families.
Bailey said OWN has also picked up an eight-episode series that will follow Bono and his partner as they go on a publicity tour for the doc.
“One of the reasons I think the film is connecting with people is because where we have all evolved culturally is that this is the next thing, and that people who perhaps previously couldn’t understand or connect with this issue now can,” said Bailey.
“And I think Chaz is a unique opportunity to tell the story because so many people remember Chaz as that little girl in The Sonny and Cher Show, so they all feel they know him in some way. I think that that makes telling his story of transition unique and connects with people in a unique way.”