JEWEL'S DARL (1987) dir. Peter Wells Drag queen Mandy describes her love for her trans girlfriend, Jewel. Jewel's Darl concentrates on the fine details of their relationship: tea and biscuits in bed, Jewel's belief in staying strong against other people's mockery, and Mandy's memories of a troubled childhood. (link in title)
Watched Ernst Lubistch's I Don't Want to Be a Man yesterday for a class. 1910s transmasc yaoi goes fucking crazy.
Tomboyish girl hates acting feminine and family brings in a male doctor to "break her down" and teach her manners. Out of spite, she buys a suit and crossdresses as a dapper boy to sneak into a party. Immediately gets flirted with and chased by a literal crowd of girls. Runs into the doctor and decides to try and seduce his girlfriend for revenge. While she and the doctor are fighting (doctor thinks she's a boy), they realize his girlfriend's already gone and they get drunk. They start kissing and making out and fall in love (doctor still thinks she's a boy). They accidentally run into each other the morning after and flirtatiously promise not to talk about yesterday's "adventure." Later, the girl reveals she was the boy and teasingly tells the doctor that she'll "break him down." Instead of getting angry, the doctor smiles, knowing he got his ass handed to him, and they kiss again.
Do you guys think anyone fujoshi'd out in 1918.
SOUTHERN COMFORT (2001) dir. Kate Davis The final year in the life of Robert Eads, a transgender man from the back hills of Georgia. “A hillbilly and proud of it,” he cuts a striking figure: sharp-tongued, bearded, tobacco pipe in hand. Though his home is nestled among tranquil hills dotted with hay bales, Robert confronts a world hostile to him. He was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, then turned away by more than two dozen doctors who feared that taking on a trans patient might harm their practice. Beginning in spring, he falls deeply in love with Lola, a trans woman. That summer, his mother and father drive ten hours to visit their “lost daughter,” a trip they know may be their last. His final dream is to make it to the Southern Comfort Conference in Atlanta, the nation’s preeminent transgender gathering. Beating the odds, he addresses a crowd of 500 and takes Lola to “The prom that never was”. (link in title)
Laurie: "We got talking to this young man. Well, he was young anyway."
Jo: "Yes, I thought he was a man too."
Laurie: "Suddenly he said 'I'm going to have a baby,' and we'd just left the station."
Jo: "The awful thing was, we congratulated him. We thought he'd meant his wife, the long-haired girl next to him."
Laurie: "Yes, we thought he meant his wife."
Jo: "The next minute, he was on the floor in labour."
Laurie's father: "How appalling. A man? English?"
Laurie: "Oh yes."
Laurie's mother: "Which class were you travelling?"
been working on this little site of links to (mostly historical-ish) transgender docos, books, magazines etc to go with my new trans history instagram if anyone else loves transexual links enjoy!! 💖🏳️⚧️ u can have a transgender movie marathon without having to go to 20 random websites to hunt them down
"Within the space of 24 hours, Feña is swept through the extremes of human emotion when people who seemed to disappear when he transitioned are suddenly back in his life."
“ONE OF THE BEST FILMS ABOUT POST-TRANSITION ADJUSTMENT.”
“I HOPE SOMEDAY A TRANS PERSON IS HAVING A CLICHÉ TALK WITH THEIR PARENT AND THINKS, “MY GOD. I FEEL LIKE I’M IN MUTT.”
