This month Showtime will release the critically acclaimed and Golden Globe nominated Soldier’s Girl on DVD. The movie tells the true story of Barry Winchell, a soldier in the army, and Calpernia Addams, the transgender woman he met and fell in love with. The story caught the national spotlight when fellow soldiers at the Fort Campbell army base in Tennessee murdered Winchell because he was perceived to be gay.

Although they only knew each other for a short time, Calpernia Addams and Barry Winchell will be linked together forever and Soldier’s Girl is above and beyond all else a romance, a love story that almost anyone can identify with. The Gay and Lesbian Times recently had the opportunity to talk with the real Calpernia Addams to see what she had to say about the movie and how the events depicted in it have affected her life.

Calpernia Addams: Barry was the first serious boyfriend I had after I had transitioned into living full time as female. We fell into a really fast, deep, intense relationship. It was like a movie. I’d say, ironically, that we had such an intense, passionate, immediate connection that I really thought we were going to go forward with it for the long haul.

CA: I thought they did a really good job of getting across the spirit, the emotion, the love, and they showed it as a love story, which is what it was. They didn’t try to focus on Jerry Springer-like elements and that accessibility has made their movie resonate with so many people — straight people, gay, military, housewives, everybody loved it.

CA: I talked to the actors, the writers and had meetings and stuff, and it still is awful to keep reliving the story and telling it over and over, but I feel it’s important to do and it’s doing good work in honoring Barry’s memory. When I actually went onto the set in Toronto it had my mind reeling; it was so surreal and brought back so many memories, both good and bad. The first time I met Troy Garity … I burst into tears and had to leave. It was just really painful and emotional the whole time.

CA: I think Lee really found the complex core of a lot of the things I was feeling at that time. Lee showed a gentle, feminine person who had a really sexy, over-the-top job and yet was very basic and normal in real life, which is how I was. And also the difficulty in trusting anybody, because as a transgender woman people take advantage of you and do awful stuff to you so often and Lee showed all of those things.

CA: I had to live in Nashville for another year to pick myself back up and get myself together emotionally and everything but I started realizing I just couldn’t live in Nashville anymore. My heart had been broken and spirit had almost been broken totally. In Nashville I was so known in our community as ‘oh she’s the one who’s boyfriend was murdered’ and people asked me about it all the time and talked to me about it all the time so I moved to Chicago. I got a job in hospital administration and had my surgery and just sort of started over from scratch as a regular girl. After a year in Chicago I moved to Hollywood and followed what has been my dream my whole life, as an actress and entertainer, I started a production company called Deep Stealth Productions and now we’re putting on a non-profit benefit performance of the Vagina Monologues [on Feb. 21]. The playwright Eve Ensler is writing a new monologue for me to read about the transgender experience and it’s going to be an all transgender cast. Jane Fonda is one of our sponsors on it, so it’s great. It’s raising a lot of money for the prevention of violence and we are really excited on it.

CA: That’s the quintessential that comes to everyone’s mind. Was Barry gay or straight? Was Calperina a man or a woman? I think when you watch the movie you can see that he loved her, the character in the movie as a woman and Barry loved me as a woman. He never dated men and did not have any sexual response to men. To me, Barry was a straight man who was able to accept the fact that although all of my body was female, except for that one part, he could deal with it. I have since had sexual reassignment surgery, but at that time I hadn’t.

CA: The thing that makes it relative to “Don’t ask, don’t tell” and makes it a hate crime is that if you are attacked or killed because you are perceived to be gay, that’s a hate crime, whether you are or not. The person attacked him because they thought he was gay, and that means that they hate gay people and the attack was a function of that hatred. Honestly, Barry never dated men, wasn’t attracted to them, so I don’t think of him as gay.

CA: I understood that a lot of people thought that way. I am a bit of realist and although I know the facts and the truths of our relationship, if everyone else involved in the case and the trial and in the media start saying all of these things I am going to have to deal with it somehow and set the record straight. It was very difficult and unpleasant and I tried to stay out of the limelight and the eye of the cameras and media at first because I knew that people, if they thought I was transsexual would think, “Winchell must have been a fag” or “what a freak, I can’t believe he was involved with her” and then when I started seeing articles like Time magazine calling me “Winchell’s cross dressing friend” and other magazines getting the story so wrong I felt like I had to step out and set the record straight so that it would honor his memory and honor the truth.

GLT: Do you think there are a lot of gray areas in society with regards to transgender issues like sexual orientation and gender orientation?

CA: A lot of transgender women have a lot of different ideas about it themselves. There’s not even a complete consensus in our community. Some women think you’re a transsexual if you put on lipstick and high heels every so often because it turns you on. Some people would say that person is a crossdresser, not a transsexual. For me, a transsexual is somebody that feels in their soul that they are a woman, and they feel that so strongly that they are driven at all costs to become that person no matter what it costs them socially or emotionally. That’s who I am, and I went through that process.

CA: Sort of situationally, I have become that. I just thought I would transition, quit being a showgirl and go get married somewhere and settle down and be a Normal Rockwell housewife. But the way things have happened it turns out I have a bit of a platform to speak from so I think it’s important to do what I can.

CA: I feel like I should focus on my strengths and not try to spread myself too thin. As a lifelong entertainer, actress and showgirl, my personal thing has been the media portrayals of transgender women. In the movies or television we are all either a prostitute, a psycho or a punch line in everything and I think movies like Soldiers Girl are ways to change people’s mind. Not a pamphlet or someone screaming on a bullhorn or whatever are not going to do it as smoothly or easily as a well crafted piece of entertainment. My focus, through my production company and all of my interactions with the media is to put positive portrayals of trans-women out there and correct the mistakes.

CA: No, I’m open to it, but I’m so busy with this charity production and working and I haven’t met a man who is enough of a man to date a woman like me yet. Not since Barry.