Body Talk is an ongoing series of transcribed conversations on Transgender Cinema as we prepare to write a book on the subject. This part is on Jennie Livingston's seminal documentary, Paris is Burning.
WILLOW MACLAY : "God, please just let us celebrate while we're
here. Let us dance and open up the world to one another."
That's what I wrote in my
letterboxd blurb hours after having first watched
Paris is Burning in 2014, and after revisiting the film a few
days ago, in 2018, not much has changed. To watch Paris is Burning
as a transgender person is completely overwhelming. It's the
cinematic equivalent of someone dying of thirst suddenly having a
waterfall dropped on top of them. Underneath the cracks, hidden in a
back alley, on an abandoned street away from the eyes of the world
there's life, bristling and bursting with pride, beauty, vanity and
love for one another. Our brothers and sisters and everyone else
inbetween can grasp at something that's real. A reality where we can
exist, and not press up against the limitations of flesh, but grab
hold of a dream and christen it as us. In this building, a true safe
space, where dance, music, sex and identity collide into one we're
the stars of the universe without the undue burden of a racist,
sexist, transphobic society that wishes to plunge us and everyone
like us back down into the earth. The Ball Culture in Paris is
Burning is an overpowering experience, because it's like an
alternate reality where we can flourish on our own terms and gives
dignity to the transgender body as not only something valid, but
something beautiful while also not bullshitting us about the struggle
it takes to merely make it to your next day as a trans person. You
and I are cloaked in an armour of whiteness which gives us distance
to the folks in this movie while also protecting us from a lot of the
danger and difficulties present in this movie that's made up almost
entirely of LGBT persons of colour, but their struggles, happiness
and desires are lateral to our own. We want what they want. There's a
unifying theme in being trans that connects all of us through
dysphoria and desire, and Paris is Burning understands this by
presenting that idea as a matter of objective fact while letting
QTPOC hold the frame and own the film, and thus their story. I think
Paris is Burning is to this day the greatest film ever made
about transness, and I'm curious if you feel the same way Caden.
CADEN GARDNER: Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning was one of
those docs that I always heard about, but its currency and legacy was
more in the words than the images, and despite its popularity and box
office success it's shamefully not on home video. I knew a little
about Ballroom culture and I obviously knew about drag, but I had no
idea how much it intersected as this mosaic of time and place with
Paris Is Burning, particularly about trans people. I saw it
around college and was floored. We see these matriarchal houses (the
leaders of the houses, regardless of sex and gender are referred to
as ‘Mother’) of performers thriving at the ballrooms and many
have dreams that expand far beyond the ballroom floor. We see Octavia
St. Laurent and Venus Xtravaganza talk about what they want as trans
women. They talk about gaining superstardom or even just security
like many women of their time wanted, while they also share their
struggles with the limitations of their body and social status. They
both lay on bedrooms when talking to Livingston, formally this is
like a shot/reverse shot, and in their testimonials, they are
literally laying down in the place of dreams, but when we see them on
the streets and on the ballroom floor, they have star quality. You
cannot teach that.
Even if their lives
as trans women of color (and in Venus’ case as a sex worker) are
far different from my experience as you said, they want what you want
and what I want. One of the first things Venus talks about is getting
gender affirming surgery and talking about her current differences,
but saying it so matter of fact, without shame. Non-fiction films are
the rare outlets for trans people to have control of their narrative
and their voice in ways fictional films cannot and have not allowed.
There has never been a fictional film about transness like Paris
is Burning and for me it is the gold standard, the North Star in
a lot of ways to transness on film. The effortless simplicity of
merely letting these trans women talk, and, of course why wouldn’t
Livingston do that? After all, she is talking to stars.
