Gender Variance in the Arts

All Good Things

2011-12-02T05:18:00.000-05:00

Directed by Andrew Jarecki
Script by Marcus Hinchey & Marc Smerling.
101 minutes 2010

Ryan Gosling plays David Marks (= Robert Durst)
Kirsten Dunst plays Katie Marks (= Kathie Durst)
Frank Langella plays Sanford Marks (= Seymour Durst)
Philip Baker Hall plays Malvern Bump (= Morris Black)
Lily Rabe plays Deborah Lehrman (= Susan Berman)

Country of finance: US
Nationality of director: US
Location of story: New York, Galveston, Los Angeles, Bethlehem, Pa.
Filming location: Connecticut, New York City

Plot
See my Who’s Who entry for Robert Durst. The film adheres particularly closely to the facts, particularly by the standards of Hollywood. The major changes are the names of the characters, and a willingness to speculate just what happened to Kathie Durst and Susan Berman.

The film also adds a few lines of dialogue re why David Marks disguises as a woman. He tells the court that he wanted to get as far as possible away from being David Marks. Also Malvern Bump asks him if he actually likes girlie things, to which David says ‘no’.

Curiosities
All Good Things was the name of the health food store that Robert and Kathie ran in Vermont..

The names of all the characters were changed.

The film was made in 2008, but than sat on the shelf, and was quietly released to DVD early in 2011 after a minimal theatrical release.

Reaction of the Durst family and organization
Robert Durst visited the sets as the film was being made and watched from a distance. Apparently he likes the film, but doesn’t admit to any murders.

The Durst Organization considered suing, but “this movie will be seen by so few people that litigation would be superfluous”.

Charles V. Bagli & Kevin. “That’s Me on Screen, but I Still Didn’t Do It”. The New York Times, Nov 24, 2010. www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/movies/28durst.html.
"All Good Things (film)". Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Good_Things_%28film%29.

An Alison Bechdel cartoon

2011-06-09T06:13:00.001-04:00

Leslie Feinberg Transgender Warriors, page 114

Click here for more on Leslie Feinberg.

Eaux D’Artifice

2011-05-22T14:07:00.003-04:00

Directed by Kenneth Anger
13 minutes 1953

Carmillo/a Salvatorelli as the Water Witch

Country of finance: Italy/US
Nationality of director: US
Filming location: Garden of Villa D’Este, Tivoli

Synopsis
A person in eighteenth-century clothing and sun glasses runs around the fountains of the Villa D’Este, to a soundtrack by Antonio Vivaldi.

Trivia
Kenneth Anger’s first film in 1947 was called Fireworks, which in French is Feux D’Artifice. This film is about water so: Eaux D’Artifice.

Anger in his early notes for the Cinema 16 catalogue described the film as “the evocation of a Firbank heroine” and her flight as “the pursuit of the night moth”. This refers to the end of Ronald Firbank’s Valmouth where the heroine goes into a garden in pursuit of a butterfly, dressed in her wedding gown and carrying her bouquet.

All we know about the actor, Carmilla Salvatorelli, is that s/he was a short person, a circus performer, introduced to Anger by Frederico Fellini. Anger wanted a short actor to make the fountains seem larger. The actor is otherwise unknown. When I first read about this film in the 1990s the general assumption was the actor was Carmillo Salvatorelli, that is that this is a cross-acting part. Now IMDB has changed the credit to say Carmilla Salvatorelli, and likewise the booklet that comes with the Magic Lantern Cycle DVD box. However in his revised notes for the Cinema 16 catalogue, Anger wrote Carmillo Salvatorelli.

The change of mind of over Carmillo/a Salvatorelli ‘s gender is no longer mentioned. However it is the fact that she has generally been considered to be male, that has resulted in this being considered a classic of queer cinema.

P Adams Sitney. Visionary film: the American avant-garde, 1943-2000. Oxford University Press, 2002: 91-3.
Deborah Allison. “Eaux D’Artifice: Wet Dreams and Water Sports in the Garden of Delights”. Senses of Cinema, 46, 2008. www.sensesofcinema.com/2008/cteq/eaux-artifice/
“Eaux D’Artifice”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eaux_d%27Artifice

Drag moments in Miller’s Crossing

2011-05-10T21:35:00.003-04:00

Directed by Joel & Ethen Coen
Script by Joel & Ethen Coen.
115 minutes1990

Gabriel Byrne plays Tom Reagan
Marcia Gay Harden plays Verna
John Turturro plays Bernie
Albert Finnie plays Leo

Country of finance: US
Nationality of director: US
Location of story: an unnamed city
Filming location: New Orleans

The much acclaimed Coen Brothers gangster movie loosely based on Red Harvest and Glass Key by Dashiell Hammet and Jojimbo by Akira Kurosawa.

When Tom Reagan bursts into the ladies’ room, notice, if you don’t blink, the large women in black and white: an obvious extra cameo by one of the other principles.

Then there is the woman who screams when Reagan falls upon her. She is played by Helen Jolly who is unknown except for this film. What do you think?

1970s music part 2: Disco

2011-03-22T13:10:00.002-04:00

I don’t have an essay for this as I did with Punk. But here is the start of a list.

Amanda Lear was a disco star in the 1970s.
Sylvester James is best known for the disco classic "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)", 1978.
Eva Robin's as Cassandra recorded the classic, Disco Panther, 1977.
Romy Haag's singles in the late 1970s.
Divine became a disco singer in the 1980s: “You think that you’re a man”
Brian Belovitch as Tish Gervais was a disco singer in the 1990s.
Al Pillay, after his faux sex change, became a disco singer in the 1990s.
Cristina Ortiz Rodriguez sang ‘Veneno pa tu piel’ in 1996.

“A Gang of Trannies”: Gender Discourse and Punk Culture– a review of the chapter by Viviane Namaste

2011-03-05T22:41:00.004-05:00

– Jayne County.

I have previously reviewed Viviane Namaste’s Invisible Lives. In it I said nothing about her chapter on punk, it being a stand-alone chapter that does not change the overall argument of the book.

++ added later
What is punk? Is it a genre, a community, an attitude, a brand? All of these? Who was active in it, especially trans persons? Namaste has no interest in any of these questions. On the first page she writes:

“This chapter examines how gender is organized at a micrological , textual level. Focusing on historical and contemporary media representations of punk culture, I show how discourse about punk is thoroughly masculinist and describe the conditions in which this conception of punk culture emerged. This gendered portrayal of punk thus authorizes a social world in which punk excludes transsexual and transgendered people. … I choose punk as an ‘object’ of analysis precisely because of the unlikely associations between MTF transsexual and punk identities. Yet I remain uninterested in a type of historical inquiry that would establish the presence of MTF transsexuals in punk culture”.

We notice at once that Namaste does not deign to notice trans men who were active in punk, ++not even her friend Max Valero.

Namaste starts with an article in Photo Police, a scandal newspaper, about Val d’Or, Quebec, that assumes that punks are violent, and then a local Montréal paper that is surprised that punks joined in to clean up a local park. These articles are dated the early 1990s. She takes this as typical of mainstream media attitudes to punk.

She cites Matias Viegener, writing in the 1990s, who seems to think that queer punk is something new at that time. She quotes him: “Although the original punk movement seemed to have little tolerance for gays and lesbians, its edginess proved ready-made for a new generations of queers”.   She then declares three perspectives in the academic studies of punk: Punk as asexual; punk as gender fluid and punk as heterosexist, homophobic and misogynist.   She reminds us that Punk was preceded by Glam rock, and mentions David Bowie, Marc Bolan and the New York Dolls. She rightly follows the Glam themes into Punk and quotes one song by the Buzzcocks.

She then goes into detail about an incident in 1976 when Jayne County (when she was still Wayne) was heckled by ex-wrestler Dick Manitoba, singer in the band, The Dictators, shouting homophobic taunts when County was performing at CBGBs in New York. Manitoba then climbed on the stage holding a beer-mug, and County hit him with the microphone stand.   County cut his hair short and wore a false beard, but was arrested some days later and spent one night in jail.   Other musicians and performers including the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, The New York Dolls, Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, Divine put on a benefit to meet County’s legal costs. Three times Manitoba failed to show in court and therefore the charges were dropped (County:108-110).

Namaste does not give the year, fails to mention that Jayne County was still Wayne at that point, confuses CBGBs with Max’s Kansas City, does not give Manitoba’s name, does not mention that he failed to show. She makes it a major point that the other musicians and performers put on the benefit for a transgender musician as if this was not normal, and from another perspective she fails to mention that Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, Divine were also transgender. The anecdote does not carry the weight that she puts on it.

Namaste repeats a report that she had from Margaret O’Hartigan about the band Skafish as another example of trans punk.

Namaste is quite right that The Sex Pistols became the iconic Punk group, and that in their wake other punk groups became conformist and the image was much more masculine. The pogo and the slam dance and the mosh pit were off-putting for many potential punters. Namaste gives this as an erasure of transgender people, in line with the general theme of her book.

---------------------------------

There are so many questions, not to mention facts, that Namaste does not even consider.

All genres change as one or two artists are given media attention.   Likewise conformity afflicts those who come later to the chagrin of the pioneers.   It is not just the queer punks who complained about the conformist slam dunkers. Johnny Rotten/Lydon expressed the same complaint.

We might also note The Rocky Horror (Picture) Show which was a celebration of non-conformity when it opened in 1973. Many of the early fans were quite put off after the film version came out, and performances turned into rigid conformity.

Where did the queer punks go? Many did not go anywhere. They continued playing punk, but were ignored by by the mainstream press. As a trans woman, Namaste should be aware that the true images of minority groups are frequently not reflected in the mainstream press. Other forms of Punk kept going.

Other queer punks went into New Romanticism in the early 1980s and the Goth movement after that.   Goth also went through a phase of masculinization.   Goodlad makes the interesting observation that “Hardcore masculine youth styles are economically preferable to androgynous styles such as goth in part because audiences segregated by gender and age – particularly audiences composed of young men – are especially valuable to the advertisers of youth-related products (p109)”.

Another angel not explored is punk as dandyism or homeovestity. This angel is commented on in the film, The Filth and the Fury. Malcolm McLaren ran a clothing boutique in the Kings Road before he became the Sex Pistols manager. Very few theorists compare transvestity and homeovestity.

So are trans performers erased in Punk? Whether yes or no, it is very easy to come up with a considerable list of trans punkers, reflecting all flavours of trans, and all flavours of punk.

Namaste is a Foucaultian. She actually argues that she needs a Foucaultian approach to sort out out different views of punk by time and place. Personally I would have expected any competent journalist to do exactly that.    Foucaultians are not interested in facts and statistics, and to repeat from the quote above: “Yet I remain uninterested in a type of historical inquiry that would establish the presence of MTF transsexuals in punk culture”.

Not being interested and not giving evidence of presence is surely a participation in erasure.

I do not share this lack of interest. I think that it is a point worthy of note that so many trans women and also trans men have found punk to be a genre or attitude through which they can express themselves.

A final point. Namaste, in her text, does not mention even one surgically completed trans punk (although there is a brief note re Bambi Lake in her footnotes), although as you will see below, there are several candidates.
________________________________________________________________

Pre-punk

The one-time impersonator club, 82 Club, evolved into a glam and punk bar in the early 1970s.

The New York Dolls played with androgyny, but did not go very far.
Jayne County was a punk before Punk Rock in the early 1970s.
Lou Reed had a trans lover and wrote a few songs about trans persons.

Punk

Stella Nova auditioned for the Sex Pistols in 1975, and then was in the Rich Kids with ex-Sex Pistol Glen Matlock.
Al Pillay started out as a gender-bender punk in Spit Like Paint, although after his faux sex change, he became a disco singer in the 1990s.
Gender-fuck Skafish were the first punk band from Chicago.
Sometimes cross-dresser Kevin Rowland played punk before forming Dexy's Midnight Runners in 1979.
Chelsea Godwin played punk rock at CBGBs.
Fanny McNamara and Pedro Almodovar performed as a drag-punk act in the late 1970s.
Anderson Toone played keyboard in the postpunk group, The Bloods.
Marie-France Garcia’s debut single was almost punk.
Ginger Coyote, editor of Punk Globe, singer with White Trash Debutantes.
Donna Lee Parsons wrote a punk fanzine and later was recording manager on Real Men Don’t Floss by The Young and the Useless, and Polly Wog Stew, by the Beastie Boys in the early 1980s.
Claudia Wonder was in the punk band, Jardins das Delícias.
Genesis P Orridge played punk and other genres while in Psychic TV in the early 1980s.
Dean Johnson was a drag-punk musician.
Benjamin Dickerson was a blues punk drag queen.
Chloe Dzubilo was in the punk band Transisters in the early 1980s.
Bambi Lake was a punkette.
Lazlo Pearlman fronted punk bands bands Skinny Wiresand Jezebel's Kiss.
Max Valerio has worked with punk bands.
Animal Prufrock actually played at the Michigan Women’s music festival.
++ Bonze Blayk was in the Angry Samoans
Raphael Carter is a postcyberpunk novelist.
Lucretia Dearfour is a steampunk novelist.
The 1996 film, Different for Girls, features an affair between a trans woman and a punk.
The 1998 film Velvet Goldmine about glam rock with significant queer content,
Vaginal Davis is second generation punk.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch, 2002 – a punk musical about a trans person.
Lynn Breedlove, singer in punk band Tribe8, novelist, comedian.
Cross-dresser Brian Viglione drums in punk bands when not performing in the Dresden Dolls.

Dick Hebdige. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Methuen & Co, 1979: 108,121,123 .
Greil Marcus. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Harvard University press, 1989:36, 75,80 .
Matias Viegener. “ ‘The Only Haircut that Makes Sense Anymore’: Queer Subculture and Gay Resistance”. In Martha Gever, Pratibha Parmar, and John Greyson (eds). Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Jayne Count with Rupert Smith. Man Enough to be a Woman. London: Serpent's Tail, 1995:108-10.
Viviane K.Namaste. Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000: chp 4.
Julien Temple (dir). The Filth and the Fury. With the Sex Pistols. UK/US 108 mins 2000.
Charlotte Cooper. “Remembering. The Skinny, 07 Nov 2007. www.theskinny.co.uk/article/40744-remembering.
Lauren M.E. Goodlad. “Looking for Something Forever Gone: Gothic Masculinity, Androgyny, and Ethics at the Turn of the Millenium”. Cultural Critique, Spring 2007: 104-126.
Lucretia Dearfour. “Using the Transgender Umbrella to Describe the Steampunk Parasol”. SteamPunk, Oct 26, 2010. www.steampunkmagazine.com/guest-post-using-the-transgender-umbrella-to-describe-the-steampunk-parasol/.

________________________________________________________________

Dick Manitoba threatened to sue a Canadian musician for calling a project ‘Manitoba’. So far he has not sued the Province of Manitoba.

Trans persons were not the only sex-gender minority in Glam-Punk. The world’s best known convicted pedophile, Gary Glitter (Paul Gadd) was a Glam rocker.

Doris Aversham .

2011-01-31T15:31:00.002-05:00

Doris was a fictitious amorphous character who turned up at various Gay Liberation Front events in and around London in the early seventies.

Sometimes she was the prudish heterosexual, sometimes an auntie with gay relatives. She was an agony aunt for the GLF paper Come Together, and she wrote shocked letters to newspapers.

She was even once played by a woman, to open a gay jumble sale in Nottingham in 1975.

Kris Kirk & Ed Heath. Men in Frocks. London: Gay Men’s Press. 1984: 98.

Peacock

2011-01-09T18:09:00.002-05:00

Directed by Michael Lander
Script by Michael Lander & Ryan O Roy.
Edited by Sally Menke.
90 minutes 2010 Lionsgate

Cillian Murphy plays John/Emma Skillpa
Susan Sarandon plays Fanny Crill
Ellen Page plays Maggie
Keith Carradine plays Mayor Ray Crill

Country of finance: US
Nationality of director: US
Location of story: Peacock, Nebraska
Filming location: Iowa

Synopsis

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

John has a low-level job in a bank in small-town Nebraska. Every morning Emma, whom no-one in town has met, makes his breakfast, does the washing and leaves him a note re shopping. John keeps a tin box under the outside stairs so that Emma will not know about his savings account and his sports cards. The room of the recently deceased Mrs Skillpa has been left untouched. Only a few minutes into the film we find out that John and Emma share the same body. One day a train caboose slips off the tracks and ends up in the Skillpa back yard as Emma is putting out the washing. This results in others meeting Emma. The local mayor wishes to use the derailment for political advantage. Emma is pleased to let him, John is antagonistic. Maggie comes by to ask why there have been no cheques since Mrs Skillpa, John’s mother, died. Emma drives her home and finds out that Maggie’s son was fathered by John – an attempt by Mrs Skillpa to make a man out of her son. Fanny Krill attempts to recruit Emma for her work at the women’s shelter, which results in John missing time at work. John attempts to run from Emma and the memory of his mother, and takes a room at the local motel. However when he opens the overnight bag that he has brought, he finds the dress and wig that define Emma. Emma decides to kill off John. She picks up a man, takes him the the motel room, kills him, dresses him in John’s suit and sets the room on fire.

