SoMa Literary Review - Biography of Ms. Pam Handlah

Biography of Ms. Pam Handlah

SoMa's Tranny Street Sage

Ms. Pam Handlah is SoMa's literary street denizen. You can find her spouting her words of wisdom up and down Sixth Street between Market and Howard, typically around closing time for the local bars.

That's how we found her. After a night of heavy drinking, her sage one-liners seemed to make remarkable sense. We quickly realized it wasn't just our intoxication that made her seem so brilliant - Ms. Pam is, in fact, a fountain of scholarly quotations. She cherry-picks from her mental Rolodex the best single sentences of Gide, Camus, Whitman, Joyce, Wilde and countless others to create a one-woman trotting book fair that rivals a month's worth of late night C-Span.

After hearing her on several occasions, we stopped to ask her story. We discovered she's not just another strung-out tranny hooker, but a remarkably well educated person with a tale of her own worthy of Dickens.

A graduate of Brown University, she came to San Francisco three years ago to work for a dotcom start-up. While living in the "fabulous" SoMa loft she bought with leveraged stock options, she immersed herself in her new hood and became entranced by the world of gender manipulation. By day she wrote e-commerce code. At night she learned the subtleties of hiding candy.

The dotcom she worked at was one of the early casualties of Wall Street's wake-up call. She couldn't pay for the condo, and soon found those options that made her a millionaire on paper had become a massive debt to the IRS. Poverty-stricken and soon to be a wanted tax scofflaw by the Bush administration, she sold her possessions and moved into a SRO where she assumed her female persona full time.

At Brown, where students are allowed to make up their own majors, Ms. Pam combined studies in English Literature, Film History, and Computer Science for what she called "Industrial Light and Magic 101." Since most of her work is done late at night, she spends many afternoons, sans drag, at the Metreon and Embarcadero movie theaters.

So we asked her to combine her proclivity for one-liners with her lifelong love of the movies, and a new column for SoMa Literary Review was born.

Kemble Scott

Editor

August 2001

Related Link: One Sentence Movie Reviews