Here's where it's showing across the U.S.: muttthefilm.com/us-theaters
great freedom 🤝 joyland
queer existence may be treated as unwanted and even criminal, but it’s potentially full of far more freedom and community and joy than can be found by clinging desperately to systems that make you force yourself into tinier versions of selfhood, just to maintain correct ways of being, and although there is likely punishment and loss and pain that these smaller people will dole out to force queerness out of existence, the fight is worth it, and the self is worth it, and the joy is worth it
some more movies I watched this year (so far) that had some things to say about queerness that made my head explode
the transexual menace (1996): rosa von praunheim just wandered around new york interviewing trans people in a way that is off the walls in terms of just how many voices are included in the piece. the community, the scale of it, it's like rapid fire "how many experiences can you include in this (yes)." if you want to be inundated with the feeling of "we have always been here and we've always been fucking cool." my favourite ongoing thread is the interviews of trans immigrants from several continents, but there's so much to take in in such a short runtime, I feel like it deserves 100 more watches
kokomo city (2023): d smith celebrating black trans sex workers in several cities in america, notably allowed the kind of freedom of expression that comes from being an intracommunity piece, rather than voyeuristic a la elements of paris is burning. I swear our greatest philosophers of the age are black trans sex workers, you do not hear these truths in mainstream LGBT politics and philosophy, and also it's so fucking funny. d smith herself was lamenting how often film doesn't show just how funny trans women can be, as a part of undermining the overall complexity of trans woman experiences
wildhood (2021): a story about a multi-ethnic kid who flees his abusive father and goes on a roadtrip to find his mother and reconnect with his native Mi'kmaw heritage, and on the way also allows himself to challenge the fraught masculinity he was raised on, via falling in love with an Anishinabeg boy *deep breath.* there's no way I can celebrate this harder than through the above description, it packs so much depth of suppressed identities into a simple story, I don't think its like exists honestly, and that's not even going into how compellingly acted the characters are
honey moccasin (1998): so at the beginning of the year there was a one month online festival celebrating native film and I went on a binge -- this movie I went into without knowing the plot and I kind of loved that experience, so I'm hesitant to say too much about plot (also because how to summarise a plot so cornucopian). in terms of feel though, this is something that offers a tantalising example of counter-image to dominant, hollywood-ised cinema, not quite "avant-garde" so much as simply wholly itself, a joyful ride through a place and time, incredibly funny, and with that complex gender-sexuality-ethnicity that isn't easy to sum up using white eurocentric terminology
glen or glenda (1953): I don't think it's quite possible to be able to fully comprehend how modern trans identities have been crafted without this film. at this point in time american psychiatrists were winning the fight to "own" the language of transness, putting us squarely (or so they thought) into the realm of pathologisation and medicalisation as a way of enforcing conformity. this film captures that zeitgeist, while also putting out impassioned pleas for tolerance, in language that is struggling against the small box that we can exist in, at times breaking out and giving us images that are intensely modern (or maybe reminiscent of pre-war ideas?) and at others functioning within those limitations. it's frustrating, it's illuminating, it's colonialist, it's an attempt at liberation, it's an indelible, visible stamp of history
lotus sports club: this one's a tad more personal to me, I've screened this movie, I've met one of the directors, I play football, getting to see trans people a continent away building spaces that I've found lacking in my own country (but crucially are being built at a community level now as well) squeezes at my heart so intensely, both times I've seen this film I've felt like I wasn't breathing. we're connected across space in a way that cannot be sufficiently described in a simple summary. also there's a fundraiser to support this team and the trans guys who've played on it so there's a tangible way to reach out to our siblings in Cambodia
Leslie Feinberg, Transexual Menace, 1996 (dir. Rosa Von Praunheim)
had the opportunity and privilege to watch kokomo city yesterday, a documentary about black trans sex workers in America, directed by d. smith, who was working with some of the biggest names in the music industry, before (surprise surprise) losing employment and housing following her transition
if there's any chance to watch it, I really do recommend. there's so much love in the imagery and it's so vibrant, you can tell she's got a music background in the way the image beats move electrically with the soundtrack, and it adds to the ability to tell nuanced stories and let the women (and cis men who speak about their attractions to trans women) actually be funny/smart/sad/complicated
I hope this spells a shift in her opportunities and in the platforming of this sort of work and documentation
More recently, Wachowski has partnered with the non-profit QUEER|ART as one of the organization’s cadre of esteemed mentors.
I will say this for “the world according to garp” it was like “the most magical person you could get to know is a trans woman” and they’re not wrong about that
having now finished it, there is technically an interesting exploration of different facets of radical feminism buried in this story, but oddly enough they’re not the point, even as this makes up the majority of the backdrop. and I actually quite liked the way roberta was written, I’d love more narratives were trans women are a part of feminist circles + considered wonderful friends + this is a rare one where she’s not friendless or pre-surgery or agonisingly in the closet.
I also was increasingly fascinated by the story of the Ellen Jamesians, but again, were they (or the character of Ellen James)... for... anything? I get confused about how this ties into garp’s sense of self/life/narrative, why he “cares” so much, especially as something that comes in at idk... over the 1 hour mark perhaps.
so overall an interesting film, I’m not thaaat compelled to read the novel, but just on its own merits, can see how a different way of shooting and editing it (with some trimming) would be good. the ending, of course, was... there.