WM: I was a little bit older than college age coming around to
this film the first time. I had been out a couple years up to that
point, but I admittedly didn't know a lot about transgender history
and I hadn't seen much in the way of LGBT cinema. I was under the
same roof as my parents and if they ever caught me watching a movie
like Paris is Burning there would have been consequences. That
didn't mean I didn't sneak around and watch things like the HBO
series, Six Feet Under or even something like Brokeback
Mountain, but transness? Forget about it. I don't even think I
learned about the film until I saw fellow, transgender film critic,
Alice
Stoehr write about it on letterboxd and that's when it
sort of entered into my headspace. I haven't seen anything quite like
it since. There have certainly been a lot of films to follow in its
footsteps like The Aggressives, Kiki and the more
recent, Shakedown, but Paris is Burning is certainly
the first of these observational documentaries about trans people to
truly leave an imprint on cinema. There's pre-stonewall documentaries
floating around like The Queen, but that film never made
nearly 4 million dollars at the box office and formally doesn't
approach Paris is Burning in terms of pure craft. You can
certainly see the visual and structural influence that followed.
Paris is Burning
shines brighter than all the rest, because its heart is in truly
cinematic images, and it's not merely Livingston's touch which brings
this out, but the trans women and drag queens themselves. These
people are bigger than life and damn sure wanted viewers to know it.
Their hearts are in the movies, like there's that scene where
house mother Dorian Corey talks about how the balls begged for
participants to model themselves after movie stars like Marlene
Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe and for a later generation that shifted
to the models that graced the pages of fashion magazines like Vogue.
So there was already an innate cinematic quality to the bodies on
screen (which is bittersweet considering cinema doesn't recognize
these bodies as valid), but Livingston sprinkled in a lot of other
little formal wrinkles which makes the film feel different from your
standard documentary. Frederick Wiseman's name is in the thank you
credits so his observational techniques seem like they mattered to
Livingston, but even when she does things like talking heads segments
there's a lived in quality surrounding the people when they're
discussing their lives, because we see them sewing while they talk,
or sitting on the beach, or smoking in their den. It's vastly
different from the fussy, empty rooms and uptight interview segments
you normally see in documentary filmmaking, so even when the film
goes for more traditional storytelling elements seen in the
documentary film Livingston does something different, and she hardly
deserves all the credit because she isn't the one sewing, making up
their face or decorating their living room. It's life in every corner
of the frame, and that's the touch of the trans people and drag
queens who were interviewed, not hers.
CG: The testimonials are so essential and there is not a
single patronizing moment from Livingston in how she employs formal
qualities. Most documentaries on trans folks are guilty of partaking
in that very thing, even if they are doing us a solid in presenting
our lives (I’m talking about Southern Comfort and which, you
know, that title still makes me eye-roll despite how much I love who
the subject is). There is that moment where Octavia St. Laurent is
walking among the Ford Models and we get Eileen Ford herself talking
about womanhood and trying to reconcile that with the feminist
movement and how Octavia’s presence on the periphery of that scene
just shows how much there is to go and how much consideration still
needs to be paid to let her and others in to the world where they are
as valid as any supermodel for Ford Models. Livingston says nothing
beyond getting that footage. Octavia is not listening in on that
interview by the TV journalist and Eileen Ford, she’s just there to
meet and greet her idols. But the moment is still so perfect.
Octavia’s difference is invisible and there whether she was trans
or cis, she passes in a way that flies completely under the radar.
It's a complicated, daring image of differences that we know as an
audience and as she knows, but the public doesn't, and isn't her
invisibility among a crowd of women something of an end goal in our
own wants and desires? Some cis people get so confident that they can
pick all trans people out of a line-up, but Octavia flies
in the face of that. I think Livingston does understand that and
that was why she kept that footage and in that presentation in that
particular way.