Who are they?

This is the first and so far only film by Michael Lander.

This is the first and so far only film written by Ryan O Roy.

Editor Sally Menke died in September 2010 while hiking.

Cillian Murphy is an Irish actor of growing note who has played cis male parts in 28 Days Later, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Cold Mountain, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Batman and Inception. He also played a trans woman, the lead character Kitten Braden, in Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto – in fact Cillian lobbied Neil for several years to make the film.

Susan Sarandon, of course, was Janet in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. She has been acting since 1969, has been in loads and loads of movies, and if she were British would probably be a Dame.

Ellen Page is an up and coming young actress.

Keith Carradine is part of the Carradine acting dynasty, has also been in loads of movies, is especially noted for his roles in Robert Altman and Alan Rudolph films.

Curiosities

In the same way that most films made in Toronto or Vancouver are claimed to be set south of the border, Peacock is filmed in Iowa, but claims to be set in Nebraska.

The when of the film is left vague, but as no-one has a television, it must be set in the early 1950s. Although the women’s shelter and the feminist orientation of Fanny Frill do seem to be a bit anachronistic re this assumption.

John has obvious beard stubble, while Emma does not. Emma is not shown dealing with this.

Nobody comments on how similar looking Emma is to John.

Whilst being a much better film than most of the rubbish that plays the multiplexes, Peacock was not released to either the festival or to the art-house circuit. The film was delayed for over a year after completion and then went straight to DVD.

Is John/Emma a transvestite?

A few minutes into the film we watch as Emma undresses to transform into John and we see that she wears male underwear. This is unusual for a transvestite.

John and Emma are both ignorant of what the other does. This is a symptom of multiple personality. The shrinks equivocate about whether one can be both trans and multiple. The DSM has said that to be transsexual, one must not have any (other) psychiatric condition. Other shrinks talk about co-morbidity. Both of these positions of course make the unreasonable assumption that being trans is in itself a psychiatric condition.

Conclusion

It is difficult to watch this reacting as if John is a real-world transvestite. Some of the life options are real on this reading, but they do not stay so.

The ghost behind the screenplay is obviously Psycho’s Norman Bates. Both John and Norman are dominated by their dead mothers.

Another film that is echoed in Roman Polanski’s The Tenant, where the personality of the previous tenant of the room takes over Trelkovky’s body and life.

The film is not about choice, about deciding who you are and taking steps to be yourself. It is about an other that takes you over, and even kills the original.

There is another ghost behind the screenplay, one that Lander and Roy may not have heard of. The recurring voice of the dead mother constitutes an introjection. Remember how Sanda Davis explained how introjections can take you over, and that transsexuality can and should be treated and cured as an introjection. But apart from me and three other people, nobody has read Sanda Davis. I think that Davis owes much more to Psycho than Peacock owes to Sanda Davis.

As I said about Norman Bates, John/Emma is not like any other transvestite that you may have met.

Trailers for 2010 films–part 3

2010-12-31T06:48:00.000-05:00

The Thank You Girls.

Ticked-Off Trannies With Knives.

To Die Like a Man.

Trans Francisco.

Trinidad.

El ultimo verano de la boyita.

Albert Nobbs.

Dalam Botol

I Was a Tranny Werewolf

J. Edgar

Trailers for 2010 films–part 2

2010-12-29T09:04:00.000-05:00

Orchids: My Intersex Adventure.

Quanto Dura o Amor?/Paulista.

Peacock

Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance.

Schoolboy To Showgirl: The Alexandra Billings Story.

The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister.

Stonewall Uprising.

Switch: A Community in Transition.

The Tempest.

Teslimiyet

Trailers for 2010 films–part 1

2010-12-28T06:58:00.000-05:00

Baby Jane

Beautiful Darling

La bocca del lupo

Changing House

Diagnosing Difference

En el cuerpo equivocado

Insects in the Backyard.

Let Me In

The Lies of Liberty

Meu Amigo Claudia

Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture

2010-12-06T14:48:00.001-05:00

Jonathan Katz has co-curated Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, which is currently on until February 13, 2010.

Incoming Speaker John Boehner and the Catholic League objected and achieved a partial censorship.

Some images of interest (Click on the link below for more details):

Romaine Brooks. Self Portrait, 1923.

Janet Flanner, aka Genet, by Berenice Abbott, 1927

Dancing Sailors, 1917, by Charles Demuth.

Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi, NYC, 1991, by Nan Goldin

I Look Just Like My Daddy, 2003, by Cass Bird

Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/hideseek/index.html.
Brian Logan. “Hide/Seek: Too shocking for America”. The Guardian, 5 December 2010. www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/dec/05/hide-seek-gay-art-smithsonian

Time travelling trans woman in 1928

2010-10-27T13:28:00.002-04:00

Serp i Molot

2010-08-16T22:13:00.002-04:00

English title: Hammer and Sickle

Directed by Sergei Livnev
Script by Sergei Livnev & Vladimir Valutsky
93 minutes 1994

Aleksei Serebryakov as Evdokim Kuznetsov

Country of finance: Russia
Nationality of director: Russian
Location of story: USSR

Synopsis

As part of a experiment to meet the demand by Stalin that the Soviet Union have more soldiers, Evdokiia Kuznetsova is taken from the gulag and is transformed into a man, Evdokim. He then becomes a Stakhanovite building the Moscow underground in the 1930s, marries a female fellow worker, and adopts a child, Dolores, who had been orphaned in the Spanish Civil War.

They became the models for Vera Mukhina's famous sculpture that adorned the 1937 Paris World's Fair and became the emblem of Mosfilm. The athletic male representing the Hammer (Heavy Industry). After posing for the statue, the Kuznetsovs became celebrities, living in luxury, Kuznetsov a member of the Supreme Soviet.

However Kuznetsov became angry and attacked Stalin. He was shot in the scuffle. Paralysed and unable to speak, Evdokim was turned into a hero once more: he had supposedly saved Stalin's life and was exhibited as a museum piece. His wife commanded his thoughts, and even wrote his book "Hammer and Sickle."

Interpretation

Birgit Beumers. “Myth-making and myth-taking: Lost ideals and the war in contemporary Russian cinema”. Canadian Slavonic Papers. Mar-Jun 2000. Online at: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3763/is_200003/ai_n8890675/
Aleksandr Prokhorov. “ “I Need Some Life-Assertive Character’ or How to Die in the Most inspiring Pose: Bodied in the Stalinist Museum of Hammer and Sickle”. Studies in Slavonic Cultures. 1, Jan 2000. http://www.pitt.edu/~slavic/sisc/SISC1/prokhorov.pdf

The End of the World

2010-08-03T11:41:00.002-04:00

Episode 1.2 of Doctor Who

Directed by Euros Lyn
Script by Russel T Davies
45 minutes 2005

Christopher Eccleston plays the Doctor
Billie Piper plays Rose
Zoë Wanamaker voices Cassandra

Country of finance: UK
Nationality of director: Welsh
Location of story: a spacestation
Filming location: Cardiff
Channel: BBC Wales

Synopsis

The Doctor takes Rose billions of years into the future to witness the end of the Earth as the Sun expands and destroys it. Observation is from a space station, and the guests are the super-rich. One of the guests is Cassandra, who has had 708 operations and is now just a stretched face. She is described as the last Earthling (which of course ignores the two minions who move her frame and frequently moisturize her).

Cassandra is also the bad guy. She releases robot insects which destroy the station's protections so that all will die and she will make a killing having bet against the other guests on the stock exchange. She teleports out at the last minute, but is brought back by the Doctor.

Incidentally, Casandra who uses makeup and mentions various ex-husbands is obviously to be taken as female, started out as boy. This makes her one of the more rococo specimens of the old film favourite, the transy killer.

Trivia

Zoë Wanamaker was unable to be in Cardiff when the episode was filmed. Cassandra was originally voiced by Eve Myles, and Zo's voice added later.

Of course referring to this series as number 1 is high revisionism. The original season 1 of Dr Who was back in 1963.

The movies and videos of Divine (Harris Glenn Milstead) (1945 – 1988)

2010-06-10T07:16:00.002-04:00

Multiple Maniacs, 1970

Pink Flamingoes, 1972

Female Trouble, 1974

Polyester, 1981

Lust in the Dust, 1985

Trouble in Mind, 1985

Hairspray, 1988

You Think You’re a Man, 1984

I’m so beautiful, 1984

Steppenwolf

2010-06-06T13:12:00.005-04:00

Novel by Herman Hesse. Berlin: G. Fisher Verlag 1927. English translation by Basil Creighton. London: Martin Secker. New York: Henry Hold & Co. 1929. Many other editions.

Film produced by Melvin Fisherman & Richard Herland.
Directed by Fred Haines
Script by Fred Haines based on the novel by Herman Hesse
106 minutes 1974

Max von Sydow plays Harry Haller
Dominique Sanda plays Hermine
Pierre Clémenti plays Pablo

Country of finance: USA/Switzerland/UK/France/Italy
Nationality of director: US
Location of story: Germany
Filming location: Basel, Hamburg.

Synopsis.

Harry Haller, a man devoted to the high culture of Goethe and Mozart but alienated by the shallow bourgeois pretence of admiring that culture, sees himself as having a second animalistic nature, a wolf of the steppes. However he is in despair and on the verge of suicide when he encounters Hermine in a chance visit to a dance bar. She offers him friendship and teaches him to value the little things in life, to dance and to take drugs. From the start he notices that her features have a masculine aspect, and feels that she reminds him of his childhood friend Hermann. He eventually fully falls in love with her at the costume ball where she is dressed as a man. She and Pablo, a jazz saxophonist, take Harry to a magic theatre where he is able to encounter some other of his myriad personalities.

Who are they?

Herman Hesse (1877 – 1962) was an influential German-Swiss novelist with interests in Buddhism and Jungianism.

Melvin Fishman produced only this film. He was a student of Jung and Alchemy and wanted Steppenwolf to be the first Jungian Film. The film was in pre-production for seven years as Fishman built up a relationship with the Hesse family to obtain the film rights. He did lots of drugs and had a heart attack shortly after the film was finished. Two years later another heart attack killed him. He died with 20 Swiss Francs in his pocket, and no other money.

Richard Herland produced one television series and four films between 1964 and 1986. He raised the money for Steppenwolf.

Peter Sprague, the major financier, was a scion of US industrial wealth who thought of himself as radical.

Fred Haines (1936 – 2008), from Los Angeles, fluent in French and German, did a degree in literature. He met film director Joseph Strick and together they wrote the script of James Joyce’s Ulysses, 1967. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. He was a co-writer of Strick’s Tropic of Cancer, but took his name from the credits after a disagreement. Steppenwolf in the only film that he directed.

Max von Sydow has been in over 140 films. He is one of Sweden’s most distinguished actors. He has played both God and the Devil.

Dominique Sanda is a French actress who was especially known for her roles in Italian films. She has been in 54 films.

Pierre Clémenti, also French, had just completed a two-year sentence for drug charges.

Curiosities

The post-Zabriskie-Point Michelangelo Antonioni was approached to direct, but he thought that the book was unfilmable. John Frankenheimer and actor James Coburn were also approached to direct.

Timothy Leary, on the run from prison, was considered for the part of Harry Haller, but he gave two acid tabs to Sprague who then had a bad trip.

Conrad Rooks, a heir to the Avon cosmetics fortune, who had made the druggie film Chappaqua, was also courting the Hesse family for Steppenwolf, but ended up with Siddhartha instead.

While the film was made in English, none of the actors are native English speakers.

Peter Sprague, the major financier ended up owning the rights. He put the film on a shelf for two years.

The colours were wrong when the prints were made.

The special effects were cutting edge for 1974.

Mati Klarwein (1932 – 2002), who did the album covers for Santana’s Abraxas and Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, painted the images in the corridors of the Magic Theatre.

The Czech artist, Jaroslav Bradac , did the animated sequence.

Decades earlier than the Terminator films and The Matrix, Steppenwolf includes a sequence where humans are fighting a war against the machines.

The entire film is available on YouTube.

“…it seems to me that of all my books Steppenwolf is the one that was more often and more violently misunderstood than any other, and frequently it is actually the affirmative and enthusiastic readers, rather than those who rejected the book, who have reacted to it oddly…”–Hermann Hesse in the 1961 prologue to Steppenwolf.

I was one of very few people who saw the film on the big screen.

Interpretation

Do we have one personality? Or is it an illusion? Early in the book, Harry sees himself as having two personalities: the spiritual, high-culture snob; and the wolf from the steppes who loathes the bourgeoisie.

When he enters the Magic Theatre the illusion, his fake personality are fractured and he finds that he has thousands of personalities. Significantly he does not have any female personalities, or perhaps he merely fails to acknowledge them.

There is a suggestion in the text that somehow Hermine is not real - as such she would be Harry's Anima (Hesse was influenced by Carl Jung at the time he wrote the book). This idea is supported by the fact that 'Hermine' is the feminine form of the Hesse’s first name. As Harry is not able to recognize his feminine selves, his anima is projected outwards. and takes the form of an independent person. The ‘fact’ that he maybe/maybe not kills Hermine at the end would constitute a further refusal to accept his inner woman.

Janny Fabian. “Jung hearts run free”. The Guardian. 21 April 2000. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2000/apr/21/4.
“Steppenwolf (1974)”. 366 Weird Movies. Mar 24, 2009. http://366weirdmovies.com/15-steppenwolf-1974
“Steppenwolf (novel)”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steppenwolf_%28novel%29
“Steppenwolf (film)”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steppenwolf_%28film%29

Bert Horgson (1911-2001) FBI agent.

2010-03-27T22:14:00.003-04:00

The tale goes thus:

Bert was an FBI agent from Minnesota. He joined the FBI in 1935 to fight Nazi spies.

When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover saw him he was re-assigned as a special agent en femme using the name Bettina.

Hoover kept him from quitting by a mixture of promises and intimidation. He even had Horgson’s legal identity changed to ‘female’, so that it would be illegal for him to wear men’s clothes. Hoover gave orders that after his own death, Horgson was to be confined to a high-security nursing home as a national security risk.

Katrum Schultz. “J. Edgar Hoover Ordered Agents To Impersonate Women”. Weekly World News. 11/11/2002. Online at: http://bit.ly/cKKASn.

Cecil Beaton (1904 - 1980) photographer, set & costume designer.

2010-03-19T13:53:00.002-04:00

Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton was the son of a prosperous timber merchant. He was educated at Harrow and Cambridge, where he read history, art and architecture but left without a degree.

The first photograph that he sold was of the Shakespearean scholar, George Rylands, in drag as the Duchess of Malfi. It was published in Vogue. Beaton worked regularly for Vogue from 1927 in addition to having his own studio. He became known for his fashion, society and royalty photographs.

In 1934 Gerald Berniers, under the name Adela Quebec, published his spoof novel, The Girls of Radcliff Hall, which featured himself, Beaton and others as lesbian schoolgirls at an institution named after the famous writer. Beaton attempted to have all the copies destroyed and it became a very rare book until reprinted in 2000.

Five years later Beaton published his own spoof of the memoirs by minor royals that were popular at the time. My Royal Past, By Baroness von Bulop as told to Cecil Beaton features photographs of Beaton and some of his friends crossdressed as the characters in the book.

During the war Beaton worked for the Ministry of Information. Later he photographed many Hollywood and Broadway stars. He expanded into set and costume design for both stage and film, and won Oscars for the costumes in Gigi, 1958 and My Fair Lady, 1964. He was an influence on photographers Angus McBean and David Bailey. He had affairs with Gary Cooper and Greta Garbo.

He was knighted in 1972, and two years later was paralysed on the right side of his body after a stroke. He died in his sleep at age 76.

Adela Quebec. The Girls of Radcliff Hall. Privately published 1934. Reprinted as by Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt Berners. London: Montcalm, 2000.
Theodora Louise Alexina Ludmilla Sophie von Bülop, Baroness. My Royal Past, By Baroness von Bulop as told to Cecil Beaton. London: B.T Batsford. 1939. Reprint: London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson xiv, 105 pp1960.
“Cecil Beaton”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Beaton.
“The Girls of Radcliff Hall”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girls_of_Radcliff_Hall.