You know, I’d love to have a conversation with cis men who played trans women pre-2005ish (this a bit loose depending on country, because the conversation about cis people playing trans people is different in different countries. list below is english-speaking movies).
youknow, how did John Lithgow approach this character in 1982, a character who’s very nonchalant about being trans? Jaye Davidson. Chris Sarandon. Lee Pace. Cillian Murphy. Hugo Weaving. John Leguizamo (I believe described his role along those terms -- too bad Patrick Swayze is no longer with us as well). -- and the english actors in those PSA films like “I want what I want” or “different for girls” (I haven’t yet seen “girl stroke boy”). What spaces did they move in that included trans people, if any? were they able to/did they want to actually interact with trans communities? how much was the awareness such that they knew that trans people existed prior to taking on these roles? have they felt they understood more/wanted to be allies to the trans community?
-- this not as a necessarily a series of attacking questions, because a fair few of these films were done with some (I wanna say) love for trans people, either as a wish to educate, or as a celebration of. I think they’re interesting as a part of the representation of transness, for better or for worse. and I’d be interested in a timeline, for example, I think it may have been more likely for later “bigger” actors to know and work with trans women (as al pacino did in his early stage career) in the 70s than in the 80s, but I could be very wrong about that
thoughts thoughts thoughts
FROM YOU DON’T KNOW DICK: COURAGEOUS HEARTS OF TRANSSEXUAL MEN (1997) - trans men discussing what it means to be trans and a man
Stephan: Being a transsexual man is different. It’s truly different. I didn’t grow up a boy. I can’t go to all the same places as those guys have been and will go. And yet turn it around and put me into a group of women, where I used to fit into that, and I don’t fit there anymore either.
Max: Some of us feel like we become man and then we kind of leave being transsexuals behind, because it’s a transition place. And I understand that, but I think what really happens, what I feel really happens, is more sort of a shifting of identity. You know, where man becomes more important at some point than transsexual. And it’s not so much that you give up the transsexual and you take on the man, it’s just that the man part of that compound becomes more important.
James: But I don’t like the term “genetic men” as opposed to transsexual men. Because I’m genetic too. And we don’t know where transsexuality comes from. It could be genetic, who knows.
Stephan: I think the transgendered community has to live with an ambivalence and ambiguity that most other people don’t have to live with. Maybe biracial people live with it in another way. And that’s where I live. I live in this ambiguous, ambivalent place.
Michael: I might be totally wrong about this, but it seems to me that transsexuals are the only ones that really know what’s happening on both ends of the [male and female] spectrum [of experiences].
Max: I don’t know at all what it is to be a woman, and in some ways I do know. Both things are true. That is the strange nature of this, and the power of this ultimately, I think, is that two things that simultaneously cancel each other out can be true at the same time, and are true.
Michael: Now I’m kind of accepting my history as a female, the female part of it. The part of my life that I lived as a female outwardly, and I kept the little boy inside – somehow I kept him alive, and he stayed alive until I could bring him out.
Isabella (Loren’s then-girlfriend), You Don’t Know Dick: Courageous Hearts of Transsexual Men, 1997
Jamison “James” Green (You Don’t Know Dick: Courageous Hearts of Transsexual Men, 1997)
something that strikes me about joyland vs many other films centering trans women, is that biba’s story is one that interweaves with various cisgender women -- while it does have scenes showing her community, which is notably a place she is happy and safe and able to let her guard down, her actual story stands in comparison to other cis women, who likewise are comparable to each other. she’s not the “othered” woman to their “normative” woman, she’s a woman, whose perspective is relevant to a story largely about women
the part where her being transgender is important (and it is important!), is that she has taken the necessary steps in life to be freely herself, and this has come at great cost, but it’s also working. she knows the pain that comes with that and we see a lot of it in the movie itself, but she’s definitely also got the joy that comes from a certain kind of freedom (the freedom of creating a new reality after everything is gone)
so in that sense, the main contrast of her as “trans woman” to their “non-trans woman,” is that it’s given her the opportunity for joy precisely because the margins -- once everything has perceivably been lost -- is where that joy is to be created, whereas the other women whose stories we see are clinging to what scraps they have. they aren’t happy, not because they’re women, but because the little bits that they do have in the society in which they function, are things they’re too afraid to lose to stand up for what they want
nucchi at first appears to be happy as a housewife, desperate to produce a son, but she gets stripped away, bit by bit, merely as someone who can tolerate the role she has. she studied to be an interior designer, I believe it was, and it makes perfect sense, once she shares that piece of information with mumtaz. she comes into focus -- and then she’s the one who suggests that she and mumtaz leave the house together (gasp) to go to the amusement park, for their One Good Day
and mumtaz you simply see deteriorate, until she’s on the verge of doing the one thing that might help -- running away -- and then cannot go through with it. I think at least one of the reasons is that she’s wondering if maybe she can do this after all, if maybe once she tells haider that she’s pregnant something will open up, but instead the future closes in and in and in. she doesn’t manage to grab that one sliver of freedom she had (and it would have come with so much pain), and the ending starts careening at the viewer from that point onwards
the second-to-last scene, where you see haider and mumtaz talk prior to their wedding is just... oof. ouch. mumtaz :( me, sitting in this movie screaming at the screen to just get her the damned air-conditioners she wanted, at least! one thing!
