This might be a silly essay, about a silly movie, but at its core, I do think that My Cousin Vinny contains a seed of truth about the audacity that it takes to be publicly, glaringly trans and in love with another trans person.
This month, we’re proud to feature the guest editor of our June issue, poet Spencer Williams, in conversation about a pair of films that hearken to our theme of trans cinema: Canadian Billy Tipton doc No Ordinary Man and the incendiary short American Reflexxx.
Black Swan is a movie about someone whose art is so pure it annihilates her. Or maybe Black Swan is a movie about someone who is persuaded to believe in an art so pure it can annihilate, and in doing so makes it true.
There are plenty of straight and cis films about friendship, but a full-length feature film like By Hook or by Crook—about two trans guys just being friends—is something that, to my knowledge, has no peers.
Films like Céline and Julie Go Boating and Desperately Seeking Susan present female characters whose identities are in flux, evolving, and constantly merging into others.
Sally Potter's Orlando doesn't arc toward transness as salvific, symbolic, or rich with meaning. Instead, the movie’s performance of elusiveness demonstrates the shallowness of gender variance, the empty space where meaning should be.
On Junior (1994) and Titane (2021) as frames to talk about a fear of pregnancy.
Desperate Living was never meant to be some prescient allegory of rebellion, yet the film’s anarchy and mean-but-hilarious spirit is welcome and fulfilling in a way that few contemporary films can offer in this current moment.
What Yentl is about—more than it is about Judaism, gender roles, sensitive short kings, the fabric of love, or the Mulan paradox (that is, whether a straight man’s gay desires are redeemed as hetero by the revelation of his love object as a woman)—is Babs’s face.
Amidst this grand, never-ceasing chaos, this issue seeks to mine the complicated joy of trans existence, balancing both the dark corners of our lives with the many brilliant cracks of light.