Noël Coward (1899 – 1973) and Gerald du Maurier (1873 - 1934 …

2010-03-14T22:10:00.002-04:00

at a theatrical garden party in the late 1920s.

This photograph is found on page 40 of Terry Castle. Noël Coward & Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits. New York: Columbia University Press 1996.

Earthlings Welcome Here

2010-02-28T16:26:00.004-05:00

Episode 2.13 of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (SCC)

Directed by Félix Enríquez Alcalá.
Script by Natalie Chaidez
60 minutes 2008

Lena Headey plays Sarah Connor
Dinah Lenney plays Eileen/Alan Park

Country of finance: USA
Nationality of director: USA
Location of story: USA
Filming location: USA

Synopsis

Sarah, chasing the image of three dots, goes to a UFO convention where she hears about a blogger, Abraham, who has written of the three dots. She is approached by Eileen who says that she knows about Abraham. Her trailer contains maps of sighting of Abraham and of UFOs. At a restaurant, Sarah follows Eileen into the ladies room and demands that she must meet Abraham. Eileen takes off her wig and confesses that she is Abraham. Her real name is Alan Park, and as an MIT graduate was employed on a secret project with an unknown metal. Park fearing for his life went into hiding and disguised as a woman so as not to be recognized. Park never knew where he worked for he taken there each day in a closed van. Sarah takes Park to a regression therapist to go over memories of noises etc. She records the session, and although an assassin kills both Park and the therapist, Sarah is able to deduce the location of the plant.

Who are they?

This is the only episode of SCC directed by Félix Enríquez Alcalá. He has directed episodes for a lot of television serials.

Natalie Chaidez wrote 30 SCC episodes.

Dinah Lenney is in only this episode of SCC but is a regular as Nurse Shirley in ER, and has played small parts in many television series, almost all female parts.

Conclusion

A cross-dressing drama for the cis-gendered. Passing in gender role creates problems of its own, extra problems that a person hiding from bad guys does not need. How did Eileen rent a car without a drivers license in her female name? The script avoids these problems.

Antonio Cuomo. “The Sarah Connor Chronicles - St. 2, ep. 13: Earthlings Welcome Here: Recensione dell'episodio Abraham”. Movieplayer.it. www.movieplayer.it/articoli/05229/the-sarah-connor-chronicles-st-2-ep-13-earthlings-welcome-here/

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20

2010-02-27T22:34:00.002-05:00

This, probably the best known of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, is central to discussions of homosexuality in Shakespeare. It is possibly addressed to a cross-dressed young man, or at least a young man with androgynous beauty.

'A woman's face, with Nature's own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false woman's fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hew all Hews in his controlling,
Which steals men's eyes, and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prickt thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure.'

Proposed identifications of the young ‘master-mistress’ include Willie Hughes and Henry Wriothesley, to both of whom we will return.

“Sonnet 20”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet_20

Wanda Koolmatrie (1949 - ) writer.

2010-02-23T12:11:00.002-05:00

Koolmatrie, an aboriginal Australian, was born to the Pitjantjatjara people but taken from her mother in 1950 and raised by white foster parents. She finally expressed herself in an aboriginal acting troop . Her 1994 autobiography, My Own Sweet Time, won the $5,000 Dobbie award for women’s life writing.

When she proposed a sequel to the book in 1997, the publisher insisted on meeting her, and it came out that she is the female persona of Leon Carmen (1950 - ) and John Bayley, two white men with a grudge that white men cannot get published. Carmen admitted that he had not ever met an aboriginal woman.

Wanda Koolmatrie. My Own Sweet Time. Broome WA: Magabala Books 1994.
John Bayley. Daylight Corroboree: a first-hand account of the Wanda Koolmatrie hoax. Eidolon Press 2004.
“Wanda Koolmatrie”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanda_Koolmatrie.

Hot Peaches

2010-02-10T13:08:00.002-05:00

Here is a video retrospective of the Hot Peaches.

Many persons of interest passed through Hot Peaches, including Marsha P Johnson, Bette Bourne, International Chrysis, Hapi Phace and so on.

Fellini’s La dolce vita

2010-02-07T16:17:00.007-05:00

Directed by Federico Fellini.

Script by Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Brunello Rondi & Pier Paolo Pasolini (uncredited)
174 minutes 1960

Marcello Mastroianni plays Marcello Rubini
Anita Ekberg plays Sylvia
Anouk Aimee plays Maddalena
Alain Cuny plays Steiner
Annibale Nichi plays Marcello’s father
Walter Santesso plays Paparazzo
Nico plays herself
Dominot and Carlo Musto play transvestites

Country of finance: Italy/France
Nationality of director: Italy
Location of story: Rome
Filming location: Rome & Cinecittà

Synopsis

Marcello is a hack journalist chasing celebrities, religious stories and the local aristocracy. He encounters Steiner, an established writer with a loving wife and children, and an attractive apartment, all that Marcello aspires to. Later Steiner kills his children and commits suicide.

Who are they?

Marcello Mastroianni (1924 – 1996) acted in 143 films. La Dolce Vita made him famous. He was married to Flora Carabella from 1948 until his death. He famously had an affair and a daughter with Catherine Deneuve. He died of pancreatic cancer. It is also rumoured that he was the young boyfriend of Giovanni Montini (1867 – 1978) whose stage name was Pope Paul VI.

Nico (Christa Päffgen 1938 – 1988), related to the Päffgen brewery in Cologne, went on to appear in the Morrisey-Warhol film Chelsea Girls and to sing with The Velvet Underground. She died aged 40 after a minor heart attack while cycling.

Dominot continued as a female impersonator and performer and has his own club in Rome.

Carlo Musto is otherwise unknown.

Steiner was based on the novelist Cesare Pavese(1908 – 1950) an anti-fascist and award-winning novelist who committed suicide. Co-screenwriter Tullio Pinelli had gone to school with Pavese and felt that he had become burnt out.

Religious aspects

The film divides into seven episodes, which reflects the seven hills of Rome, the seven sins, seven sacraments, seven days of creation etc. See the Wikipedia article for details.

The film opens with a parousia, an arrival of Jesus as a statue carried by a helicopter. It ends with a parousia of the sea monster that can still look at you after being dead for three days (the fish symbolism of Jesus is hinted at here). Both the opening and the ending have a non-communication because of distance or of noise. Thus like Mark’s gospel the end reflects the beginning. Click here for an essay by David Ulansey comparing the beginning and end of Mark’s gospel.

The centre of Mark’s gospel is the transfiguration where Jesus goes up a mountain to gain an epiphany. At the centre of La Dolce Vita Marcello goes up to Steiner’s apartment and finds that what he believed in does not exist. Steiner says: "Sometimes at night the darkness and silence frightens me. Peace frightens me. I feel it's only a facade, hiding the face of hell".

The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano condemned the film as a parody of Jesus’ second coming. The film was banned in Catholic Spain until 1981 after the death of Franco. The Vatican also disliked the film for its portrayal of Rome’s aristocracy which of course is very dynastically intertwined with the Church hierarchy.

The trans bits

The famous sequence of bathing in the fountain was suggested by Giò Stajano (who became Maria in 1983) who had himself done the fountain thing, and had written novels about the café society scene in Rome, of which La Dolce Vita can be seen as a sequel. His novels, of course, have a lot more gay characters.

When Marcello’s father visits and they go to a nightclub, he tells of his visit to Paris where he saw a stripper who revealed herself to be a man. Probably he had been to Le Carousel, but it is not named.

In the last party scene, optimistically called an ‘orgy’ in some accounts, there are suddenly two young men who change upstairs, come down in drag and do a dance routine. The others refer to them with male pronouns. IMDB lists three transvestites: Domino, Carlo Musto and Antonio Jacono (uncredited). Close watching of the film fails to reveal a third transvestic character, but the mystery is resolved when one discovers that Domino’s birth name was Antonio Iacono.

Sexual politics

La Dolce Vita was made between two great scandals. The heterosexual Montesi Affair of 1953 began with a dead young woman washed up on a beach near Ostia (a second hint from the sea monster at the end of the film) and expanded into police and political cover-ups and tales of drugs and orgies. The gay Ballete Verdi scandal, 1960 came right after La Dolce Vita opened, and unlike the Montesi Affair included no murder, but like it expanded to include celebrities.

“La Dolce Vita”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Dolce_Vita
Philip French. “Italian cinema’s sweet success”. The Observer. 17 Feb 2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/feb/17/features.worldcinema.
Darwin porter & Danforth Prince. Hollywood Babylon: It’s Back!. Blood Moon Productions, Ltd. 2008: 161.

Barbarian Venus by Paul Klee

2010-01-24T07:13:00.001-05:00

Paul Klee (1879 –1940) painted this in 1921.

Lanier Graham says:

Barbarian's Venus by Paul Klee (1879-1940) is one of the most "barbaric" Androgyne images of the era. She is a Venus with a penis. Klee was not a member of the Surrealist circle, but sometimes exhibited with them. He was associated with Kandinsky and Marc in Munich in 1911 and 1912, then took from Cubism and Orphism the concept of fluctuating planes. Klee was thought by some to be an Alchemist when he discussed the Absolute, Nothingness, and the Ground of Being. His students at the Bauhaus (only half in jest) called him "Heavenly Father." He was one of the first modern artists to explore Androgyny in tribal art.

The painting is owned by The Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, but is not currently on view. They describe the painting:

This androgynous Venus, with her direct gaze confronting and challenging the viewer, displays both female and male organs, thereby engaging us by flaunting her dual and "barbaric" sexuality.

Lanier Graham. “Duchamp & Androgyny: The Concept and its Context”. Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal. January 2002. www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_4/articles/graham/graham5.html
www.nortonsimon.org/collections/browse_title.php?id=P.1953.062

Elémire Zolla’s The Androgyne: Reconciliation of Male and Female

2010-01-22T22:45:00.004-05:00

Elémire Zolla (1926 – 2002) was born in Turin to an Italian-French father who was a painter and an English mother who was a musician. He was raised in Paris and London, but then settled in Italy.

In 1956 he won the Strega Prize for his first novel, Minuetto all'inferno. He married a poet, Maria Spaziani, 1958, but they were divorced in 1960. From 1966 to 1978 he was Secretary of the Istituto Accademico di Roma and from 1970 to 1973 Director of the Istituto Ticinesi di Alti Studi in Lugano. In 1970 he wrote an introduction to the Italian version of Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings. He was the long time director and editor of Conoscenza Religiosa, a leading Italian journal in religious studies. He taught Anglo-American and comparative literature at La Sapienza University in Rome and at the University of Genoa.

The Androgyne: Reconciliation of Male and Female, which was published first in English and only later in Italian, is an intriguing book that covers many of the aspects of the Androgyne in myth, but also features some items that readers may be puzzled about, such as decapitation and plunging into water.

Zolla proposes two paradigms of androgyny:
(1)
a) Suitors are slighted or a goddess is offended or mating is hindered, the hidden meaning possibly being that an esoteric use is made of sex;
b) A plunge is taken into transforming waters. Or contact is made with serpents. The currents of subtle inner energy may be alluded to in either case;
c) There follows a succession of switches in sex; one's self-reflection pivots on its axis of symmetry. In Tantric sex the two opposite currents are usually stimulated in turn;
d) The consequence is a loss of sight leading to the acquisition of spiritual or prophetic insight, or the granting of the gift of music, the mastery of rhythms. In the Narcissus myth the explicit discovery of the self-delusive quality of maya takes the place of the loss of sight. Tales such as Hermaphroditus, Teiresius and Narada fit into this paradigm, as does the Genesis tale of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, and the Buddhist tale where a chaste youth closes his ears to a woman's entreaties and she has him blinded out of spite.

(2)
a) A cosmic cavern or tree or anthill;
b) inside is concealed the androgyne, the Primal God, or the God who assumes the sex opposite to that of the worshipper;
c) violence of love blinds, bisects or beheads the androgyne;
d) The severed head or lost eyesight becomes a cause of trouble; a sacrifice has to be made;
e) Balance is restored, the androgyne made whole once more, the land healed.

His other books are: The Eclipse of the Intellectual, 1968. The writer and the shaman; a morphology of the American Indian, 1973. Archetypes: The Persistence of Unifying Patterns, 1981.

Elémire Zolla. The Androgyne: Reconciliation of Male and Female. The illustrated library of sacred imagination. New York: Crossroad, 1981. London: Thames and Hudson, 96 pp 130 illustrations 1981. L'androgino: l'umana nostalgia dell'interezza. Arte e immaginazione, 8. Como: red edizioni, 1989.
“Elémire Zolla”. Wikipedia, l'enciclopedia libera. it.wikipedia.org/wiki/El%C3%A9mire_Zolla.
www.elemirezolla.org.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The application of any of this to real-life trans persons is not at all obvious; nor if this is indeed androgyny, what should a person do who wishes to be androgynous. Nor do I perceive any system in Zolla’s archetypes of Androgyny. Surely by emphasizing different myths of androgyny, one could arrive at different archetypes.

Unlike Joseph Campbell or Mircea Eliade, Zolla’s approach is neither that of a scientist nor of a mythographer, but that of an artist. You relate to his presentation or you do not. But there is no dialectic or doxy that will accept or reject it.

Madame X

2010-01-11T15:11:00.002-05:00

This photograph is online at: http://www.photo.rmn.fr/cf/htm/CSearchZ.aspx?o=&Total=8&FP=46801092&E=2K1KTS6URHS5K&SID=2K1KTS6URHS5K&New=T&Pic=2&SubE=2C6NU0CVNJC3

It is exhibited at Toulouse, musée d'Art moderne et contemporain, les Abattoirs.

The author is Joël-Peter Witkin (1939 – ).

Title: Madame X.

While, of course it is a riff on the Venus de Milo, I think that it captures well the ambivalence of the male gaze with regard to androgyny. The fact that it is a modified photograph, and thus more ‘realistic’ than a statue, that it combines ‘hermaphrodite’ in the art sense with body mutilation that accidentally happened to Greek and Roman statues over 2,000 years. Wasn’t it the 1953 Julius Caesar, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz with Marlon Brando, that featured armless statues of the Venus de Milo type as if the Romans actually created them like that?

The films of Candy Darling

2010-01-04T12:58:00.001-05:00

See the biographical entry on Candy.

Flesh 1968

Women in Revolt 1972

There are no clips online from Women in Revolt.

Trailers for 2009 films – part 2

2009-12-31T14:45:00.001-05:00

Rage

Still Black: A Portrait Of Black Transmen.

Stock Shock

Taking Woodstock

Transproofed

Two Spirits

Veselchaki

Trailers for 2009 films – part 1

2009-12-31T14:21:00.002-05:00

The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela.

Be Like Others

Chan di Chummi

La Dany

Life is Hot in Cracktown.

Morrer Como Um Homem.

Prodigal Sons

Non-fiction writers

2009-12-17T18:59:00.004-05:00

Viviane Namaste said: “autobiography is the only discourse in which transsexuals are permitted to speak”. Obviously this is not true. There are loads of books, including three by Namaste herself, on transiness in general, apart from autobiography.

But trans persons have other interests. Here are a few books on other topics. You may find this a useful list for gift giving or for buying for oneself in this the season of Yule-Saturnalia.

Please feel free to add to this list by using the Comments feature.

Jan Morris. The Pax Britannica Trilogy. London:Faber and Faber, 1968. The three separate volumes: Heaven’s Command, Pax Britannica and Farewell the Trumpets are also available in many different editions. Morris has written more books than many people have read. The Trilogy is one of the more readable histories of the British Empire.

Susan Faye Cannon. Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period. New York : Science History Publications, 1978.
Margaret A. Coulson, and Carol Riddell. Approaching Sociology. London: Routledge, 1972 revised 1991.
Jessica Amanda Salmonson. The Encyclopedia of Amazons: Women Warriors from Antiquity to the Present Era. New York: Paragon House, 1991; New York: Anchor Doubleday(pb), 1992.

Sabrina Ramet. Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994.
Allucquere Rosanne Stone. The war of desire and technology at the close of the mechanical age. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995.

Janine P.Roberts. Glitter & Greed: The Secret World of the Diamond Empire. New York, NY: Disinformation, 2003.
Martine Aliana Rothblatt. Your Life or Mine: How Geoethics Can Resolve the Conflict between Public and Private Interests in Xenotransplantation. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2004.

Joan Roughgarden, Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist. Island Press. 2006.