and then lastly the neighbouring woman, who at first presents herself as all about that propriety, and who you then realise is at the end of what this journey is going to be. no longer useful, only a ghost, not even allowed to leave the house, and there’s no way she’ll do anything but accept this, even as she feels, deep down, there’s some way to have joy, and she even briefly offers a small fight for it, before she accepts her fate anew
in the face of all of this, biba’s is the story with the most hope, presenting out and proud transness as a gift rather than a burden that must be borne because nothing else is possible, as it often is. biba is not in a society where she’s safe, or accepted, or respected -- hell, she’s clearly the least privileged person we follow in this film -- but she is free
==> DIE BEAUTIFUL (2016) dir. Jun R. Lana Trisha, a Filipino transgender woman, suddenly dies while being crowned in a beauty pageant. Her last wish was to be presented as a different celebrity on each night of her wake, but her conservative father wants to bury her as a man. Trisha’s friends are left with no choice but to steal her body and hold the wake in a secret location. And as Trisha is transformed to look like different celebrities, they look back on her colorful, extraordinary life as a son, a sister, a mother, a friend, a lover, a wife, and, ultimately, a queen.
To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995)
Dir. Beeban Kidron
This was such a formative movie
This shit was revolutionary for the mid-90s. Among other things it helped me understand that transgender and cross-dressing were completely separate things.
To this day, I am in awe of the fact that Patrick Swayze not only campaigned hard to get the audition, not only auditioned in dress and makeup, but spent most of the day leading up to the audition walking around LA in dress and makeup.
This was a man who could sing, dance, act, ride a horse, fight, and walk in heels, he had nothing to prove to anyone, and he is MISSED.
Okay, I’m not done feeling about this.
If you’re younger, you may not know Patrick Swayze; he was Taken From Us in 2009. But Patrick Swayze was an icon of masculinity. Men were willing to watch romantic movies because Patrick Swayze was in them.
Patrick Swayze was fucking beefcake.
And this man didn’t just agree to do a movie where the only time he’s not actually in drag is the first three minutes, which involve stepping out of the shower, doing make up, and getting Dressed. He has ONE LINE that is delivered in a man’s voice, and it’s not during those three minutes.
And if you watch those three minutes, you see a stark difference between his portrayal of Miss Vida Bohéme and Wesley Snipes as Noxeema Jackson. (I am not criticizing Snipes’ performance. They were different roles.) Noxeema was a comedy character. Chi-Chi was a comedy character. But Miss Vida Bohéme was a dramatic role, played by a dramatic powerhouse.
When Vida sits down in front of the mirror, she sees a man. And she doesn’t like it.
Then she puts her hair up, and her face lights up.
“Ready or not,” she says. “Here comes Mama.”
And while Noxeema is having fun with her transformation (at one point breaking into a giggling fit after putting on pantyhose), Vida is simply taking pleasure in bringing out her true self. And when she’s done, she sees this:
And you can FEEL her pride.
All of this from an actor who, up to this point, walked on to the screen and dripped testosterone.
the fact that some of you history-ignorant children in the notes are trying to shit on groundbreaking historical queer cinema because it doesn’t meet 2021 standards is infuriating. sit down, shut the fuck up, and listen to the elders in the room for fucking once
This. If you have never lived in a world where queerness was universally pathologized and criminalized to the point that even IMAGINING a world where it wasn’t constituted a radical and potentially dangerous act, you don’t have any business judging those of us who have for how we survived it and how we found (or still find) comfort in the few imperfect representations we got.