WM: Desire
is so important. Octavia wants to be like any other model. Any other
woman, but also something more extraordinary. My own desire is enough
to confirm my feelings of gender. It didn't matter so much if I
didn't ovulate, because my desire to be a woman was so overpowering
that I gave up everything to become myself or a version of myself
that I wanted to see brought into existence. To remake my body in my
own image. That's what Venus is talking about when she references
wanting to have vaginoplasty, and when those words are spoken aloud
in this movie it is really overpowering. It's like you said earlier,
this is not comparable in narrative filmmaking where putting that
desire to image has probably never been achieved. The documentary
realism of films like Paris is Burning open up about innate
desires and needs and gives their characters room to speak about
"why" this is important to them. It's a rather low bar to
clear to merely state "I want to fix my body", but
the light behind her eyes when she's resting on her bed and the dream
of knowing that this is what she's aiming for is undeniable. The sad
matter of fact is that being trans is also a constant struggle of not
getting what you want, and sometimes we have absolutely no control
over that whatsoever. And that's Venus's story. She's only one of
many LGBT persons of colour in this movie, and I like that Livingston
gives you the full scope. Not everyone in this movie is trans, but
the gay drag queens, the butch lesbians, and the gay men vogue all
alongside each other, because ultimately we're the only other people
we've got. The only people that really really care about us are us.
And I wish we'd be wise enough to try and mend whatever problems
we've had as a community that have divided us over the years,
especially between drag queens and trans women, because in this movie
they have each others back in a way that only family can.
CG: Paris Is Burning reflected the late 1980s New York
ballroom scene that was in-between the bankrupt, sleazy New York and
the Giuliani-era 1990s clean-up and Disney-fication of Times Square.
It’s a real snapshot of a time and it is really fascinating to look
at people in that period who are both informed by their surrounding
culture but also seeking out this scene because they are not getting
their fill from the outside world. Paris is Burning was shot
amid the AIDS crisis and it is acknowledged in the film multiple
times (notably, Venus mentions that a man recoils at her when he
finds out she has a penis and immediately just assumes she has AIDS).
The viewer is seeing an underground sub-culture and the sub-cultures
within that sub-culture deal with an American presidential
administration that ignored the AIDS crisis for long as they could
and a culture at large that was getting increasingly more
conservative with the rise of evangelical Christianity. We see people
maligned by society, a lot of them running away from hostile
situations, to New York and finding their tribe in Houses. These
matriarchal Houses, of performers, artists, and models that we see
are also support systems of elders, friends, brothers, sisters,
teachers, and students of the scene. But there is always reality
lingering, such as Angie Xtravaganza, the Mother of the House of
Xtrvaganza, reflecting on Venus’ murder (she had to identify her
corpse). Angie’s reaction is fascinating, and our friend Carol
Grant noted it
in her Letterboxd review, that she is not crying,
histrionic, or in any high key. She is very solemn and resigned all
while being so eloquent and missing somebody important in her
life. But death is the reality of her daughters in the House of
Xtrvaganza and to any trans woman in New York. Being transgender
involves a lot of risk and a lot of danger. It's a game of survival,
and the deck is stacked in particular against transgender people who
are not white. Not every one leaves the ballroom with a breakout. In
fact, many of the performers and figures featured in Paris is
Burning are dead. I remember somebody on Twitter noting this fact
that most of the people in Paris Is Burning are dead and how
their own reaction was shock but so were the responses to it. And
part of me wanted to just say, ‘And why are you people surprised?’
Trans people get targeted all of the time, and are at a much higher
risk for violence, and to bring back up the AIDS crisis, QTPOC were
at the low-end of the totem pole for an era that already dehumanized,
shunned, and were ashamed of people with AIDS.
WM: It's vitally important to look at Paris is Burning
from the perspective of a specific time period, and also of our own
history as transgender people. In all the discussion that there has
been recently about a transgender moment or with some level of
exposure being put on our lives there's been a near total neglect of
what came before, and even trans people are not great in honouring
history in our pursuit to keep our language and ideas on gender
updated. But we've almost always been around, and likewise so has the
ball culture in various forms throughout history. Morgan Page is
something of a modern day transgender historian and her podcast on
the subject, "One
From the Vaults", is necessary listening for
anyone with a passing interest in transgender history. We're
oftentimes taken from this life too early for reasons that are as
wide ranging as transphobic violence, suicide or AIDS, and we need to
do better to honour our history and those who came before us. Paris
is Burning is essential in this regard, because these images
last. I think about Venus Xtravaganza twirling her hair by a boombox
and and a Carmen frolicking on a beach before stating "I AM
MY OWN CREATION!" so frequently. That's eternity, and that's
what cinema can offer, and what it so rarely has for people like us.