Deirdre N. McCloskey. The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

William Burke , Christina Kahrl, and Steven Goldman. Baseball Prospectus 2009: The Essential Guide to the 2009 Baseball Season. New York: Plume, 2009.

Ricardo Parker (1867 - ?) emigrant.

2009-12-16T13:59:00.002-05:00

The tale goes thus:

In 1884, the yacht Mignonette, on route from Britain to Australia, stopped for supplies in Madeira on June 2nd. Whilst there, Otilia Ribeiro, an orphaned flower seller, tried to sneak on board with the intention of getting to Australia. This resulted in Richard Parker, the junior member of the crew, hitting her on the head with a boat hook, and the captain rescuing her from drowning. The captain, Tom Dudley, refused her passage, but gave her a contact address in Sidney.

It was just as well for Otilia that she did not secure passage on the Mignonette, for on July 5th, in the south Atlantic, it sank in a storm. The crew members escaped in its dingy, and survived for twenty-four days before being picked up by a ship, only because they killed and ate Richard Parker.

Two of the others were put on trial, Regina v Dudley and Stephens, as an example, found guilty and sentenced to death, and then granted a royal pardon because of the extenuating circumstances.   This is a much cited legal precedent.

Tom Dudley then emigrated to Australia with his family to start anew, without the stigma of the conviction.   He ran a ships chandler shop in Sydney.

Otilia, calling herself Ricardo Parker, and as a man, travelled via Luanda and Goa and turned up in Sydney in 1887 to visit Tom Dudley. She and Dudley had an affair and an adventure on a Barrier Reef island.   Donald McCormick admits that this last part is “imaginative reconstruction”.

Dudley died of the plague in 1900.

A co-incidence that was noticed at the time is that Richard Parker is also the name of the castaway sailor who is selected by lot to be eaten in Edgar Allen Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which had been published in 1838. This became known again in 1974 when Arthur Koestler ran a competition in The Sunday Times to find the most striking co-incidence, and the two Richard Parkers, suggested by a relative of the historical one, were declared the winner.

A great story. The sinking of the Mignonette, the cannibalism, the trial and the co-incidence of the name are all true. The major problem is that the only source of the Ribeiro/Parker thread is McCormick’s book. He cites no sources, and in the early 1980s when Simpson asked about sources, he could not produce one. However he did write to The Sydney Morning Herald in July 1961 seeking information about Ribeiro/Parker in Australia.

We have met Donald McCormick before. He cited (or is that invented) a reference in The Ochrana Gazette that identified Vassily Konovalov (otherwise known as Alexei Pedachenko) as Jack the Ripper.

Paul Metcalf later retold the tale as his own.

Donald McCormick. Letter to The Sydney Morning Herald. July 25, 1961. http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1301&dat=19610725&id=c1oVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=--UDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4119,5784254
Donald McCormick. Blood on the Sea. London: Miller 1962.
Leicester Cotton. “Cannibal in Sydney”. The Sydney Morning Herald. Sept 29, 1962. http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1301&dat=19620929&id=6VoVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=EeYDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4428,8489711
W. Brian Simpson. Cannibalism and the Common Law: the Story of the Tragic Last Voyage of the Mignonette and the Strange Legal Proceedings to Which It Gave Rise. The University of Chicago Press. 1984: 44,144, 292-4.
Paul C. Metcalf. Collected Works. Minneapolis, Minn: Coffee House Press, 1996: Volume II: 284-8, 299-312.

Trans persons acting in soap operas, telenovelas and other dramatic serials on television

2009-11-27T21:10:00.001-05:00

This is a first cut as such a list. Feel free to add what is missing.

Guilda played Chevalier D’Eon in L'amour humain, 1970, Cinepix.

Carlotta played Robin Ross in Number 96, 1973, Network 10

Carlotta, then pre-op, was already a star in the Les Girls revue in Sydney. She acted six episodes under the name Carolle Lea, and her identity was kept secret from cast and crew. When Robin’s boyfriend asks her to marry him, she admits that she had previously been male. The next day the switchboard at Channel 10 was jammed by viewers wanting to know whether the actor was male or female.

Christopher Morley played Sally Armitage in General Hospital, 1980, ABC

Morley played a friend of one of the main characters for three months, and attracted flirtatious interest of a male character. This was played straight until she revealed that she was a “man”. Some say that this was the inspiration for the movie Tootsie, two years later, where the Dustin Hoffman character impersonates a woman to get a job in the soap opera Southwest General Hospital.

Lily Savage played Roxanne in The Bill, 1988-90, Thames Television

Jahna Steele played Candace La Rue in NYPD Blue, 1995, Fox.

Karen Dior played Artiphys in Xena: Warrior Princess, 1997, Universal

Karen Dior played Monica/Dennis in Veronica’s Closet, 1998, NBC

Alexis Arquette played Cleo in The Strip, 1999, Warner Bros

Florencia De la Vega played Florencia de la Suciata in Amor Latino, 2000, Central Park

Alexis Arquette played Jim in Felicity, 2000, WB Television

Alexis Arquette played Caligula in Xena: Warrior Princess, 2001, Universal

Letitia Winter played herself in Emmerdale, 2001, Yorkshire Television

Alexandra Billings played Lois in Karen Sisco, 2003, ABC.

Alexandra’s Wikipedia page says “She is the first trans woman to have played a transgender character on television”. Which is obviously not true.

Florencia De la Vega played Laisa Roldán in Los Roldán, 2004, Televisión Federal

Alexandra Billings played Ms Mitchell in ER, 2005, NBC

Alexandra Billings played Donna Gibson in Grey’s Anatomy, 2006, ABC

Candis Cayne played Carmelita Rainer in Dirty Sexy Money, 2007-8, ABC

Alexandra Billings played Joanna in Eli Stone, 2008, ABC

Alexis Arquette played lady in jail in Californication, 2008, Showtime

Pequeña P. in El ángel, 2009, Universidad Iberoamericana

This was terminated by Pequeña’s real-life suicide.

Clara Vaughan, 1864 – a novel

2009-11-14T23:13:00.005-05:00

R.D. Blackmore (1825 –1900) was one of the most famous English novelists in the second half of the nineteenth century, but since then his work has been largely forgotten except for Lorna Doone, 1869.

His first novel 'Clara Vaughan' was written in 1853 and published anonymously in 1864. The narrator is female and the Saturday Review, as part of an obsession of the period, was convinced that it had detected a female writer masquerading as a man.

'Another decided feature by which our lady novelists are wont to betray the secret of their authorship is the characteristic mode in which they unconsciously make sport of the simplest principles of physics, and of the most elementary rules or usages of the law.'

Some reviewers believed that the novel had been written by Mary Elizabeth Braddon who was popular at the time.

Blackmore was not only male, but he had practiced law in London for five years at that time. The novel is now regarded as one of the very first detective stories.

Elaine Showalter. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. Princeton University Press. 1977: 91.
“R.D. Blackmore”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._D._Blackmore.
“Clara Vaughan”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_Vaughan.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A male writer using the voice of a woman is an example of Narrative Transvestity or cross-writing. It is sometimes referred to as Appropriation of Voice.

This example shows that attempts to detect the gender of a writer by style and by knowledge exhibited by the author/protagonist can lead to wrong conclusions.

Anna Madrigal (1920- ) landlady.

2009-10-18T11:41:00.003-04:00

Anna Madrigal appears in Armistead Maupin's tales of San Francisco where it is revealed that she was raised in a brothel in Winnemucca, Nevada, and that she has a secret that she shares with her lover Edgar Halcyon when he is being blackmailed, although the reader is not informed of the nature of the secret.

She is also shown to be particularly concerned about one of her tenants, Mona Ramsey.

In the second volume she admits to being Mona's father. Andrew Ramsey had grown up feeling like a girl. He ran from home at 16, worked at various manual jobs and finally joined the army. After the war he met a woman who proposed to him and moved with her to Minneapolis where he got a job in a bookstore. Two years after the birth of their child, Mona, he left and never came back.

In 1964 Andy went to Denmark and came back as Anna Madrigal, taking her name from an anagram of 'a man and a girl'. She ran a bookshop in San Francisco and then opened a boarding house. When she saw that her daughter, Mona, enjoying a transitory moment of fame as an advertising whizz, was in San Francisco, Anna approached her and persuaded her to move in as a tenant.

Armistead Maupin. Tales of the City. New York, N.Y.: HarperPerennial, 1978.
Armistead Maupin. More Tales of the City. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.
Alastair Reid (dir). Tales of the City. Scr: Richard Kramer based on the novel by Armistead Maupin, with Olympia Dukakis as Anna Madrigal, Chloe Webb as Mona Ramsey and Gender as an unnamed trans woman. UK/US Channel 4/KQED/PBS 360 mins 1993.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Of course Anna could not go to Denmark in 1964, because after the Jorgensen affair, Denmark had passed a law limiting gender surgery to Danish citizens.

The revealing of Anna’s gender past does not happen until the second novel, but is brought forward into the first television mini-series.

Transvestism by Tina

2009-10-17T16:27:00.004-04:00

This somewhat strange drawing by Tina is found on p16 of Transvestism … men in female dress edited by David Cauldwell, 1956. No information is given as to who Tina is.

Weapons of Mass Distraction

2009-10-04T21:24:00.006-04:00

Directed by Stephen Surjik
Script by Larry Gelbart
100minutes 1997 HBO

Gabriel Bryne plays Lionel Powers
Ben Kingsley plays Julian Messenger
Mimi Rogers plays Ariel Powers
Jordan Ladd plays Letitia

Country of finance: US
Nationality of director: US
Location of story: Los Angeles
Filming location: Los Angeles

Synopsis

Powers and Messenger, both unscrupulous entrepreneurs, use blackmail, bribery and other crimes to get their way. Finally both dig up enough dirt on the other that they have to become partners. Except that the ‘dirt’ on Powers, which refers to his wife and their threesome with a younger woman, Letitia, is in fact nothing at all to be ashamed of.

Who are they?

Larry Gelbart was one of the writers on Tootsie, 1982.

Jordan Ladd is part of the Ladd acting dynasty.

Mimi Rogers was Agent Dana Fowley in the X-Files, and the mother in The Rapture, 1991.

Gabriel Bryne and Ben Kingsley are well known lead actors.

Conclusion

Alexei, from Leningrad, was sexually abused by his father, who faked paintings by famous artists. When his father was sent to Siberia, he became a male prostitute. She was a woman, Ariel, by age 25, and then emigrated to the US with her daughter Letitia.

Any husband should be proud to have a wife who has overcome such obstacles. Even if, in modesty, she had never actually mentioned them.

Of course the cliché that trans women were sexually abused as children is done far too much in movies. It is true in only a few cases.

I suppose that a cis actress had to be cast in this film, otherwise the 'surprise' would be anticipated.

Denis Bloodnok

2009-10-03T11:45:00.003-04:00

Major Bloodnok, late of the 3rd Disgusting Fusiliers, OBE, was a character voiced by Peter Sellers in The Goon Show.

In 1972's The Last Goon Show of All, Major Denis has an arrangement with Gladys, a rather deep-voiced mistress of Discipline.

In the Goon Show Scripts published by Spike Milligan in the 1970s we are told more of Bloodnok's past. After he was cashiered from the army having been found cross-dressed, he re-enlisted as Florence Bloodnok and served a year in the women’s ATS, at one point having to report a sailor for trying to interfere with her in an air-raid shelter.

“Major Bloodnok”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_Bloodnok

Surrogates

2009-09-29T20:57:00.003-04:00

Directed by Jonathan Mostow
Script by Michael Ferris & John Brancato based on a graphic novel by Robert Venditti & Brett Weldele
88 minutes 2009

Bruce Willis plays Tom Greer
Radha Mitchell plays Jennifer Peters
James Cromwell plays Cantor
Ving Rhames plays the Prophet

Country of finance: US
Nationality of director: US
Location of story: Boston
Filming location: Boston and other towns in Massachusetts.

Did you watch the Matrix films and wonder why no-one had an other-gender body inside the Matrix? This film does not leave that aspect unexplored.

Instead of a virtual reality Matrix, most people in this film have a surrogate that is a younger, better looking version of themselves. They send the surrogate out to work and play, and they themselves stay at home in a high-tech chair that allows them to see, hear and feel whatever happened to the surrogate.

A young woman in a skimpy dress is murdered at the beginning of the film. The surrogate cops, Greer and Peters chase up her operator, and find an overweight middle-aged man. An attractive young black man is shown by his ID card to be really a middle-aged white man.

Peters’ surrogate is at first operated by the real Jennifer Peters. Later the real one is killed, and the Peters surrogate is being operated by the bad guy. Greer has to get himself inside the Peters surrogate so that he can save the world.

To put it simply: The Bruce Willis character save the world while in this body.

In conclusion: a middlebrow sex-transfer fantasy for those who do fantasize other-gender bodies, but never actually do it in reality. This aspect is generally not being mentioned in the reviews.

In Einem Jahr mit 13 Monden

2009-09-19T21:40:00.007-04:00

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Script by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
129 minutes 1978
English title: In a Year with 13 Moons

    Volker Spengler plays Erwin/Elvira Weisshaupt
    Gottfried John plays Anton Saitz
    Ingrid Caven plays Die rote Zora
    Elisabeth Trissenaar plays Irene Weisshaupt
    Eva Mattes plays Marie-Ann Weisshaupt
    Lilo Pempeit plays Schwester Gudrun

Country of finance: West Germany
Nationality of director: West German
Location of story: Frankfurt
Filming location: Frankfurt

Allegory

The Little Mermaid, in Hans Andersen’s 1836 short story of the same name, falls in love with a prince of the land. Knowing that being a mermaid, with a tail instead of legs, she cannot win his love, she changes her tail for human legs. However, she is still a foundling, an outsider and a servant. He still does not love her.

In In a Year with 13 Moons, Erwin Weisshaupt thinks that he is in love with Anton Saitz, not exactly a prince, but as a businessman close enough for Erwin, the butcher’s assistant. An off-hand comment by Anton: ‘Too bad you’re not a girl', was taken too literally. Erwin goes to Casablanca, and comes back as Elvira. However, Anton is still not interested.

In this way, In a Year with 13 Moons is more faithful to Andersen’s story than is the Disney animation that took its name, but altered the ending.

Synopsis

Elvira, in male clothing, tries to buy sex from rent-boys who beat her up when they discover that she is not a man. At home, Elvira’s lover Christophe, has returned after a long absence. They argue and he leaves for good. Elvira chases after his car and is knocked down. Elvira’s hooker friend Zora sees this and cleans Elvira up. Elvira takes Zora to the abattoir where Elvira worked when she was a man. Elvira goes home, attempts to asphyxiate herself but is saved when her ex-wife Irene arrives. Irene is concerned that a newspaper article about Elvira which mentioned the businessman Anton Saitz might cause trouble. Elvira promises to go to Saitz and ask for forgiveness. Zora finds Elvira crying in a video arcade and takes her to see a gay friend who has been eight years in a mental hospital, and has not been outside for months. Zora then takes Elvira to see Sister Gudrun at the orphanage where Elvira was raised. Elvira goes to visit Saitz, meeting an ex-accountant who was fired for being ill, and a suicide with an amazingly positive attitude about things. Saitz at first fails to recognize Elvira, but goes home with her for a chat. Zora is still in Elvira’s flat, and while Elvira is making coffee, Saitz and Zora start to make out. Depressed by this, Elvira cuts her hair and dresses in male clothing, and goes to see Irene and their daughter Marie-Ann to ask if she can return to being Erwin. It is too late. Elvira goes to see the journalist who had taken the interview, but it is after 11pm. Elvira goes home and kills herself. Zora and Anton, still making out, do not notice.

Who is who

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1954 – 1982) was a prodigy of West German cinema, completing 40 films, 2 television series, 24 stage plays, 36 acting roles and more in 15 years before dying of a drug overdose.

Armin Meier (1943-1978), a former butcher, was Fassbinder’s lover 1974-8. After a break-up he committed suicide on Fassbinder’s birthday. He was in 7 of Fassbinder’s films.

Ingrid Caven (1938 – ) actress and singer. She was married to Fassbinder 1970-2. She has been in over 50 films. Her current lover French writer Jean-Jacques Schuhl has written a book entitled Ingrid Caven which won the "Prix Goncourt" 2000.

Lilo Pempeit (1922 –1993) is Fassbinder’s mother. She acted in 23 films, mostly directed by her son.

Volker Spengler (1939 – ) actor. He was the adulterer Ardalion in Fassbinder’s Despair, 1978, and Hermann Goering in The Ogre, 1996.