You don’t have to like it. You probably aren’t capable of “getting” it. And to be honest, I don’t want you to! I am glad that young queer people will never know exactly what it was like “back then.” But what you also will not do is refuse to learn your own history and then shit on everything that came before you, because like it or not what came before you is the reason you will never have to get what it was like back then.
On Wesley Snipes’s role Noxeema and John Leguizamo as Chi-Chi Rodriguez.
“I grew up in the ‘70s and even within the street culture, there was a lot of flamboyancy,” Snipes told TODAY of his perception of drag before filming. “Pimps wore the same furs as theprostitutes wore.
“Some of the great musicians of the world, like Parliament-Funkadelic, were very androgynous. So it wasn’t really new for me to see men dressed as women or men dressed as drag queens.”
Snipes attended the famed LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts and then State University of New York at Purchase. He wasn’t a dance major, but most of his friends were. “That exposed me to the world of glam, vogue, drag, transgender and gay people, LGBTQ… but it wasn’t in fashion those days. But it existed and I was around it.”
Not only did “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” pave the way for “To Wong Foo,” so did films like the 1968 documentary “The Queen” and “Paris Is Burning,” the 1990 doc that chronicled ball culture of New York and the various Black and queer communities involved in it.
Even though he was known for his action roles, Snipes’ portrayal of Noxeema wasn’t the first time he played a drag queen. In 1986, he made his Broadway debut in the play “Execution of Justice,” playing Sister Boom Boom, a real-life AIDS activist and drag nun who acted as the show’s voice of conscience. Snipes pointed out, “Sister Boom Boom did not have Noxeema’s makeup kit.”
On whether he got any pushback for stepping into Noxeema’s pumps, he said, “Not so much professionally but the streets weren’t feeling it, and there were certain community circles. The martial arts community… they were not feeling it at all.”
“In fact, when the movie came out and they would come down the street, I would see them in Brooklyn sometimes, they started listing all my movies. I noticed they would always skip that one. I would correct them, ‘Now you don’t got the full count!’”
Lesser-known than his co-stars at the time, Lequizamo didn’t really anticipate becoming a transgender icon, but he did know that they were working on something special when they started filming.
“Drag didn’t really exist in movies,” Lequizamo, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for his portrayal, told TODAY. “There were straight men pretending to be women to get out of trouble or into trouble but this was not that. I was trying to make Chi-Chi a real life trans character and Patty and Wesley were trying to be real drag queens.” Never fully articulated in the film, Chi-Chi Rodriguez has always been perceived as transgender, something that ending up making an indelible mark on LGBTQ people in the late ‘90s as trans representation in media was limited.
“Chi-Chi was a trans icon, but she also showed us that gay men and trans women can both perform and work in drag side by side, and that those relationships are symbiotic,” Cayne explained.
“It was a powerful thing. I get lots of fan mail from LGBTQ teens telling me how my character helped them come out to their parents,” Leguizamo said. “They didn’t feel like they were seen, so that was a beautiful gift from the movie.”
Lequizamo also articulates that if “To Wong Foo” were cast today, a trans actor should be cast in his role. (And that just may happen, since Beane is developing a musical for Broadway.) “Anybody can play anything, but the playing field is not fair that way,” he said. “Not everybody is allowed to play everything. So until we get to that place, it is important for trans actors to get a chance to act which they don’t. In the project I’m doing, I’m making sure that the person playing trans is a trans person so we can make it legit, make it real. That just needs to be done right now.”
a monumental film in the library of queer history.
it was formative for modern society, too.
there are a lot of action fans out there who learned from their idols that respect doesn’t cost a damn thing to give. i know plenty of people who aren’t queer saw trans women and drag queens presented as people to them for the first time in wong fu. suddenly, strange and foreign queer identities that had only been presented to them as jokes if they’d even heard of them, seemed a little more relatable, and very human.
we’re all just people.
snipes, swayze, and leguizamo were willing to play people a lot of their fans didn’t respect yet or didn’t even know how to respect and demand they figure it the fuck out.
This is a HUGE reblog but I watched this as a little girl on cable TV and I’m so glad I did. GO WATCH THIS AS SOON AS YOU CAN
