Struggling for Ordinary. Andre Cavalcante
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what it isn’t. It’s a bittersweet, endearing, sometimes funny little slice of life.” In Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Al Pacino plays a gay man who robs a bank in order to pay for his lover’s sexual reassignment surgery. Both characters were fully realized with compelling backstories, and were depicted as vulnerable and humanly raw. The World According to Garp (1982) featured the character Roberta Muldoon, played by John Lithgow, a white trans woman and former professional football player who works at a center for troubled women. She is an altruistic and grounded caregiver, although her character has little depth. Perhaps the most serious, even devastating, treatment of transgender subjectivity was In a Year of 13 Moons (1978), a German melodrama. Produced, written, and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the film follows the final days in the life of the character Elvira (formerly Erwin), who changes sex for a love that never materializes and becomes a lost-soul.
One of the most notable, and widely seen, transgender-themed films of the 1970s was not a serious drama but rather a wildly campy sci-fi musical. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) introduced the world to the character of Dr. Frank-N-Furter, an eccentric, transgender scientist and self-proclaimed “sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania.” In the film, a straight-laced heterosexual couple’s car breaks down and they find themselves stranded at Frank-N-Furter’s mansion—an alternative universe of misfits and mischief. Delighted by his new guests, he performs for them dressed in a black corset, stockings, and high heels, effectively staging the erotics of gender transgression. As with Myra Breckenridge, Rocky Horror created a brazen queer world, an alternative reality that upended conventional norms and embraced freaks of all kinds. But unlike Breckenridge, Rocky Horror appreciated high-quality production values, a compelling and linear storyline, and fabulous music. It appealed to both queer and non-queer audiences alike and has become one of the most celebrated and widely known cult classics of all time.
Whereas popular film offered visually striking displays of gender variance throughout the twentieth century, literature provided textual counterparts. Science fiction in particular offered some of the earliest and most imaginative visions of gender crossing. In Gregory Casparian’s An Anglo-American Alliance: A Serio-Comic Romance and Forecast of the Future (1908), a woman in a lesbian relationship undergoes a sexual reassignment surgery to escape discrimination and lives out her life happily with her partner. In Isidore Schneider’s Doctor Transit (1925), a struggling couple switches sex to find happiness by drinking a potion handed to them by the mysterious Dr. Transit. Indeed, body switching, identity exchange, forced gender transformations, magical gender reversals, and gender fluidity populated the world of science fiction throughout the twentieth century. Novels such as Robert Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil (1970), Fred Pohl’s Day Million (1966), and Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness (1969), along with fantasy pulp magazines such as Weird Tales (1923–1954) and Science Wonder Stories (1929–1930), trafficked in these themes.
Like the science fiction genre, comics have also been cultural sites where transgender possibilities have abounded. As Fawaz (2016) argues, postwar American comics had a distinctly queer sensibility that celebrated difference, outsider status, the supernatural, and self-transformation. Expanding the terms of what it meant to be human, popular texts such as The Fantastic Four, starting in 1961, and X-Men, in 1963, affirmed the biological outlaw and presented the body as a site of transition and mutation. Although these texts did not specifically engage with transgender identity, “bodily vulnerability and gender instability constituted the postwar superhero as a figure in continual flux, visualized on the comic book page as constantly moving among different identities, embodiments, social allegiances, and psychic states” (Fawaz 2016, 10).
In early twentieth-century print culture, two novels in particular offered intimate portraits of gender transgression, albeit with different affective structures and tones. The first was Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928), a fictionalized biography about an English nobleman, Orlando, who wakes up one morning as a woman. Beginning during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and ending in 1928, Orlando lives more than four hundred years with a subjectivity that is in constant change and a body in constant transition. Woolf uses the character’s escapade through historic time to comment on Victorian-era norms, gender roles, and sexism. The novel, which became a best seller, was highly poetic and struck a spirited and comical tone. By contrast, Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness (1928), released the same year as Orlando, was a deeply controversial and somber novel about lesbianism and gender liminality. The book chronicled the life of Stephen Gordon, a sexual “invert” born into the British upper class. When compared to Orlando, The Well is far more overcast, tortured, and forlorn. Steeped with insights from the growing field of sexology, it constructs a portrait of Gordon’s uphill search for identity, love, and happiness. Whereas most critics and scholars have focused attention on the character’s sexuality, others have highlighted Gordon’s transgender aspects. Taylor (1998) argues Stephen Gordon “irresistibly solicit[s] a transgender reading” because the character occupies a complex gendered domain, assigned female but is masculine-identified (288). Other noteworthy popular novels that centered trans figures in Western literature were Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge (1968) and The World According to Garp (1978) by John Irving, both of which were turned into films (discussed above).
Perhaps the most treasured texts of the twentieth century for trans people were memoirs and autobiographies of gender transition. These books were highly coveted by virtue of being some of the only cultural sites to reflect the lived realities of trans people. As such, they were precious resources for self-making and belonging, and were shared between individuals (Hausman 2006; Stone 1991). Some early examples include Earl Lind’s 1918 Autobiography of an Androgyne and The Female Impersonators (1922). However, the most widely known trans autobiography of the early twentieth century was Man Into Woman (1933), documenting the life of Danish artist Lili Elbe (born Einar Magnus Andreas Wegener). The book was a compilation of her personal writings and recollections, an attempt by Elbe who, after being sensationalized in the press, wanted to reflect her life as she experienced it. The next major autobiography was Christine Jorgensen’s A Personal Autobiography (1967), which sold 450,000 copies and was later turned into a film (Schilt 2009). On the heels of public interest in Jorgensen’s book, several other transgender autobiographies were published. Notable were Jan Morris’s Conundrum: From James to Jan, An Extraordinary Personal Narrative of Transsexualism (1974), written by the famous travel writer, and Mario Martino’s Emergence: A Transsexual Autobiography (1977), the only autobiography to be penned by a trans man before the 1990s.
The next autobiography to receive the kind of mass attention that Jorgensen’s attracted was Renée Richards’s 1983 Second Serve. In 1976, when Renée Richards, a successful New York ophthalmologist, competed in a California women’s tennis competition, a journalist revealed that she was born a man and had previously played in men’s competitions. Although Richards planned to compete in the US Open, the United States Tennis Association prevented her from doing so by instituting a chromosomal test for female competitors. In 1977, Richards won a much-publicized court battle that allowed her to compete in the women’s event at the US Open. Her story and the court case that ensued became a global controversy, as she recalled, “much of the population of the world had my name on their lips. It was as if someone had dropped an atom bomb” (Richards and Ames 2007, 48). In 1983, Richards released her autobiography titled Second Serve, and three years later a made-for-television film of the same name premiered on network television. As with Christine Jorgensen, Richards’s story brought the concept of sex change into the national conversation and captivated the world. One transgender activist remembered reading her book in high school:
I found her autobiography, and I bought it immediately. I’d never read a book about a transsexual before. Back then, each of us was left to our own devices. I kept it in my locker. I read it surreptitiously. I’d only had experiences with media depictions and other unflattering portrayals. But here was someone healthy, someone multidimensional, and all she wanted to do was compete. (Weinreb 2011, 4)
For both writer and reader, the transgender autobiography is a tool of self-knowledge and discovery. The genre’s narrative structure—with a beginning (undesirable or wrong gender identity), middle (transition), and end (arrival at desired or authentic gender identity)—offers a sense of plausibility and coherence to transgender life (Prosser 1998). “To learn of transsexuality,” Prosser writes,