Eva Mattes (1954 – ) actress. Jury’s Special Grand Prix at Cannes 1979. Best Actress at Bavarian Film Awards 1981. She acted in three of Fassbinder’s films, and then played Rainer Fassbinder in A Man Called Eva, 1984. She has a daughter with director Werner Herzog.

Curiosities

1978 had 13 new moons.

In addition to script and direction, Fassbinder designed the sets, edited and did the camera work. He did this in no other. He also expanded Erwin/Elvira’s biography as a short story.

The speech at the end of the slaughterhouse sequence is the closing monologue from Goethe’s Torquato Tasso, 1790, where the poet in painful awareness of the arbitrariness of his existence switches between self-torture and self-confidence.

Two quotations from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation on suicide as an affirmation of the will.

A clip from Claude Chabrol’s Le Boucher, 1970 (about a butcher who is sex-murderer). Armin Meier had been a butcher.

The ‘I Like to Hike’ scene from Jerry Lewis’ You’re Never Too Young, 1955, a gender switch version of The Major and the Minor, 1942 (both films are about passing as children).

The opening scene, along the bank of the Main River at dawn is accompanied by Mahler’s adagio movement from his Fifth symphony which is also used in the opening, also dawn, sequence of Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice, 1971.

While Elvira is asleep, Zora watches on television a news program about Pinochet’s Chile, and then there is a cameo by Fassbinder in the program.

The anecdote is told by the friend released from the mental hospital about a cemetery apparently of young children until it is explained that the dates are not of the person’s lifespan, but of the time during his life when he had a friend. This anecdote is of course also told in Orson Well’s Mr Arkadin, 1955.

Discussion

The film is very bleak, and all the more so as it was Fassbinder’s follow-up to the commercially successful The Marriage of Maria Braun. It follows the last two days of Elvira’s life. She meets or visits most of the significant persons in her life, and from the dialogue we find out her biography. That Erwin was born illegitimately during to war, and given up to an orphanage. He was almost adopted, until the birth mother would not sign the papers because she was not able to admit the existence of the child to her husband. Erwin worked in an abattoir and married Irene, the manager’s daughter. He developed a crush on Anton, with whom he was involved in a shady deal with meat. Anton said: “Too bad you’re not a girl”. Erwin went to Casablanca and returned as a woman, Elvira, but was still rejected by Anton. Part of the irony is, as Saitz’s bodyguard says, “nobody loves Anton Saitz”. He has no wife or girlfriend. He appears to be the type of man who takes a woman, and then tires of her and moves on. Had Elvira been a female from birth, she still could not have made Anton love her. It is part of Elvira’s naivety that she does not understand this.

The genre of male-to-female transsexual narratives is small. However In a Year with 13 Moons does not seem to be of the type. These films deal with the difficulties of changing gender, of operations and hormones, of building a new life and seeking acceptance. In A Year with 13 Moons this is suggested rather than detailed - indeed of hormones there is no mention at all. The film is about a person, the gender hardly matters, who is failed by all those who know him, and who gives up. In this it is like other Fassbinder films, especially Fox and his Friends, 1974.

Most of the books on Fassbinder describe this film as his most personal. In addition to directing and writing the script, he expanded Erwin/Elvira’s biography as a short story, he designed the sets, edited and did the camera work. He did this in no other. He also cast his mother as Sister Gudrun. This of course does not mean that it is autobiographical - at least not in a straightforward way. Fassbinder was not transgendered. He was more of what the modern gay scene would call a bear, and he usually had a beard. Unlike some other German directors, Lothar Lambert and Rosa von Praunheim, he never put on a frock to appear in front of the camera, and very few of his films contain transgendered characters (although it is said that there are undeclared drag cameos in several of them). However Laurens Straub has argued that the film is indeed autobiographical: “He could feel like a woman more than a man .... his quickness, his sense for intrigue ... and maybe he was longing to be a woman”. Straub is the writer of A Man Like Eva made five years later, when Fassbinder was also dead, in which Eva Mattes (who plays Elvira’s daughter, Marie-Ann, in In a Year with 13 Moons) played Fassbinder himself, a rather unattractive portrait.

Fassbinder made this film immediately after his lover Armin Meier committed suicide after one of their frequent rows over Fassbinder’s affairs with others or drugs or politics, a normal part of their dramatic relationship. The immediate cause was that Fassbinder was taking a different lover to the Cannes film festival. Meier took an overdose of pills on Fassbinder’s birthday. His body was not discovered until five days later when Lilo Pempeit, Fassbinder’s mother, who had a key, came to investigate because the neighbours were complaining of a bad smell. Fassbinder did not attend the funeral.   Meier, like Erwin had been a butcher. Erwin’s sex-change is an attempt to buy love, a cry of loneliness, which Fassbinder identified with Meier. At the same time there is much of Fassbinder himself in Elvira, especially the anomic experience of urban life, which is not the way that Meier experienced it. However, the extreme passiveness of Elvira, and the simple-mindedness is such that one is doubtful that this is a portrait of Meier - surely Fassbinder is either insulting his dead lover, or is playing intellectual games. And while Fassbinder is part of Elvira, surely Fassbinder is part of Saitz also, in particular the manager of people who takes multiple lovers and then casts them aside.

Fassbinder had dedicated his 1974 film Fox and His Friends, which is about a working-class gay man exploited by his middle-class lover, to Meier and played the title-role himself. In 1977 he contributed a segment to Germany in Autumn which mainly consists of Fassbinder losing his temper as Meier voices working-class reactionary clichés about terrorism and authority. While Fassbinder grieved in his own way at Meier’s death, when he locked himself in Volker Spengler’s flat in Frankfurt for several days, the cynics who knew him were predicting that he was turning his lover’s death into a new film.

Fassbinder is not the first filmmaker to dramatize his dead lover with a gender switch.   The playwright and screenplay writer Terence Rattigan had an affair with Kenneth Morgan which ended with Kenneth’s suicide. In the play, later film, The Deep Blue Sea, 1952 and 1955, Kenneth has become Hester who twice attempts suicide as details of her affair with an ex-RAF pilot become known. Her husband William is based on Rattigan himself.

Let us return to Hans Andersen. Andersen, a closeted gay man who never married, had a lifelong friendship with Edvard Collin, of whom he wrote “he was the antagonist to my almost girlish nature”. When Collin announced that he would marry, Andersen wrote The Little Mermaid. He later confessed that nothing in his writing had ever moved him more. Even his first biographer, who is otherwise coy, wrote: “the little mermaid was himself ... She lost the prince, saw him wed another”.

The film contains several past-tense narratives: Elvira’s story of her life with Christoph told to Zora at the slaughterhouse; Sister Gudrun’s story of Erwin’s childhood; the cancer victim’s story of Saitz. This is a technique from pre-cinematic drama when flashbacks could not be done. Gudrun’s tale of how Erwin was born illegitimately to Anna Weisshaupt while her husband was a prisoner of war, and how her inability to admit this prevented Erwin from being properly adopted was written by Fassbinder as a short story - only parts of it are narrated in the film.

Volker Spengler, the actor who plays Elvira, does not specialize in feminine roles. He plays Elvira more with bravery than conviction. And when he switches to male clothing at the end, he looks natural as a man - very unlike Dil in The Crying Game , 1992, who looks like a woman in men’s clothing.

Zora, Erwin's friend says: ‘She just did it. And she didn't have a good reason, like, because of her soul, or something. I don't think she was even gay. Isn't that right, baby? You weren't even gay when you went to Casablanca.'   This set Elvira apart from almost all transsexuals, most of whom have felt since childhood that they should really be the other gender. This is a dismissal of the opinions re the transgendered experience. It is not social constructionist, nor is it essentialist; it is neither nature nor nurture which lead Erwin to become Elvira. It is rather an existentialism of terrifying arbitrariness - a decision based on happenstance rather than pattern. There is one other film that features a transsexual - much better adjusted than Elvira - whose change was based equally on a whim, and whose story is also told in a past-tense narrative. This other is Tina in Pedro Almodovar's Law of Desire, 1987, who had had the change as a teenager as part of an affair with her father. Like Elvira, Tina became a woman because she conformed to the whims of others.

Hans Christian Andersen. “Den lille havfrue”. Eventyr, fortalte for Børn. Første Samling. Tredie Hefte. 1837.
Marjorie Baumgarten - www.auschron.com/issues/vol14/issue42/arts.scanlines.html
Ed Gonzalez. “in a Year of 13 Moons”. Slant Magazine. Aug 23, 2003. www.slantmagazine.com/Film/film_review.asp?ID=776
Ronald Hayman. Fassbinder: Film Maker. New York: Simon and Shuster. 1984: 76-83.
Joseph Jacobs. “Fassbinder, Franz, Fox, Elvira, Armin, and all the Others”. October 21, 1982.
Robert Katz & Peter Berling. Love Is Colder Than Death: The Life and Times of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. London:Paladin. 1989: 139-143.
Alice Liddell. “Brilliant, naturally, but very difficult to watch”. IMDB www.us.imdb.com/CommentsShow?0077729
Hans Mayer. “Alternatives in the Nineteenth Century” 1975. Reprinted in Outsiders: A Study in Life and Letters. The MIT Press 1984.
Kaja Silverman. “Masochistic Ecstacy and the Ruination of Masculinity in Fassbinder’s Cinema”. in Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge 1992.

My Human Gets me Blues

2009-09-17T22:18:00.004-04:00

A song on the album Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart (also known as Don Van Vliet) and His Magic Band.

'I saw yuh baby in yer x-ray gingam dress
I knew you were under duress
I knew you under yer dress
...

You were afraid you'd be the devils red wife
But it's alright God dug yer dance
'n would have you young 'n in his harum

Dress you the way he wants cause never had a doll
Cause everybody made him a boy
'n God didn't think t' ask his preference
You can bring yer dress 'n yer favourite dog'

Captain Beefhart & His Magic Band. Trout Mask Replica. LP Straight STS 1053 – 1969.
John Muir (ed). The Lives and Times of Captain Beefheart. Babylon Books. no date, probably 1980.

This video is of two songs: She's Too Much For My Mirror & Human Gets Me Blues.

Helena Amwrosjewa & Georg Schachnin

2009-09-15T09:47:00.002-04:00

The Moscow State Circus in the 1960s featured the following clown act.

An amazon and a tiny absent-minded professor come into the ring. She plays a trombone loudly, skilfully and in horrible taste; he accompanies her on the piano. They then both remove their wigs to show that the Amazon is a man and the professor is a woman.

William Willeford. The Fool and His Scepter; A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their Audience. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969: 98.

3 X ‘I Wish I was a girl’ – the lyrics

2009-09-11T14:16:00.002-04:00

‘I Wish I was (sic) a girl’ is a popular title for a song. The lyrics in some cases are rather odd.

Do any of these lyrics give the impression that the singer will actually start down the gender path?

The Pink Fairies, 1973

The boys come down to see me
I know that they can't believe me
I don't need their coffee bars
or clapped-out racing cars

You can tell I was the only one
My school days weren't much fun
As a child I was the only one
I can't say I was a son of a gun
because
I wish I was a girl

As a street fighter I don't make it
When the boys cut loose I can't take it
The sight of Blood don't turn me on
When the trouble starts I'm long gone
Oh, I wish I was a girl'.

Counting Crows, 1998

The devils in the dreamin’
He tells you I’m not sleepin’
In my hotel room alone

With nothing to believe in
You dive into the traffic rising up
And its so quiet
You’re surprised and then you wake

For all the things you’re losing
You might as well resign yourself to try and make a change
And I’m going down to hollywood
They’re gonna make a movie from the things
That they find crawling round my brain

I wish I was a girl
So that you could believe me
And I could shake this static every time I try to sleep
I wish for all the world
That I could say
Hey, elizabeth, you know Im doing all right
These days

The devils in the dreamin
You see yourself descending
From the building to the ground

And you watch the sky receding
And you spin to see the traffic
Rising up and its so quiet
And you’re surprised and then you wake

For all the things I’m losing
I might as well resign myself to try and make a change
And I’m going down to hollywood
They’re gonna make a movie from the things
That they find crawling round my brain

I wish I was a girl
So that you could believe me
And I could shake this static every time I try to sleep
I wish for all the world
That I could say, hey, elizabeth,
You know I’m doing all right these days

And one of these dreams
You forgive me
It makes me think of the bad decisions
That keep you at home
How could anyone else have changed
But these are wrong conclusions
That leave you alone
How could everyone rearrange
How could everyone else have changed
What I see
I believe

For all the things I’m losing
I might as well resign myself to try and make a change
And I’m going down to hollywood
They’re gonna make a movie from the things
That they find crawling round my brain

I wish I was a girl
So that you could believe me
And I could shake this static every time I try to sleep
I wish for all the world
That I could say, hey, elizabeth,
You know I’m doing all right these days
Well I cant sleep at night [repeated]

Violent Delight, 2003

I wish I was a girl so I'd see more tits
I wish I could jack by dipping in a pit
I only have a dick that's quite hairy
My ass is too, that's kinda scary

I wish I was a girl

I don't care about the blood, I don't care about the pain
Cos being a girl's the only thing that's on my brain
Cost being a guy is really boring
And cross dressing just isn't my thing

Some people think I might be gay
But I don't swing the other way
I just wanna be a girl so damn much
To fell my clit as it gets.........

But if I was a girl I couldn't drive no more
Cos I couldn't tell the difference between the clutch and the door
I'd get mood swings and I'd have to shave my pits
But I wouldn't really care cos I would have massive tits
I wouldn't have to put up with erections all the time
I'd get a better job when performing 69
Cos being a girl would be so cool
Cos when you cum you don't leave a pool

Mother

Why wasn't I a girl
[repeat 12 times]
Why
[Chorus and out]

And for the other side with better grammar

Beyoncé, 2009

If I were a boy
Even just for a day
I’d roll outta bed in the morning
And throw on what I wanted then go
Drink beer with the guys
And chase after girls
I’d kick it with who I wanted
And I’d never get confronted for it.
Cause they’d stick up for me.

[Chorus]
If I were a boy
I think I could understand
How it feels to love a girl
I swear I’d be a better man.
I’d listen to her
Cause I know how it hurts
When you lose the one you wanted
Cause he’s taken you for granted
And everything you had got destroyed

If I were a boy
I could turn off my phone
Tell everyone it’s broken
So they’d think that I was sleepin’ alone
I’d put myself first
And make the rules as I go
Cause I know that she’d be faithful
Waitin’ for me to come home (to come home)

(Chorus)

It’s a little too late for you to come back
Say its just a mistake
Think I’d forgive you like that
If you thought I would wait for you
You thought wrong

(Chorus)

But you’re just a boy
You don’t understand
Yeah you don’t understand
How it feels to love a girl someday
You wish you were a better man
You don’t listen to her
You don’t care how it hurts
Until you lose the one you wanted
Cause you’ve taken her for granted
And everything you have got destroyed
But you’re just a boy

Cold Souls

2009-09-07T21:14:00.002-04:00

Directed and written by Sophie Barthes

101 mins 2009

Paul Giamatti plays Paul Giamatti

Dina Korzun plays Nina

Emily Watson plays Claire Giamatti

Katherine Winnick plays Sveta

Anna Dukova plays Olga

Country of finance: USA/France

Nationality of director: French

Location of story: New York, St Petersburg

Filming location: New York, St Petersburg.

SYNOPSIS

Paul, paralyzed by anxiety about playing the lead in Uncle Vanya on Broadway, reads in the New Yorker about a new service Soul Storage which removes your soul and preserves it until you want it back. He does this and becomes too light-hearted. So he rents the soul of a Russian poet, which enables him to get the performance just right. In St Petersburg, where souls are bought and sold rather than stored for a fee, the boss’s wife, Sveta, a soap-opera actress, wants the soul of an American actor. She gives a list of 12 names of famous actors. Her husband asks why no actresses on the list? Nina, the mule who transports souls between St Petersburg and New York inside her body, steals the only actor soul that the New York Office has. She tells Sveta that it is Al Pacino’s soul. Paul wants his soul back but is not to be found. He tracks down Nina, and then goes with her to St Petersburg. He finds out that his rented soul is that of Olga, a factory worker, and that unable to get her soul back, she has committed suicide. Nina and Paul drug Sveta so that they can extract Paul’s soul from her. They do so. It has become dried up from her soap-opera performances. They both return to New York where the Soul Storage company has been taken over by a hedge fund.

CURIOSITIES

Both Sveta and Paul acquire opposite-gender souls. In neither case does this affect their self-identity, their mannerisms or their attitude.

Olga dies without her soul. This is opposite to the legends in The Golden Bough where external soul storage is used to avoid death.

