Struggling for Ordinary. Andre Cavalcante
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feature characters who temporarily cross-dress to accomplish something and then stop after getting what they want.
By the 1950s, transgender representation experienced a paradigmatic shift, moving beyond the temporary transvestite film trope. In addition to portraying transgender subjectivity as something that one did, film, news, and other forms of popular media presented it as something one was. Gender variance moved from an act to an identity—a shift largely precipitated by the story of Christine Jorgensen and other real people who publicly transitioned gender. Throughout the early twentieth century, newspapers would occasionally print stories of gender transformation and sex change. For example, in 1931 the European press created a public stir with their coverage of Lili Elbe, a Danish painter who underwent one of the first recorded male-to-female sex changes (as dramatized in the 2015 film The Danish Girl). Sex change stories were also present in the journalism of the American West, as local newspapers were fascinated with gender benders (mainly women presenting as men) surviving and thriving along the country’s wild frontier (Boag 2011).
Yet it was the 1951 front page of the New York Daily News announcing the sexual transformation of Christine Jorgensen that captivated the global cultural imagination and instantiated transgender identity as something one can be and inhabit full time. Headlining with “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty: Operations Transform Bronx Youth,” the story created a massive sensation. In her autobiography, Jorgensen remembers feeling bewildered at the level of publicity she received, recalling that for a time her story overshadowed news coverage of the historic hydrogen bomb tests at Eniwetok Atoll. On the one hand, her journey stoked anxieties about what it meant to be male and female, and the press presented her as a bizarre curiosity. On the other, amid the social and political anxieties of the Cold War era, Jorgensen’s transgender identity was framed as a success story, a triumph of modern science, a daring tale of self-actualization, and a win for Western individuality (Meyerowitz 2002).
Thrust into the spotlight, Jorgensen carefully crafted her image for a 1950s viewing public, styling herself as a classic Hollywood “blonde bombshell.” She also identified as heterosexual and articulated dreams of domestic life. Her gender performance was conventional and she was celebrated for it. Those who followed suit also garnered press attention in 1950s America. As with Jorgensen, Charlotte McLeod and Tamara Rees became public figures and models of the “good transsexual” (Skidmore 2011, 272), embodying whiteness, heterosexuality, domesticity, and conventional femininity. In choosing to highlight these women’s stories—to the exclusion of women of color and women who were less conventionally feminine—media presented a narrow conception of transgender subjectivity (ibid.). Nevertheless, Jorgensen and others gave sex and gender transgression a human face, and for those who felt similarly to them, they served as role models.
Seeking to capitalize from the new public interest in transgender topicality that Jorgensen’s story spurred, film production companies increasingly began to green-light projects with transgender themes. For example, Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda, released in 1953, was marketed with the tagline “I Changed My Sex!.” Financed on a shoestring budget, the movie told the story of a man who agonizes over the consequences of telling his fiancé he is a transvestite. Wood, himself a transvestite, used the film as an attempt to humanize and explain transvestism. In the film, the character Dr. Alton, a psychiatrist, underscores that transvestism is a harmless and sincere condition of healthy heterosexual men with “normal” sex lives. Into the 1960s, film continued to articulate transgender identity as a medical concern but pushed further, framing it as a dangerous and pathological condition. This was most clearly evidenced in Psycho (1960) and Homicidal (1961). Psycho was Alfred Hitchcock’s horror story about a psychopathic cross-dressing murderer. The film became a pop-cultural sensation: “Psycho upstaged the presidential campaign … teenagers turned the showings into rituals—returning with their friends again and again” (Hoberman 2010). Inspired by the success of Psycho, William Castle, another iconic horror director of mid-century America, produced and directed Homicidal one year later, which offered another shocking tale of a transgender killer. Both films captured the American popular imagination and offered up images that associated gender transgression with madness, violence, and emotional instability.