I almost believe that documentary is the only way to directly address
transness in cinema. When filmmakers have tried to directly make
movies about transness they have more often than not failed.
Something like The Danish Girl ignores dysphoria for
fetishization, TransAmerica is a family carnival, and even
recently, A Fantastic Woman is an exercise in sympathy via
punishment. Even when transgender people make their own films it is
oftentimes too soft a presentation of what is essentially a hard
life. It can be good, but there has to be a flipside otherwise the
film is dishonest. Where are the moments of "I AM MY OWN
CREATION!"? I'm not sure there are any, but I think of the
ingenuity of the trans people in Frederick Wiseman's, "In
Jackson Heights", and the sensuality of the trans women in
"Hookers on Davie", and the vibrancy of everyone at
the ball in "Paris is Burning", and those people
stick out to me. If we're going to have a new transgender cinema and
a new language in live action then we have to learn to apply these
images and characters to narrative filmmaking.
CG: I love
that moment with Carmen and Brooke at the beach singing that
verse from ‘I Am What I Am’/’We Are What We Are’
from La Cage Aux Folles. That musical
and A Chorus Line were really the first Broadway musicals to
center around gay characters that made their sexuality part of the
identity, and in La Cage’s case, drag queens are at the center of
the story. It’s so spur of the moment and something you can
absolutely imagine them doing off-camera to each other, and that's
what's fictional films. Sure, there is always some level of
artificiality in fictional filmmaking but most trans movies rooted in
original storytelling are missing the part you bring up. Something
that feels like it does not have to be about respectability,
martyrdom, polemic, or an object of fascination for cis viewers with
only a surface level interest in our lives. For cis viewers the
fascination is the trans part and nothing more. Venus, Octavia, and
Angie are fascinating to me because they have so much confidence,
dreams, philosophies, insights, and self-worth that you can form a
full person for each of them. All of the subjects in Paris Is
Burning are that way. Even the MC at the Ballroom contests with
just his diction and mic work is amazing. You feel like you are
hearing all of their stories and learning something without it
feeling like homework.
There is an anthropological quality a la Wiseman in dropping in on a
world from the outside- yet still maintaining a populist streak in
feeling open, educational only in this is not using academia for
validation of these subjects and lives. I think an LGBTQ person from
that world would have made a different type of documentary in that
respect, and who is to say how different or better, worse that would
have been. Livingston does not really check her privilege in the
documentary, prefers invisibility, but she has no interest in making
subjects of this documentary people reacting to her subjects which I
think other documentarians trip up on that when dealing with similar
subject matter. Who would want to hear cops or the Johns or the
gawkers who get their heads turned or the Giuliani types that made
political promises to ‘clean up’ Manhattan and Times Square from
these ‘freaks’ or, my favorite moral panic term, ‘sodomites’.
No need to dignify or check in on the outside world, as if anything,
they more than have had their time in the culture and places of
power.
WM: Right. I think one of the most beautiful things about
Paris is Burning is that Livingston doesn't chase leads in the
way a lot of documentaries about LGBTQ people do. She doesn't go ask
the parents of the performers questions like "when did you know
your child was different? etc, etc". Most films about
transgender people are obsessed with details like that, and it's
purely a cisgender curiosity. One of the more interesting formal
qualities are the instances where one character is out in public,
outside of the safe space of a ball and Livingston catches in frame
an onlooker. She never lingers on the images of cisgender
heterosexual, white people looking in, but makes sure to point out in
the image that their presence still condenses the world into their
mold. And that's even present in the Dorian Corey testimonial we
mentioned earlier where she discussed dressing up like Marlene
Dietrich. Beauty, and an accepted idea of what is womanhood by the
public at large is white and cisgender. It effects everything. You
need look no further than Madonna taking Vogue from everyone here and
turning it into her thing. Culture is shifting slowly and slightly in
this regard where there is more people to look at as a model of hope
whether that be cis black women like Beyonce and Rihanna or in the
transgender scope of things with women like Carmen Carerra and
Laverne Cox. There are more images appearing, even if it is slower
than we'd all like.