Why is it, in western movies, that it is always winter in Russia?

Psycho

2009-08-30T12:13:00.006-04:00

Novel by Robert Bloch, New York: Simon & Shuster. 1959.
Film directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Script by Joseph Stefano.
109 mins, 1960.

Anthony Perkins plays Norman Bates
Janet Leigh plays Marion Crane
Vera Miles plays Lila Crane
Martin Balsam plays Milton Arbogast

Country of finance: USA
Nationality of director: UK
Location of story: Arizona
Filming location: California, Arizona.

Synopsis

Norman Bates poisoned his widowed mother when she was forty, when she took a lover, had her embalmed and buried, and then two months later dug her up and kept her around the house. This left her a little bit immobile, and so he had to move for her. So he dressed as her, and as such carried out her will. Especially her will to protect her son from strange women, and to that end it was sometimes required that she must kill them.

Marion Crane stole $40,000 from her employer, and ran away. She stayed in the Bates Motel. Norman spied on her as she undressed. ‘Mother’ then killed her. Norman then sank her and her car in a nearby swamp without finding the money.

The detective who comes after her is killed by ‘Mother’ when he enters the house. Eventually Norman is arrested and the police psychologist declares that he is a transvestite.

Curiosities

Hitchcock in his determination that audiences would not anticipate the climax cheated from the point of view of gender impersonation. Anthony Perkins does not play ‘Mother’ for the first two killings. In the famous shower killing scene, 'mother' is played by Margo Epper, a stuntwoman; and in the knifing at the top of the stairs scene she is played by another stuntwoman who goes by the name of Mitzi. Mitzi is petite and completely unlike Anthony.

The voice overs by “mother’ are even more rococo. First hired was Paul Jasmin, an aspirant actor who had developed, as a joke, a practice of phoning well-known actors as 'Eunice Ayers'. Hitchcock also hired actresses Jeanette Nolan and Virginia Gregg to record the same lines. The version on the sound track is a splicing together of the three voices. From word to word it jumps from one to the other.

Like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 1974, and Silence of the Lambs, 1991, Psycho is sort of, loosely, based on rumours of Ed Gein.

In Robert Bloch's novel Norman is in his forties, short and fat. However in the film, Anthony Perkins is still in his twenties, which changed the nature of Norman.

The first US film ever to show a toilet being flushed.

The film is in black & white because a) Hitchcock thought that it would be too gory in colour, b) he wanted to make it for under $1m c) he was making a superior version of the cheap b/w B-movies that did so well in the 1950s.

Some people have speculated about the licence plate on Marion’s second car: NFB-418. NFB =National Film Board of Canada, and 418 is the area code of Quebec City where Hitchcock had made I Confess, 1953. However there is no Canadian money or content in the film.

In the opening scene, Marion wears a white bra. After she steals the money, she wears a black bra.

The white Ford sedan is the same car used in Leave It to Beaver, 1957.

The house was built by cannibalizing several stock unit sections. The tower is from the house in Harvey, 1950.

It is Vera Miles, not Janet Leigh, in the shower scene in the trailer.

Parallels with Orson Well’s Touch of Evil, 1958.

An extended show-off dolly shot as a opening.
Janet Leigh is harrassed by a transvestite (an uncredited Mercedes McCambridge as a man) in a cheap motel in the US South West.
Both hotel managers are badly dressed, nervous, stammers, uncomfortable with women.
For more see the article by John Hall.

Is Norman a transvestite?

The MPAA censors objected to the use of the term "transvestite" to describe Norman Bates in the final wrap-up. They insisted it be removed, until writer Joseph Stefano used a dictionary to prove to them it was a clinical psychology term with no sexual connotation. They thought he was trying to get one over on them and place a vulgarity in the picture.

The psychiatrist at the end claims that Norman was a transvestite. Purely technically, as he sometimes dressed as his mother, then he must have been. But he wore her dress over his male clothes, and has no existential need to crossdress as an end in itself. In previous decades the term ‘pseudo transvestite’ was used for persons who cross dress e.g. to commit a crime, to appear on stage etc. Norman is more of a pseudo transvestite than an existential transvestite.

He is not like any other transvestite that you may have met.

Other transvestites in Hitchcock’s films.

Murder, 1930. Handel Fane, a trapeze artist who also does female roles on stage, is the killer.
To Catch a Thief, 1954. Danielle Foucard imitates a retired jewel thief so that he will be blamed.

Conclusion

Psycho joins a puritanical view of sex with psychopathology. This illiberal view was continued in giallo and slasher films in great number.

Psycho was effectively the first slasher film, a genre that generally retained gender ambiguity (see Clover’s book).

Bell-Metereau sees Psycho as the start of a new era, particularly in contrast to Some Like It Hot of the previous year. The Dame role, dressing as an older woman, Charleys’ Aunt and Old Mother Riley, a tradition that goes back to medieval morality plays and is found in Shakespeare, Music Hall and Pantomime, is usually taken to be good-natured (if you ignore the misogyny) but has had a dark side all along (think of Lon Chaney in The Unholy Three ,1925 and 1930, Lionel Barrymore in The Devil Doll 1936). Psycho is the iconic Dame and murder film, and much better made than most of the other films that came in its wake.

We can admire Psycho as a film, but the gates that it opened, not just the murderous Dame characters, but also the psychotic transy killers who came afterwards, added an undesirable colour to the public perception of trans persons.

There are transgendered killers. I have featured some of them on my other blog. But there are far too many in movies compared to a) the number of trans characters in movies b) the numbers of real killers who are transgendered.

Sequels and Remakes

There are three sequels: Psycho II, Psycho III, Psycho IV: The Beginning. In these Anthony Perkins does get to play ‘mother’ as well as Norman.

Psycho was remade shot-by-shot from Joseph Stephano’s script, copying the camera angles of the originals, with the same errors, and in colour, by Gus Van Sant in 1998.

Rebecca Louise Bell-Metereau. Hollywood Androgyny. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Second Edition 1993: 129-132.
Stephen Rebello. Alfred Hitchcock and the making of Psycho. New York: Dembner Books. 1990.
Carol J.Clover. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.
John W. Hall. “Touch of Psycho”. Bright Lights Film Journal. September 1995. www.brightlightsfilm.com/14/psycho.html.
Richard Scheib. “Psycho”. The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review. 1998. www.moria.co.nz/horror/psycho.htm.
“Psycho (1960 film)”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho_%281960_film%29

The Rose

2009-08-28T00:17:00.005-04:00

Directed by Mark Rydell
Script by Michael Cimino (uncredited) & Bo Goldman, based on a story by Bill Kerby
125 mins 1979

Bette Midler plays Mary Rose Foster
Alan Bates plays Rudge Campbell
Frederick Forrest plays Huston Dyer
Michael Greer plays emcee
Kenny Sacha plays Rose impersonator
Sylvester plays Diana Ross impersonator
Claude Sacha plays impersonator
Michael St Laurent plays impersonator

Country of finance: US
Nationality of director: US
Location of story: New York, Florida
Filming location: New York, Los Angeles

Synopsis

Rose Foster is and is not Janice Joplin. She is a big blues singer in the 1960s given to self-destructive behaviour. She is kept going by the bullying of her manager, Rudge. She takes up with Huston, an AWOL-soldier cum chauffeur, and then drives him away. One of the best scenes is 40 minutes into the film when she takes Huston into a supposed gay bar where she used to work, and the drag performers pull her on stage to sing with them.

Who is who

This is Bette Midler’s first real film. She had first made her name singing at the gay Continental Baths in New York. She went on to become a big star as a singer and actor.

Alan Bates is a distinguished English actor who started in the 1950s. He was awarded a CBE in 1996. In The Rose he does not attempt a US accent. He has never played a drag or transgendered role.

The club emcee is Michael Greer who was in The Gay Deceivers, 1969, and was the flamboyant prison drag queen in Fortune and Men’s Eyes, 1971 (on both stage and film). He has worked only infrequently since the 1970s, probably because he was so good in Fortune and Men’s Eyes that he was typecast.

For Kenny Sacha this was his first film. In the next five years he did Bette Midler impersonators in the television shows Madame’s Place and Simon & Simon, and and was a female impersonator in Miss Lonelyhearts, 1983. After that he played a few male roles, but died in 1992 of AIDS.

Sylvester is Sylvester James, who was The Cockettes in the early 1970s, and went on to become a famous disco singer. His biggest hit was "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)". He died in 1988. He contined doing drag until the end.

Claude Sacha appeared in only this film. One wonders if he is Kenny Sacha’s brother?

Michael St Laurent appeared in only this film. One wonders if he is part of the St Laurent voguing house featured in Paris is Burning, 1990?

Curiosities

The crowd in the gay bar does not look gay.

There are 6 drag queens/performers in the club, but only 5 are credited.

When the emcee removes his dress, he is wearing a white tuxedo underneath. However when he was in the dress we do see trousers underneath, and he is not shown rolling down the legs.

The Rose - Trailer | Movies & TV | SPIKE.com

Caldonia

2009-08-16T13:30:00.002-04:00

One of the notable female impersonators in New Orleans in the early 1940s was Caldonia, who was a major influence on Patsy Valdalia.

In 1945 Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five has a number one on the ‘Race Records Charts” with a song called ‘Caldonia’. The song was written by Louis Jordan under his then wife’s name. It was featured in the film Caldonia, 1945, and the sequence was cut out and featured as a Soundie, a short musical piece that was played in cinemas at that time (a precursor of the music video). The song was also recorded by Woody Herman, B.B. King, Muddy Water, Bill Haley, James Brown, The Band, Van Morrison and many others. Thus it is one of the standards of Blues and Rock music.
Here are the lyrics:

Walking with my baby, she got great big feet
Long, lean and cranky and ain't had nothing to eat
But she's my baby, I love her just the same
I'm crazy about my baby 'cause Caldonia is her name
Caldonia, Caldonia
What makes your big head so hard?
I love you, I love you just the same
I'm crazy about you, baby, 'cause Caldonia is your name
You know my mother told me to leave Caldonia alone
No kidding, that what she said
She said, "Son, the woman ain't no good, leave her alone"
But mama didn't know what Caldonia had been putting down
So I'm going down to Caldonia's house and ask her just one more time
Caldonia, Caldonia
What makes your big head so hard?
I love you, love you just the same
I'm crazy about you, baby, 'cause Caldonia is your name

Now remember the analysis of Little Richard’s lyrics. Is this song about Caldonia the female impersonator? I cannot find any statement that it is. But it is suggestive that it might be.

One of the performers who had toured with Louis Jordan was Estella Young, a contortionist who was almost sixty but still agile. She danced to the song and took Caldonia as her professional name, but not until after he had written the song.

Célestine Berger

2009-08-10T19:31:00.004-04:00

Dorothy L.Sayers. “The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question” in Lord Peter Views the Body. London: Gollancz. 1928. London: Penguin Books. 1962.

Synopsis

Célestine, 'a slim singled creature with the face of a Paris gamin' but with ankles 'a trifle on the thick side', took a job in England in 1928 in the service of the Dowager Duchess of Medway.

She had the misfortune, in the queue at the Gare Saint-Lazare to have one’s luggage weighed, to be immediately in front of the English private detective Peter Wimsey. Wimsey's idiosyncratic mind was bothered by a phrase that she used: 'Me prends-tu pour un imbécile?'. He had a surreptitious photograph taken of her.

When the family diamonds disappeared just before the wedding of the Duchess's granddaughter, Wimsey, working with the police knew enough to have Célestine arrested. He explained that he was quite intrigued that a young woman would use a masculine article to describe herself, rather than saying 'une imbecile'. He had her photographed and confirmed with the Sûreté that she was indeed Jacques Lerouge also known as Sans-culotte.

Curiosities

While Dorothy Sayers(1893-1957) was an androgynous dresser, she rarely used gender variance in her plots, this being almost the only exception.

“Sans-culotte” was a expression used in revolutionary France where men wore pantaloons rather than the knee breeches of upper-class men. Here of course it means in a skirt rather than a culotte.

La Celestina was a major character in the 1499 Spanish novel by Fernando de Rojas, Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea or Libro de Calisto y Melibea y de la puta vieja Celestina. She is a former prostitute who now arranges discreet meetings between lovers, and runs a brothel.

Celestine is also the name of five Roman Catholic Popes.

Sayers regarded her translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia to be her best work. It was released as three Penguin Classics.

Marjorie Garber. Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge. xiii, 443 pp. 1992. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993. London : Penguin Books, 1993: 190-1.

Le locataire

2009-08-02T22:07:00.011-04:00

Novel by Roland Topor, Paris: Buchet-Chastel. 1964. English translation by Francis K. Price. The Tenant. London: W.H. Allen. 1966. New York: Bantam Books: 1966.
Film directed by Roman Polanski
English title: The Tenant.
Script by Gérard Brach & Roman Polanski, based on the novel by Roland Topor
126 mins 1976

Roman Polanski plays Trelkovsky
Isabelle Adjani plays Stella
Shelley Winters plays the concierge

Country of finance: France
Nationality of director: Polish
Location of story: Paris
Filming location: Paris.

Synopsis

In urgent need of an apartment in Paris, Trelkovsky finds one on the rue de Pyrenees that was about to become vacant as the current tenant, Simone Choule, had thrown herself out of the window into the courtyard below. He visits Simone in the hospital ward where she is dying, and becomes acquainted with her friend Stella.

After being criticized by the neighbours for a flat-warming that was too noisy, Trelkovsky became more and more paranoid about the neighbours. Some stand in the toilet across the courtyard and stare at his window, there are knocks on his door but no-one is there. The neighbours organize a petition to evict a woman with an handicapped child; they fight with each other over noise.

The cafe owner across the street insists on always serving the hot chocolate and toast that Simone Choule had always had, and pushes Trelkovsky into smoking her brand of cigarettes. The landlord persuades him to wear slippers in the apartment as she had done. One morning he awakes to find his face made up in a feminine manner. For a while he plays along with the role, going out made up, buying a wig, a dress etc., shaving his legs and enjoying the normal pleasures of transvestity. Then one morning he awakes and finds one of his upper incisor teeth missing - as Simone Choule had.

The next time that he awakes he is dressed and made up, he sees a parade of people in costume in the courtyard suggesting a ritual sacrifice. He barricades himself in, and escapes the next morning in his regular male outfit. He stays with Stella. After being knocked down by a car, he is sedated by a doctor. The driver of the car, to make amends, drives him home: however the driver was one of the neighbours from the rue de Pyrenees.

The next morning, Trelkovsky, in full drag, jumps out of his window. Surviving, he struggles back to his room, only to be stabbed, and thrown out the window again.

He awoke in hospital, to find Stella calling him Simone, and a man who looks like himself looking on.

Curiosities

Most critics point out that it was Roman Polanski’s third film about apartment neighbour paranoia (after Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby). But we could also categorize it with his occult films: Rosemary's Baby, Macbeth, The Ninth Gate.

The film is also a time loop. Time loop films, where the end is also the beginning, often have a trans or androgyny theme. A good example is Before the Rain, 1994.

Like Polanski himself, Trelkovsky was a Pole in Paris who did not know how to do things.

Trelkovsky is given no first name in either the novel or the film.

The story fitted so well into Polanski’s oeuvre that the file critic Rebecca Bell-Metereau attributes details found in the novel - such as finding Simone's tooth behind the wardrobe - as Polanski's additions. The film suggests more strongly than the book does that Trelkovsky was imagining it.

Polanski, playing the lead role, is actually uncredited as an actor.

The film has no final credits.

Although the UK cinema version was complete the 1986 video was cut by 6 seconds by the BBFC to remove a brief extract of the banned nunchaku scene from Enter the Dragon (1973) (seen by Trelkovsky and Stella during a cinema visit). The cuts were restored in the 2004 Paramount DVD.

The film is not really in either French or English. No matter which audio language you choose on the DVD, the lips never properly match.

This is the last film made by Polanski while still persona grata in the US. Two years later he fled from a paedophile charge in California and has not been back since.

Awards

Nominated for a Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, 1976.
Nominated for a César Award for production design, 1977.

Transvestity in the films of Roman Polanski

This is hardly a theme in Polanski’s films. In Cul-de-Sac.1966, George (Donald Pleasence) is encouraged by his young wife (Francoise Dorleac) to put on a nightie and makeup. This is pretty minor.

In The Magic Christian, 1969, Polanski was the straight man to Yul Brynner’s drag performance.

The only real Polanski drag movie is this, The Tenant. Polanski cast himself as Trelkovsky, but we cannot assume anything about his gender identity from this. The protagonist being a Pole in Paris, who does not fit in, as was Polanski himself and also Topor, was enough reason for him to identify with the part. The themes other than the cross-dressing, especially the neighbour paranoia, are very Polanski.

