From the Margins: What the Archives Show Us About Trans Cinema and Audiences

A film that centers on a transgender person or storyline enters the culture like any other movie. The difference lies in the discourse around it. A pervasive disregard for the realities of trans experience beyond the screen is evident in how criticism of such films is written, in how moviegoers view them, and even in how they’re made. Trans bodies have long been depicted in cinema in the most salacious and deviant contexts, and this has been met without much protest from the mainstream society that absorbs those images. Trans people in movies are written and talked about as if they were abstract concepts, anomalies. For years, it’s been clear that very little attention is being paid (by filmmakers, critics, or marketers) to the ways in which a trans audience might see and react to these attempts at putting their lives in front of the camera, and the cisgender majority continues to control the conversation. But a robust dialogue about these films has existed for decades within the trans community—it’s just gone unnoticed by the general public.

There is a false presumption that little trans history exists on record, that the trans experience is some neat trend of the present. Part of that is willful ignorance; another factor is that the archive of transgender lives is largely made up of works never meant to be consumed by the masses. The internet has been key in counteracting inaccurate narratives by bringing about a sea change for transgender archives and bridging the digital and the pre-internet worlds. There are numerous collections of trans history—including the largest in the world, the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada; the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; the ONE Archives Foundation at the University of Southern California; and the National Transgender Library & Archive at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor—each with its own repositories of letters, diaries, magazines, photographs, do-it-yourself zines, newspaper clippings, and audio. There are also several nonprofits and individuals with their own holdings and projects.

What has been most crucial in recent years is the integration of these archives for research purposes. Central to that effort is the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA), an initiative that started at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and will soon relocate to Boston’s Northeastern University. In the past, trying to uncover what was available in individual archives often proved to be a tall order for trans researchers. The DTA brings together collections from around the world, centralizing a marginalized community’s scattered histories within a single search engine. It has created an incredible opportunity to investigate, whether as a researcher or as an amateur, how trans communities of the past wrote about and expressed their experiences, and also how they responded to the moments when mainstream society looked back at them.

Some of the most valuable and insightful access points to trans history found on the DTA are magazines published in the latter half of the twentieth century. Exclusively transgender publications date back to the pre-Stonewall 1960s. Virginia Prince, a trans woman from Southern California who led a support group, self-published Transvestia magazine starting in 1960, and it was one of the earliest and most popular of these publications. Prince and others in her generation belonged to a wave of trans pioneers who emerged after Christine Jorgensen, a transgender American woman, gained global attention for her gender confirmation surgery in 1952.

These American trans publications of the 1960s and ’70s—self-published magazines and newsletters that are estimated to number around two dozen—were juggling an array of functions, responding to the needs of an eager readership looking for community and a better sense of what was out there, and who else was out there. Very early on, these publications were aware of how the outside world saw them, and those bigoted views meant that the majority were available exclusively in adult bookstores. Still, most of the publications could not be dismissed or labeled as smut, although there was certainly a cis male readership who also bought them because of fetishistic, prurient fascination.

Contained within their pages was medical news, as trans surgeries were beginning to take place in the United States; for example, Dr. Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon, published in 1966, gave readers official scientific affirmation that “sex changes” were happening domestically and were not just available to those Americans, like Jorgensen, who were willing and able to travel abroad. There were also bulletins on other issues that concerned the community; sections in which readers could communicate with pen pals; “Dear Abby”–like advice columns; and photo shoots depicting everyone from anonymous trans women to internationally known French entertainers like Bambi and Coccinelle.

Also featured were spaces to talk about movies. Films with trans people or cross-dressers had the community on notice and generated consistent coverage. Just the mere presence of a trans character, however brief, could provoke a review or an editor’s note. There was commentary about Toshio Matsumoto’s 1969 Funeral Parade of Roses (in the publication DRAG: A Magazine About the Transvestite) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1978 In a Year with 13 Moons (in Les Girls) upon their release in the U.S., and a few publications collected lists and tracked relevant films, offering guidebooks with short capsules. The scarcity of trans images inspired some publications to promote Super 8 reels of known trans performers for purchase.

Many of the publications operated in secret out of self-protection—one newsletter was irreverently titled Ssshhh!—in light of the fact that Virginia Prince had at one point been arrested for publishing Transvestia. The legal and professional risks of being outed for their trans identities had led many writers to forgo bylines or take on pseudonyms. There were also many trans people who never identified with the queer community at large and who created publications that distanced themselves from the social and political conflicts that concerned the movement at the time. Some of that attitude resulted in exclusionary, predominantly white publications and groups that splintered these communities for several decades. Prince herself, unfortunately, was one of the publishers guilty of this practice. Her hostility toward certain segments of the trans and cross-dressing communities led to those whom she marginalized building their own publications and support groups.

Still, a constant in these different, sometimes estranged corners of the trans community was an interest in trans film images. Their prevalence in these magazines stemmed from a yearning shared by editors and readers. In letters to the editor, trans readers regularly mentioned that watching certain films helped them begin to realize their identities, even if the trans characters in those movies often ended up as villains or corpses by the end—as in Richard Rush’s buddy-cop film Freebie and the Bean, in which a character simply named “Transvestite” in the credits suffers a brutal death. While outrage over that scene got some mainstream media attention, it was the gay community’s response that was centered. Trans magazines, on the other hand, shared much more nuanced perspectives, including fascinating anecdotes that expressed viewers’ conflicted identification with that character and with the actor, Marilyn Monroe impersonator Christopher Morley. It’s clear from these publications that, for some trans viewers, the movie transcended whatever intent the filmmakers originally had.