CG: It is
fascinating again how the legacy of the film, not so much the film
itself but the testimonials of those figures from that scene, hit
mainstream culture. It wasn't images but in language, terminology,
and, of course, dancing. Those who refer to voguing or even the terms
shade, realness, reading, etc. would have no idea where it came from
first. I heard the term ‘throwing shade’ recently on one of the
most red meat, masculine, straight cis male platforms there is:
sports talk radio. Perhaps that accelerated with RuPaul’s Drag
Race and how internet culture, and especially in memes, have run
with those terms. Fragments in Paris Is Burning have probably
been seen by millions in GIF form in all likelihood. It is a little
frustrating in that sense, as Livingston presented and those
performers gave so many memorable moments of movement and in words,
but people are sharing images of Drag Queens and trans women without
name or credit of who they are and what work they’re sourcing.
Twitter now just has a GIF search engine where getting a GIF from
Paris Is Burning does not even mean you have to type in Paris
Is Burning. At risk of sounding overly serious, I do find that a
problem as far as losing history. People have their own ways to
discover transgender identity and drag, but just having things
unattributed can lead to a lot of future confusion and even people
getting history flat out wrong. One of my problems with even the way
this film is shown is that it is often in college classrooms and
instead instructors wanting to mine through more of this underground,
hear more of these people, learn more about their ways of life, they
just would rather give the class reading material of bell hooks and
Judith Butler coming from different sides of this film. I have a
liberal arts degree but I think making this film part of academia
misses the point of who Paris is Burning is about and who it
is for. It's for people like those two young gay street kids with
infectious smiles despite being in an almost modern Dickensian
situation. Ultimately, the film wants its audience to be as open as
its subjects are. I think that is what true populist art is. Paris
Is Burning’s audience is mostly white liberal students and
academics when it should be broader and the broad audience are
getting fragments of Paris Is Burning without even knowing it.
And that is frustrating, as you mention how seeing images of trans
people or people in a scene can be validating and even life-saving
for any person, anywhere. I think there is slightly more visibility
but it still comes with certain gawking and fascination as a cultural
object than a three-dimensional person. That’s no knock on women
like Laverne Cox or Janet Mock, but more about the dominant society’s
slow-footedness.
WM: I think you can chart your original point of the film
being populist art and needing to be taken out of the classrooms and
out of gender studies courses to my original experience of not having
heard about the film until I was already out. The thing about art
about outsiders and minority groups is that it usually ends up out of
our reach, and with the death of the video store and homogenization
of streaming options with Netflix's near monopoly it gets even
dicier, unless you're torrenting your own history. To give you an
idea of my own personal experiences with movie theaters I'd have to
take you to small town rural Kentucky where there's just as many
churches as people living there. I'm only barely exaggerating. But
the cinema that I grew up with had 4 screens and was strictly limited
to whatever Bruce Willis, Johnny Depp or Arnold Schwarzeneggar was
blowing up that week. When I grew up and had access to a car I was
still 4 + hours away from any independent cinema and growing up poor
meant that wasn't an option. Now that I've grown up and moved to
Newfoundland to both chase my dreams and live with the man I love I
find myself in a similar tricky position with cinema where there just
isn't that much to offer. If I'm going to a rep screening it's
probably for something like Michael Mann's HEAT. It's not
going to be a film starring the Chelsea Girls y'know? But I think we
need to ask ourselves questions about access to movies and how these
are shown. Paris is Burning and movies about LGBT people need
to be shown EVERYWHERE. We've seen the kind of impact
something as nice and easygoing as Love, Simon has had in
mainstream cinemas recently, but there's got to be more, and in the
case of trans people where we are not even close to being a
mainstream commodity for studio filmmaking a movie like Paris is
Burning becomes even more vital and important. Watching something
like Paris is Burning is so overwhelmingly life-affirming,
even when it is depressing, that it would likely be an important
moment for anybody who was questioning their gender. There's more to
cinema than relatability but there's sheer fucking power in seeing
someone saying something and you immediately recognize yourself in
the image. It makes it seem like we actually can make it out here on
our own. We don't have to die by our own hand, because we came into
life under difficult circumstances.