In the counterculture of the 1960s, however, underground and cult films offered alternative and more transgressive imaginings. Reflecting the zeitgeist of the space age and a daringness to push boundaries, these films ventured into new, previously unexplored territories. Jack Smith, an early pioneer of queer cinema, screened gender chaos and queer sexual performance in his art piece Flaming Creatures (1963). Andy Warhol’s taboo-saturated experimental films featured the transgender “Warhol Superstars”: Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis, and Candy Darling, all of whom became legends of avant-garde culture and cinema. Holly Woodlawn, for instance, became the inspiration for Lou Reed’s 1972 hit song “Walk on the Wild Side.” John Waters introduced the world to the fearless and unforgettable drag queen Divine in his early films Roman Candles (1966), Eat Your Makeup (1968), and Mondo Trasho (1969). Divine would later star in Waters’s better known works, including Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974), and Hairspray (1988), a film that was by far his most popular. Collectively, these more fringe films depicted gender variance within a queer subcultural celebration of sexual nonconformity, “dramatic artifice,” and “a theatrical sense of the absurd” (Bell-Metereau 1993, 119). Made by and for queer people, they created a sense of community among moviegoers who marveled in the self-confident and norm-smashing performances of the trans figures.
The 1960s also produced one of the first serious, non-fiction cinematic investigations of gender variance in the documentary The Queen (1968). The independently produced and unusually poignant film revolves around the 1967 Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant held in New York City. The film takes audiences behind the scenes, offering a cinema vérité glimpse at Manhattan’s drag balls, which have a long and rich history dating back to late nineteenth-century Harlem (Garber 1989). We witness the artistry of drag as the queens apply their makeup and wigs, perfect their costumes, perform in dress rehearsals, and compete in the pageant. During offstage moments, we hear about their everyday lives and learn about their relationships. We view the gritty and unglamorous side of drag, and watch the fierce conflict that arises among contestants. As a matter of fact, imagery from The Queen has been recycled for contemporary usage, appearing in the opening credits of Amazon’s hit transgender-themed series Transparent.
Moving into the 1970s, two films about transsexuality, Myra Breckenridge (1970) and The Christine Jorgensen Story (1970), inaugurated the decade. In popular culture, it “was a period of liberalization in the industry,” Diffrient (2013) argues, “when new previously verboten subject matter, such as sex-reassignment surgery, penis transplants, sodomy, and transvestitism, could be presented to an inquisitive public” (55). Inspired by Gore Vidal’s best-selling novel, Myra Breckenridge (1970) was an X-rated, trashy, sexually explicit romp that featured Raquel Welch as a transsexual woman, Myra. In the film, Myron Breckenridge visits Europe to have a sex change operation, becoming Myra. Upon returning to the United States, he visits his wealthy Uncle Buck, who runs an acting school. Pretending to be Myron’s widow, Myra asks Uncle Buck for money, and he puts her to work at his school. The film is a nonlinear and at times nonsensical farce that was well received among queer audiences who appreciated its camp value, but lampooned by critics and the mainstream press (Diffrient 2013). The second transgender-themed film, The Christine Jorgensen Story (1970), was a fictionalized melodrama loosely based on Jorgensen’s life. Whereas the film portrays Jorgensen as a sympathetic and sincere individual, to a contemporary audience it feels campy and melodramatic, exuding emotional excess and garish sentimentality. Nevertheless, at the time some acclaimed the film for its portrait of Jorgensen. The New York Times review maintained, “Here is a quiet, even dignified little picture, handled professionally and tastefully, minus a touch of sensationalism. Compared to a glittery garbage pail like “Myra Breckinridge,” the film is downright disarming” (Greenspun 1970).
Into the late 1970s and 1980s, a corpus of films continued to treat gender variance in more serious and humane terms, albeit within the ideological and imaginative limitations of the time period. Outrageous (1977), an independent Canadian film about a gay hairdresser who becomes a drag queen and his friend Liza who suffers from schizophrenia, offered an unexpected story of friendship and compassion. As film critic Roger Ebert (1977) wrote at the time, “Almost