The Curious Case of Ed Wood, "Transvestite"

I was watching a surprisingly well-made 1980s film about a vampire motorcycle when my thoughts turned, once again, to the godfather of bad movies, Ed Wood.

Wood casts a long shadow over the cult of bad films.  He is their patron saint, their avatar, the shining exemplar of the "outsider artist".  His work combines profound sincerity and profound artistic incompetence, and he is therefore equally praised and mocked, a mythic figure.  When I was young, Tim Burton made a hagiographic biopic.

I am not certain if I have seen Wood's first feature film, 1953's "Glen or Glenda?" all the way through.  I remember it mostly through the way it is represented in Burton's film.  Burton represents an artist who took an assignment to make a schlock exploitation film and turned it into a deeply personal apologia.  "Glen or Glenda?" is therefore an incredibly significant film, a film in which someone who is someone we might now call "gender non-conforming" speaks for himself, tells his own story.

It's not, though, Wood's entire story.  It's not a complete chronicle of his experiences with being gender nonconforming.  It was his first film, directed when he was less than 30 years old.  He lived 25 difficult years after making it, years that might possibly lead us to revise his hypothesis.

There is no reason to assume that Wood did not sincerely believe, in 1953, that he was a healthy, red-blooded American male who just happened to enjoy wearing women's clothing, just as there is no reason to believe that Wood did not believe, in 1960 when he directed "The Sinister Urge", that pornography is a shameful and predatory blight.

Wood's last decade was not a happy one.  He was, sources tell us, alcoholic.  He abused his wife.  He made hardcore pornography.  Even people who celebrate Wood's life seem to find little to celebrate in his last decade, and so the temptation is to sweep it under the rug.  To ignore it.

The 1970s is also the decade where he may have come to identify more and more closely as a transgender woman.  I say "may have" because I can't even give you a cite on this.  I can't point to documentary evidence, to any modern analysis of Wood's relationship to gender norms, to how his self-identification may have changed over time.  His relation to gender has been frozen in time as it was in 1953, reinforced (with, as far as I can tell, the best of intentions) by Burton's big-budget hagiography.  We remember Wood as a man who enjoyed wearing women's clothing.

I wonder, sometimes, how his experience tracks with my own.  I recall the struggle, the pain, of being gender non-conforming and of not having any socially accepted or healthy way of expressing it, all of the things I said about myself that weren't quite true.  I am marked indelibly by those decades of suffering.  It does not surprise me or strike me as unusual that a gender non-conforming person in a non-accepting culture should deal with that stress by drinking to excess, that his last life was not a happy one, that he treated the people closest to him inexcusably poorly.

What I remember of Burton's film is the image of Ed Wood as a sort of transvestite Elroy Jetson, an irrepressible, happy-go-lucky, boundlessly enthusiastic young man.  I think this is probably genuinely part of who he was.  I am not sure Wood would have been suited, in 1994, by another in the endless stream of tortured-artist biopics.

Cinema lies, and Burton's lies - I think they were well-intentioned, just like Wood's own lies were well-intentioned.  I wouldn't say it's their _fault_, either of them, that I carried the burden of those lies, took them inside me as part of who I was.  I made my own compromises, told my own half-truths, chose the ways in which I would hurt, just like Wood did before me.  I'm trying to do better now.  I'm trying to tell my own story, as honestly and fairly as I can.

I think maybe it's time we revisit Ed Wood's story.  I suspect there are things about his life and experiences that we can understand better now than anyone could in 1994 or in 1953.  I believe that Ed deserves that privilege, that all of us who grew up in his shadow deserve that privilege.