Actress, comedian and talk show host
Rosie O'Donnell will host a special after the Oprah Winfrey Network's
(OWN) premiere of the Chaz Bono documentary Becoming Chaz, the
Los Angeles Times
reported.
Becoming Chaz, which focuses on
Bono's gender reassignment, premiered in January at the Sundance Film
Festival, where it was acquired by Oprah Winfrey's nascent cabler
OWN.
The film's May 10 premiere will launch
the network's OWN Documentary Film Club.
Immediately following the film,
O'Donnell will host a one-hour special that focuses on the making of
the film and other issues faced by transgender people and their
families. In the special, O'Donnell will talk to Bono, his
girlfriend Jennifer Elia, and the makers of the film.
The 42-year-old Bono, who was born
Chastity Bono to gay idol Cher and the late entertainer-politician
Sonny Bono, announced last June that he was eight months into gender
reassignment.
“I hated my body since puberty,”
Bono says in a trailer for the film released by OWN. “But sex
change never occurred to me at that point. I went on hormones and
started to feel comfortable.”
“There's a lot of stuff that she
[Cher] really doesn't know, because I haven't told her. And there
was that fear: Who's going to love someone like me?”
The sex reassignment is “making me
feel more confident,” Bono adds.
“You know, at some point, I'm going
to have to start calling her him,” Cher says. (The video is
embedded it he right panel of this page.)