However, despite Polanski using transvestity to tell a tale of madness and fear, and having little interest in real transvestites, there are moment that trans women will relate to. The days of not really knowing who you are, and that period when you do not quite pass and are the neighbours talking about you, especially when they stop and stare at you.

Rebecca Bell-Metereau. Hollywood Androgyny. New York: Columbia University Press. 1985. Second Edition 1993: 171-2.
Jake Euker. “The Tenant”, PopMatters 14 July 2003. www.popmatters.com/film/reviews/t/tenant.shtml
Richard Scheib. “The Tenant (Le Locataire)” The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review. 1990. www.moria.co.nz/horror/tenant.htm

The Magic Christian

2009-08-01T12:41:00.007-04:00

Directed by Joseph McGrath
Script by Terry Southern & Joseph McGrath, with additional material by Graham Chapman, John Cleese & Peter Sellers, based on the novel by Terry Southern.
92 mins 1969

Peter Sellers play Sir Guy Grand
Ringo Starr plays Youngman Grand

Country of finance: UK
Nationality of director: UK
Location of story: London
Filming location: London.

Synopsis

Billionaire Sir Guy Grand adopts a young man whom he finds sleeping in the park, and together they bribe people to abandon their principles, do silly things etc. A large part of the film takes place aboard the new cruise ship, The Magic Christian.

Trivia

The novel was set in the US, but was relocated to London for the film.

This is the only film that is that features Beatles, Goons and Monty Pythons.

This is the last thing that Polanski did before his wife Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson gang, although the film was not released until afterwards.

Cross-Dressing

There is a short scene with Guy Grand dressed as a nun. That is not very interesting.

However there is also this with one of the uncredited stars. Note the man at the bar, who is Roman Polanski and credited. The point is that at the last moment you should recognize the female singer. A great performance by one of Hollywood’s biggest macho stars.

Lola

2009-06-18T14:56:00.001-04:00

Lola is song written by Ray Davies and performed by The Kinks. It was released in June 1970. The single went to number 2 in the UK, number 1 in Ireland, New Zealand and the Netherlands, and number 9 in the US.

Ray Davies said that it was based on an incident with the band’s manager, Robert Wace:

I remembered an incident in a club... in his apartment Robert Wace had been dancing with this black woman, and he said, ‘I’m really on to a thing here.’ And it was okay until we left at six in the morning and then I said, ‘Have you seen the stubble?’ He said ‘Yeah,’ but he was too pissed [drunk] to care, I think.

Many of our readers must have had the experience, early in their experience of going out dressed, of this song being played in a public place, and fearing that it might point to themselves.

The song has been covered and parodied by many other artists. A notable cover is by trans musician Dana Baitz, who changed the words to Lola’s perspective.

I met her in a club down in old Soho
Where you drink champagne and it tastes just like cherry-cola [LP version: Coca-Cola]
See-oh-el-aye cola
She walked up to me and she asked me to dance
I asked her her name and in a dark brown voice she said Lola
El-oh-el-aye Lola la-la-la-la Lola
Well I'm not the world's most physical guy
But when she squeezed me tight she nearly broke my spine
Oh my Lola la-la-la-la Lola
Well I'm not dumb but I can't understand
Why she walked like a woman and talked like a man
Oh my Lola la-la-la-la Lola la-la-la-la Lola
Well we drank champagne and danced all night
Under electric candlelight
She picked me up and sat me on her knee
And said dear boy won't you come home with me
Well I'm not the world's most passionate guy
But when I looked in her eyes well I almost fell for my Lola
La-la-la-la Lola la-la-la-la Lola
Lola la-la-la-la Lola la-la-la-la Lola
I pushed her away
I walked to the door
I fell to the floor
I got down on my knees
Then I looked at her and she at me
Well that's the way that I want it to stay
And I always want it to be that way for my Lola
La-la-la-la Lola
Girls will be boys and boys will be girls
It's a mixed up muddled up shook up world except for Lola
La-la-la-la Lola
Well I left home just a week before
And I'd never ever kissed a woman before
But Lola smiled and took me by the hand
And said dear boy I'm gonna make you a man
Well I'm not the world's most masculine man
But I know what I am and I'm glad I'm a man
And so is Lola
La-la-la-la Lola la-la-la-la Lola
Lola la-la-la-la Lola la-la-la-la Lola

“Lola (song)”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lola_(song)

Stonewall – the movie

2009-06-01T10:45:00.010-04:00

Produced by Christine Vachon
Directed by Nigel Finch
Script by Rikki Beadle Blair, a fictionalization from the book by Martin Duberman
99 mins 1995 BBC

Frederic Weller plays Matty Dean
Guillermo Diaz plays La Miranda Queredis/Hector Duarte
Brendan Corbalis plays Ethan/Bruce Compton
Duane Boutte plays Bostonia
Bruce MacVittie plays Vinnie
Dwight Ewell plays Helen Wheels
Matthew Faber plays Mizz Moxie
Michael McElroy plays Princess Ernestine
Vince Cupone plays Jose/Camelia
Steven Wishnoff plays Lucy Tania
Divas:
Candis Cayne
David Drumgold
Sherry Vine (Keith Levy)
Queen Allyson Allante gives a testimonial

Country of finance: UK
Nationality of director: British
Nationality of producer: US
Location of story: New York, New York, USA
Filming location: New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Fire Island.

Synopsis

In 1969, Matty Dean arrives in New York City from somewhere in the midwest. He quickly falls in with a group of drag queens going to the Stonewall tavern. When La Miranda is harassed during a police raid he stands up for her and is beaten. They are arrested. Bostonia, a drag mother to the Stonewall queens, bails them out. Bostonia is also the lover of Vinnie, the closeted mafioso manager of the Stonewall. Matty also attends meetings of the Mattachine Society, where he becomes the lover of Ethan, a writer. Hector, La Miranda’s male persona, is called for military induction. She reports en femme, but is terrified when she is sent to a psychiatrist for evaluation. Matty wears her clothes and goes in her place. He gets her declared as ‘sexual deviant’. Vinnie arranges an appointment with a sex change doctor for Bostonia, apparently thinking that this will okay their relationship in the eyes of the straight world. She refuses: “I’m a chick with a dick who ain’t done with her dick yet”. Ethan and Matty go on the Mattachine Society demonstration at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Then they go to the gay resort of Fire Island for a few days, where at a gay dance, man are not allowed to dance face to face, and on the beach police check that swimming costumes are not too skimpy. Matty prefers La Miranda’s defiance over Ethan’s acceptance of the system, and goes back to her. After watching Judy Garland’s death on television, Vinnie takes Bostonia out in public for the first time. The next morning, after telling her that he loves her, he shoots himself. The next night there is another raid at the Stonewall Inn, and after taunting, La Miranda hits back at a cop. The riot starts.

Awards, and afterlife

1995 London Film Festival - Audience Award

1996 San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival - Audience Award for Best Feature

1996 L.A. Outfest - Grand Jury Award Honorable Mention - Outstanding Screenwriting - Rikki Beadle Blair
Rikki Beadle Blair turned the filmscript into a play, and it was premiered at the Edinburgh Fesival in 2007.

Cast & Crew

Christine Vachon (1962 - ) is a US film producer who has made many queer films including Poison, 1991, Swoon, 1992, Go Fish, 1994, Safe, 1995, I Shot Andy Warhol, 1996, Velvet Goldmine, 1998, Boys Don’t Cry, 1999, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, 2001, Far From Heaven, 2002, Infamous, 2006.
Nigel Finch (1949 – 1995) was a BBC producer/director. He had made previous programs about such queer topics as the Chelsea Hotel, Robert Mapplethorp, Kenneth Anger, Yukio Mishima. He was suffering from AIDS as he made Stonewall. He died shortly after its completion.

Rikki Beadle-Blair (1961 – ) is a Briton of Jamaican descent. He is an openly gay actor /singer /writer /producer /director. He adapted Boy George’s autobiography, and did a documentary on homophobia on BBC Radio 4.

Martin Duberman (1930 – ) was a history professor at the City University of New York. He published the first book-length history of Stonewall in 1993.

Frederick Weller (1966 – ) is a cousin of actor Peter Weller. He can be seen in episodes of Law and Order. He is apparently heterosexual.

Guillermo Diaz (1971 – )(La Miranda) is an openly gay actor. He has played gay and straight parts. Stonewall is his only drag role.

Duane Boutte (Bostonia) has been in 7 films. Stonewall is his only drag role.

Dwight Ewell (Helen Wheels) has been in 31 films. Stonewall is his only drag role.

Matthew Faber (Mizz Moxie) has been in 23 films. Stonewall is his only drag role.

Michael McElroy (Princess Ernestine) has been in 7 films. Stonewall is his only drag role.

Vince Cupone (1972 - )(Jose/Carmilia) is a stunts person. He has also acted in 30 films. Stonewall is his only drag role.

Steven Wishnoff (1959 – ) (Lucy Tania) has been in 3 films, and played one of the prisoners in the television series Oz. He is an Emmy nominated producer. He played Albin/Zaza in the stage version of La Cage aux Folles, and has played other drag roles.

The Diva chorus, Candis Cayne, David Drumgold and Sherry Vine were well-known drag performers in New York. Candis Cayne, of course, started transition shortly after this film, and is now a woman.

Queen Allyson Allante, who with other actual participants in the real riot, is briefly interviewed during the opening credits, is transgendered. She is ignored in both Martin Duberman’s and David Carter’s books on Stonewall.

Curiosities

Most accounts say that the first return blow was from a trans man (Stormé DeLarverie). There are no trans men in the film.

It is sometimes assumed that La Miranda is (very loosely) based on Sylvia Rivera. Guillermo Diaz, 24 when he made the film, looks too old to be the 18-year-old that Sylvia was in 1969. And where is the character based on Marsha Johnson?

In fact, all the persons in the film (except Judy Garland, and the testimonials) are fictional. This avoidance of the real persons in the history is the aspect that is most criticized.

The Diva chorus which lip-synchs to songs by the Shangri-Las and others are in effect a Greek Chorus commenting on the action.

Like Tales of the City, 1993, US film/television was not interested in filming the story, and a British team stepped in.

Nigel Finch had never been to the United States before making this film.

Rikki Beadle-Blair was criticized during the making of the film: “No one's going to want to see a drag queen having sex -- that's a freak show, a bad example for the youth of America.” However he and Finch stood their ground.

Blair found problems in that the alternate accounts of Stonewall disagree. See for example the two major books by Duberman and Carter which disagree significantly. He partially resolved this by having La Miranda say at the beginning and at the end of the film that this was her Stonewall, her memory of events. This partially forestalls criticism about the facts, but does not explain how she knew about events where she was not present.

The characters in the film are to some extent composites of different people; others are archetypes to tell the story. Time is also collapsed. Some of the events with the Mattachine Society actually took place earlier in the 1960s, not in 1969.

As in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, 1995 and Transamerica, 2005, the major drag roles go to cisgendered actors and the real drag performers/transgendered actors get only the small parts.

Jack Nichols, real life lover of drag star Logan Carter, was so negative about the film that he (wrongly) doubted that Nigel Finch was even gay.

Sylvia Rivera, a major real-life participant at the riots, demonstrated against the film at its New York premiere.

Conclusion

The film is annoying to some of those who want it to be a documentary, and to follow the known facts detail-by-detail. It is however a work of art, using composites, archetypes, time compression and a Greek chorus. These techniques are used in many films about historical events.

The film does re-assert the importance of transgendered persons at the riot. Transgender activists have rightly been aggravated by the efforts of some gays and lesbians to write the transgendered out of the history of Stonewall. Here a lesbian producer, a gay director and a gay writer put the transgendered back at the centre of the story.

Martin B Duberman. Stonewall. New York: Dutton, 1993. New York: Plume, 1994.
Edward Guthman. “`Stonewall' -- Gay History Lite”. SFGate. July 26, 1996. www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1996/07/26/DD54562.DTL
Jack Nichols. “Stonewall: A Film by Nigel Finch. Badpuppy Gay Today. 1997. http://gaytoday.badpuppy.com/garchive/entertain/071497en.htm
“Stonewall (film)”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_(film)
David Carter. Stonewall : the riots that sparked the gay revolution. New York : St. Martin's Press 2004. New York: Griffin 2005.

Little Richard (1932 – ) and his lyrics.

2009-05-29T23:25:00.003-04:00

Richard Wayne Penniman was a Rock-and-Roll singer/pianist and preacher.

In his apprenticeship years, he had toured the southern US in a vaudeville show where he played in drag as Princess Lavonne, ‘the freak of the year’.

Later, as he became famous as Little Richard from 1955, he performed with make-up, flamboyance, high pitched squeals, extravagant clothing and pompadour hairstyle.

Little Richard was certainly out of line with the 1950s concept of masculinity. One of the pioneers of rock and roll, he was unique in purveying an androgynous image.

Two of his hit records have been taken to be about drag queens: bald-headed Sally, and Miss Molly who is addressed as ‘son’. The 18th-century mollies were of course transgendered.

Good Golly Miss Molly

From the early early mornin' to the early early night,
When I caught miss Molly rockin' at the house of blue lights,
Good golly miss Molly, sure like to ball,
A-When you're rockin' and a rollin', can't hear your mama call.

Mama, papa told me 'Son, you better watch your step',
If'n your Papa's Mama had to watch my Papa's step ,
Good golly miss Molly, sure like to ball,
A-When you're rockin' and a rollin', can't hear your mama call.

Long Tall Sally

Well, long tall Sally, she's built for speed,
She's got everything that uncle John need,
Oh baby, yes baby, woo baby, havin' me some fun tonight.

Well, I saw uncle John with bald headed Sally,
He saw aunt Mary coming and he ducked back in the alley,
Oh baby, yes baby, woo baby, havin' me some fun tonight.

W.T Lhamon writes: “Traditional black folk figures scamper through this song in scandalous antics. Uncle John is a stock figure in black lore from the ‘John cycle’ of tales about a slave who outwits the authorities. On this level, the song’s Aunt Mary is a good wife … But ‘Aunt Mary’ is also gay argot for a possessive queen. So she operates on at least two levels, apparent nurturer and drag possessor. In any case, Uncle John in this song is ducking out on Aunt Mary’s authority, whatever she represents. It’s Long Tall sally, ‘built for speed,’ who ‘got everything that Uncle John need.’ But where did Sally come from? Nightmare to to every Aunt Mary, Sally is the newly noticed, old, subtraditional freak. Not only long, tall, and speedy, she’s ‘bald-headed.’ As such, she’s figuratively phallic, flashing in and out of alleys in the hand of Uncle John, that trickster. That is attractive enough in the male-bonding context of the studio where all this cropped up mutually among these men, but there is more. In the transvestite shows of Little Richard’s apprenticeship, baldheadedness was preparation for one’s wigs… Long Tall Sally, in addition to her other meanings, is therefore a transvestite fantasy figure slipping and and sliding through life’s niches. … A transsexual variant of Sambo, and just like this new rock form which her surfacing embodied at this mid-fifties moment of family breakdown, she represents whatever anyone wishes her to represent.”

Richard Penniman is also an ordained born-again Christian. As a reverend, he married Bruce Willis and Demi Moore.

He was one of the first seven inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.

Marjorie Garber. Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety. Routledge. 1992: 302-3
Wayne Studer. Rock on the Wild Side: Gay Male Images in Popular Music of the Rock Era. Layland Publications. 1994: p135.
Charles White. The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock. New York: Da Capo Press xvi, 282 pp 1994.
W.T. Lhamon. "Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s. Harvard University Press. 2002: 89, 93-95.
“Little Richard”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Richard.
Little Richard. Little Richard.com. www.littlerichard.com.

King Rat

2009-05-28T14:34:00.005-04:00

<p>&amp;lt;br /&amp;gt; &amp;lt;br /&amp;gt; </p>Novel by James Clavell, London: Martin Joseph. New York: Little, Brown and Company. 1962
Film directed by Bryan Forbes
Script by Bryan Forbes, based on the novel by James Clavell
134 mins, BW 1965

George Segal plays Corporal King
Tom Courtney plays Lieutenant Robin Grey
James Fox plays Flight Lieutenant Peter Marlowe
Denholm Elliot plays Lieutenant G.D. Larkin
John Mills plays Colonel George Smedley-Taylor

Country of finance: US
Nationality of director: British
Location of story: Changi POW camp, Singapore
Filming location: California, US.

Synopsis.