Love, Simon has
me thinking about mainstream progress, and what that even means and
how it's hijacked by some level of conformity. For LGBTQ people
progress has always been slow and when it has come it's been
breadcrumbs. Even if we look at this in terms of cinema trans people
certainly existed as long as cinema has, but in the 100 plus years
people have been making movies there just hasn't been that much we
can gravitate towards that isn't in some way rooted in societies
fears over transgender people. We can even see this in Paris. Venus
is killed because she's transgender, because she has a non normative
body in the eyes of cisgender society and I find that tragic beyond
words, because that fear of being expunged by some random person in
society is real for us. The only real problem I have with Paris is
Burning is that it ends on her death, because even in the
negative moments of the film and the unfortunate circumstances of
life there was always this affirmative, positive, glowing quality
surrounding everything. I think if a trans person makes the movie it
probably ends with a glow rather than an obituary. But even with that
complaint and the controversy surrounding the payment issues and
later fame (and I side with the performers on this, not Livingston) I
think this is the best movie about transness ever made. It
functionally shows us, warts and all, as a people, how we come
together as family and survive and live the best we can, even when we
know society would watch us die and turn a blind eye to our bodies.
They always have.
CG: Even though I grew up in a blue state, where marriage
equality was law before SCOTUS, and not in a place hostile with
people transitioning in its laws a la North Carolina, I grew up
around people who didn't erase LGBTQ lives, but barely acknowledge
them. I only had Jerry Springer type-shows, reality shows, and an
occasional National Geographic special to see trans people, and that
is itself a mixed bag. The cliffnotes version of my high school is
Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon but for the Trump era. I
was queer and disassociating. It was mostly a blur with very little
worth holding onto.
My high school was
full of people who made AIDS jokes on the regular, were hostile
towards gay men, and in health class, transness was never spoken
about and homosexual sexual activity was not even touched, despite
there being an after school special that my health class watched
about AIDS with Harvey Fucking Fierstein in a supporting role about
how straight can get HIV/AIDS too! The closest gay bar was a 30
minute drive on a good night, and most of the queens there were just
the same tired lip-sync act of ‘And I’m Telling You’ from
Dreamgirls (the only difference being if the queen chose
Jennifer Holliday or Jennifer Hudson) complete a dramatic,
“cathartic” wig removal finale. With the exception of me
seeing a Todd Haynes film in a theater as far as watching ‘a gay
movie’, I mostly used the internet and TV to check out New
Queer Cinema of the recent past with Gregg Araki and even
kitsch pastiche like Charles Busch filling my interest. I look
back at what stuff I used to get my fill with mixed feelings because
I wonder if my liking of the things were because I was that desperate
for anything to validate my experience (I am afraid to revisit Hedwig
& The Angry Inch). But as noted in the Boys
Don’t Cry Body Talk, I still feel like I am
searching for myself on-screen that is not covered with dread and an
air of tragedy. It took me more than half of my life to discover that
something like By Hook Or By Crook existed, a true indie, that
was hiding in plain sight with the internet. It is one of those films
that I wished I watched as a teenager.
WM: I feel
like to I'm still looking for a single movie where I feel seen in a
way that feels validating rather than fatalistic. I think, because of
my past history with childhood sexual abuse and my upbringing as a
transgender person I gravitate towards films where the main character
dies in some form or fashion or is shattered by a traumatic event. I
like severe art because my mental health is fucked and sometimes that
can be the only thing that feels like an antidote to a poison that
runs through my veins, because of things in the past I had no control
over. I write poems to Laura Palmer and bury myself in the body of
the alien from Under the Skin, because at one point in my life
their fate felt inevitable, and those characters and movies certainly
help me, but I do wonder how I'd respond to a trans woman version of Cher Horowitz (Clueless) me on my best day, the brighter side of my life. I have no way
of knowing, because no such film exists, and I'm not expecting to see
something that feels real and magical in the way my life sometimes is
now. It's something I'm tired of waiting for, and I know other trans
women are too. I'm tired of watching the movie about transphobia or
the movie about transition. What I want to see is a movie about a
transgender person. Person being the important word.
CG: I honestly do not know how a mainstream trans story by
Hollywood would look like. And I am morbidly curious about the
reaction. I think about Paris Is Burning with Willi Ninja, how
his voguing got associated- many still decry co-opted- with Madonna
and her dancers (many of whom were from that ballroom scene) with
‘Vogue’.
Even the mainstream, polished version of that scrappy but glamorous
sub-culture, now with the avatar of one of the biggest pop stars in
the world making this underground dance (that had been a staple in
black and Hispanic parts of New York City for decades before) her
signature, had a lot of the mainstream in a culture war. There was
panic and foaming at the mouth. Madonna’s dancers had to face off
against pastors for making out, talking frank about sex, and their
scandalizing dancing from the Blonde Ambition Tour and the
documentary Truth or Dare. That seems to still be how the
media operates, which does concern me.
WM: Things
haven't really changed that much since then either. There's
definitely been some drawback to our increased visibility. The murder
rate is up, new legislation seems to be introduced almost daily to
keep trans people out of bathrooms and sexual assault centers. The
two of us specialize in understanding media and art, but as trans
people we have to learn about things like legislation. Within the
United States government things like employment protection,
legislation and basic human rights are things we're always lagging
behind compared to our cis counterparts. I don't think cisgender
people take us seriously most of the time. They want to be seen as
progressive and forward thinking, but won't actually take the time to
listen or care about us, and that goes for cis gays as well. We
struggle to find our place in the world and it can feel downright
debilitating to feel like you're out here on your own, and this is
coming from a small town girl who didn't have anybody. I was branded
the queer of my school almost immediately and it was unbelievably
hard at times just to even gather the courage to go to school. I
didn't see a way out for myself, but if I had seen Paris is
Burning when I was fourteen or fifteen it would have been nothing
short of life-changing, and that's why I think we have to do better
at getting this movie out there to younger people. So they can see
themselves, create their own stars, and maybe they won't feel so
alone in the world, because if there's anything Paris is Burning
is about: its family.
CG: I feel like cis people view trans people in the media as
something where it is a ‘gotta hear both sides’ attitude of
half-brained dialectic that they can’t quit. If I have to see
another trans woman have to sit next to right wing transphobic chode
Ben Shapiro for another debate about trans people in public life or
in popular culture, I am changing the channel. However, I am
suspecting that will be the case if there is a mainstream trans film
that comes up in the near future. Will it be worth fighting over?
Will it be worth the price of admission? We can hope, but the current
mainstream Hollywood that is still shaking off some decades-long
trans panic but I still think we are stuck in objects of fascination
and gawking phase at the moment.
People are probably wondering what we could be complaining about
given the progress and gains that our cis allies see. Those people
love to retweet our stuff share another trans person’s point of
view to show they are woke about us. I want to think they are trying
but it can be awkward, as though we are supposed to instruct them and
tell them not to just see things at a surface level and that there
has to be more done, primarily in understanding us. There are also
those who seem to think that one experience made visible represents
our own community. My eyes roll out of my head in people thinking
that Caitlyn Jenner (editor's note: she's the worst!) represents the
trans community at large or that Dave Chappelle ignores statistics of
violence against trans women of color taking transness as a vanity
act just for rich white people, which is the exact opposite of Paris
is Burning. And then there are the people who cannot stop telling
you how much they love Transparent and are surprised you don’t
love it as much as they do. Bless their hearts.
Paris Is Burning remains a monument. That scene, as it was in
the late 80s, has disappeared and so have the most of the people in
it. But it is a vibrant document of a time in a city where there was
a congregation of people putting on a performance while also getting
to experiment and be themselves, carving out any space they can to be
real.
ADDITIONAL READING//VIEWING
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