territories. Jack Smith, an early pioneer of queer cinema, screened gender chaos and queer sexual performance in his art piece Flaming Creatures (1963). Andy Warhol’s taboo-saturated experimental films featured the transgender “Warhol Superstars”: Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis, and Candy Darling, all of whom became legends of avant-garde culture and cinema. Holly Woodlawn, for instance, became the inspiration for Lou Reed’s 1972 hit song “Walk on the Wild Side.” John Waters introduced the world to the fearless and unforgettable drag queen Divine in his early films Roman Candles (1966), Eat Your Makeup (1968), and Mondo Trasho (1969). Divine would later star in Waters’s better known works, including Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974), and Hairspray (1988), a film that was by far his most popular. Collectively, these more fringe films depicted gender variance within a queer subcultural celebration of sexual nonconformity, “dramatic artifice,” and “a theatrical sense of the absurd” (Bell-Metereau 1993, 119). Made by and for queer people, they created a sense of community among moviegoers who marveled in the self-confident and norm-smashing performances of the trans figures.
The 1960s also produced one of the first serious, non-fiction cinematic investigations of gender variance in the documentary The Queen (1968). The independently produced and unusually poignant film revolves around the 1967 Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant held in New York City. The film takes audiences behind the scenes, offering a cinema vérité glimpse at Manhattan’s drag balls, which have a long and rich history dating back to late nineteenth-century Harlem (Garber 1989). We witness the artistry of drag as the queens apply their makeup and wigs, perfect their costumes, perform in dress rehearsals, and compete in the pageant. During offstage moments, we hear about their everyday lives and learn about their relationships. We view the gritty and unglamorous side of drag, and watch the fierce conflict that arises among contestants. As a matter of fact, imagery from The Queen has been recycled for contemporary usage, appearing in the opening credits of Amazon’s hit transgender-themed series Transparent.
Moving into the 1970s, two films about transsexuality, Myra Breckenridge (1970) and The Christine Jorgensen Story (1970), inaugurated the decade. In popular culture, it “was a period of liberalization in the industry,” Diffrient (2013) argues, “when new previously verboten subject matter, such as sex-reassignment surgery, penis transplants, sodomy, and transvestitism, could be presented to an inquisitive public” (55). Inspired by Gore Vidal’s best-selling novel, Myra Breckenridge (1970) was an X-rated, trashy, sexually explicit romp that featured Raquel Welch as a transsexual woman, Myra. In the film, Myron Breckenridge visits Europe to have a sex change operation, becoming Myra. Upon returning to the United States, he visits his wealthy Uncle Buck, who runs an acting school. Pretending to be Myron’s widow, Myra asks Uncle Buck for money, and he puts her to work at his school. The film is a nonlinear and at times nonsensical farce that was well received among queer audiences who appreciated its camp value, but lampooned by critics and the mainstream press (Diffrient 2013). The second transgender-themed film, The Christine Jorgensen Story (1970), was a fictionalized melodrama loosely based on Jorgensen’s life. Whereas the film portrays Jorgensen as a sympathetic and sincere individual, to a contemporary audience it feels campy and melodramatic, exuding emotional excess and garish sentimentality. Nevertheless, at the time some acclaimed the film for its portrait of Jorgensen. The New York Times review maintained, “Here is a quiet, even dignified little picture, handled professionally and tastefully, minus a touch of sensationalism. Compared to a glittery garbage pail like “Myra Breckinridge,” the film is downright disarming” (Greenspun 1970).
Into the late 1970s and 1980s, a corpus of films continued to treat gender variance in more serious and humane terms, albeit within the ideological and imaginative limitations of the time period. Outrageous (1977), an independent Canadian film about a gay hairdresser who becomes a drag queen and his friend Liza who suffers from schizophrenia, offered an unexpected story of friendship and compassion. As film critic Roger Ebert (1977) wrote at the time, “Almost any description of ‘Outrageous!’ makes it sound like a sensational exploitation film but that’s exactly what it isn’t. It’s a bittersweet, endearing, sometimes funny little slice of life.” In Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Al Pacino plays a gay man who robs a bank in order to pay for his lover’s sexual reassignment surgery. Both characters were fully realized with compelling backstories, and were depicted as vulnerable and humanly raw. The World According to Garp (1982) featured the character Roberta Muldoon, played by John Lithgow, a white trans woman and former professional football player who works at a center for troubled women. She is an altruistic and grounded caregiver, although her character has little depth. Perhaps the most serious, even devastating, treatment of transgender subjectivity was In a Year of 13 Moons (1978), a German melodrama. Produced, written, and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the film follows the final days in the life of the character Elvira (formerly Erwin), who changes sex for a love that never materializes and becomes a lost-soul.
One of the most notable, and widely seen, transgender-themed films of the 1970s was not a serious drama but rather a wildly campy sci-fi musical. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) introduced the world to the character of Dr. Frank-N-Furter, an eccentric, transgender scientist and self-proclaimed “sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania.” In the film, a straight-laced heterosexual couple’s car breaks down and they find themselves stranded at Frank-N-Furter’s mansion—an alternative universe of misfits and mischief. Delighted by his new guests, he performs for them dressed in a black corset, stockings, and high heels, effectively staging the erotics of gender transgression. As with Myra Breckenridge, Rocky Horror created a brazen queer world, an alternative reality that upended conventional norms and embraced freaks of all kinds. But unlike Breckenridge, Rocky Horror appreciated high-quality production values, a compelling and linear storyline, and fabulous music. It appealed to both queer and non-queer audiences alike and has become one of the most celebrated and widely known cult classics of all time.
Whereas popular film offered visually striking displays of gender variance throughout the twentieth century, literature provided textual counterparts. Science fiction in particular offered some of the earliest and most imaginative visions of gender crossing. In Gregory Casparian’s An Anglo-American Alliance: A Serio-Comic Romance and Forecast of the Future (1908), a woman in a lesbian relationship undergoes a sexual reassignment surgery to escape discrimination and lives out her life happily with her partner. In Isidore Schneider’s Doctor Transit (1925), a struggling couple switches sex to find happiness by drinking a potion handed to them by the mysterious Dr. Transit. Indeed, body switching, identity exchange, forced gender transformations, magical gender reversals, and gender fluidity populated the world of science fiction throughout the twentieth century. Novels such as Robert Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil (1970), Fred Pohl’s Day Million (1966), and Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness (1969), along with fantasy pulp magazines such as Weird Tales (1923–1954) and Science Wonder Stories (1929–1930), trafficked in these themes.
Like the science fiction genre, comics have also been cultural sites where transgender possibilities have abounded. As Fawaz (2016) argues, postwar American comics had a distinctly queer sensibility that celebrated difference, outsider status, the supernatural, and self-transformation. Expanding the terms of what it meant to be human, popular texts such as The Fantastic Four, starting in 1961, and X-Men, in 1963, affirmed the biological outlaw and presented the body as a site of transition and mutation. Although these texts did not specifically engage with transgender identity, “bodily vulnerability and gender instability constituted the postwar superhero as a figure in continual flux, visualized on the comic book page as constantly moving among different identities, embodiments, social allegiances, and psychic states” (Fawaz 2016, 10).
In early twentieth-century print culture, two novels in particular offered intimate portraits of gender transgression, albeit with different affective structures and tones. The first was Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928), a fictionalized biography about an English nobleman, Orlando, who wakes up one morning as a woman. Beginning during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and ending in 1928, Orlando lives more than four hundred years with a subjectivity that is in constant change and a body in constant transition. Woolf uses the character’s escapade through historic time to comment on Victorian-era norms, gender roles, and
