Ed Wood and Some Trailblazing Emasculation

This is not a trigger warning.

Jun 07, 2024

✚ When a transvestite dies, does a transsexual get his wings?

GLEN OR GLENDA?

Ed Wood basically plays himself in this self-indulgent ode to transvestism. The famously campy film is an inexplicable mess of jumbled stock footage and scenarios that include raving pent-up strippers, the Devil, Bela Lugosi and a couple of gender deviants whose flimsy stories bookend Glen’s woes of covert transvestism. In the opening segment, a dead transvestite is discovered in his small room in what looks like a cheap resident hotel. A creaky-voiced deathbed narration explains that transvestism has driven him to suicide. Building maintenance men, photographers, neighbors and cops all pour in the crowded room to gape at the dead man wearing the clothes he preferred to wear in life. (See intro photo.) Later, we meet ‘Anne’ in another short and cheaply sentimental segment that heralds her gender reassignment surgery while she basks in the glory of her overnight fame and neo-vaginal power.

In Glen’s story, it’s his masculine will that’s tested. When faced with a decision, he hands over his angora sweater, a gesture that symbolizes his abandonment of transvestism, but his girlfriend (Dolores Fuller) hands it back! Why Dolores Fuller was not honored with a star on the Radical Feminist Walk of Fame for her trailblazing work in emasculation is unclear, but her painfully poor acting ability couldn’t have helped her cause too much. It’s wild to have once viewed her gesture as one of acceptance and now as emasculating. Time may distort and reveal distortions in equal measure.

Don’t be confused, Ed Wood (Glen) was not a drag queen, not a female impersonator, not transgender—he was a transvestite. This is interesting because up until transgenderism became an encouraged life path option, transvestism was not that uncommon. So where did it get buried? I’ll go out on a limb and say that transvestism was the first fetish to be absorbed into and consumed by transsexualism and gay inclusivity. An inclusivity so thorough that it annihilates and homogenizes, going so far as to relegate the memory of transvestism, a fetish mostly reserved for straight men, to just another letter or symbol somewhere after LGB, a place that you’ve got to admit is a confused fetish wasteland.

In 1981, Paramount re-released Glen or Glenda in an attempt at midnight campiness and to contribute to what could only be considered a coordinated flood of gay themed movies in the early 1980s.

(1953; Ed Wood)