Marlowe, whom Clavell based on himself (Clavell was three years in the Japanese POW camp at Changi), is at first aloof from the US Corporal King, the leading black marketer in the camp, but is eventually drawn into his circle. This brings Marlow to to attention of Lieutenant Grey, the Provost Marshall of the camp who attempts to arrest both of them. The film is set in 1945 leading up to the end of the war.

Sean Jennison(1923 - 1945) Fighter plane pilot and stage entertainer.

There is an extra minor character in the novel.

Sean Jennison was with Marlowe in the same RAF squadron in Java. As a fighter pilot he had shot down three Japanese Zeroes. He was then himself shot down and captured.

The commanding officers within the POW camp selected Sean to play female parts in the camp theatricals because he was one of the youngest men present and because he shaved only infrequently. Sean fought this assignment quite bitterly, but the order was repeated. We “tried to sooth Sean down, but he swore he was going to be the worst actress in the world, that he was going to make sure that he was sacked after the first disastrous performance. We told him that we couldn't care less. His first performance was terrible. But after that he didn't seem to hate it so much. To his surprise, he even seemed to like it. So we really started to work.
It was good having something to do - it took your mind off the stinking food and stinking camp. We taught him how a woman talks and walks and sits and smokes and drinks and dresses and even thinks. Then to keep him in the mood, we began to play make-believe. Whenever we were in the theatre, we'd get up when he came in, help him into a chair, you know, treat him like a real woman. It was exciting at first, trying to keep up the illusion, making sure that Sean was never seen dressing or undressing, making sure his costumes were always concealing but just suggestive enough. We even got special permission for him to have a room of his own. With his own shower.

“Then suddenly, he didn't need coaching any more. He was as complete a woman on the stage as it was possible to be.

“But little by little, the woman began to dominate him off stage too, only we didn't notice it. By this time Sean had grown his hair quite long - the wigs we had were no damn good. Then Sean started to wear a woman's clothes all the time. One night someone tried to rape him.

“After that Sean nearly went out of his mind. He tried to crush the woman in him but couldn't. then he tried to commit suicide. Of course it was hushed up. But that didn't help Sean, it made things worse and he cursed us for saving him.

“A few months later there was another rape attempt. After that Sean buried his male self completely. ‘I'm not fighting it any more,’ he said. ‘You wanted me to be a woman, now they believe I am one. All right. I'll be one. Inside I feel that I am one, so there's no need to pretend any more. I am a woman, and I'm going to be treated like one.”

Sean continued to have identity crises. He was, after all, the only only non-male in a very artificial environment. He could talk to the other actors, but no-one else was in a situation like his. He was so effective on stage that he became the lust object for the camp. Whilst he was the only prisoner to have a room to himself, he could never sleep in it because of the risk of rape.

In 1945, when the war with Japan was over, and allied troops came to free the POWs and send them home, many of the prisoners had difficulty adjusting. Sean had difficulties more than most. The beach was now open for swimming. One day Sean went to the beach, accompanied by homophobic catcalls. He found a quiet spot, put on female clothes for the last time, and walked into the sea.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

King Rat was filmed in 1965. The Sean Jennison episodes were in the script from the beginning, but at a late stage, Columbia Pictures executives finally realized that they were present, and Sean was completely removed from the film.

In Hollywood ‘buddy’ films there is often a possibility of reading of reading the relationship between the two leading males as homoerotic. A common diversion from this reading is to have an obvious queer character, often a trans person of some kind. The classic film of this kind is Freebie and the Bean, 1974, where cops James Caan and Alan Arkin go on at each other like a married couple. The diversion is provided by a trans criminal – without the courtesy of a name – who is beaten up and killed by James Caan in the ladies’ room. The relationship between Marlowe and King could of course be taken as homoerotic. Perhaps in 1965, upper management was simply homophobic, without the understanding of the diversions that would become common a few years later.

Given the surname Jennison, Clavell may have had some psychoanalytical theory in mind, but no such thoughts are presented or developed in the book.
__

Vito Russo. The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies. New York: Harper & Row. 1981: 136,198.

Love Is a Stranger

2009-05-25T17:36:00.002-04:00

This is a video about dressing up as a woman, and going out in an expensive car. She even takes off her wig as per the old-time drag performance tradition. And she ends up back in a suit and tie. View it here (You Tube says: Embedding disabled by request, so I can only give a link).

Except of course the person, doing the dressing up, is Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics. Society deems it to be normal when a women dresses in female drag, but a very different thing when a man does the same. A qualification is needed here. After a certain age, women are criticized. Mutton dressed up as lamb.

So what is when a woman dresses up as a woman. Two major terms have been proposed. Autogynephilia and homovestity. The first means getting off on yourself as woman. This is normal behaviour. In men as in women. Except when men do it, psychiatrists and others rush in an attempt to pathologize it. Equally normal is autoandrophilia: getting off on yourself as a man. Whether you are a man or a woman. The second term, in contrast to transvestity, means dressing up as the sex that you are.

When the single and video was originally released in 1982, some viewers thought that the person in the video was male bodied, presumably a transvestite, especially because of the wig removal.

Not that Annie Lennox is all for gender play, at least not for men. The Lyrics of “I need a man” contain:

You should know Im not impressed
cause theres just one thing
That Im looking for
And he dont wear a dress.
I need a man...
I need a man...
Baby baby baby
Dont you shave your legs
Dont you double comb your hair
Dont powder puff
Just leave it rough

“Love Is a Stranger”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Is_a_Stranger

Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones.

2009-05-11T11:01:00.005-04:00

Cisgendered heterosexual that he is, the younger Mick Jagger did have an ambiance of being androgynous, although not to a degree that compared at all with real gender variance. Androgyny for the cisgendered. Steven Simels in his Gender Chameleons: Androgyny in Rock ‘n Roll, 1985, wrote of Jagger “Hipless and emaciated, possessing lips of such astonishing lasciviousness, that when you put him on stage he resembles nothing so much as some weird mixture of both human sex organs.”

However we must say that the major items below were recorded 1966-70. Very few other rock bands flirted with androgyny until the coming of Glam rock in 1972.
In 1966 of the band dressed as World War II army nurses for the photograph that accompanied the single, 'Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing in the Shadow?'.

In 1967 We Love You, one of the very earliest videos, made in the wake of Mick Jagger's trial for marijuana possession, has Jagger, in the dock, dressed as Oscar Wilde and Marianne Faithful as Alfred Lord Douglas.

The Stone's single, 'Honky Tonk Women', 1969, has been commented on by different writers as being about a drag queen: 'a gin-soaked barroom queen in Memphis' heaves him 'right across her shoulder ... she blew my nose and then she blew my mind'.

The word androgyny has often been used about the film Performance, 1970, which has Jagger as Turner, a retired rock-and-roll singer who initiates Chas, an on-the-lam gangster into androgyny and fusions of gender and identity. Well, the trailer intimates that. At the end the identities of Turner and Chas have become confused. Which one has been killed? Which one is taken away by the gangsters? This is not really androgyny (man-woman): it is more andrander (man-man). But then there is that bit where Chas is in bed with one of Turner’s women, and with a bit of tricky editing, you think for a moment that it is Turner himself rather than the woman.

Steve J. Spears' stage play, The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin, about a transvestite speech-therapist, which was first performed in 1977, uses both the Rolling Stones' song You Can't Always Get What You Want and Mick Jagger's image as part of the ambience.

The film, Running out of Luck, 1986, features Jagger as himself recording his first solo album in Rio de Janerio when he is kidnapped by a gang of transvestites. This film is so obscure that I could not find either a suitable photograph or clip.

Naked Came the Stranger

2009-05-03T00:38:00.004-04:00

A Long Island housewife, Penelope Ashe, was the author of Naked Came the Stranger, a badly written sex romp, which was published in 1969 and sold some millions of copies.

Not only did Penelope turn out to be mainly a man, she was revealed to be 19 men and 5 women. A group of writers and editors on Newsday magazine organized by Mike McGrady wrote the book over a weekend to demonstrate how quickly a trash novel could be produced. McGuire got his sister-in-law to play Penelope Ashe in interviews.

In 1970 McGrady wrote a book telling how they did it. He later wrote the autobiography of Lin da Lovelace who was famous for being in the porn film Deep Throat.

The novel was filmed in 1975, still giving Penelope the credit.

Mike McGrady et al writing as Penelope Ashe. Naked Came The Stranger. New York: L. Stuart, 1969. Fort Lee, N.J.: Barricade Books, 2003.
Radley Metzger (dir). Naked Came The Stranger. Scr: Jake Barnes, based on the novel by Penelope Ashe, with Darby Lloyd Rains as Gillian Blake. US 83 mins 1975.
Mike McGrady. Stranger than naked;: Or, How to write dirty books for fun and profit; a manual . P.H. Wyden 1970.
Linda Lovelace and Mike McGrady. Ordeal. Star Books. 1982.
Alex Boese. “Naked Came The Stranger”. The Museum of Hoaxes http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Hoaxipedia/Naked_Came_The_Stranger/
“Naked Came the Stranger”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Came_the_Stranger.

Who was Wanda Tinasky?

2009-04-30T23:37:00.001-04:00

Wanda Tinasky was the pseudonym used by the writer of a series of letters sent to the Mendocino Commentary and the Anderson Valley Advertiser, both in northern California, between 1983 and 1988. Wanda is self-described as a bag lady living under a bridge. Her opinions on many topics were witty, irreverent and sometimes harsh.

Bruce Anderson, the editor of the AVA, was later struck, while reading Vineland, with the stylistic and biographical similarities to Thomas Pynchon (1937 - ), and published a book to that effect. The same thesis was taken up by Fred Gardner and TR Factor (alias Diane Kearney and C.O. Jones), who also published a book on the thesis.

The alternate opinion has been put forward by Don Foster, Shakespeare scholar and literary detective, that Wanda is in fact an obscure beat poet, Tom Hawkins (1927 – 1988) who killed his wife and committed suicide at the time of the last Tinasky letter. More matches of biographical details turned up, and his poetry is recycled in the letters.

*Not Diane Kearney, the HBS advocate.

Bruce Anderson (ed). The Letters of Wanda Tinasky to the AVA, The: The Complete Casebook San Francisco: Anderson Valley Advertiser 1995.
TR Factor (ed). The Letters of Wanda Tinasky. Portland, Or: Vers Libre Press 1996.
Don Foster. “Wanda, the Fort Bragg Bag Lady”. Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous. New York: Henry Holt 2000.
“Wanda Tinasky”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanda_Tinasky.

Heaven

2009-04-28T20:10:00.007-04:00

Directed by Scott Reynolds

Script by Scott Reynolds, based on the novel by Chad Taylor

105 minutes, 1998.

Martin Donovan plays Robert Marling
Danny Edwards plays Heaven
Richard Schiff plays Stanner
Joanna Going plays Jennifer Marling
Patrick Malahide plays Melrose
Karl Urban plays Sweeper

Country of finance: US/NZ

Nationality of director: New Zealand

Location of story: implicitly New Zealand

Filming location: New Zealand.

Synopsis

Robert and Jennifer Marling are a US couple, living in New Zealand, who have now separated because of his gambling addiction and her greed. Robert is a down-and-out architect with only one client, Stanner, the crooked owner of the nightclub, Paradise. The star turn at Paradise is Heaven, a former street transy whom Stanner has employed in his nightclub. This is partly, perhaps mainly, because Heaven (no other name is given for her) is psychic, and gives him hints of what to play in poker. Heaven also sees images of a coming slaughter. Both Robert and Heaven are seeing the same psychiatrist, Dr Melrose, who just happens to be having an affair with Jennifer, and tells her that Robert is coming into money, because Heaven has foreseen it. After Heaven rescues Robert after he had been robbed while drunk, she adopts him giving the poker advice that she had previously given to Stanner, because she has seen that he will rescue her from a much worse situation. Heaven’s friend Sweeper works as doorman/bouncer at the club, until he is fired for refusing entry to two obvious thugs (whom Stanner employs to burn down the club). The two thugs make a pass at Heaven, and chase her, but end up being the ones who rob Robert. Heaven steals Stanner’s money and flees to Robert. Stanner gets it back and kidnaps her and ties her up. The two thugs murder Stanner and all the other club dancers, but kidnap Heaven to rape her. Robert interrupts the rape, but is being defeated by the thugs when Sweeper saves him and Heaven. Heaven and Sweeper take the money, give some of it to Robert, and then go off together.

Curiosities

New Zealanders, of course, drive on the left. Jennifer and Melrose both have cars with the driving wheel on the left (to drive on the right). Perhaps Jennifer brought hers from the States when she immigrated.

Paradise is a girly bar that attracts a male clientele. One would expect that the dancers would strip. But they don’t seem to.

Of course a real-life trans woman was not offered the part of Heaven. Nor is it made clear that she is in transition. However it is clear that she lives female full time.

Dr Melrose makes a pass at her, and then rejects her as ‘disgusting’. This is acceptable as it is part of establishing that he is a creep.

The two thugs early on chase Heaven presumably with the intention of rape. When they burn down the club, they murder all the cis women, and take only Heaven away and start raping her (until she is rescued). There is no scene where they discover that she has an optional extra, so presumably they knew before that she is a trans woman. It is unlikely that two criminal partners are both transy-chasers. This aspect is not developed in the script.

The film is non-linear to cope with Heaven’s psychic abilities. Until the end we do not really know what happened earlier.

Who is Danny Edwards?

Edwards is a British actor. Here is his IMDB page. He played a drag queen in La Lengua asesina, 1996, and then Sherrie, a transy hooker in the Granada Television series Gold/Band of Gold, 1997-8.

After Heaven, he has been playing blokey parts. Perhaps he thinks that he is getting too old to play transy parts unless he takes hormones.

Many films with transsexuals are unrealistic in that the trans woman is just too beautiful. Edward’s Heaven is plausible. She is pretty enough to work in a sleazy nightclub, but no more so than an average woman.

*not the US golfer, nor the sculptor, nor the Port Vale footballer, nor the NASCAR racer.

Who is Scott Reynolds?

Reynolds is a New Zealand film director who has made four films. He has attracted some good reviews. Here is his IMDB page.

Conclusion

At the end, Heaven still has the stolen money (minus the portion that she gives to Robert) and goes off with Sweeper who turns out to love her.

She gets the money and the man.

Neat.

Madame Sesostris

2009-04-20T12:59:00.002-04:00

The character, Mr Scogan appeared in Aldous Huxley's first novel, Chrome Yellow, a 'roman à clef' published in 1921. Mr Scogan appeared at the village fair as Madame Sesostris, 'the Sorceress of Ecbatana'. In this role he read palms and tried to set up selected female clients for seduction.

It is generally agreed among critics that Mr Scogan is based on the philosopher and womanizer, Bertrand Russell.

The very same year, T.S. Eliot, in his much to be discussed poem The Waste Land, used the character (with a slight spelling change, and perhaps influenced by the fact that Russell had had an affair with his wife Vivienne) to give a tarot reading anticipating the rest of the poem:

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor ...

P.Lal, the Indian poet, renders homage in 1960:

All that they knew. In Sly hieroglyph
Floating on time’s gauze, Psammetichus
Carved more than carvers of the carious cliff …
Ask the wild sea. It is all on the rock.
But Cheops sleeps: he has not heard of birth.
And Sesostris: he has not heard of death.

In episode 2.8 of the television series, Witchblade, Roger Daltrey of the Who, plays a priest who has a second persona as Madame Sesostris.

'Sesostris' is the name of three twelfth dynasty Egyptian pharaohs, and another pharoah whom Herodotus tells of as invading Europe. Ecbatana is in Iran. To conflate the two is an example of orientalism, the Western custom of projecting fantasies upon the East, a custom that often features cross-dressing. This is the kind of thing that Marjorie Garber discusses in Vested Interests, 1992, although she did not use this particular example.

Aldous Huxley. Crome Yellow. A Triad Grafton Book. 1977 (original 1921): chp XXVII.
T.S. Eliot. The Waste Land in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1901-1950. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. 1971: line 43-59.
Grover Smith. The Waste Land. George Allen & Unwin. 1983: 67-8.
Calvin Bedient. He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Waste Land and Its protagonist. The University of Chicago Press. 1986: 52,55.

The drag queens of Oliver Stone’s JFK

2009-04-20T11:37:00.003-04:00

Whether you regard them as gratuitous or as background colour, there are two fleeting drag queens in JFK, 1991.

Crystal Palace Park Tearoom

2009-04-12T09:48:00.008-04:00

In the tearoom next to the lake at the bottom end of Crystal Palace Park (map), in south London, there is this mural. Make of it what you will: