Boys Don't Cry 9780228013006

Table of contents :
Cover
BOYS DON’T CRY
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Synopsis
Credits
A Note on Names and Pronouns
1 This Is My Voice on T (in the House that Brandon Teena was Murdered In)
2 Boys Don’t Cry
3 Take It Like a Man
Coda
References
Index

Citation preview

B O Y S D O N ’ T C RY

Queer Film Classics Edited by Matthew Hays and Thomas Waugh

The enduring commercial success of lgbtq2i films over recent generations offers proof of widespread interest in queer film within both pop culture and academia. Not only are recent works riding the wave of the new maturity of queer film culture, but a century of queer and proto-queer classics are in busy circulation thanks to a burgeoning online queer cinephile culture and have been brought back to life by omnipresent festivals and revivals. Meditations on individual films from queer perspectives are particularly urgent, unlocking new understandings of political as well as aesthetic and personal concerns. Queer Film Classics at McGill-Queen’s University Press emphasizes good writing, rigorous but accessible scholarship, and personal, reflective thinking about the significance of each film – writing that is true to the film, original, and enlightening and enjoyable for film buffs, scholars, and students alike. Books in the series are short – roughly 40,000 words – but well illustrated and allow for considerable depth. Exploring historical, authorial, and production contexts and drawing on filmic analysis, these open-ended essays also develop the author’s personal interests or a subjective reading of the work’s sexual identity discourses or reception. The series aims to meet the diversity, quality, and originality of classics in the queer film canon, broadly conceived, with equally compelling writing and critical insight. Books in the series have much to teach us, not only about the art of film but about the queer ways in which films can transmit our meanings, our stories, and our dreams. L’Homme blessé Robert Payne Boys Don’t Cry Chase Joynt and Morgan M Page

B O Y S D O N ’ T C RY Chase Joynt and Morgan M Page

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston

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London

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Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2022 isbn 978-0-2280-1081-4 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-1082-1 (paper) isbn 978-0-2280-1300-6 (epdf) isbn 978-0-2280-1301-3 (epub) Legal deposit second quarter 2022 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Boys don’t cry / Chase Joynt and Morgan M Page. Names: Joynt, Chase, 1981- author. | Page, Morgan M., 1987- author. Description: Series statement: Queer film classics | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220152837 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220152926 | isbn 9780228010814 (hardcover) | isbn 9780228010821 (softcover) | isbn 9780228013006 (pdf) | isbn 9780228013013 (epub) Subjects: lcsh: Boys don’t cry (Motion picture : 1999) | lcsh: Peirce, Kimberly—Criticism and interpretation. | lcsh: Transgender people in motion pictures. | lcsh: Motion pictures—United States—History and criticism. Classification: lcc pn1997.b69 j69 2022 | ddc 791.43/72—dc23

Contents

Preface | vii Acknowledgments | xi Synopsis | xiii Credits | xv 1 This Is My Voice on T (in the House that Brandon Teena was Murdered In) | 3 2 Boys Don’t Cry | 21 3 Take It Like a Man | 61 Coda | 91 References | 93 Index | 103

Preface

An annoying thing about gender is that it always gets in the way of people understanding context. – T. Fleischmann, Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through

“Why would you want to write about that film?” recoiled a colleague steeped in the politics of trans representation, “Why go back to something so problematic?” In the lead-up to our collaboration, this sentiment became the dominant refrain about our desire to return to Boys Don’t Cry. Twenty years after the film’s release, the life and death of Brandon Teena has remained suffocatingly present in our work as trans cultural producers. So much so that prior to writing this book, neither one of us had seen the film in well over a decade because we hadn’t needed to. The story and its many contextual reverberations surrounded us and moved through our innumerable conversations, works, and critiques. Central to conversations about trans representation, violence against gender non-conforming people, and the contentious and contested borders between butch and ftm identities (Halberstam and Hale 1998), Boys Don’t Cry offered the first mainstream access to transmasculine embodiment in North America, one that many simultaneously embraced and rejected. Through director Kimberly Peirce’s portrayal, Brandon Teena served as both

viii Preface

a larger-than-life playboy to whom one could aspire and a terrifying cautionary figure for the annihilation that would surely await those who dared to cross gender. His story became an unavoidable measure against which many trans men could assess their own personal becoming. Ultimately, the legacy of Brandon Teena is a story of isolation and exceptionalism, one that reinforces the idea that trans people exist without access to or knowledge of others like them. We begin this book together from the lived premise that trans people know trans people. Having come of age in Toronto’s trans and queer artistic milieu during the late 2000s and early 2010s – knowing of each other but only ever passing like ships in the night – we were keen to think out loud together about how and why an object such as Boys Don’t Cry continues to both consolidate and repel community attention. As trans cultural producers invested in intercommunity gossip and the drama of history, we couldn’t help but find the premise of critically examining Boys Don’t Cry and its many ongoing debates delectable. Boys Don’t Cry has inspired generations of trans activism and scholarship, from Transexual Menace’s original agitation around the case in 1994 to Jack Halberstam’s canonical analysis “The Brandon Archive” from In a Queer Time and Place (2005) and Cáel M. Keegan’s “Mirror Scene” (2020). Even while we join in the critique of the ways in which cisgender makers, audiences, and journalists have mismanaged Brandon’s narrative, we return time and again to the role trans people have played in telling and maintaining his story. The landscape of representational possibility for trans people has changed dramatically since the release of Boys Don’t Cry. Here, we look to recent projects – Adam (2019) and Disclosure (2020) – and argue that new visibilities of transness on screen require us to re-engage earlier portrayals. Acknowledging a younger generation of queer and trans people who are straining against the images foisted upon them by culture, we are curious about the limits of these historical returns. How do we contend with the tensions between a new generation that claims egregious violence in a project that should never be seen

Preface ix

again and an older cohort for whom it remains a formative if complicated representational touchstone? Rather than reproduce only still images from the film itself, our text is emboldened by activist portraits and images from other films that serve to complicate the context of Brandon Teena’s story and its telling. These images allow us to think across projects and across histories, to think visually about what the telling of a story like this could otherwise look like. We contend that it is not just cinematic texts themselves but also their surrounding activist and artistic cultures that produce enduring significance. As kids, we obsessively watched movies on repeat, convinced that each return might unlock new meaning in the same old images. Our writing here takes the same approach, revisiting moments in the film and its surrounding history in search of underexplored significance. From our first viewing together – Chase in Canada, Morgan in England – we have approached our analysis through a series of interlocking questions: What is at stake when a cultural object becomes overdetermined, locked in place, entrenched in the cultural imaginary? What can be gained from re-approaching the film not as the story of a deviant outsider disciplined by the existing order, but rather as one of a “normal” person entering a strange and hostile land? How has the marketing of Brandon Teena as a romantic hero fundamentally altered how his story is framed? And what can our combined trans gaze elucidate that doesn’t simply reproduce prior scholarship by largely transmasculine scholars? We draw attention specifically to the possibilities of working together across opposite ends of the gender spectrum on a subject typically dominated by a transmasculine perspective. Co-authorship can take many styles and forms. For this project, we met on the page together each day during nine months of pandemic quarantine, resisting the urge to redeem or condemn, in favour of finding and investing in a productive in-between. Two decades of polarized reaction, criticism, and scholarship stand between us and the film. As a result, our analysis starts in the contemporary moment with those who live, make, and work in its after-

x Preface

math. Starting in the contemporary moment allows us to revisit the original contexts of production and distribution in chapter 3, unsettling the now overdetermined ways the film has been understood and interpreted. Between the two, we zoom in for a close textual analysis that endeavours to build upon prior scholarship and opinion about the film rather than reproduce it. Together we relocate Brandon and Boys Don’t Cry within historical and conceptual contexts that attend to the story’s violences and values both on and off screen.

Acknowledgements

Our work on trans life is built upon the foundations of – and in dialogue with – so many other thinkers, artists, and organizers. We are indebted to the work of scholars including Jack Halberstam, Susan Stryker, C. Riley Snorton, and Cáel M. Keegan; as well as artists and writers Cooper Lee Bombardier, Rhys Ernst, Sam Feder, and Shu Lea Cheang. Lauren Berlant passed away as we finished final revisions on this manuscript and her contributions to our thinking both in this project and in life remain ongoing and immeasurable. We’re grateful to Tom Waugh and Matthew Hayes, Jonathan Crago and the editorial team at McGill-Queen’s University Press, and our peer reviewers for the opportunity to think out loud and on the page together about shared moving-image histories. Various friends had eyes on this work in early stages; we are thankful to Naomi de-Szegheo-Lang, Davey Davis, and S. Lamble. The creative team behind No Ordinary Man: The Billy Tipton Documentary offered extended opportunities for engagement with the interplay between transmasculine histories, and we are thankful to Aisling Chin-Yee, Sarah Spring, and Amos Mac for their friendship and ongoing collaboration. Concurrent with our writing here and the production of No Ordinary Man, we started working together as a co-writing team on the feature film Framing Agnes, and wish to extend our thanks to the cast and crew as we understand all our projects to be interlocking, and recognize our worlds as critically and mutually sustaining.

xii Acknowledgements

For making and maintaining intimate and aesthetic worlds, Chase wishes to thank Julietta Singh, Nathan Snaza, Isadora Singh, Sarah Joynt-Bowe, Samantha Curley, Kristen Schilt, and John Greyson. The Department of Gender Studies at the University of Victoria, Alexandra D’Arcy, and the University of Victoria Humanities Faculty Fellowship generously supported and bolstered the completion of this book. Morgan wishes to thank the living: Sarah L. Jones, Vajra Conjure-Wright, Sharrin Spector, Paul Forest Hickman, Jia Qing Wilson-Yang, Sarah Schulman, Mirha-Soleil Ross, the boys; and the dead: Jack L. Young, Kyle Scanlon, Bryn Kelly, and Shloma Rosenberg. This book could not exist without the work of Kimberly Peirce, Christine Vachon, Donna Minkowitz, and the activists of Transexual Menace – including Riki-Ann Wilchins, Leslie Feinberg, and Kate Bornstein – whose combined efforts brought Brandon’s story to enduring attention.

Synopsis

Boys Don’t Cry is a romantic drama based on the real-life murders of trans man Brandon Teena and his friends Lisa Lambert and Phil DeVine in Humboldt, Nebraska, in 1993. The film opens with protagonist Brandon (Hilary Swank) trying on his new male identity next to his gay cousin in a trailer park in Lincoln. The two head to a roller rink, where Brandon has a date with a young, presumably straight, girl. After narrowly escaping a group of homophobes, Brandon meets Candace (Lecy Goranson) in a bar and follows her and her friends, Tom (Brendan Sexton III) and John (Peter Sarsgaard), back to a farmhouse outside of Falls City. At a karaoke bar Brandon falls in love with their friend Lana (Chloë Sevigny), after seeing her perform a rendition of “The Bluest Eyes in Texas.” Through his growing relationship with Lana, Brandon becomes embedded within the chaotic landscape of working-class Falls City. Immersing himself in this new milieu, Brandon endures several tests of his masculinity – from skiing on the bumper of a pickup truck in the middle of the night, to outrunning the cops in a borrowed car – in order to prove himself to his newfound friends. John and Lana are quickly revealed to be caught in a web of complex and incestuous relations. With each character differently attached to Lana’s mother, Brandon vies for a spot in the confused family structure by alternately inhabiting idealized roles of husband, son, and boyfriend. With Candace, Brandon tests out what it might mean to be father to her child. With

xiv Synopsis

John, Brandon tries on brotherhood. And with Lana and her mother, Brandon performs sweet boyfriend and doting son. These role plays are undone when Brandon’s past catches up with him. Brandon’s trans status is revealed after police arrest him for outstanding charges of forgery. Lana visits the jail and questions why he has been housed with women prisoners, a predicament that Brandon struggles to justify. This sets in motion a series of events that escalate from invasive questioning to a violent depantsing in the bathroom of Lana’s family home. Tom and John kidnap Brandon and rape him. Brandon survives a probing and surveilling medical exam which exposes the trauma his vulnerable body has suffered. After the rape is reported to unsympathetic police, Lana and Brandon hatch a plan to escape together. When Brandon’s trans status is made explicit, Lana’s relationship to his body and their intimacy changes. No longer seeing Brandon as a man, Lana balks at their previously imagined future. Before the pair leave town, Lana returns to her family home. Concurrently, Tom and John arrive at the Tisdel house, where Lana’s mother betrays Brandon’s location with Candace. Dragging along a protesting Lana, the men storm to the farmhouse and kill Brandon and Candace. After this catastrophic eruption, a devastated Lana clutches the body of her lover and falls asleep. The film ends with Lana fulfilling the dream she had once shared with Brandon of driving out of Falls City toward a better future.

Credits

Boys Don’t Cry © 1999, US, English, 118 minutes. Colour, sound, 35 mm, 1.85:1 A Killer Films Production Presented by Fox Searchlight Productions and the Independent Film Channel Productions dvd release by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Directed by Kimberly Peirce Written by Kimberly Peirce Andy Bienen Cast (in credits order) Hilary Swank Chloë Sevigny Peter Sarsgaard Brendan Sexton III Alicia Goranson Alison Folland

Brandon Teena Lana Tisdel John Lotter Tom Nissen Candace Kate

xvi Credits

Jeannetta Arnette Rob Campbell Matt McGrath Cheyenne Rushing Robert Prentiss Josh Ridgway Craig Erickson Stephanie Sechrist Jerry Haynes Lou Perryman Lisa Renee Wilson Jackson Kane Joseph Gibson Michael Tripp Shana McClendon Libby Villari Paige Carl Griggs Gail Cronauer Guilford Adams Chad Briley Ryan Thomas Brockington Christophe Dahlkvist Taylor Eaves Michelle Fairbanks Gabriel Horn Gavin Perry Robert A. Steffenino Caitlin Wehrle

Lana’s Mom Brian Lonny Nicole Trucker Kwik Stop Cashier Trucker in Kwik Stop April Judge Sheriff Pam (as Lisa Wilson) Sam Phillips Tom Nerdy Teen Girl in Car Nurse Dave – Deputy Clerk Brandon’s Father (uncredited) Extra (uncredited) Kiss (uncredited) Truck Driver (uncredited) Toddler (uncredited) Girl in Car (uncredited) Lester – Restraining Order Guy (uncredited) Deputy (uncredited) Bartender (uncredited) Valley Girl (uncredited)

Credits xvii

Produced by Christine Vachon Jill Footlick John Hart Caroline Kaplan Pamela Koffler Eva Kolodner Jon Marcus Jonathan Sehring Jeffrey Sharp Brad Simpson John Sloss Morton Swinsky Music by Nathan Larson Cinematography by Jim Denault Film Editing by Tracy Granger Lee Percy Casting by Kerry Barden Suzanne Crowley Billy Hopkins Jennifer McNamara

Producer Line Producer Producer Executive Producer Executive Producer Producer Line Producer (additional photography, New York) Executive Producer Producer Associate Producer (as Bradford Simpson) Executive Producer Co-Producer (as Mort Swinsky)

xviii Credits

Soundtrack “Just What I Needed” performed by the Cars “Burning House of Love” performed by X “And It’s All Right” performed by the Dictators “Cod’ine” performed by the Charlatans “Space” performed by Butthole Surfers “She’s a Diamond” performed by Opal “Bluest Eyes in Texas” performed by Nathan Larson and Nina Persson “Bluest Eyes in Texas” performed by Chloë Sevigny, Alicia Goranson, and Alison Folland “A New Shade of Blue” performed by Bobby Fuller “Tuesday’s Gone” performed by Lynyrd Skynyrd “That Lady ‘Part 1’” performed by the Isley Brothers “Rock Your Baby” performed by George McCrae “Who Do You Love” performed by Quicksilver Messenger Service “Boys Don’t Cry” performed by Nathan Larson “Haunt” performed by Roky Erickson “Why Can’t We Live Together” performed by Timmy Thomas “Fan Blades of Love” performed by Ed Hall Selected Awards Hilary Swank for Best Actress Academy Awards, usa 2000; Golden Globes, usa 2000; Boston Society of Film Critics Awards 1999; Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards 2000; Chicago Film Critics Association Awards 2000; Chicago International Film Festival 1999; Chlotrudis Awards 2000; Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association Awards 2000; Film Independent Spirit Awards 2000; Florida Film Critics Circle Awards 2000; Gijón International Film Festival 1999; Las Vegas Film Critics Society Awards 2000; Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards 1999; Online Film & Television Association 2000; Molodist Interna-

Credits xix

tional Film Festival 2000; National Board of Review, usa 1999; New York Film Critics Circle Awards 1999; Santa Fe Film Critics Circle Awards 2000; Satellite Awards 2000; Southeastern Film Critics Association Awards 2000; Toronto Film Critics Association Awards 1999; Village Voice Film Poll 1999. Kimberly Peirce for Best Filmmaker/Director Boston Society of Film Critics Awards 1999; Independent Spirit Award; Gijón International Film Festival 1999; glaad Media Awards 2000; Las Vegas Film Critics Society Awards 2000; London Film Festival 1999; Molodist International Film Festival 2000; National Board of Review, usa 1999; nyfcc Award Best First Film; Young Hollywood Awards 2000.

A Note on Names and Pronouns

Throughout this text, we refer to Brandon Teena as “Brandon” and use he/him pronouns. In life, Brandon did not use the formation “Brandon Teena” – a name given to him post-mortem by activists from Transexual Menace. We elect not to follow traditional protocols of using his surname, as continually invoking “Teena” to refer to Brandon unnecessarily confuses sentences and would not recognize him as he wanted to be known. When speaking about other trans-identified people in the past, we default to the names and pronouns we understand them to use – or have used – for themselves (such as zie/hir for Leslie Feinberg), all the while recognizing that understandings change, and that our text might soon fall out of date. We have also chosen to distinguish the film characters John and Tom from their reallife counterparts, whom we refer to as Lotter and Nissen, respectively.

B O Y S D O N ’ T C RY

Figure 1 Beckftm arrives at the farmhouse. YouTube still.

Chapter 1

This Is My Voice One Year on T (in the House that Brandon Teena was Murdered In) “It’s so hard to disengage from what you see in a movie,” says a young trans man as he walks through an abandoned house in Humboldt, Nebraska. Peeking into different rooms, he asks his girlfriend – off-screen – if the carpet, the floorplan, any of the details match up to what they’d seen in Boys Don’t Cry. Uploaded to YouTube on 13 June 2012 and sitting at 395,572 views at the time of this writing, “My visit with Brandon ‘Boys Don’t Cry’” is a 13:52 minute video by Beckftm. The film begins with text on screen, followed by images of Brandon and stills from the feature film, alongside short clips from the documentary The Brandon Teena Story. Photos of Brandon Teena, Lisa Lambert, and Philip DeVine flash on screen, each accompanied by the chilling sound of a canned gunshot. We join Beck and his girlfriend in the car as they slowly drive up a dirt road and see the farmhouse for the first time through a windshield. Dilapidated and abandoned, the small square structure is isolated, surrounded only by fields and sporadic trees. In a selfie-style firstperson testimonial, Beckftm sets the scene: he and his girlfriend had visited Brandon’s grave earlier that day while on a move from Florida to Washington State. The pair asked around town until they were able to locate the crime scene and make their pilgrimage. Part of the first wave of “ftm YouTubers,” Beck Rosato Lewis’s vlog documents his transition for an imagined online public of also-transitioning young people and curious outsiders. Alongside people like FreshlyCharles

4 Boys Don’t Cry

and Skylarkeleven, these early makers of the genre were untrained and unmonetized, relying primarily on iMovie, early smart phones, and grainy webcams to produce diy content for each other. Though their work is largely forgotten, these YouTubers constructed the now-ubiquitous trans vlog format – “This is my voice, five minutes on T.” To many steeped in trans media cultures, YouTube vlog diaries that chart the progression of medical transition now feel formulaic and cliché. At their inception however, the vlogs served as critical connective threads for those seeking personal accounts about hormones and surgery. Tobias Raun explores the vlog format as an emotionally therapeutic and affectively connective space for young trans people. With the webcam as a companion for the confessional, trans people find community through shared access to digital spaces. Adapting traditional consideration of the confession in film theory, Raun argues “that users complicate our understanding of the confessional modus by using interconnected practices like (self)-disclosure, coming out and testimony as tools in an ongoing self-representation and community building” (Horak 2014, 166; citing O’Neil 2014). The farmhouse in Humboldt was full of garbage. Through the shaky, lowresolution footage of his digital camera, Beck slowly reveals the detritus of the house turned squat. He speculates that the house, which has passed through several hands since the murders, may still hold some of the carpeting or fixtures from the time, remnants that provide a link between his real-life experience and his fantasy of Brandon. For Beck, Brandon exists as the first, the primordial representation of a transmasculine subject in culture, a blueprint from which he can craft a sense of self in the past and in the future. “Do you remember how the movie looked?” Beck asks his unnamed girlfriend. We realize, as she narrates details of the film, that though he is the primary subject of the video, he is not the only expert and is never alone in his experience. The return to Humboldt is shared between the couple, a process made visible through conversation and photos. Watching Beck and his girl-

This Is My Voice on T 5

friend retrace Brandon’s final steps in the farmhouse is an eerie call-back to the construction of a doomed romance between Lana and Brandon in Boys Don’t Cry. Beck’s investment in the beatification of Brandon is perhaps obvious – as one white trans man reaching back in time to another – but his cis girlfriend’s ability to recall greater detail about the life, murder, and valorization of Brandon is less straightforward. Her identification is not with Lana, per se, but with Brandon as a romantic figure. Lana takes up no space in their shared discussion of Brandon’s life, but it’s clear that in some ways this unnamed girlfriend accompanying her trans boyfriend is also positioning herself relationally alongside Brandon, like just another one of the girls fawning over him as described by Donna Minkowitz in the 1994 Village Voice article that first broke the story. Beck and his girlfriend are not the only couple to make the journey to the farmhouse. A handful of other videos detail similar journeys, such as one posted in 2013 by the ourstories YouTube account, featuring a lesbian couple who describe it as “Our Trip to See One of Our Idols Brandon Teena rip.” These romantic pilgrimages – most often pursued by rural queer and trans couples – continue the treatment of Brandon as both an exceptional case and as an iconic martyr of queer rurality. Taken together, these re-enactments and re-tracings complete the work of transforming the life story of Brandon into the Romeo and Juliet narrative crafted by film director Kimberly Peirce. Both Kimberly Peirce and Beckftm – and people like him – are motivated to return to the farmhouse by similar emotional curiosities, yet their approaches are articulated through vastly different class positions. While Peirce was a Columbia University mfa student making a multi-million-dollar film aimed at a mainstream audience, these YouTubers who return again and again to the gravesite and desolate farmhouse produce video documentation aimed at communities of people more like Brandon.

6 Boys Don’t Cry

Stone Comforts Released in 2001, Southern Comfort is a documentary that chronicles the life and death of Robert Eads, a white working-class trans man diagnosed with uterine and ovarian cancer. After winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, Southern Comfort received moderate media attention and thrust trans identities momentarily into the film festival mainstream, and later into living rooms through a distribution deal with hbo Documentary. Southern Comfort borrows its name from an annual conference held at the time in Atlanta, Georgia, that has served as a meeting ground for many trans people across the United States since 1991. In the film, Robert hopes to live long enough to attend one more conference. Unlike Brandon in both Boys Don’t Cry and The Brandon Teena Story, Robert is not the only trans person in Southern Comfort. Throughout the film, Robert is featured alongside his partner Lola who is transitioning from male to female at the time of shooting. Robert’s narrative is not one of transition, but rather one of life and death. The “transition narrative” in Southern Comfort belongs to Lola, though the focus of the story is never about the physicality of her journey between genders. The presence of Lola’s transition displaces the authority and singularity of Robert’s gender identity as primary object of study, and instead renders transitioning – as both conceptual and embodied articulation – part of the broader narrative fabric. Robert’s self-understanding, self-presentation, and self-summary remain stable throughout the film. By presenting Lola in various stages of ever-changing identification, Southern Comfort successfully doubles (Halberstam 2005) the experience of transitioning, and thus troubles the opportunity to make rigid articulations of a singular trans narrative. In addition to his growing intimate relationship with Lola, Robert is doubled again by a group of trans men whom he describes as both friends and family. We are introduced to Maxwell Anderson and his partner Corey, both of whom are also trans. Audiences are offered another form and configura-

This Is My Voice on T 7

tion of relationship to reference. Where initially relational assumptions could be made about the heteronormative interactions between Lola and Robert, there now exists a reflected double in the queer relationship of Maxwell and Corey. Through relational and experiential doubling, director Kate Davis uses Southern Comfort as an opportunity to engage a community of trans subjects without parodying their experiences against a cis standard. As a result, Southern Comfort is a film about the construction and maintenance of family and community, rather than the exploration of transness as exceptional, singular, pathological, or even explicit. When transitioning is removed from priority focus, rightful attention can and must be paid to the devastating neglect of Robert’s health by the medical industrial complex on account of the illegibility of his identity. Issues of transition remain in focus; however, transition is not the orienting logic of the storytelling. Southern Comfort was not the only project coming out of the 1990s to think critically about transmasculine representation. Documentaries such as Max (1992) and Gendernauts: A Journey through Shifting Identities (1999) by Monika Treut and Shinjuku Boys (1995) by Jano Williams and Kim Longinotto, erotic material including Alley of the TrannyBoys (1998) by Christopher Lee, portrait photography by Loren (Rex) Cameron and Del LaGrace Volcano, and an array of newsletters and zines (from the staid pages of ifge Newsletter and ftm Newsletter to the punk aesthetics of 1999’s Tim Tum – A Trans Jew Zine by artist Micah Bazant) provided growing networks of trans people access to resources, burgeoning artistic critiques, and each other. But no singular piece of trans cultural production was more responsible for setting the stage for Boys Don’t Cry and Southern Comfort than revolutionary communist Leslie Feinberg’s ground-breaking novel, Stone Butch Blues (1993). Published only months before the murder of Brandon Teena, Stone Butch Blues is a fictionalized retelling of Feinberg’s own life and transition through the 1940s–70s. Jess Goldberg, the working-class Jewish butch stand-in for Feinberg, moves in and out of the butch-femme lesbian community in Buffalo, New York – facing brutal police violence, job discrimination, and their own

8 Boys Don’t Cry

often-conflicted feelings about butch identity. Jess joins union politics while dating a series of femmes, before eventually deciding to medically transition and being cast out of the community as a result. Landing in New York City after a disastrous stealth affair with a straight woman, Jess ultimately stops taking testosterone and begins dating a trans woman neighbour. Feinberg’s narrative explores the contested dividing line between butch and trans identity, reflective of hir own position as what we might today call non-binary. Published by the small lesbian press Firebrand Books, Stone Butch Blues was a surprise hit. In the tenth anniversary edition preface, Feinberg reflected, “I thought I would keep cartons of copies in my closet to give out to people who were ready to read it” (Feinberg 2014, 337). Feinberg had seized hold of a current in the cultural zeitgeist at precisely the right moment, as academics theorized the performativity of gender via Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), lgbt activists got queer on the street through act up–style groups like Queer Nation, and trans activists began agitating following Brandon’s murder. By the book’s first anniversary, it had swept up both the Small Press Book Award from the Lambda Literary Awards and the Lesbian/Gay Book Award from the American Library Association. While Kimberly Peirce was in Falls City researching what would eventually become Boys Don’t Cry, producer Jelayne Miles, a Black queer woman who “knew and marched with Feinberg” (Bendix 2018), picked up the film rights for her Against the Tide Productions company and quickly set about trying to drum up money for an onscreen adaptation. “The public has spoken on gender bending. They want to see it,” an original press release for the proposed Stone Butch Blues adaptation from January 1994 explains (Against the Tide Productions 1994). “It’s hot and everyone knows it.” This sexualized pandering to cis audiences did not sit comfortably with Feinberg. Though the relationships Jess has with femmes throughout the book are of key significance, Feinberg felt that “the producer’s prospectus was trying to raise capital from investors by offering a sexual fantasy: an invitation to watch butches being raped by police” (Feinberg 2014, 354). Fein-

This Is My Voice on T 9

berg shut down the adaptation, and two decades later, when zie published the revised twentieth anniversary edition, made sure to include a specific note stating hir desire that no film adaptation ever be produced of the book. Only months after Feinberg’s death from Lyme-related complications and, subsequently, the free publication of the twentieth anniversary edition by hir literary estate in October 2015, Jelayne Miles registered “Stone Butch Blues llc” in New York City (BestBusinessNY 2015) and set about trying to relaunch her ill-fated movie version of the book through her new production company 11B Productions. The company’s previous work includes Rhys Ernst’s trans history docuseries We’ve Been Around (2016). With a script written by transgender writer Ro Haber – who was reportedly unaware of Feinberg’s wish not to have a film produced (Bendix 2018) – the film project forged ahead without the permission of Feinberg’s literary estate and invited considerable controversy after a casting call was posted on Backstage.com in March 2018 (Julig 2018). The controversy, first broken in a story by Slate magazine, largely centred around Feinberg’s explicit instruction against adaptations, but also animated growing debates around trans representation on screen. The casting call specified that they were seeking a “Caucasian” actor, with no mention of Jess’s Jewish ethnicity, and wilfully waded into dangerous and contentious waters as it described the ideal transitioning body for an actor to play the role of Jess: “Seeking transgender and gender non-conforming actors on the trans masculine spectrum. Open to trans men as well as non-binary actors. Note: Jess presents as a butch female at the beginning of the film, but takes hormones to transition to male for a significant portion of the film. Actors who plan to medically transition but haven’t yet done so or are in the early stages of transition are strongly encouraged” (Bendix 2018). In the minds of cis filmmakers like Miles and Peirce, transitioning bodies pose a problem – the cis gaze needs to simultaneously be able to read someone as trans while also believing in their ability to pass. The use of testosterone, with its fabled sudden transformations, produces an anxiety in cis directors

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who believe there is a sort of “golden hour” where they can catch actors in this space of a passing-and-not double vision. The stakes had changed significantly between Miles’s original production in 1994 to her second attempt in 2018, and trans people were not about to take it. The resulting internet furor, and the barrage of articles from both mainstream and gay press outlets, seems to have sent the potential Stone Butch Blues movie straight to development hell, much to the relief of Feinberg’s long-time fans and supporters.

“Fuck This Cis White Bitch” “Fuck your respectability politics,” a group of trans and allied protesters shouted as they burst into the auditorium at Reed College in November 2016, just days before the presidential election (Dry 2016). You’d be forgiven for assuming the group was agitating against a noted trans-exclusionary radical feminist, or a campus Republican group, or even Donald Trump. But in fact, the students were protesting the screening of Boys Don’t Cry and the accompanying lecture by Kimberly Peirce. In the weeks leading up to this heated confrontation, students had systematically torn down all or most of the posters advertising the screening event, worked together to fashion a variety of signs, and strategized about how they might disrupt what they felt was the lauding of a harmful, transphobic movie and the director responsible for making it. The signs students hung outside the auditorium and carried inside revealed some of their political critiques: “Fuck Your Transphobia!”; “Trans Lives Do Not Equal $$”; and, “Jobs 4 Trans People.” The protesters saw the film as transphobic on three primary counts: the use of cis actor Hilary Swank to play a trans role; the profiting off of stories of anti-trans violence by a director they perceived to be cis; and the graphic depiction of the brutal rape and murder of Brandon in the name of entertainment.

Figure 2 Reed College protest signs. Photograph by Jack Halberstam.

These critiques, worthy of serious consideration and discussion, would be eclipsed both at the protest and in the national media when one of the protesters chose to hang a sign on the podium that read “Fuck this cis white bitch!” A number of protesters were also heard shouting “bitch” at Peirce during the ten minutes of chaos that erupted upon their entrance into the auditorium. The internet and the press eagerly latched on to the obvious misogyny of the repeated use of the phrase bitch, alternately painting trans people as misogynists and student protesters as over-privileged children running wild. To understand what happened at Reed College, it is necessary to situate the protest both within its context at Reed and as part of a broader shift in discussions about representation on screen. Despite a headline to the contrary in the Atlantic, there is in fact nothing surprising about revolts at Reed College (Bodenner 2017). A small liberal arts school in West Coast activist hotbed Portland, Oregon, as that same Atlantic headline describes, Reed College is quite possibly “the most liberal college in the country” (Bodenner 2017).

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Protesting is a bedrock of the student culture at Reed: in September 2016, just weeks before the Boys Don’t Cry protest, the student group Reedies against Racism (rar) organized a boycott of all classes in solidarity against antiBlack shootings by police across the country; the following year, rar disrupted lectures after a professor screened a decades-old Saturday Night Live sketch about the then-current “King Tut” exhibition travelling the country that students felt was racist and disrespectful to Egyptians (Bodenner 2017). So, while the activists who disrupted Peirce’s screening and lecture may have veered into misogyny in some of their posters, the vehemence of their demonstration was part of a laudable campus tradition of student engagement. In the seventeen years between the release of Boys Don’t Cry and the eruption at Reed College, the landscape for discussing both depictions of trans people and sexualized violence on screen had fundamentally shifted. In a post–Transgender Tipping Point climate, trans people broadly agree that cis actors playing trans roles is at best problematic, and often reinforces harmful stereotypes about trans women that may contribute to the epidemic of violence against transfeminine sex workers and people of colour (Feder and Scholder 2020). These debates had become particularly heated over a series of trans roles given to acclaimed cis actors in the 2010s, namely Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl (2015), Jeffrey Tambor in Transparent (2014), and Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club (2013). But despite how often it is described this way in the press, activist critiques of cis actors playing trans roles are not an Obama-era excess – in fact, some of the earliest trans activism agitated directly against this trend. As one example, Angela Douglas and the Transsexual Action Organization in the 1970s – a psychedelic activist network interested in “ufos, [Transsexuals], & Extra-T[errestrial]s” (tao 1974) founded in la, which eventually grew branches in Miami Beach and as far away as Birmingham (uk) and London (uk) (Lewis 2017) – protested the 1970 release of Myra Breckinridge for this very reason (Zagria 2015). Similarly, critique of graphic on-screen depictions of sexualized violence has grown in recent years. “Film depictions of sexual violence are increasingly

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alarming, it has to stop,” read one 2018 headline in the Guardian (Lazic 2018). Feminist film critic Elena Lazic took aim at the use of rape as a narrative device, explaining that “cinema cannot turn sexual violence into another plot point or symbol [while ignoring] the specific experiences of victims.” Like the critique of cis actors playing trans roles, this too has a storied history within activist cultures and film criticism (Haskell 1974), from its beginnings with groups like Women against Pornography and Women against Violence in Pornography and Media in the 1970s and ’80s (Rubin 2011, 185–6, 206–11). Filmmakers thus have a razor-thin line to tread between not making gratuitous use of sexual violence on the one hand, and not erasing the brutal realities of sexual violence on the lives and deaths of many people, including Brandon, on the other. It would be impossible not to include the rape and murder of Brandon, in some form, in a film about his life without the risk of sanitizing his story – an issue Peirce wrestled with repeatedly throughout the production, as we will explore in chapter 3. Perhaps the more thorough critique of violence in Boys Don’t Cry, alongside the erasure of Philip DeVine, a Black disabled man murdered alongside Brandon, would be to ask why choose to tell this story at all? The murder of Brandon represented a major watershed moment for trans activism that deserved some form of cultural depiction, yet its recent critics argue that Boys Don’t Cry is just another in a sea of onscreen narratives of violence against trans people, one that positions an exceptional white transmasculine person in the centre at the expense of the majority Black, Latinx, and sex-working transfeminine people who are murdered in North America. Much of the thrust of the Reed protesters’ critique hinged on discussions of Kimberly Peirce both as a white person and as someone perceived to be cis. Revisiting Peirce’s 1999 interview on GenderTalk Radio reveals a much more nuanced and complex engagement with gender and authorship than perhaps protesters were aware. In this and subsequent interviews, Peirce had repeatedly discussed her own difficult relationship to gender – which she summarized as “gender disalignment” to the trans hosts of GenderTalk – including

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an internal conflict over transness that she said she may never be able to fully reconcile (GenderTalk 1999). Her resulting affinity for – and connection to – Brandon Teena cannot be reduced to a conversation about insider/outsider status, nor the appropriation of trans narratives for profit, as Peirce herself identifies outside the bounds of binary gender. It is also worth considering the ways in which Peirce embedded herself among trans activists from the very inception of Boys Don’t Cry as detailed in chapter 3, travelling to Nebraska with Transexual Menace, and returning the film again to trans communities throughout her promotion, appearing in trans-produced media and at events for trans audiences like those held by Genderpac. Overly determined critiques about Peirce’s identity and its charged relationship to her authorial control over Boys Don’t Cry are further complicated when we remove these “representational roadblocks” and ask the question “What happens when the film is made by trans people?” Rhys Ernst is a transmasculine film director who burst into the festival mainstream with his Sundance-premiering short, The Thing (2012). A producer on Amazon’s Transparent, and director of the Emmy-nominated series This Is Me (2015), Ernst has prioritized stories by and about trans and gender non-conforming people throughout his career. His first feature, Adam (2019), is a comedy based on a novel of the same name by Ariel Schrag. Adam is the story of a cis teen who visits his queer sister in Brooklyn, only to accidentally find himself passing as trans and then using this as a way to gain acceptance and love in the queer scene. Set up as a comedy of manners, the book is a warts-and-all snapshot of the hipster Brooklyn queer scene of the mid-2000s in which transmasculinity was briefly a highly fetishized identity. For Ernst, the idea of passing as trans to gain acceptance is a flip of the clichéd cinematic script. Where historically, the trans person is passing as cis in order to disappear and gain acceptance through assimilation, here, becoming legible as trans is the desired outcome. When transness is the mode through which cultural and romantic capital is both received and gained, what else is possible in the narrative?

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The adaptation from book to film allowed Ernst to make some necessary and useful revisions to the plot and its problems. Schrag’s novel had been subject to scathing critique by trans people since its release in 2014, beginning with online criticism by Topside Press editor Tom Léger (Reynolds 2019) as well as artist, historian, and podcaster Morgan M Page (Page and Léger 2014). Critics of Adam took umbrage with the centring of a straight, cis male character’s coming of age in a book ostensibly about trans communities. The protagonist’s use of trans identity in order to gain access to sex with a queer woman not only raised concerns about consent, but also reinforced harmful transmisogynistic tropes levied against trans people “deceiving” straight people into sex, which have been used in so-called “trans panic” defences after incidents of transphobic violence. Ernst knew from the start that adapting the book for screen would be potentially controversial but felt that by having a trans director, cast, and crew, production could make changes that would retain the best of the novel – its rollicking portrait of queer Brooklyn circa 2006, a scene of which Ernst had himself been a part – while minimizing the harmful messages the book had perpetuated. “A primary condition to my working on the project was that I would tell it from a trans perspective,” recounts Ernst in a Medium post wherein he attempts to address both the controversy and his ongoing intentions (Ernst 2018). Citing the book as a jumping-off point rather than as a primary text, the director attempted to situate his project and practice within a larger framework of creative interpretation. While the book is not the primary focus of our analysis here, we recognize resonances between Adam author Ariel Schrag and Kimberly Peirce, both of whom created their work deeply enmeshed within trans communities while understanding themselves as gender-fluid people, but were then recast in the popular uptake of their work as uncomplicated cis lesbians profiting off trans lives. Though compelling in its theoretical articulation, the backlash against Adam was swift. Long before the movie’s release, Ernst was swarmed with online critique, calling him and his project violent and careless. Young trans people who had not seen the film called for a boycott, flooded online review

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sites with one-star ratings, and harassed the primarily trans cast, crew, and supporters of the film on Twitter. It is useful to return to the protests at Reed and consider them alongside the ongoing critiques of Adam: casting, identification of the director, perceived exploitation of minoritized identities for profit, and violence as entertainment. The problems of casting and authorial control have been satisfied by Ernst and his team, with trans and queer people in positions of power throughout and actors self-representing on and off screen. While Adam received industry funding and sales after release, it cannot be compared to the now multi-million-dollar, multi-decade-long financial success of Boys Don’t Cry. Accusations of violence by the hand of a creative text deserve careful attention here – in online forums, critics accuse Adam and Ernst of enacting a kind of violence on screen through a continued engagement with deception.

Disclosure The deceptive transsexual is one of the most prevalent and pervasive tropes about trans people in culture and on screen, one that continues to have real life consequences. Trans people are simultaneously extolled to divulge intimate details about our trans status and genital configurations to friends, lovers, employers, and people on the street, while such disclosures are also often met with harassment, discrimination, violence, and even premature death. In the United Kingdom, over a dozen cases of “sex by deception” or “gender identity fraud” have recently been brought against young transmasculine and gender non-conforming people engaging in otherwise consensual sex with cis girls without disclosing their trans status, resulting in lengthy prison stays and sex offender registration. In one particularly shocking case, a trans boy received one charge for merely kissing a girl without first disclosing (Sharpe 2018, 47). This legal logic has also been put to work in Israel, where prosecutors have used it both against transsexual men who have not

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made clear their trans history and against Arab men who do not disclose to Jewish women that they are Arab (Sharpe 2018, 4), as well as by the Canadian state in prosecuting hiv-positive people for alleged failures to disclose their status irrespective of whether transmission was possible (Hastings et al. 2017), illuminating the deeply entwined nature of transphobic, racist, and aidsphobic ideologies of contagion underpinning these types of cases. Isolated cases of gender identity fraud were brought forward in courts in North America in the late 1990s and early 2000s, even while Hilary Swank won an Oscar for her portrayal of Brandon, a trans man who did not disclose his trans status prior to sex and was violently outed before being murdered as a result (Sharpe 2018, 4). It is thus unsurprising that trans people would react so strongly to Adam’s cis protagonist being rewarded with a girlfriend after not disclosing that he was cis, despite Ernst’s attempt to use these scenes to subvert the harmful anti-trans trope. Regardless of intent, the centring of cis actors and cis characters to tell trans stories – whether Hilary Swank playing Brandon, or Adam pretending to be trans – is interpreted as violent and egregious (Jaschik 2016). Together, we wonder what can be learned by thoughtfully revisiting these creative decisions. After premiering at Sundance in January 2020, Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen arrived on Netflix to those eagerly awaiting new content amidst the global pandemic. A collaboration between director Sam Feder (Boy I Am, Kate Bornstein Is a Queer & Pleasant Danger) and actress Laverne Cox (Orange Is the New Black, Doubt), the film represents the first cataloguing of 100 years’ worth of trans representation on screen. Through talking head interviews with trans creatives, Disclosure asks a series of critical questions about the impact of representational choices: What is the relationship between the history of gender crossing on screen and blackface? What tropes has Hollywood constructed that reverberate through culture’s understanding of trans people? What is possible when trans people gain creative control over their own projects about their communities? Backed by some of the most preeminent

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speaking subjects of contemporary trans entertainment, the film toggles between rich archival footage and the experiences of those most impacted by the representational choices. From the films of D.W. Griffith to present-day episodic productions like Pose, Disclosure orbits around the irresolvable question over whether culture dictates representation or representation dictates culture. In development for over five years, and supported by a robust crew of trans and non-binary people with varying levels of industry experience, Disclosure attempts to close the gap between worlds lived onscreen and off. With widespread press attention from the New York Times, Variety, IndieWire, and Democracy Now!, each public narration of the project returns readers and viewers to the reality that increased visibility does not equal decreased vulnerability for the most marginalized subjects in the trans community. As such, the film exists as a clarion call for the rights and better treatment of trans people. It is of value to follow the ways in which Boys Don’t Cry is discussed in Disclosure. What begins as a moment of recognition among transmasculine viewers, ends with the often-traumatizing experience of viewing the film shared by many. “It took me a long time to come around to watching it, but when I did, it was terrifying. It was hard to watch, it was really hard to watch,” actor Brian Michael Smith says of the film. “There was a rape scene in there that was very brutal, but then there’s a moment before the rape that I think was literally my worst nightmare” (Feder and Scholder 2020). “I hear people say, ‘but it’s based on a true story,’” notes Laverne Cox, “but why is this the kind of story that gets told over and over again?” Cox pushes viewers to question the constant reiteration of narratives of violence and brutality against trans people in American cinema. That this portrayal in particular comes at the expense of Philip DeVine “changed the film” for writer and activist Tiq Milan. “It’s the erasure of Black people, so it’s like you can’t have queer and trans people and Blackness in the same space at the same time. So, what’s it say about my queer trans Black ass?” These concerns about Boys

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Don’t Cry are echoed by scholar C. Riley Snorton who argues that representations of white trans masculinity are often positioned in proximity to Blackness, even while the racial contexts are obscured (Snorton 2019). What happens when we de-centre whiteness from depictions of trans masculinity? Moving image representations of Black trans masculinity are scant. Prior to Kortney Ryan Ziegler’s Still Black: A Portrait of Black Transmen (2008), Daniel Peddle’s 2005 documentary The Aggressives was one of the only depictions of Black and Brown transmasculine and butch-identifying young people. Set in New York adjacent to the Ballroom scene, the film follows a group including Marquise Vilsón, then a marginalized Black young person navigating the borderlands between butch/stud and trans identities. Vilsón is the only interlocutor in the film who moves toward accessing medical transition, a choice the film struggles to reconcile with its project of depicting butchness, ultimately abandoning his storyline mid-way through (Keeling 2009). The Aggressives offers an early look at some of the tensions that arrive when moving image projects attempt to cohere an identity in order to make insider lives legible to outsider audiences. Vilsón returns in Disclosure as a now out transmasculine actor and activist. Connections between past and present in the film allow us to think about the ongoing impacts of representation on real life circumstances. Vilsón and his contemporaries arrive on screen in a moment of continued violence against Black and Brown trans people. Just days before Disclosure’s release on Netflix, thirty-eight-year-old Black trans man Tony McDade was murdered by Tallahassee Police. Initially misgendered by police and news reports, his death became part of the international eruption of Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd (Dickson 2020). If the murder of Brandon and its subsequent film adaptation in Boys Don’t Cry had been a watershed moment for an international conversation around anti-trans violence, crystallizing the nascent trans activist movement of the 1990s, its status as an exceptional case also obscured the broader impacts of race, sex work, and transfemininity that account for the vast majority of mur-

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ders both then and now. As Beckftm put it, “it’s so hard to disengage with what you see in a movie,” whether that be the narratives we digest about whose bodies are vulnerable and whose bodies simply “clutter” the plot, the subtle but insidious implications of casting, or the assumptions we make about a film’s creators and their intentions, audiences across the decades are caught up in a tangle of images projected on screen. Throughout this book we try to disentangle ourselves, to step back and assess the film’s failures and its values, its violence and its validation, its truths and its fictions. Taken together, we hold the ongoing critiques and enduring significance in tandem – a frictive doubleness through which we can generate not only a nuanced look at history, but a lens through which to examine the stakes of representing trans lives – and indeed deaths – on screen.

Chapter 2

Boys Don’t Cry

“It’s the classic premise of a stranger who comes to town and turns everything completely upside down,” explained producer Christine Vachon in the press kit for Boys Don’t Cry. Priming critics and audiences with a well-trod roadmap to encounter Brandon’s otherness, Vachon positioned the film from the outset as one organized around cis understanding.

Figures 3 Brandon. Boys Don’t Cry. Film still.

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Rather than follow Vachon’s guidance towards trans otherness, we contend that the presence of Brandon in Boys Don’t Cry allows us to highlight the inner workings of cis genders. Instead of catering to cis ways of knowing and seeing transness, we reposition our mode of critique away from the trans body to account for what is happening outside of and around transness. In our reading of the film, transness is not a catalyst but a lens. Brandon is our Alice in Wonderland, a perfectly normal set of eyes through which we encounter a strange land. Together, we ask ourselves: what if instead of looking at Brandon as a strange person entering a normal world, we recognize him as an average person entering an extraordinary environment that allows us to look at the workings of violence within that space? Through our multiple viewings, we return to the ways in which masculinity, violence, surveillance, and white supremacy not only organize the film’s narrative but also implicate the viewers as participants in narrative violence enacted on real-life subjects. We understand the film as a portrait of cis violence rather than one about the meaning of transness or an opportunity to be a voyeur of trans experience. In this chapter, we focus on what the film says about the construction, operation, and undoing of white masculinity in middle America. In service of this analysis, we de-centre transness as the object of study and fix our attention on the backgrounds and landscapes – literal and figurative – that create the terms of narrative engagement. “It’s not a biopic or a true-crime story,” Vachon continues in the press kit, “but it’s true to the spirit of Brandon Teena, who stood for the ultimate freedom to be who you want to be.” The branding of Boys Don’t Cry as a romantic drama about the freedom of individuals haunts our re-viewing and the broader mythology that surrounds the film in popular culture. Whose bodies and identities are sacrificed and upheld through narrative decisions that prioritize the romantic story of two young, white protagonists? Rather than follow the film chronologically, we pivot between thematic clusters, weaving perspectives and connections in a mosaic approach. Our analysis is bolstered by a re-viewing of Kimberly Peirce’s original dvd direc-

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tor’s commentary, contemporary interviews with Peirce and actors Hilary Swank, Brendan Sexton III, and Chloë Sevigny, as well as twentieth anniversary screening panels about the film at the University of Chicago (with scholars Lauren Berlant, C. Riley Snorton, and Chris Trujllio) and Columbia University (with cast and crew). Two decades of scholarship on the film has explored a range of themes present in its text – the desolation of highways and desperation of class (Henderson 2001; Schewe 2014; Smith 2015), the power of audio in the film’s soundtrack (Välimäki 2013, 2019), “female” masculinity (Hanson and Dobson 2005; Detloff 2006; Cooper 2010), the sexualizing and romanticizing of the transgender body (Abbott 2013; Arroyo 2014), the disciplining and punishment of trans bodies (Sloop 2000; Meuzelaar 2012), tensions between cis and trans masculinities (Grozelle 2014; Yamamoto 2017; Hansbury 2017), and the various stakes in representing trans bodies on screen (Halberstam 2000, 2005; Pidduck 2001; Hird 2001; Willox 2003; Nero 2003; Rigney 2003; Barron 2005; Coffman 2011; Gieni 2012; Cavalcante 2017; Keegan 2020). This history of scholarship about Boys Don’t Cry that emerged in the wake of its release informs much of our analysis in both overt and subtle ways. Here we also prioritize alternative sources and citational practices that circulate outside of and at times against – or in spite of – dominant academic discourse, including YouTube videos, blogs, and the uncitable sharp, gossipy chatter that circulates in trans and queer spaces between friends, lovers, and enemies.

Roads and Lights Caught between the rush of lights and shimmering bokeh of an unknown highway, a pair of eyes flash in the rear view. Before we have a chance to decide – is this a man or a woman? Are they coming or going? – the camera cuts back to the headlights of two cars as one overtakes another. Back again to the eyes for only a moment to record the pleasure of cutting ahead.

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Figure 4 Brandon in the rear-view mirror. Boys Don’t Cry Film still.

No transsexual movie is complete without an establishing shot of a trans person looking at themselves in a mirror and Boys Don’t Cry proves no exception, opening on Brandon’s eyes in the rear-view. These “mirror scenes” (Keegan 2020) recur throughout the history of trans cinema, a thread connecting Buffalo Bill’s psychotic cross-dressing dance to “Goodbye Horses” in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Bree’s circumspect gaze in Transamerica (2005), and Lili Elbe’s melancholic longing in The Danish Girl (2015), to earlier representations such as in Roy/Wendy’s soft pleasure taking in her transformation in I Want What I Want (1972). While these scenes of pseudotransfeminine mirror gazing are intended to indicate a character’s inner reckoning with the incongruities between body and spirit, Brandon’s eyes are caught in the rear-view, not looking at himself, but instead to the car he’s overtaking, and to the audience itself. Brandon, in a masculine gesture never granted to his transfeminine counterparts, asserts his control over the nar-

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Figure 5 The wide Nebraska sky. Boys Don’t Cry. Film still.

rative when he looks into this mirror. The tight frame constrains how much of him we are allowed to see, temporarily limiting audience access to what will eventually be violently brought into sight. Brandon is being chased. Boys Don’t Cry sets up Brandon as an outlaw on the run – from police, from broken-hearted ex-girlfriends, and from the all-too-present threat of a cis world that does not understand him or his choices. Through the establishing shot in the rear-view, we recognize that the danger of being chased by the consequences of his actions is also mixed with the mischievous pleasures Brandon derives from being on the lam. Open roads appear throughout the film as escape hatches for Brandon, and later Lana, to flee from their tragic present toward a future that can only ever remain a fantasy. Roads mark shifts between reality and fantasy, as in-between spaces of transition, emblematic of the broader narrative tensions between stuckness

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and freedom, cisness and transness, heterosexuality and queerness. Flashing trails of headlights fill streets and highways in a place often depicted as slowmoving and empty. These time-lapse lights serve to fast forward narrative events, and breach the membrane between harsh reality and romantic fantasy. In one particularly striking example, Lana gestures to the lights outside her bedroom window, telling Brandon “look how beautiful it is out there, that’s us.” Here, the lights serve as an opportunity to be elsewhere and punctuate the potential stagnation of staying put. As Jack Halberstam notes, this slowmotion light sequence temporarily shifts the point of view from Brandon to Lana, establishing “the female gaze” (2005, 87). In chorus with Halberstam, we mark this rupture as a brief prelude before the narrative pov permanently shifts away from Brandon following the rape. Lana’s control of narrative perspective shifts in step with Brandon’s closing proximity to annihilation. In the end, fast-moving lights come to signal flashes of Brandon’s vital, dreaming inner self – a reality that is extinguished after his death, represented by a shot of an empty highway now devoid of lights. From Easy Rider (1969) to The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) and On the Road (2012), the open highway has long been a classic cinematic trope of masculine freedom. In Boys Don’t Cry, cars make visible the terms of masculine hierarchy – whoever controls the car is who gets to be the man. In one of many tests of masculinity throughout the film, Brandon fails to out-drive the cops at John’s request and encouragement. After narrowly avoiding being outed by the police, Brandon is stripped of his role in the driver’s seat by a furious John. Everyone, including Candace – the car’s owner – is kicked out onto the “Dustless Highway” as John takes control of the vehicle and reclaims his alpha status. Classic cars are key signifiers of post-war American masculinity – simultaneously used as status symbols while recalling a historical period forcefully associated with white male power. After springing him from jail, Lana joins Brandon as they run into the bright light of freedom. A quick cut reveals the pair in the back of a 1950s roadster. This car is another dip into their shared fantasy, as it never reappears and seemingly isn’t owned by anyone they know.

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Figure 6 Lana and Brandon in their fantasy classic car. Boys Don’t Cry. Film still.

Bodies of cars stand in for bodies of men, masculinizing scenes and interactions outside the logic of visible gender. Boys Don’t Cry suggests: is a classic car not just a socially acceptable strap-on for all masculinities? The erotics of cars and driving reverberate throughout the film. During a high-speed chase onto the Dustless Highway, John – flooded from behind by the pursuing lights of a police car – leans his head back and blows smoke out of his mouth in seemingly post-orgasmic satisfaction. The connection between cars and male eroticism is soon subverted by a cross cut to Lana’s mouth as she orgasms in the back of the classic car with Brandon, to her mouth again when she, Brandon, and two girlfriends race their car through town. In the director’s commentary accompanying the dvd Peirce admits she had first wanted the camera to come out of Lana’s throat post-orgasm – one of many creative choices she attributes as lost due to budgetary constraints – as a guttural expression of female pleasure. This scene is

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the first time we see a car driving without the presence and organization of cis men, revealing worlds made outside the logics of their control and domination. Alongside Brandon, the girls are shown engaging in the same openly reckless behaviour that is the provenance of cis men, illustrating different ways the film believes “women” can “become” men. The road as a place of becoming is a motif found throughout trans-related cinema from this period. Films like The Ballad of Little Jo (1993), The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995), and Transamerica (2005) feature trans and gender variant protagonists setting out on the open road, an obvious metaphor for gender transitions from one point on the spectrum to another. With the exception of the Australian Priscilla,1 this sub-genre of films features trans people “going west,” indulging in white American nationalist imagery – manifest destiny, the west coast as a site of freedom and prosperity, and the triumph of individualism – normally reserved for Westerns. White audiences are invited to identify with these trans characters through their embodiment of familiar nationalist tropes, effectively recuperating their deviance piece by piece with each mile of conquered highway. Headlights of cars often signal visual transitions between scenes in Boys Don’t Cry. From a distance, oncoming cars signpost impending danger – be it from cops in a chase or Lana’s desperate attempt to stop John from entering the murder house. Whether flashes of light from oncoming traffic or the stability of a single light at the scene of the rape, headlights serve to both abstract and refocus viewer attention. As one example, car lights illuminate an early test of Brandon’s masculinity as he is dragged behind the tail of a truck, “bumper-skiing” his way toward desired acceptance and recognition from his new friends. The audience’s understanding of Brandon’s gender disrup1 Priscilla’s use of Australian nationalist and colonialist themes has been widely explored. See Viviane Namaste (2000).

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tion highlights the inherent absurdity of these proofs of manhood. Accidents of filmmaking – the reality that this scene and many others were shot just before dawn – become the visual texture of the film (dvd Commentary 2000). As a result, a blue hue saturates the backdrop of significant scenes, from time lapse transitions to the newness of shared intimacy.

Night and Day Two different worlds are made available to Brandon throughout the film: the night world and the day world, each with their own freedoms and risks. Traditionally associated with safety, in Boys Don’t Cry the light of day conversely makes visible Brandon’s transness, rendering him vulnerable to criminalization and the threat of being outed. Alternatively, the night world affords Brandon the freedoms of being recognized as a man, yet also brings him into closer proximity to eventual – and even, the film seems to argue, inevitable – violence. While night affords the backdrop for sex, discovery, and adventure, day renders the very same landscapes claustrophobic and surveilling. In popular imagination, trans people are flamboyant but ephemeral creatures who can only exist in darkened clubs and on street corners, caught in fleeting glimpses by those who know how to look. Nighttime in this configuration softens the edges of our perception, increasing trans people’s ability to pass or blend, inviting new ways to see and be seen, and thus new ways to live. In Boys Don’t Cry, Brandon enters from the night. “The thing that I realize when you look at some of our favourite films, The Wizard of Oz, Bonnie and Clyde, Raging Bull, is you have about a minute and a half at the beginning of the movie when you can do anything you want, when you are inside the character’s fantasy of themself,” Peirce explains in the director’s commentary. “It opens up the landscape for the audience to go anywhere you want them

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to go with you.” Following Peirce’s logic, where we want to be is at night, riding shotgun alongside Brandon, sharing in both his search for thrills and his self-identification. In the first half of the film, the safety of the night upholds Brandon’s maleness even under the watchful eyes of the police. After the cops chase Brandon and his friends down the Dustless Highway, we watch as the officer scrutinizes Brandon’s id. Even though this outs Brandon to his friends as using the id of someone named Charles Brayman – Brandon’s real-life cousin – the night lets Brandon and his gender off the hook from the surveilling gazes of both the police and his peers. Brandon knows he is being watched, lit up by not just the cop’s flashlight but the prying eyes of his friends – chief among them John and Tom who are still trying to configure Brandon into their masculine social order. Yet the cover of night allows him to slip away from scrutiny. While Brandon’s quick cover of his id mismatch refuses a certain sort of intimacy with his newfound friends in Falls City, the night also opens unexpected avenues for connection throughout the film. It is into the night that Brandon and Lana spill as they flirt while taking polaroids in her backyard. Brandon has fixed Lana in his gaze – holding the camera, thus holding perspective – and Lana takes pleasure in being seen. This visual topping and bottoming is reenacted when he visits her at work in the factory. There, Brandon waits outside in the darkness, looking up and considering her for some time before she notices he is watching. While most films about trans people made by cis filmmakers locate the act of surveillance as the exclusive purview of a cis gaze intent on undoing trans genders, in Boys Don’t Cry Brandon has – at least for a time – the ability to appropriate it for his own purposes. The pleasure of being seen, in the polaroid and at work, draws Lana out of the factory and into Brandon’s night where they fuck in the tall grass, temporarily unencumbered. Later, the same night scene of looking up at Lana in the factory window is re-coded as threatening. Having just passed on “ownership” of Lana to Brandon at the birthday party – “I couldn’t think of a better guy” – John stalks

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her from outside the building, matched shot for shot with Brandon’s previous Romeo and Juliet exchange with Lana the night before. Here, Boys Don’t Cry radically juxtaposes cis and trans masculinities, positioning Brandon as a suitor invested in reciprocity and exchange, and John as a predator stalking his prey. Whilst Lana had previously chatted with Brandon through the window, she remains entirely unaware of John’s presence, further highlighting the lack of consent that structures their ongoing interactions. The comparison between “scenes of looking” at the factory invites questions about who the audience is assumed to be and how they might participate in modes of seeing throughout the film. If we were given access only to Brandon looking at Lana, we would always approach her with the same sense of reciprocity. By replaying the scene through John’s eyes, the audience also becomes sutured to predatory modes of surveillance. Thus, if we are both Brandon and John at the factory, then we are both Brandon and John at the scene of the murder, implicating the audience’s position. The ambivalent structure of the film does not allow the audience to choose and make allegiance, and thus viewers must reckon with their ongoing complicity in witnessing the violence that is to come. Taking Brandon as our Alice, the threat of John’s assaulting gaze is made evident. Building upon Halberstam’s early assertion about the film’s unstable “transgender look” (2005), our exploration here points to a binary between cis and trans masculinities and their associated ways of seeing. Trans masculinity is constructed as charming, reciprocal, safe, but deceptive, while cis masculinity is a dominating, violent, but honest position. This partially false binary under-attends to the myriad ways in which white trans masculinity benefits from and reproduces hegemonic masculinity (Abelson 2019). It also signals how trans masculinity can disrupt and draw attention to the workings and structuring of power. With the majority of the film’s action occurring at night, careful attention must be paid to the narrative work revealed during the day. In the day world, Brandon is forced to reckon with the consequences of living in a trans body.

Figures 7, 8, 9, 10 Brandon and Lana’s Romeo and Juliet moment, contrasted with John’s surveillance of Lana. Boys Don’t Cry. Film stills.

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The first time we encounter Brandon’s day world is the morning after he wakes up at Candace’s house in Humboldt – the fictionalized character and narrative replacement for real-life murder victim Lisa Lambert. Standing in Candace’s yard, Brandon distances himself from the house to have a phone conversation with his cousin about his sex change and impending court appearances. The harsh light of day serves to reveal not only the compromising nature of his conversation, but the stakes of being seen. With Candace and her toddler approaching, Brandon hangs up the phone and deftly invents a story, telling Candace he’s got “one of [his] own,” proving that the ultimate cover for a desired sex change is the lie of reproductive cisness. During the day, Brandon must be twice as agile to avoid the scrutinizing gazes of his cisdominated surroundings. While most intimate encounters in the film occur at night, Brandon’s goodbye kiss with Lana – their first – takes place during the day. It is an exception that serves to underscore the chivalrous, non-threatening, Tiger Beat masculinity Brandon is often thought to represent (Halberstam 2005, 65; The Hussy 2013). We’re only allowed to have the kiss because we, like Lana, understand that he is leaving. As in much of the often-condescending media coverage and scholarship on Brandon Teena’s life, this goodbye kiss elaborates the ways Brandon’s appeal rests on the assumption that loving him comes with none of the usual repercussions: pregnancy, intimate partner abuse, and eventual betrayal. Brandon’s is thus, in their eyes, a masculinity without consequence. The visibility of Brandon’s body is most egregious in scenes of criminal justice. From jail to the waiting room of a police precinct and the eventual collection of rape kit evidence by a nurse, Brandon must continually confront the dissonance between his sense of self and the processing of his body by the state. In perhaps the most literal of inclusions, a judge stamps court documents with “failure to appear” as audiences watch Brandon slink out of the courtroom, both appearing and failing to appear simultaneously.

Figure 11 Top Brandon auditioning for the role of boyfriend with Candace. Boys Don’t Cry. Film still. Figure 12 Bottom Brandon and Lana share their first goodbye kiss. Boys Don’t Cry. Film still.

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Figure 13 Brandon’s consequences. Boys Don’t Cry. Film still.

The film can only maintain the distinct spaces of night and day for so long before conflicts and consequences cause them to collapse in service of Brandon’s undoing. We can chart a return to scenes once established as easeful and spacious, now tinged with the claustrophobic threat of repercussion. The playful polaroid documentation of Brandon’s early flirtation with Lana is destroyed in a later photo-burning scene at a fire pit. The id card that saved Brandon from the cops during the night chase scene is the very same information used to incarcerate him only days later when cops address him as “Miss Brandon” after running his Charles Brayman id through the system. It is through a re-looking – a re-visiting of data, scenes, and landscapes – that Brandon’s transness is revealed, and through forced explanation and exposition that audiences gain access to his prior strategies of self-making. Searching Brandon’s borrowed room for confirmation of his “true sex,” Candace discovers a used tampon wrapper stuffed underneath the mattress.

Figure 14 Candace makes a troubling discovery. Boys Don’t Cry. Film still.

While this discovery is grounded in the reality of the case, it exists as an alltoo-cheap way for Boys Don’t Cry to visually represent the “failure” of Brandon’s body to maintain his tenuous hold on a cis male identity, reinforcing the essentialist narrative that the body, rather than the mind, offers the ultimate truth and proof. In the end, transness becomes concretized as an action item in the form of a pamphlet replete with detailed surgical photos and information about sex reassignment discovered by John and Tom among Brandon’s things in the Tisdel house. Proving what has otherwise only ever been represented as thoughts, feelings, and speculations, the pamphlet doubly serves to highlight the harsh reality of the real class limitations that deny Brandon the ability to pursue medical transition. What is revealed here beyond gross exposition about transitioning bodies is the reality that it is, in fact, money that stops Brandon from being able to secure desired procedures.

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Figure 15 John and Tom discover trans literature. Boys Don’t Cry. Film still.

Cops and Class “Don’t look at my stupid house,” says Lana, gesturing to the passed-out figure of her drunk mother as Brandon enters her home for the first time. Lana’s embarrassed comment crystallizes the film’s focus on racialized class – “white trash” – as both subject and object of scrutiny, simultaneously calling out the viewer’s scopophilic attractions while drawing our attention to her lived circumstances. “I hate my life,” she continues as she leads her mother away. “I hate it too,” Brandon replies playfully. Two interlocking questions organize our approach to thinking about cops and class in Boys Don’t Cry: how does Brandon’s experience lay bare the inner workings of cis structures of race and class, and what role does the state play in the management and discipline of classed and gendered bodies in the film?

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Figure 16 “Don’t look at my stupid house.” Boys Don’t Cry. Film still.

The vignette above serves as a literal “peeping in” to unknown worlds, a mode of class porn that positions a white, middle-American, and working class as the baseline landscape for representational comparison. When we assume a white working-class normative baseline, then difference is set atop and apart from it, rather than an already integrated part of the same environment. To construct a narrative entirely devoid of people of colour is to invisibilize whiteness – a narrative violence that obscures the real-life concurrent murder of Philip DeVine, a disabled Black man shot dead alongside Brandon Teena and Lisa Lambert. Details of DeVine’s life were expanded in early true crime reportage about the case (Jones 1996, 193–202), but intentionally excluded by Peirce as she repeatedly claimed there was “no room” for his tragic death in her narrative. The notion of “room” and narrative capacity underscores two interrelated socio-political priorities: that white bodies are infinitely mournable and white victimhood becomes the lens through which

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the public is instructed to empathize with violence against queer and trans people. As a result, Brandon emerged as the face of anti-lgbt “hate crimes” alongside white cis gay man Matthew Shepard, killed a year before Boys Don’t Cry’s release. Both crimes represent the exceptional case of white murder victims, painting over the far greater numbers of trans and gender non-conforming people of colour who were murdered during the same period, but whose stories garnered none of the same media furor or Oscar-generating film attention. By choosing to exclude Philip DeVine – reportedly even absent from an early cut’s closing dedication to Brandon and Lambert (Halberstam 2005, 89) – Peirce attempts to avoid the reality that white supremacy is a dominant force through which transphobia is articulated and that white supremacy and transphobia are – both historically and in the contemporary moment – mutually constitutive (Snorton 2017). Summaries of the real-life murder that explain DeVine as “being in the wrong place at the wrong time” reveal the assumption that there is ever a “right place.” The “right place,” in the world of Peirce’s filmic imagination, is one not available to Black people. While most of the attention is rightfully focussed on the erasure of DeVine in the wake of his murder, other Black people closely linked to the peer group and Tisdel family were also removed from narrative view (Jones 1996; Snorton 2017). Throughout the film, working-class whiteness is coded through structures of family and home making. We first see Brandon in full view “at home” reflected in the mirror of a trailer as he gets a haircut from his cousin. We then follow him through the houses of others, a veritable poverty tour of spaces that serve as case studies for classed femininities and absent masculinities. In contrast to the ways in which single room occupancy hotels and tall city tower blocks code for Black and Brown racialized classes in the popular imagination, the trailer parks of Boys Don’t Cry become a shorthand for Peirce’s narrative unspooling about white working-class domesticity. Brandon’s experiences in Falls City reveal the shifting power relations of the accusatory category of white trash. White trash represents a disordered

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Figure 17 Brandon arrives at his cousin’s trailer. Boys Don’t Cry. Film still.

and polluted whiteness, from which all class actors seek to distance themselves by moving the label to whoever else has depleted – or depleting – social capital. Following this logic may account for Lana’s mother’s strong homophobic/transphobic reaction to Brandon’s outing. Brandon had previously gained her favour through distancing himself from the “trash”-ness of John and Tom’s disorderly masculinity by being well-mannered and unusually gentle, deigning even to serve the family at the breakfast table. But upon being outed Brandon is immediately reconfigured into the trash from which others seek to distance themselves; his break from the cisnormative and heteronormative system is enough to demote him in the social order. Trash then must be expelled from the domestic sphere – “I don’t want it in the house” – in order to protect the delicate illusion that the Tisdel house is not, as Lana’s mother puts it, “tainted” (Smith 2015, 141). Failure to do so could bring unwanted social scrutiny and judgment, and, as Lana instructed us upon first entering her home, the Tisdels do not want anyone to “look at [their] stupid house.”

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White-trash class stereotypes and markers are baked into the film at every turn, none more central to the plot than the close proximity of the characters to the criminal justice system. Early on, John establishes his ownership over Lana by revealing to Brandon that a barely teenage Lana had written him letters while he was in prison, as if to say “even at that distance, I still held control over her.” Brandon’s own arrival in Falls City is based in part on his desire to flee pending court dates for outstanding charges of forgery and theft. Even driving into the obscurity of the Dustless Highway can’t help the new friend group avoid the flashing lights of the police. To be both white and poor, the film tells us, is to be in constant relation to criminalization. Though class brings all subjects in the film into relation with the criminal justice system, it is the workings of white supremacy which serve to protect John and Tom from police intervention after Brandon’s initial rape accusation. Had Lotter and Nissen been Black or Brown in Nebraska, they would not have been cast as proverbial “good ol’ boys,” protected by cops through a series of benefit-of-the-doubt and second chances. Whiteness thus becomes the means through which Brandon’s murder, and thus the film, is made possible. In Boys Don’t Cry, the police are simultaneously ever-present yet perpetually obscured. Though the real-life Sheriff Laux – whose degrading post-rape interrogation of Brandon is recreated in the film word-for-word – is inarguably partially responsible for Brandon’s murder, he remains an unnamed figure in the film, someone who, like the flashing lights of a police car in a cloud on the Dustless Highway, is present but only through abstraction. When the state is continually represented as bodiless, contrasted time and again with the hyper-congested embodied realities of the family, the questions of where power comes from and who takes responsibility come into focus. As one example, Lana’s mother is represented as an agent in Brandon’s ultimate undoing – through continued attachment to and identification with John and Tom, and scathing disgust at the revelation of Brandon’s body. Boys Don’t Cry is a film

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about a hate crime that locates the problems of the film in the heterosexual family rather than within state systems that create and perpetuate the violences in play. If, for example, Lotter and Nissen had not spent their entire lives in and out of institutions where they were repeatedly subjected to violence, would they still have seen rape as a form of corrective punishment? One of the ways the state becomes most visible is in the processing of the rape kit. As we reckon with a close-up of Brandon’s bruised and battered body the nurse asks him to undress, to which he responds “How did you know I was raped?” The nurse offers an empathetic look as a wordless response before administering the kit. Here, it is significant to think about the real-life event that inspired this scene. Brandon had not disclosed the rape upon reaching the hospital. It was in fact purely the surveilling curiosity of an Xray tech – who had heard rumours about Brandon’s gender – that motivated the nurse to unnecessarily undress Brandon (Jones 1996, 219). Framed as required for the collection of evidence, the rape kit serves to “prove” Brandon’s “true sex” to both the medical practitioners and to the audience. Here, Boys Don’t Cry covers up a real-life act of violence by repackaging it as a tender gesture of care from a female authority. From the forced disclosure of Brandon’s bodily specificity – “my vagina” – during his post-rape interrogation by police, to the use of gender-segregated space in prison as a way to punctuate punishment outside cell walls, the legitimacy of the law becomes a tool to justify state regulation of gender nonconformity. Police as extensions of state control become the literalization of consequence and stand-ins for the dominant logics of heterosexuality and cisness that organize the world of the film. This treatment is made explicit in the cross-cutting of worlds between Brandon in prison and the voiceover narration that frames his experience to those “on the outside.” Prison becomes a pressurized environment that unravels Brandon’s self-making – from Candace’s discovery of Brandon’s used tampon wrapper to Brandon’s forced explanations of his body to Lana when she visits him in jail. Brandon’s ongoing

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interaction with the state reveals policing, courts, prison, and disclosure as tools of violent evidencing that conspire to regulate and punish those living outside dominant logics of the race-class system that structures the film.

Fathers and Boyfriends Falls City is a town of fatherless homes. Men are absent or unstable, leaving in their wake multiple vacancies of intimate masculinity that Brandon tries to fill in pursuit of his desire to disappear into the presumed safety of heteronormativity. Brandon is not exceptional in his longing to escape and find reprieve from struggle in heteronormative structures. Candace, Lana, and a constellation of women who surround Brandon each play out their own desires for escape from disordered homes into the fantasy of a middle-class, white family that is beyond their reach. “She’s obsessed with finding a husband,” says Lana of Candace who almost immediately attempts to play house with Brandon by introducing him to her toddler. Through these scenes, we encounter a cluster of fatherless homes in the film, setting up the transient nature of men and their familial roles throughout Falls City. We understand that men do not have permanence within the domestic sphere because they are so often in and out of prison. Not only are there no men in the homes, but the men don’t have their own homes to return to. Sitting on a plastic chair in the front yard of the Tisdel house, John tells Brandon he’s “in the doghouse.” Here, John is both integrated into and exiled from the home, a bad boyfriend who’s been kicked out, but never too far. Brandon is quick to try on this role, mirroring John’s self-asserted position by responding, “I’ve been there my whole life.” Finding kinship through dysfunction, Brandon comes to see John as both father and brother. And more, an example of a man who can be both disorderly yet also loved. Functioning as the de facto father of Falls City, John soon deputizes Brandon to the role of Lana’s boyfriend, effectively subcontracting out his previous

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Figure 18 John as father. Boys Don’t Cry. Film still.

position for reasons that are never made clear. Boiling beneath the affable surface of this conversation is the undercurrent of jealousy and possessiveness that structures John’s intimate life. Though he does not live in the Tisdel house, John tells Brandon, “This is my home.” In doing so, John reinforces the fact that even when subcontracted into position, Brandon will never fully have access to Lana, the home, and/or the family over whom John energetically presides. John does not knock when he enters a room. The world of Boys Don’t Cry is a world in which boundaries are constantly transgressed and blurred as characters attempt to stabilize their interactional surroundings. Everybody in the film is complicit, and the looming questions remain: what in fact is being stabilized and at whose expense? John is the most powerful and egregious in this regard, entering intimate spaces of homes and bedrooms without

Figure 19 John as boyfriend. Boys Don’t Cry. Film still.

asking for permission and asserting his dominance through acts of covert surveillance. In a world without boundaries, John creates temporary stability on his own terms by establishing a new rule of order – the only way he can maintain control and stability is to become the axis upon which the rest of the world spins. John’s control of the family unit is on display in a scene Kimberly Peirce often refers to as “incest breakfast.” A calm and classic breakfast with Candace in which she serves Brandon pancakes is juxtaposed with another breakfast at the Tisdels’ wherein the family drinks, smokes, dances, and transgresses intimate boundaries of relation. The Tisdel breakfast begins with Linda, John, Tom, and John’s baby sitting at the kitchen table. “Who’s That Lady” by the Isley Brothers comes on the radio and Linda jumps up to dance in the living room. As Linda sensually grabs John’s body in solicitous invitation, he presses his face between her breasts and stands to join her. An exasperated Lana enters the scene from the hallway to yell at the commotion. The energetic chaos in the living room is accentuated by bodies claustrophobically clustered in the

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Figure 20 Incest breakfast, John as lover/son. Boys Don’t Cry. Film still.

frame as the hands of John, Linda, Tom, and John’s child pull Lana in, absorbing her body into the incoherent and sexually charged family scrum. Incest contorts and confuses power relations, inspiring both a disregulation and reorganization of intimate attachments. It is from this point of relational confusion that strange bonds and ambiguities emerge. Is John a boyfriend or a father? Is Linda a mother or a lover? And if so, to whom? This bewildering collapse of familial relations forms a sticky web that traps people within it, highlighting how the disordered heteronormative family prevents people like Lana and Brandon from escaping. In Boys Don’t Cry, the back-to-back breakfasts show us divergent possibilities for familial relations – the tensionless, polite, superficial performance of straight gender and sexuality on display at Candace’s house is presented in stark contradistinction to the Tisdel house where roles, relationships, and boundaries are constantly muddled, fraught, and threatening.

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Familiality can function as an arresting force even in the face of mounting risk, and the Tisdel home is a prime example of how family actors can succumb to, be rendered immobile by, and make excuses for bad behaviour. As is often the case in families impacted by blurred and incestuous bonds, Lana’s disorganized attachment to John prevents her from taking action to stop his violent behaviour, even when she becomes certain that its end point will be murder. In the final climax, Lana does not call to warn Brandon and Candace, nor does she call the police; instead – in a possibly apocryphal scene based on recanted real-life testimony of Tom Nissen – she rides along with John and Tom towards the farmhouse, becoming complicit via proximity in the film’s inevitable macabre conclusion. In the moments before the murders, we watch Lana cling to the legs of a raging John on his march toward total devastation, making visible her failure to escape and thus enabling the destructive roles and patterns of an incoherent family unit.

Sex and Violence In Boys Don’t Cry, cis men are monsters. When assessed individually, Tom and John animate complex psycho-social dynamics of estrangement, harm, and alienation. Tom constantly hovers on the edge of violence and John erratically moves between moments of friendly calm and explosive anger. Taken together, the film consolidates characteristics and behaviours to highlight the way violence enforces hierarchies of masculinity. “Doctors say he ain’t got no impulse control,” explains Tom about John as he speeds away in Candace’s car, leaving Brandon and the others abandoned on the side of the Dustless Highway. “I’m the only one who can control that fucker,” he continues, drawing our attention again to the organization of power among men. In the exchange that follows, Tom and Brandon share a private conversation by a fire wherein Tom narrates a history of self-harm

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Figure 21 Tom plays with fire. Boys Don’t Cry. Film still.

while encouraging Brandon’s participation. “I guess I’m a pussy compared to you,” responds Brandon. The self-harm scene with Tom serves as the third test of Brandon’s masculinity. Bumper-skiing on the back of a pick-up at John’s instruction had established Brandon as a man among the men, but his failure to evade the police undercut his newly established position in John’s eyes. Now, Tom is tasked with assessing where Brandon fits, whether above or below him in the hierarchy of Falls City. Brandon’s refusal to participate in the fireside selfharm renders him non-threatening to Tom’s position, and thus at the bottom of the chain of masculine command. We are given little access to Tom’s motivations in the film, and only come to know him by his actions on- and offscreen – vandalism, arson, self-harm, rape, and murder. It is through the flattening of psychic complexity that men

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like Tom get a pass and are written off as monsters rather than understood to be both symptomatic and emblematic of ongoing societal permissions that embolden men’s catastrophic behaviour. While Tom is characterized as a onenote psychopath bent on destruction, John’s embodiment of violent masculinity offers a more nuanced and terrorizing portrait of a man whose sudden turns from friendship to rage are impossible to predict. At night in the Tisdel house, a family scene unfolds around the television. John sits on the couch with his toddler daughter, and tries to give her a sip of his beer. While Linda and Brandon look on, the camera lingers as John nuzzles into his daughter’s hair. Instead of a tender moment between father and child, we find an uncomfortable echo of the disorganized attachments resonant of earlier interactions on display during incest breakfast. In the dvd commentary, Peirce marks this scene as a moment of strategic discomfort, pointing to unspoken tensions and dangers embedded within seemingly banal family interactions between cis men and children. “Most women have asked me about this moment,” she recounts, “and I say, ‘hasn’t every woman had their pervy moment, which was with the uncle or the father, or somebody who just did something that was a little bit imperceptibly or slightly perceptibly dangerous or off limits, and that is what this is supposed to be. You are glimpsing it along with Brandon, that there is something wrong’” (dvd commentary 2000). When John’s daughter accidentally pees on him, the fantasy of a calm family space and John as an empathetic father is obliterated. John explodes into rage, revealing that the film believes he, too, is fundamentally monstrous and ultimately irredeemable. Prior to the peeing incident, Brandon looks on in awe of John as a parent, his jealousy for a life he wants but cannot lead palpable enough to override the “something wrong” that the audience observes from the same interaction. An irresolvable tension exists between Brandon’s attraction to – but also alienation from – the masculinities that ultimately consume him. In Boys

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Figure 22 Disordered family relations. Boys Don’t Cry. Film still.

Don’t Cry, nobody operates outside of or escapes the control and force of John and Tom’s predation. Taken together, John and Tom reveal the inner workings of a violent white masculinity that structures the film and haunts Brandon’s attention. By simplifying their emotional landscapes, the film denies audiences access to their interiority, and thus Tom and John exist as surface-level stand-ins for broader socio-political anxieties and issues. By casting the men of Falls City as monsters, Peirce creates a world in which Philip DeVine – the boyfriend of Leslie Tisdel and eventual murder victim – cannot exist. To include Philip would be to make space for a man who is neither a monster nor gay, a man who – like Brandon – is not an insider to Falls City, and whose death deviates from the construction of a narrative about exceptional violence against gay and trans subjects.

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Violent acts in the film are not limited to physical and sexual behaviour. Peirce uses real-life transcript material of Brandon Teena’s post-rape questioning by the cops to highlight the invasive interrogation and expose the ways that outing and disclosure function as another form of violence. Here, Sheriff Laux wields new power in the telling, collecting, and manipulation of Brandon’s story. It is through Laux’s questions that audiences gain access to their (however unacknowledged) curiosities about the workings of trans bodies in violent distress. Despite including Laux’s own words via the transcript, the film erases the sheriff as a primary actor within the murder – neither naming him nor showing his face. Violence in Boys Don’t Cry is then framed solely as the responsibility of toxic white masculinity working within familial homophobia, losing the critiques of police violence and the prison industrial complex levied by Transexual Menace activists at the time of Brandon Teena’s death. Throughout many years of on-stage conversation about the film after its release, Kimberly Peirce has often marked the admission of the word “vagina” as the location of Brandon’s rape. Peirce explains that when Sherriff Laux pressures Brandon to claim the site of the rape as “my vagina,” the “Brandon identity” is irreparably shattered. And thus, it is through the re-gendering and re-narrativization of Brandon’s body in the post-rape interrogation, according to Peirce, that he is stripped of his trans identity. Bathrooms populate the film as sites of bodily surveillance and evidencing. We watch Brandon scrubbing period blood out of his jeans in Candace’s bathroom, desperately trying to disappear the evidence of his body. The moment serves as the first time audiences must actively contend with the fracture between Brandon’s public and private management of self. The bathroom itself exists unstably as both a private and public space, inside a home in which Brandon is a guest, becoming a place that protects him while also threatening to expose him. We see Brandon from the doorframe of the bathroom, with the shot locked off in place allowing us to witness from a slight distance. This

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mode of looking from the threshold is returned to again and again as scenes in bathrooms escalate, compounding the threat and surveillance of Brandon’s increasingly vulnerable and exposed body. After returning home from a date, Lana and Brandon are ambushed by the Tisdel family as they reckon with the revelation of Brandon’s criminal and (mis)gendered past. When Lana fails to produce the confirmation of Brandon’s genitals demanded by John, Tom, and Linda, the men take the matter into their own hands and drag Brandon into the bathroom. There, Brandon is forcibly stripped and searched. Again, the camera places us at the door frame to watch the scene. What begins as a locked-off shot soon becomes handheld, pushing the viewer into the brutality. Mobile camera movements turn viewers from silent witnesses into active participants in the violence depicted. For those audiences who came to be titillated by the spectre of the deceptive gender non-conforming body, as in The Crying Game (1992), the depantsing serves as a highly anticipated reveal. It is in this moment of evidencing that transness finally satisfies cis curiosity. Careful attention to who is looking where and when during the depantsing scene allows us to further analyze who holds and controls the power to look. As the camera moves close, Tom pulls down Brandon’s briefs. While it is set up for us to assume that John and Tom are the most invested in seeing Brandon, Tom inexplicably looks away. When Lana is dragged into the bathroom, forced to see for herself, John and Tom must break her resistance by prying her hands away from her face. In the end, it is the audience who lingers the longest on Brandon’s genitals. The third time we enter the bathroom, we cut between Tom and John sitting on a couch through the door frame of their bathroom and Brandon becoming undone within it. John has ordered Brandon to wash away all evidence of the rape. The stripped reveal of Brandon in the previous bathroom scene has settled the question and satiated John and Tom, and thus they no

Figure 23 Family interrogation. Boys Don’t Cry. Film still.

Figure 24 Brandon dissociates. Boys Don’t Cry. Film still.

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longer need to be physically present. In the shower, we are forced to watch a body undone, our gaze no longer tethered to any one character’s subjectivity, but rather a routinized cis gaze controlled by the camera (Halberstam 2005). We return to John and Tom’s bathroom a final time when Linda arrives to tell them that Brandon has gone to the police. Tom is caught in the act of washing mud from the crime scene out of his jeans, and a previously ambivalent Linda realizes that the accusations against the men are true. Where once the bathroom revealed Brandon’s “truth,” now it lays bare the real violence of John and Tom. Linda is redeemed in the eyes of the audience as she looks between the two men, transformed temporarily from an active participant in Brandon’s depantsing and rape into a woman who sees herself as a potential victim of the same violent abusers. The rape and murder of Brandon haunts our analysis throughout this chapter, just as it haunts the action of the film. John and Tom use rape as a corrective measure against the uncertainty that Brandon’s body creates. While violence is foreshadowed in scenes of simmering threat with John, Tom, and the family, it is not until the bathroom depantsing that audiences understand we have hit a point of no return, and Brandon’s downfall has been marked as both inevitable and irrevocable. The rape itself is represented through both showing and telling, cross cut between verbatim transcripts of Brandon’s real-life police interrogation and stylized filmic enactments by the actors. This moment is so disruptive to the film that it verges on genre-crossing, blurring the porous boundaries between independent Hollywood narrative feature and true crime documentary. Thus, these two modes of violence become one, culminating, in Peirce’s understanding, in the “fulfilment of the rape” as the moment in which “Brandon dies” (Peirce, University of Chicago 2019). Following Peirce’s logic then, it is femaleness that allows a body to become rapable, and transness that is constructed as a fantasy of the self that can be obliterated by others through rape. Through this rupture, the audience’s narrative attachment shifts away from Brandon to Lana (Halberstam 2005). The post-rape scenes between the couple

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Figure 25 Crossfade between headlights at the rape scene and Brandon talking to the police. Boys Don’t Cry. Film still.

that follow prove that it is not just Brandon’s self-conception that has been fundamentally altered, but also Lana’s conception of him as a man. After the police interrogation, we find the couple in a controversial post-rape sex scene in a shed behind Candace’s house. For the first time, Lana asks Brandon to describe his pre-transition self: “Were you like me? Like a girl-girl?” Brandon resists her revisioning by responding, “I was just a jerk.” Lana then initiates sex telling Brandon that she’s “never done this before” (emphasis ours). Because we have seen the couple engage in sex prior, we are to understand that Lana has now reconfigured her understanding of sex with Brandon as woman to woman. Ultimately this queer sex proves in some way unsatisfying to Lana’s heterosexual desires, and as she exits into the light she leaves behind the ring Brandon had given her.

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The post-rape sex negotiations between Lana and Brandon exist in stark contrast to how Lana described their intimacy prior. In bed with her friends discussing their early romance, Lana admits that she can’t talk about the details because “it is too intense.” Here, Lana is both revealing and concealing her orientation to Brandon – protecting him through an evasion of detail while validating his bodily configuration through gender-affirmative lies and omissions. Boys Don’t Cry invites us to consider Lana’s ability to know and not know about Brandon simultaneously. Here, we do not suggest a performed ignorance or denial, but rather that Lana legitimately exists in a grey zone of understanding and recognition about Brandon’s body and identity. A bird’seye view of Lana giggling with friends about a sexual encounter with Brandon and its assumedly many gender-confirming details is intercut with a midmake-out reveal of Brandon’s bound chest. A post-coital embrace with a still fully clothed Brandon is punctuated by a graze of Lana’s hand across his genitals. Taken as a whole, the film relies upon common tropes of 1990s comingout films – trying to leave a small town, suffocated by heterosexual family structurings, driving into the metaphorical sunset – to position Lana as a queer subject in ways that far surpass the extant data about the actual Lana Tisdel. In Boys Don’t Cry, the question of Lana’s knowing is resolved at the moment when Brandon is depantsed, and her enduring desire in the scenes that follow renders her a viable queer subject. Much has been written about the stylized, out-of-body sequence that anchors Brandon’s violent depantsing (Halberstam 2005). Punctuated by Lana screaming “Leave him alone,” the film breaks form, separating Brandon from himself to become a witness to his own experience. Close-up shots of Brandon in a hallway, lit theatrically and from a distance, are juxtaposed with a silent bathroom crucifixion tableau – John and Tom holding Brandon up with Lana wailing at his feet. If we push this signification further, we see Lana

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as Mary Magdalene cleaning Jesus’s feet with her hair and tears, thus transforming Brandon into a martyr saint for queer America. The out-of-body bathroom sequence is stylistically exceptional, a marked rupture with what Peirce has often referred to as the neo-realism of the rest of the movie, drawing further attention to the various constructions at work: Brandon’s construction of identity, the visual construction of Brandon as a martyr, and even Peirce’s narrative construction of the film itself. It is here that Boys Don’t Cry becomes a morality play, and we recognize the lights, the set pieces, and the mise-en-scène that scaffold the narrative.

Fake and Real Tensions between fact and fiction exist in all adaptations of historical events, but in Boys Don’t Cry these shifting boundaries animate both the construction of the film and the events within. From literal forgeries to questions about authenticity and access to archival transcripts, the film continually returns audiences to the divide between what is real and what is fake. Following the title sequence, we are dropped into Lonny’s trailer where we find Brandon preparing for a date. Alongside mirror checks of hair and last glances, we watch him pull a pair of rolled-up socks out of his pants, readjusting their size before shoving them back in. Later, we gain access to Brandon’s fake id, listing his name as Charles Brayman. In a morning-after exchange with Candace, we listen to Brandon narrate a past that includes kids from another relationship – kids we know immediately do not exist. In perhaps the most literal and consequential articulation of fraud, Brandon writes fake cheques and is thus caught in the snare of the criminal justice system, ever-hovering on the brink of imprisonment. Taken together, these moments highlight the workings of falsification that are necessary for Brandon’s life and ability to thrive as a man, but which also directly imperil him.

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Figure 26 Failure to appear. Boys Don’t Cry. Film still.

Brandon’s constructed masculinity is contrasted throughout the film with the assumed naturalness of John and Tom’s manhood. While Brandon fakes a fatherly past, John is presented as having successfully fulfilled his reproductive capabilities when his daughter is introduced. Though Brandon is never able to exist without a shirt, around the campfire, Tom pulls up his shirt, revealing not only the traces of a life of self-harm but also the freedom of a male chest that does not need to be bound or surgically altered. Rather than focus on passing as realness, the film organizes itself around fakeness and the theatricality and props required for the making of identity. Through a continued return to the apparatus of passing – via strap-ons, socks, binding bandages, and cross-dresser guides – Boys Don’t Cry argues that Brandon’s identity is fake, that he traffics in counterfeit masculinities.

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Questions about the truth of one’s identity echo across the film. From Lana’s opening line to Brandon, “Who are you?,” to Lonny’s sarcastic prod “So you’re a boy, now what?” Brandon must continually answer to the suspicions and curiosities of others. Characters repeatedly push Brandon to answer questions he is intent on dodging, and to account for consequences he refuses to acknowledge. When Lana visits Brandon in jail and finds him housed with women, Brandon knows the jig is up and says, “You want the truth, don’t you?” He is not just asking Lana but also the viewer, as this question satisfies one of the film’s central curiosities. Hardly missing a beat, Brandon invents another explanation that the audience knows can only be false – “This place is crazy, they’ll put you wherever they want.” Through such moves, the film reveals how cisnormativity is structured and maintained via ongoing gender surveillance and regulation. The interplay between fake and real bleeds and collapses during the narrations of Brandon’s rape to police. While the film makes use of actual transcripts from the recorded interrogation, boundaries become blurred, contexts confused, and legacies of violence linger on screen. It is in this moment that the differences between fake and real become impossible to distinguish, and the film’s mythology eclipses real-life events – thus becoming “the truth” of Brandon Teena in the collective imaginary.

Chapter 3

Take It Like a Man

In Nebraska, a man was sentenced to death for killing a female crossdresser who had accused him of rape and two of her friends. Excuse me if this sounds harsh, but in my mind, they all deserved to die. – Norm MacDonald, Saturday Night Live, 24 February 1996

Brandon Teena arrived in pop culture long before Boys Don’t Cry did, as the butt of a joke on snl’s Weekend Update. Reacting to the death sentence of John Lotter, Brandon’s killer, snl’s resident bad boy Norm MacDonald laughed as he told millions of viewers that the punishment for murder and for gender dysphoria should be equal. Looking back decades later, it might be reasonable to assume that the outrage and backlash to the joke would be immediate. But in the wake of MacDonald’s callous conflation, only a handful of organizers from nascent trans activist network Transexual Menace picketed nbc in response. The rape and murder of Brandon Teena alongside his friends Philip DeVine and Lisa Lambert had occupied the media’s attention for three years prior to MacDonald’s cruel insults. The sensational story of a “white trash” gender non-conforming playboy grabbed the attention of queer journalists, true crime ambulance chasers, transsexual activists, and student filmmakers alike.

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As an mfa student at Columbia University’s film school, director Kimberly Peirce had been developing a project about Pauline Cushman, a woman who lived as a man during the American Civil War. Scanning the Village Voice, Peirce landed on an article by white leatherdyke journalist Donna Minkowitz that broke the story of Brandon’s murder, framing it as the tragic love story of a butch girl playing out the fantasy of being a man. Minkowitz’s article animated debates about the porous borders between gender, sexuality, and identity. Not only did the article inspire Transexual Menace’s first public protest, it also motivated Peirce to jump in a car loaded with documentary filmmakers and Menace activists who were headed for the scene of the crime. Meanwhile, true crime writer Aphrodite Jones was already on the ground in Nebraska, chasing her next story. Even the intellectual elite turned out – Joan Didion’s husband John Dunne began building a story about Tom Nissen, one of the accused, for the New Yorker. And though the middle class of Falls City paid little mind to what was happening at their courthouse, all the major players of the drama showed face: Brandon’s, Lambert’s, and DeVine’s families were all demanding justice while the Tisdels were enjoying the sudden spotlight of media attention. In 1994, the first of two trials for the rape and murder of Brandon Teena began with Tom Nissen. A twenty-three-year-old man who had spent most of his life bouncing in and out of institutions before going awol from the army, Nissen had reported connections to the white supremacist organization the White American Group for White America (Jones 1996, 154). Immediately after Nissen’s trial, John Lotter, also twenty-three, was tried and eventually convicted of first-degree murder, based largely on Nissen’s plea deal testimony. Together, Lotter and Nissen became a nexus for contemporary understandings about the connections between anti-lgbt “hate crimes,” class, and Figures 27, 28, 29, 30 Opposite and following page Brandon Teena, Philip DeVine, Lisa Lambert, Lana Tisdel. The Brandon Teena Story. Film stills.

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Figure 31 Trans protest photograph, Mariette Pathy Allen.

racial violence; however, they were not the only actors deserving of attention in this story’s unfolding. Jumping out of the car toward the courthouse, Transexual Menace activists Kate Bornstein, Leslie Feinberg, and Riki Ann Wilchins, among others, highlighted the role of police sheriff Charles Laux in the outing and murder of Brandon,1 while Brandon’s family repeatedly accused girlfriend Lana Tisdel and her mother of involvement in the murder. Film student Peirce headed to the murder house in Humboldt to figuratively and literally touch the blood 1 Footage of Transexual Menace protests around the death of Brandon can be found in Rosa von Praunheim’s documentary Transsexual Menace (1996).

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stains on the floor, and documentary makers Gréta Olafsdóttir and Susan Muska began interviewing the people of Falls City for what would eventually become The Brandon Teena Story (1998). The 1990s marked the emergence of televised courtroom dramas, made famous by the murder trial of former football star OJ Simpson. On the streets, aids activists rallied against the neglect of queer and trans bodies by governments and families, while the mainstream obsessed over gender and sexuality through the first wave of queer stories on film, from documentaries like Paris Is Burning (1990) and Forbidden Love (1992) to narrative features such as The Crying Game (1992) and The Living End (1992). Taken together, these films gave viewers a titillating glimpse of underground queer cultures, but not without punishing their trans subjects – such as The Crying Game’s Dil or Paris Is Burning’s Venus Xtravaganza – with outing, poverty, and violence, setting the terms of viewing for years to come. On the small screen, Saturday Night Live’s “It’s Pat!” sketches invited viewers to endlessly question the gender of the title character, while RuPaul shot to stardom as North America’s most visible drag personality with mtv hit “Supermodel (You Better Work)” (1993) and eventually his own vh-1 talk show. New pop cultural attention on queer and trans subjects consolidated alongside a deluge of media coverage of anti-lgbt hate crimes in the early 1990s. From the October 1992 murder of US Navy Petty Officer Allen Schindler, whose death would later inspire the infamous “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy brought in by President Bill Clinton, to the murders of Brandon Teena and Matthew Shepard, a North American public urged on by celebrities began to mourn young white bodies as the casualties of homophobia. While Shepard and Brandon became the emblematic cases of an emerging discourse around hate crimes, queer and trans people of colour were murdered and assaulted in greater numbers, including the death of Stonewall veteran Marsha P. Johnson in 1992. The murder of Rita Hester, an African American trans woman in Massachusetts, generated little fanfare in 1998, but led activists to create the Transgender Day of Remembrance. The deaths of queer and trans people of

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colour found little traction in a media landscape obsessed with easily digestible, single-issue stories. When the media was ready to talk about racist hate crimes, exemplified by the lynching of James Byrd, Jr, in 1998, they reached for the bodies of straight cis men. Emboldened by groups such as act up, Queer Nation, and Lesbian Avengers, white queer people began agitating around hate crimes and violence against people who looked like them. This momentum pushed journalist Donna Minkowitz toward the story of Brandon Teena, whose 1994 Village Voice article landed in the hands of Kimberly Peirce.

Research and Development love hurts, read the headline of the Village Voice on 19 April 1994. “Brandon Teena was a woman who lived and loved as a man. She was killed for carrying it off,” the subtitle continued, surrounded by four photographs of women who claimed Brandon as “the best boyfriend they ever had” (Minkowitz 1994, 24). The article detailed the life and murder of Brandon through interviews with his family and some of the girls he had dated. Bringing Brandon’s story of trailer parks and rural tragedy to a mainstream, cosmopolitan audience, Minkowitz focused her attention largely on the romantic aspects of his life. Troublingly, she framed Brandon’s gender non-conformity as a reaction to childhood experiences of sexual trauma. Her writing held Brandon up as a small-town lesbian hero whose life was cut short because of “her” pursuit of love in a homophobic world. Twenty years later, Minkowitz authored a public response to her original piece in the same publication. There, she recalled that her first insight into the story was through an Associated Press story in the New York Times that summarized Brandon as a woman. Admittedly knowing “nothing about trans people,” Minkowitz attached to the story as one about a lesbian trying on masculinity for sex, someone in whom she could see herself reflected. She

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Figure 32 “love hurts,” Donna Minkowitz. The Village Voice, 1994.

recognized in retrospect, “I also projected my own experience of sexual abuse onto his, and used it to concoct my own biased theory of trans origins” (Minkowitz 2018). These projections would come to characterize ideas about who Brandon was and why he had lived how he had lived for decades to

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come, and Minkowitz’s decision to largely excise the murders of Lisa Lambert and Philip DeVine had a lasting impact on how Brandon’s story would be remembered. During her initial trips to Nebraska to investigate the story, Minkowitz was joined by Susan Muska, a freelance reporter for Dyke tv – a public access lesbian news and culture program broadcasting, at its height, to sixty-one cities across the United States – who was making a documentary. Muska’s research claimed Falls City as “a sundown town,” where Black people were subjected to increased violence and threat after dark. In her retrospective reflection, Minkowitz acknowledged how her choices contributed to the ongoing cultural devaluation of Black lives. Now able to look back from a distance not only of time but also of politics, Minkowitz has charted a journey from prior ignorance to better self-knowing. She has returned to her research archive to excavate many under-attended pieces: namely, notes about how trans and lesbian communities were already debating the stakes and identity claims over Brandon’s life and history, as well as an interview with Leslie Feinberg that didn’t make it into her original piece. For decades, according to Minkowitz, Feinberg called her original article “sleazy, salacious psychosexual babble” (Minkowitz 2018). While Feinberg’s response has held up over time as a scathing but necessary rebuke, so too have other reactions that inform present-day understandings. In a note to Minkowitz on the tails of her first reading, director Kimberly Peirce remarked: “Your article was on fire. I read it and I fell in love with Brandon. It made me love his vulnerability, his daring, his innocence, the way that he gave pleasure sexually. I was in love with this person who had shaped himself.” Peirce’s interest in Brandon’s story was part of a broader curiosity about the lives and histories of “passing women” – narratives that Peirce now identifies as trans and gender non-conforming subjects. During her time at Columbia, while developing the feature about Cushman, Peirce read Feinberg’s freshly released novel Stone Butch Blues. Now hailed as a central text that illuminates the porous boundaries between butch, trans, and non-binary

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identities, Stone Butch Blues lays narrative foundations later built upon by Peirce in Boys Don’t Cry: from the endless questioning of gender to violent police interactions and the careful negotiation of intimacy with femmes. The novel was so resonant with the themes of Brandon’s story, as framed in Minkowitz’s Village Voice article, that Peirce later gave away copies to prospective producers in an effort to gain traction for her film. Alongside authoring formative texts, Feinberg was one of the key figures in the emergence of transgender activism in the early 1990s, including the San Francisco–based Transgender Nation and the national organization Transexual Menace. Founded by activists Riki Ann Wilchins and Denise Norris, the Menace quickly spread across the country via the early internet with their readily identifiable T-shirts seemingly designed to emulate the logo of the Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Wilchins and Norris drew their inspiration for both the name and the iconic T-shirts from the Lavender Menace zap at the Second Congress to Unite Women (1970) after the president of the National Organization for Women, Betty Friedan, attempted to distance now from lesbian feminist organizers, such as the Daughters of Bilitis (Crawford 2021). Transexual Menace activists picketed the offices of the Village Voice after the publication of Minkowitz’s article. Wilchins had been particularly incensed by Minkowitz’s focus on Brandon’s sex life in a story purportedly about his rape and murder. “What really pissed many of us off was the rampant sexualization. The article made 11 references to Brandon’s sexual practices, seven references to his genitals and five to a dildo he allegedly owned,” she later wrote (Wilchins 2017). Bornstein, Wilchins, Feinberg, and Transexual Menace grabbed national attention not only through demonstrations, but also media interviews and appearances on daytime talk shows. The murder of Brandon, whom the Menace dubbed “Brandon Teena” in a reversal of his legal name, became this largely white cohort’s first major rallying call. The Menace’s cross-country road trip with Peirce to hold a vigil outside the trials of Brandon’s killers

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brought transgender activism to the mainstream. Marching hand-in-hand with Menace shirts forward, Feinberg, Bornstein, Wilchins, and others critiqued the exclusion of trans people from gay and lesbian media – Wilchins remembers that the Boston gay and lesbian newspaper, presumably Gay Community News, refused to run a story on Brandon because “if he was trans, he wasn’t gay or lesbian” (Wilchins 2017) – as well as from feminist spaces. Further, the group protested the 1991 expulsion of transsexual woman Nancy Jean Burkholder from the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, part of the wider awakening of third-wave feminism from the ashes of the feminist sex wars that had so bitterly divided the second wave during the 1980s. While historically contested, feminism’s third wave and the protests at Michigan aligned with broader moves in both community and academic spaces to radically approach the political power of – and distinction between – gender and sexuality. Characterized by vicious debates about the political legitimacy of butch/femme identities, bdsm, porn, and sex work, the sex wars motivated the birth of queer theory, giving rise to an exhaustive rethinking of normativity and its constraints. Marking a decade of transformative poststructuralist and deconstructive thinking, from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) to New Queer Cinemas born in the wake of the aids crisis, queer theory pushed back against essentialist renderings of the sexed body. While distinct from, and at times positioned in opposition to, queer theory, transgender studies emerged alongside it as “queer theory’s evil twin” (Stryker 2004), beginning with Sandy Stone’s The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto (1987), to initially push back against trans-exclusionary radical feminism and account for the ways in which gender non-conforming subjects have been elided and obscured in the theorization of subjects deemed “lesbian” and “gay.” The figurative hallways of academia were but one of many locations of Peirce’s research. Nineties activist cultures and hubs of diy cultural production also served as portals of access to those living in the now-familiar

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borderlands of trans gender. As one example, Silas Howard and Harry Dodge, soon-to-be-makers of the Sundance-winning By Hook or by Crook (2001), would eventually read for the role of Peirce’s Brandon.

Casting Casting for Brandon was a problem. The 1990s did not see a proliferation of out queer or trans actors with significant – or any – on-screen experience. Peirce spent five years attempting to locate “the perfect Brandon” through a variety of different avenues, starting first with trans and butch actors and performers from her local community, and eventually ending in the mainstream casting rooms of Hollywood and independent cinema. Early in her research process, Peirce had to contend with the politics of passing and how to make what is only ever ephemeral and contextual feel concrete on screen. Here, the problem she immediately confronted was that Brandon was a non-medically transitioned person who passed. Many trans actors she auditioned inhabited different embodiments: some were already on testosterone and/or had had top surgery, while others strategically inhabited the borderlines between butch and trans masculinities but wouldn’t read as credibly passing enough to characters in-film. Peirce and her team returned again and again, year after year, to the same question: how do you cast an actor who is able to be understood within the logic of the film as passing for a man while also being legible as a trans person to the audience (Columbia 2020)? The politics of passing are undoubtedly linked to the politics of recognition. Straight and queer audiences tend to approach the story of Brandon Teena differently. More often than not, and especially in the ’90s, straight audiences were looking for queerness by relying upon dated signifiers, unable to disentangle transness as a distinct mode of expression. Queer audiences, however, were looking for community-specific texts that were already invested in distinguishing between familiar modes of identification and bodily

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inhabitation. In casting for Brandon, Peirce had to consider conflicting audience needs – how could the film represent distinctions between queerness and transness that would be legible to lgbtq+ communities while making non-normative and underrepresented identities legible to the mainstream? The watershed moment for queer legibility on screen came in the wake of Ellen DeGeneres’s coming out on her popular sitcom Ellen in 1997, opposite Laura Dern. While activists had been working for decades to make political and cultural changes off screen, the blonde, blue-eyed Ellen DeGeneres brought an easily consumable example of lesbian life to the living rooms of middle America who had previously only encountered supposed sexual deviants through sensationalized daytime talk shows. While on stage at the film’s twentieth anniversary panel at Columbia, Peirce marked Ellen’s coming out as the moment that she was flooded with straight actresses vying for the part “who wanted to put socks in their pants and make out with women.” While tongue in cheek, Peirce’s comment illuminates a profound shift in potential for queer representation on screen – no longer a modern “box office poison,” suddenly playing gay was ground-breaking, heroic, and Oscar bait. Chloë Sevigny was the it girl of ’90s indie cinema, breaking onto the scene in Larry Clark’s controversial hit Kids (1995). An instant fashion icon, club kid, and sought-after avant garde actress, Sevigny initially auditioned for the role of Brandon. Producer Christine Vachon didn’t see her as Brandon, but asked her to come back in to try for the role of Lana. Sevigny refused to reaudition. “My agent’s always telling me if you audition you don’t get the part,” she reflected at the Columbia anniversary event (Peirce et al., Columbia University 2020). Her refusal forced Peirce to watch all of Sevigny’s films on tape, searching for some sign that Sevigny could play the part. A scene toward the end of Last Days of Disco (1998) when Sevigny’s character gets into the subway and starts dancing provided just that. “It was intoxicating how sexual and open and easy and fluid” Sevigny was, Peirce later said (Peirce et al., Columbia University 2020), and she cast Sevigny as Lana on the strength of that short scene alone.

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Casting Brandon continued to be the most arduous and fraught aspect of making the film. Beyond auditioning dozens of butch, trans, and straight actors and actresses for the part, Peirce had even once set her sights on Canadian indie darling Sarah Polley, who rejected the offer. One day, a tall, lanky, virtually unknown actor in a cowboy hat walked in during casting director Kerry Barden’s lunch break. With only small parts in films like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) as well as the hit tv series Beverly Hills 90210 (1997–98), Hilary Swank’s appearance in the casting room that day was a last-ditch effort to reinvigorate a career she was contemplating dropping. Once in the room, the square-jawed actress refused to take off her cowboy hat, afraid that the reveal of her waist-length hair would deflate any ability she had to pass for a man. At first glance, Swank embodied many of the necessary parts in Peirce’s visual fantasy of Brandon: “boy jaw, boy ears, boy eyes, boy forehead” (Charlie Rose 1999). While Swank was not trans or queer, her similarities to Brandon did not end with aesthetics. Born and raised, like Brandon, in Lincoln, Nebraska, Swank shared an almost identical class background – something she has long referred back to, including periods of sleeping in cars with her mother. The history of trans representation on screen is one of cis actors playing out their fantasies about trans bodies. Whether engaging “transsexual consultants” as Olympia Dukakis did in preparation for the role of Anna Madrigal in the Channel 4 miniseries Tales of the City (1993) and its sequels, or relying purely upon their own imaginations like William Hurt in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), cis actors have received acclaim for performing widely recognized stereotypes of transsexuality. These representations of trans people have largely been relegated to three dominant categories: the imposter, the easy-going humorous relief, or the psycho-killer. Films such as Just One of the Guys (1985) and The Crying Game (1992) characterize the gender nonconforming person as a liar or imposter, responsible for inspiring doubt and

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speculation in viewing publics. In contrast, gender non-conforming characters have also been presented as overly palatable and easygoing. Films such as To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995) drop trans subjects into predictably gendered worlds to fix problems and right the wrongs of other people, all for the benefit of audience amusement. Finally, representations of trans subjects as monsters and killers overwhelm. Films such as Psycho (1960) and Silence of the Lambs (1991) reverse the reality of trans people as murdered subjects and instead render them fear-provoking agents. As such, gender variance becomes a site of fear, hesitation, and distrust. Debates over casting cis actors in trans roles are not new. These representational conflicts stretch back at least as far as the casting process for the film Myra Breckinridge (1970), when actress and Warhol Superstar Candy Darling hounded producers of the film for the lead role. In the end, “they decided Raquel Welch would make a more believable transvestite,” Darling said at the time, with no lack of irony (Colacello 1990, 84).

The Brandon Teena Story Boys Don’t Cry was in production at the same time as The Brandon Teena Story by documentarians Susan Muska and Gréta Olafsdóttir. After winning the Teddy Award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1998, The Brandon Teena Story circulated widely on video and was released as a part of reel life on Cinemax before eventually landing as a pirated open access on YouTube in 2016. Recognizing the concurrent production timelines of Boys Don’t Cry and The Brandon Teena Story allows for important questions to emerge about the stakes of non-fiction audio-visual portraits versus stories bolstered by the creative liberties offered to narrative features. Heavily reliant upon interviews with those closest to Brandon and scattered archival materials, The Brandon Teena Story is anchored by an audio

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recording of Brandon’s police interrogation with Sherriff Laux after the rape. Remarking upon the use of voice as a “treatment of transgenderism” in film, Jack Halberstam notes that this inclusion of audio creates a ghosting effect, revealing Brandon to audiences only after his death – a haunting that reminds audiences of his inability to truly speak while living (Halberstam 2005). While recognizing the narrative slippage between documentary and fiction, Muska and Olafsdóttir’s pursuit of “truth” and earnest quest for “facts” cannot be overstated. Early writing about the documentary aligns with Donna Minkowitz’s interpretations of Brandon’s life – not surprising given the Dyke tv journalists-turned-filmmakers who were with Minkowitz throughout their reporting – framing Brandon as a woman performatively passing for a man as a way to avoid further trauma. The film focuses much attention on Brandon’s many girlfriends, reinforcing and coaxing cis-audience curiosity about the making and workings of his intimate and sexual life. Here, viewers gain access to Brandon’s many attractions and commitments – a notable inclusion when considered against and alongside the singular focus on his life with Lana in Boys Don’t Cry. The aesthetic tone of The Brandon Teena Story is that of a road movie shot by outsiders looking at an unknown land, always with the intention of leaving. Writing a review of the film in the spring 1999 issue of Great Plains Quarterly, June Perry Levine remarks upon the use of roads to tell the atmospheric story of Lincoln and Falls City. Here we find resonances with formal choices made by Peirce, as she considered roads and landscapes to be central to the unfolding of Brandon’s story in Boys Don’t Cry. Levine’s morose conclusion that the narrative of The Brandon Teena Story proceeds “with a dreadful inevitability” is echoed by Peirce’s conclusion that for most of the characters in Boys Don’t Cry, “there is no way out” (Levine 1999, 128).

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Figure 33 Crossfade between Brandon and Lana and the Nebraska landscape. The Brandon Teena Story. Film still.

True Crime Minkowitz, Peirce, Olafsdóttir, Muska, and the activists of Transexual Menace were not the only people who had hit the pavement of Falls City in the weeks and months following the murders of Brandon, Lambert, and DeVine. True crime writer Aphrodite Jones smelled her next book. Writing for the New

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Yorker, John Dunne described Jones as “the most glamorous thing to hit Falls City in a long time, and she was not unaware of it” (Dunne 1997, 45–62). Jones had two books about murders already under her belt, and she quickly put her skills to work on the story about “the girl who became a boy but paid the ultimate price” (Jones 1996). Stalking not only the courthouse but also the Kwik Stop and other local hangouts of the disaffected youths who had populated Brandon’s final days, Jones worked hard to use her glamorous cosmopolitan appearance to gain the trust of most of the people who had known Brandon. She forged particular connections to the women in his life, who became her strongest informants. But, as Dunne explains, Jones had no interest in collaborating with any of the other artists, activists, and storytellers who had arrived at the same time. “She did not suffer competitors gladly, and, to make her position clear, she had the foresight to sign the Brandons and other principals in the case to contracts in which the signees agreed to ‘exclusively supply author with interviews, letters, photos and other pertinent documents to support the author’s writing of the book and film project,’ effectively freezing out other reporters” (Dunne 1997, 45–62). Jones’s possessiveness over Brandon’s story reportedly knew no bounds. In a 2000 LA Weekly profile titled “The Devil and Aphrodite Jones,” Matthew C. Duerstein summarized the experience of Muska and Olafsdóttir, who contacted Jones to share information and maybe even an apartment. “I phoned her and she said, ‘Oh, I’ve received some threats, and I can’t let a lot of people know where I am, because I work in a dangerous field!’” Muska laughs. “It seemed strange, melodramatic – like why would she be receiving death threats? It was a little bit over the top” (Duerstein 2000). In court, Jones’s research tactics were so aggressive toward the jury that she nearly caused a mistrial. Duerstein elaborated, “The enraged judge hauled her onto the stand and grilled her before handing down a reprimand. (She kept her seat in court, but her business cards were confiscated by the marshals.)” (Duerstein 2000).

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Jones would also feud with Transexual Menace activists. At a Unitarian Universalist Church in Kansas City, the group came together to hold a memorial for Brandon. Jones arrived, not just to observe, but intending to speak. In an interview with LA Weekly, Jones recalled, “I said, ‘Teena Brandon, Brandon Teena, what’s the difference?’ They went crazy. They wanted to throw me out. People booed and yelled, stomped off the stage, walked out of the room. It was terrible” (Duerstein 2000). Curiously, this incident did not originally appear in her somewhat condescending account of the memorial and encounters with Transexual Menace in her book about the case. Taking its title from Brandon’s favourite song – Ace of Base’s 1992 hit “All That She Wants” – All S/he Wanted: The True Story of Brandon Teena, Jones’s account of the life and murder of Brandon Teena, would be published in 1996. While the book remains the single most comprehensive source of information on Brandon, Menace activists were incensed upon its release on account of Jones misgendering Brandon throughout the text, and their own patronizing depiction within. All S/he Wanted was released alongside other biographical accounts that misgendered transmasculine subjects in the same period, including Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton by Diane Middlebrook. During Jones’s press tour, Menace activists repeatedly interrupted Jones’s book launch events to call attention to the textual violence it enacted (Duerstein 2000). In the 2010s, the book would eventually be re-released in a self-published e-book edition under the title All he Wanted, but this would be far too little, too late. The original edition remains in print, though the new edition includes an author’s note in which Jones attempts to apologize for misgendering Brandon and then proceeds to repeatedly misgender him again (Jones 2016). Jones knew she had more than just a bestseller on her hands – she thought ahead and had most of the key players in the story sign over their life rights at the moment she interviewed them, with an eye on the potential of a film adaptation. As Dunne described, “The contract read that no money would

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change hands until or unless a ‘motion picture’ was ‘released’ from any book Jones would publish, at which point the signee would receive ten thousand dollars or ten percent of the book’s movie purchase price, whichever was greater; the prospect of this payment was so problematic as to barely exist, and would come to seem, for those who signed, just one more disappearing dream” (1997, 45–62). While Peirce was struggling to get Boys Don’t Cry off the ground as a young queer filmmaker, Jones was out shopping the film rights to All S/he Wanted around Hollywood. Eventually, the book would fall into the hands of Academy Award–winning actress Diane Keaton, who optioned it through her production company, Blue Relief. Keaton and Jones set their sights on child actress turned 1990s superstar Drew Barrymore to play Brandon (Harrison 2000). Producers Keaton and Bill Robinson took the picture to Fox Searchlight, who were by then already in process with Peirce about Boys Don’t Cry.

Brandon (1998–99) Activism, documentary, and true crime were not the only lenses through which Brandon’s story was processed. New media artist and filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang was also struck by Minkowitz’s article in the Village Voice. When Cheang later read another article in the Village Voice, titled “A Rape in Cyberspace” (Dibbell 1994), which detailed an early spree of violating experiences in a text-based chat room, she began to form ideas for a new project (Rhizome 2019). Commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum, Brandon would become the institution’s first online exhibit. A large and complex – even by today’s standards – virtual experience, Cheang’s Brandon is part interactive history installation and part massive multiplayer online chat game. Drawing on the polyvocal nature of the online chat rooms that provided one-half of the inspiration for the project, Cheang assembled a large team of programmers as well as trans artists and historians,

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Figure 34 “bigdoll,” Jordy Jones. From Brandon, Shu Lea Cheang. Screen capture.

including Jordy Jones and Susan Stryker, to create the piece. Divided into several narrative sections, which require careful puzzle-based interactions to navigate, Brandon invites users to consider how gender, the body, and violence fuse together with technology, creating the possibilities for new life (transgender identity) as well as new relationships to violence and death (online sexual harassment, rape, murder). Through different rabbit holes, users can alternately learn stories of trans men from the past such as Jim McHarris and Brandon Teena, as well as participate in online chat “court” rooms to pass legal judgments. The project further sought to expose the blurred boundaries

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between online and offline life through a series of in-person events at both the Guggenheim in New York and Amsterdam’s Theatrum Anatomicum. Restored in 2017 by a team from the Guggenheim and New York University, Brandon is, at the date of publication, available again to interact with online (Guggenheim 2017). The project represents an important and prescient step in the development of pre-social media internet art. It is from these early digital art, documentary, journalism, and activist projects that Peirce’s production of Boys Don’t Cry emerges.

Production Between her initial trip to attend the trial of Tom Nissen and the eventual production of Boys Don’t Cry, Peirce claims to have amassed “ten thousand pages of transcripts” as well as additional sources on Brandon’s life (Fox Searchlight 1999). The director interviewed many of the people closest to him in the weeks before his death, most notably Brandon’s girlfriend, then nineteen-year-old Lana Tisdel. “It was interesting to watch people’s stories change the longer I stayed there,” Peirce noted in the film’s online press kit (Fox Searchlight 1999). “Sometimes people were lying to themselves, other times to me ... I believed Lana was lying to me throughout her interview, but her lies depicted her relationship with Brandon – the emotional truth just poured out.” Lana’s contradictory statements to Peirce occurred in real time alongside differing accounts of the night of the murder from all involved. While awaiting trial, Tom Nissen casually told a corrections officer transporting him to the courthouse that, in fact, Lana had been an active participant in the murder, having gone with Nissen and Lotter to the farmhouse that night (Jones 1996, 253–4). Though he later recanted that story, the first of many recantations over the years, the Brandon family continued to believe Lana and her mother to have been in some way responsible. In wading through the lies and con-

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flicting testimonies of her interlocutors to construct a filmic narrative, Peirce would eventually pluck this possibly apocryphal story and use it to help “reshape [Brandon’s life] into a mythic tale” (GenderTalk 1999), which she described as “an opportunity to tell something truer than what really happened and to distill a whole life into two entertaining hours” (Fox Searchlight 1999). It’s no surprise then that when Peirce began production on Boys Don’t Cry as her grad school thesis film in 1995, her script was not based directly on Brandon’s life and murder, and was instead “inspired by” – with changed names for the lead players (Vachon, Columbia University 2020). The short would attract the attention of producer Christine Vachon. In pursuit of future project potential, Vachon paid $18,000 to retrieve the footage from Peirce’s first draft “out of hock at DuArt,” only to see it and realize “it was still a student film” and essentially unusable (Vachon, Columbia University, 2020). Hot on the tails of winning the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Todd Haynes’s Poison (1991), Christine Vachon started her production company Killer Films in 1995. Now widely recognized for producing some of North America’s most important and influential queer films, Vachon got her start working alongside college friend Haynes while studying at Brown in the mid1980s (Haynes and Vachon 2016). Together, the pair joined the aids Coalition to Unleash Power (Schulman 2021, 401–3) and, along with collaborator Barry Ellsworth, created Apparatus Films to produce Haynes’s controversial and banned debut Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987). Since then, through Killer Films, Vachon has produced all of Haynes’s work, alongside cult classics like Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) and John Waters’s A Dirty Shame (2004), as well as winning an Emmy for executive producing the tv version of Ira Glass’s This American Life (2008). Boys Don’t Cry received additional financing from ifc Films and Hart Sharp Entertainment after Vachon put Peirce on a plane to the Rotterdam International Film Festival. With ifc’s contribution of $1 million, the film’s budget totalled just under $2 million. Vachon encouraged Peirce to rewrite the script as based on a true story, restoring Brandon and other characters’

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names. The team brought on co-writer Andy Bienen to help Peirce tackle the script, which ended up a staggering 150 pages. Peirce claims the pair messed with the margins and font size to wrangle the unwieldy screenplay down to a more palatable, industry-standard 120 pages (Peirce et al., Columbia University 2020). Still, the initial cut of the Boys Don’t Cry would end up totalling four and a half hours, leading to an arduous editing process. Even with the injection of ifc funding, the film operated on a micro-budget, a circumstance that Peirce has often referred to in public as “the poverty of the production.” As one oft-cited example, Peirce notes the use of second unit time lapses of roads and landscapes as a fix for otherwise impossible dream shots – high-budget visuals with low-budget tech requirements. To further punctuate the differences between production fantasy and reality, Chloë Sevigny recounts the moment when Hilary Swank – who was paid $3,000 to star in the film – arrived with her dog on set to ask about the location of her trailer, only to be laughed at by other actors who informed her that they were all staying together in a cheap motel (Peirce et al., Columbia University 2020).

On Set Principal photography of Boys Don’t Cry occurred across thirty-six days between 19 October and 24 November 1998. Peirce scouted locations in Falls City, Nebraska, but moved on to other cities and states – Omaha, Kansas, Florida – before settling on Greenville, Texas. Approximately fifty miles northeast of Dallas, Greenville had a population of 23,000 people – a significant increase from the barely more than 4,600 population of the real-life Falls City. In promotional material for the film, Peirce described how the team “visited six towns in Texas and I began to notice certain architectural similarities with Falls City … best of all what we found was a whole Qwik-

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Stop culture of narcotized kids that sleep all day and hang out all night just like in Falls City. We had all the flat farmland we needed and we found beautiful dilapidated farmhouses. It was entirely the right feel in class and attitude” (Fox Searchlight 1999). Often citing shot-style inspiration from Cassavetes and Scorsese, Peirce collaborated with Jim Denault, a cinematographer who joined the project in the final hours after the original director of photography dropped out. Shooting primarily in the hours before dawn, Peirce described the film’s overall mood as “artificial night,” a visual tone that becomes a character in the film. The middle-of-the-night schedule forced actors to confront some of the narrative’s most brutal scenes together without breaks – constantly reminded of the terror and trauma of Brandon’s lived experience and the role that night played in Brandon’s ultimate undoing. On many of the panels in the years following the film’s release, cast members spoke at length about their struggles to see difficult scenes through to completion. At a twentieth anniversary event at Columbia, Brendan Sexton III, who played Tom Nissen, burst into tears after the screening, telling the audience it was the first time he’d seen the movie since its release, and that the bathroom scene in particular was hard for him to watch. Sexton described the difficult experience of shooting Boys Don’t Cry’s most brutal moments – the depantsing, the rape, and the murder – and talked about how both he and Peter Sarsgaard began drinking heavily each day to cope with the disturbing scenes they were charged with acting out. Prior to shooting the rape scene, Sexton went “missing” and cried for forty-five minutes behind the dairy factory where they were shooting. Peirce found him and talked him down, encouraging the young actor by recognizing and valuing his empathetic connection to Brandon. On the same panel, Peirce told the audience that Sexton’s ability to feel the horror of the violence was exactly what made him the right actor for the part. She explained, “part of our analysis of people like Tom was that they didn’t have a venue for their feelings, and so Tom was someone who took it out on himself

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– he burned himself, he cut himself – and then Brandon became an object he could unleash his feelings upon” (Peirce et al., Columbia University 2020). Processing the realities and requirements of shooting the rape, Sexton feared that he might hurt Swank during shooting. Swank responded by telling him to fully commit to the rape scene, saying it was a way to honour what had happened to Brandon. These intense bodily reactions to filming were not confined to Sexton. Sarsgaard also broke down during the filming of the bathroom depantsing scene and vomited while shooting. After getting the part, Peirce asked Swank to live as a man for a month prior to shooting and keep a journal of her experiences. From borrowing her husband’s clothes to purchasing a discount cowboy hat and experimenting with her voice, Swank approached the role willing to try trans on for size (Charlie Rose 2000). Talking about this method to the press in the many weeks and months that would follow, Swank was quick to narrate the ways her own “real-life test” provided insight into the daily discriminations and anxieties experienced by trans people. “It’s a very sad place and a very lonely place,” Swank described to Charlie Rose while promoting the release of the film (Charlie Rose 2000). “And to think that I was passing as a boy, and yet I was the same person inside with the same needs, wants, insecurities, desires, and I was treated night and day different. I learned a lot about humanity and I learned a lot about myself and I learned a lot about the way I want to live my life.”

Release Prior to the film’s release on 22 October 1999, Peirce facilitated a series of feedback screenings with audiences “to find out how much information I needed to tell the audience about Brandon and about sex change and about his aspirations and about everything, so that I could then reshape it” (GenderTalk 1999). Her initial four-and-a-half-hour-long cut focused on Bran-

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don’s backstory prior to his arrival in Falls City, including scenes with Brandon’s mother that were eventually excised. Peirce had major concerns about the depiction of violence, particularly the rape. Understanding that audiences could only digest the graphic violence once, Peirce eventually chose to collapse the rape and the invasive police interrogation into a single sequence. Originally titled Take It Like a Man, clips of the film-in-progress were shown at a special screening at the Sundance Film Festival in 1999 (Forrest 1999). Retitled Boys Don’t Cry, the film premiered first in Canada at the Toronto International Film Festival and in Italy at the Venice International Film Festival in September, then the New York Film Festival in October before securing a wide theatrical release. Opening weekend box office sales garnered $73,720 from twenty-five screens. By March 2000, the film reached its peak at nearly 200 screens, motivating an international push to Australia and the UK. At the time of our writing, the film has grossed over $20 million internationally (“Boys Don’t Cry” n.d.). Having initially conceived the film in conversation with activists from Transexual Menace, Peirce was mindful of bringing the film back to trans communities. In addition to promotional appearances on trans media such as GenderTalk Radio (1999), Peirce and Swank participated in a trans activist event with Riki Wilchins’s then-new Genderpac (Wilchins 2017). Held at New York City’s Lesbian and Gay Community Center, Wilchins remembers Swank as a humble and keen participant in discussions with members of the trans community (Wilchins 2017). Upon the release of the film, Fox Searchlight was slapped with two lawsuits. The first, from Lana Tisdel, claimed that despite interviewing her extensively, Peirce had not gained the rights to her life. Tisdel’s rights had already been signed over to a zealous Aphrodite Jones, and she further alleged that the film portrayed her as a “scheming skank” (O’Neill 1999). She received a confidential settlement from the production. Jones herself – along with producers Diane Keaton and Bill Robinson, who had been trying to make their own feature with Drew Barrymore – also filed suit. Fox Searchlight concealed the

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conflict of interest from Jones, Keaton, and Robinson while pursuing the development of Boys Don’t Cry. Jones argued that Fox Searchlight had knowingly given them the run-around to stop their production from competing with Boys Don’t Cry. Ultimately, Jones would settle out of court for an undisclosed sum six days before the Oscars (Duerstein 2000).

Oscars Hilary Swank’s humble and humorous approach to her new public acclaim was remarked upon often throughout the film’s press tour. Looking back on footage from promotional interviews, it’s striking to consider Swank’s performance of gender. For all the ways the marketing of the film had capitalized on the capacity of Swank’s own personal transformation into the visibly masculine, the promotion was reliant upon a strong corrective return to heterosexuality and femininity. In addition to “femming up” her appearance in interviews and on red carpets, Swank’s husband, actor Chad Lowe, was frequently evoked in discussion both as donor of the clothing Swank wore to pass as a man and as a stabilizing and patient agent of her “true identity.” Though Ellen had blown open the closet doors in such a way that straight actresses could more easily consider “playing gay” – or trans – a return to heteronormative femininity was crucial both in preserving Swank’s future career potential and in underscoring the “Oscar bait” potential of her role in Boys Don’t Cry – a “universally acknowledged” (Hays 2015) strategy that had already served numerous actors, including William Hurt (Kiss of the Spider Woman) and Tom Hanks (Philadelphia). To play gay, you had to remain unquestionably straight. This would, as it turned out, be a winning strategy. At the 2000 Academy Awards, Swank was nominated for Best Actress, alongside the likes of Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep, and Janet McTeer – four big-name ac-

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Figure 35 Hilary Swank accepts the Oscar for Best Actress beneath a still from Boys Don’t Cry. YouTube still.

tresses who were tough competition. Bening’s performance in American Beauty had made one of the most iconic films of the year. When Italian actor Roberto Benigni announced Swank’s win, the shock was clear on both Swank’s and Peirce’s faces. The audience erupted to the sound of “The Bluest Eyes in Texas” from the soundtrack of Boys Don’t Cry as Swank swept onto the stage. The show announcer summarized Swank as having “lived as a boy for one month to prepare for the role of Teena Brandon. A true story of a boy-girl living as a boy in Nebraska” (Academy Awards 2000).

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In her acceptance speech, Hilary Swank thanked twenty-four people and groups before reaching Brandon Teena. Both her acceptance speech and interviews from the time highlight how Swank interpreted the story of Brandon: not as a tragedy, but as a celebration of following one’s eccentric dreams. “His legacy lives on through our movie to remind us to always be ourselves, to follow our hearts, to not conform. I pray for the day when we not only accept our differences but we actually celebrate our diversity,” the shaking Swank told millions of viewers across the world (Academy Awards 2000). It is uncomfortable in 2021 to listen to Swank thank a murder victim, essentially for being murdered, without any call for action on the structures and circumstances that made his death possible. The audience was not urged to stop killing trans people or even to support the rights of trans people, but rather to join Swank in praying for a future in which diversity is celebrated – a politically empty liberal fantasy with no enduring bite.

Coda

“In fact, exactly how wrong I had been only came to me later,” Donna Minkowitz admitted to Chase Joynt during the filming of No Ordinary Man (2020), a documentary about transmasculine history. Speaking more than two decades after her initial writing, Minkowitz reflected upon the fact that it was her own affiliation and identification with Brandon as a butch leatherdyke – however incorrect it may have been – that attracted her to spend time with his story. It was from a place of not knowing – about his transess or his truth – that Minkowitz approached her original story, and from a place of greater clarity and responsibility that she apologized twenty-five years later. While such accountability genuinely attempts to undo harm, both the initial misreporting and her subsequent engagements form integral components – of Brandon’s story and of Boys Don’t Cry – that cannot be erased. The unexpected success and endurance of Peirce’s film continues to shape contemporary understandings of transmasculine life, as well as stir oftenvolatile community conversation about the stakes of authorship and representation. Like Minkowitz, Peirce relied on her own projections about Brandon to create the emotional resonances in the film. “One thing I’ve learned from my experience with writing about Brandon,” continued Minkowitz, “is that my imagination as a writer will not always show me what is truthful.” We wonder what work can be done in the extended wakes and aftermaths of artistic decisions. As trans culture continues to flow outwards into the

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mainstream, we must find nuanced ways to reckon with the representations of the past. A contemporary liberatory impulse urges us to condemn these bad objects as they exist in our collective consciousness, but just like Minkowitz’s and Peirce’s visions of Brandon, this too rests on an imagination that will not always show us what is truthful. Only by taking in the complexity of a figure like Brandon – as a man, a tragic folk hero, an activist rallying call, and indeed an Oscar-winning artistic portrayal – is it possible for trans cultural makers to heal the damaging depictions of the past and move beyond them. Despite a present moment defined by a near-global backlash against the rights of trans people, the promise of a future for trans stories on screen – not only in their glory, but revelling, too, in their sublime mess – lies just beyond the horizon. We can almost see it.

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Index

Adam, 14–17 All S/he Wanted, 79–80 anti-Black violence, 12, 13, 19, 40, 69

Feder, Sam, 12, 17 Feinberg, Leslie, 7–8, 65, 69–71 GenderTalk Radio, 13–14, 87

Beckftm, 3–5, 20 Bornstein, Kate, 65, 70–1; film by Sam Feder, 17 Boys Don’t Cry: history of scholarship, 23 Brandon Teena Story, The, 3, 6, 66, 75–7 butch/ftm, 7–8, 19, 62, 69–70, 72 Byrd, James, Jr, 67 casting, 9, 10, 16, 72–5 Cheang, Shu Lea, 80–2 class, 5, 6, 7, 37–44 Crying Game, The, 53, 66, 74 Cushman, Pauline, 62, 69 DeVine, Phillip, 3, 13, 18, 39–40, 51, 69, 77 disclosure, 4, 16, 17, 43–4, 52 Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen, 12, 17–19 Dyketv, 69, 76 Ernst, Rhys, 9, 14–17

Halberstam, Jack, 8, 26, 31 Humboldt, Nebraska, 3–4, 34, 65 jail. See prison Jones, Aphrodite, 62, 77–80, 88 Lambert, Lisa, 3, 34, 39, 40, 69, 77 Laux, Charles, 42, 52, 65, 76 Lotter, John, 30, 42–3, 61–2, 82 masculinity, 19, 22, 34, 44, 48–9, 50–2, 59; and cars, 26–8; and the gaze, 30–1 McDade, Tony, 19 Miles, Jelayne, 8–10 Minkowitz, Donna, 5, 62, 67–9, 76–7, 80, 91 mirror scenes, 24–5, 58 Muska, Susan, 66, 69, 75–8 Myra Breckinridge, 12, 75

104 Index New Queer Cinema, 71 Nissen, Marvin Thomas “Tom,” 42–3, 48, 62, 82, 85 Ólafsdóttir, Greta, 66, 75–8 Oscars, 88–90 Peirce, Kimberly: authorship, 10–13, 15, 39, 46; casting, 72–4; dvd commentary, 27, 29, 50–2; production, 82–5, 91; research, 5, 8, 62, 65, 69, 80 prison, 26, 34, 42–4, 52, 58 rape: depiction, 10, 13, 26, 52–3, 55–7, 85–7; interrogation, 42; kit, 34, 43; reception, 18; trial, 60–2 Reed College, 10–13, 16 Sarsgaard, Peter, 85–6 Saturday Night Live, 12, 61, 66 Sevigny, Chloë, 23, 73, 84 sex by deception cases, 16–17 Sexton, Brandon, III, 23, 85–6 Shepard, Matthew, 40, 66 Southern Comfort, 6–7

Stone Butch Blues, 7–10, 65, 69–70 Stryker, Susan, 81 Sundance Film Festival, 6, 17, 36, 83, 87, 94 Swank, Hilary, 17, 23, 74, 84, 86–90; critiques of, 10 Tisdel, Lana, 82, 87; intimacy, 30 Transexual Menace, 14, 52, 61–2, 65, 70, 77, 79, 87 Transgender Tipping Point, 12 trans representation, 4, 7, 9, 11, 14, 17, 73–4, 91 Transsexual Action Organization, 12 Treut, Monika, 7 Vachon, Christine, 21–2, 73, 83; and Killer Films, 83 Village Voice, 5, 62, 67, 70, 80 Vilsón, Marquise, 19 visibility, 29, 34, 40 whiteness, 31, 38–42 white trash (stereotype), 38–42 Wilchins, Riki Anne, 65, 70–1, 87 YouTube, 3–4, 5, 23, 75