But this kind of reclamation was certainly not the only response to transphobia on-screen. These magazines also cast a more critical eye on how mass-produced trans images had an impact on them. As the seventies gave way to the eighties, there was increased concern and immediate skepticism about Hollywood’s attempts to tell trans stories—understandably, as the community had been burned many times over, and not just by widely distributed feature films. In one case, a production team for a project called Vera had held tryouts in Los Angeles and New York City, promising to make a romance movie with a trans woman lead. These filmed auditions and casting calls (that included former child star Danny Bonaduce reading for the male romantic lead) turned out to be a scam, and the project came to light when DRAG, Female Mimics International, and Les Girls did their due diligence and investigated it. Over the course of multiple issues, Les Girls exposed the production company, which had planned to use the footage they’d gathered to make an unauthorized documentary that fortunately never came to be. In an editorial for a 1981 issue focused on the whole affair, editor-in-chief M. B. West spoke directly to the people behind Vera: “If, indeed, you have exploited them [trans women], we challenge you to step forward and demonstrate at least half the courage the transsexual community as a whole has shown!”

The trans community became a lot more organized and less fractured in the eighties and nineties. In 1987, the International Foundation for Gender Education (IFGE), a trans nonprofit of unprecedented scale, was established for the explicit purpose of countering widespread intolerance and ignorance, and, among other things, it took control of the magazine Transgender Tapestry. Language started to change, with “transgender” and “the gender community” becoming more commonly used terms. Trans men gained more prominence and were directly involved in publications that had previously been exclusive to trans feminine writers and subjects (trans male multimillionaire Reid Erickson’s Erickson Education Newsletter, which dated back to the sixties and centered on trans health, was one of the few publications that had targeted trans men before this time). Alongside Transgender Tapestry, a slew of publications emerged in this period—including Chrysalis Quarterly, TransSisters, Cross-Talk, and Rupert Raj’s Metamorphosis newsletter—that focused less on covering pageants and balls and more on conferences and educational, health, and political programs. Along with this heightened social awareness, these publications doubled down on probing and studying the cultural history that had led to prejudice and misperceptions.

Part of that project was building an awareness of trans film history. The late trans activist Lou Sullivan’s 1985 handbook Information for the Female-to-Male Crossdresser and Transsexual included a list of films from a wide range of periods with broad categories for the on-screen trans masculine: women in male disguise (Barbra Streisand’s Yentl); a gender-queer, androgynous female lead (Sylvia Scarlett); and a woman playing a man’s role (Eva Mattes as a thinly veiled version of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in A Man Like Eva). Availability of trans cinema was a major issue, one that was directly tackled in the reviews of a writer named Laurie Ann, who had a column in LadyLike magazine in the 1990s. Having spent years searching for titles at her nearest video store, she wrote on movies such as Bob Clark’s She-Man: A Story of Fixation (1967),Doris Wishman’s documentary Let Me Die a Woman (1977),and Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge (1963).Her pieces on these older films were the works of a scavenger; they never immediately dismiss their subjects, regardless of their flaws or their disparate genres, which run the gamut from exploitation to educational film to art house. Instead, the reviews place the films within their cultural moment and a broad lineage of trans cinema. Reviewers like Allen were talking directly to a trans audience catching up on its own past, putting together a puzzle riddled with missing pieces.

The 1990s were an inflection point in the mainstreaming of trans cinema, with trans characters popping up in major hits like The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; The Crying Game; and M. Butterfly, as well as in successful nonfiction titles like Paris Is Burning. It may seem shocking now, but a film like To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, a road movie about drag queens with no trans characters represented, received considerable coverage from multiple trans magazines and was even publicized with a still of Patrick Swayze on the cover on Transgender Tapestry. Alongside these hits, there were smaller movies that the trans magazines touted as “game changers” and officially cosigned as being especially forward-thinking—one that comes to mind is the much-forgotten British film Different for Girls, by Richard Spence, which was so popular in the community at the time that Tapestry collected half a dozen reviews by trans people praising it.

Yarborough’s commentary was more than fair. For several decades there had been a cyclical trend in which trans stories made the news and became fodder for Hollywood films but never led to any forward political momentum, leaving most trans people still living discreetly on the margins. Could a film really change things for the community? At the time, a “good,” forward-thinking movie would invariably still be outnumbered by films filled with both malicious and casual transphobia. And there was still an unspoken issue: these stories were not in the hands of the community, and it was unthinkable that an out trans person would have enough authority to work on a widely distributed film. The trans experience has long been tied to the struggle to gain autonomy over one’s body and life, making this phenomenon of trans stories being controlled by outsiders a problematic and unsustainable one.

Online spaces have done a significant service in making transgender communities more accessible and reachable to those questioning their gender identity and those outside of the community. This has helped open more people up to an awareness of trans identities across boundaries of economics, age, and geography. But in this digital era, physical trans publications and newsletters have become incredibly antiquated forms of media. Trans identities have also become broader in their conceptualizations and experiences, and public attention and interest have increased along with the broader community visibility. But it’s because of democratic digital spaces like the DTA that younger trans generations are now able to trace a longer history, and to see the continuity and lineage of trans experiences and perspectives.

Given the way the trans image keeps being discarded, forgotten, erased, or in some cases actively suppressed, there is untold damage that will take years to undo, particularly due to how incurious the cis mainstream is about trans experiences. That makes discovering and centering the trans voices of the past—many of whom are still alive—all the more necessary. These people, their art, and their artifacts have always been around, and thanks to the DTA, their history has been gathered in one place for the rest of the world to finally discover.

From the Margins: What the Archives Show Us About Trans Cinema and Audiences

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