Out the Movies is a bi-weekly newsletter about queer film for AF+ subscribers written by Drew Burnett Gregory.
Ever since I transitioned, I’ve wanted to see a revival of Sweet Charity starring a trans actress. It’s almost too obvious. A sex worker with a community of supportive femmes yearns for love, wealth, and acceptance, in a cruel world that crushes her optimism again and again.
As much as I loved the musical’s inspiration Nights of Cabiria, it was Bob Fosse’s film of Sweet Charity that really resonated with me as a lonely teenager who hadn’t identified the biggest reason for that loneliness. Bursting with romance, nothing ever seemed to work out for me. Maybe it was because I was a teenager or maybe it was because the people I fell for saw me better than I saw myself. Even when they liked me and I appeared lovable on paper, something wasn’t quite right. It was like a rabbit in a tuxedo. Sure, it’s cute, but it’s not fancy.
After transitioning and breaking up with the person grandfathered into loving me, I returned to the dating world with the feral optimism of my adolescence. Again, there was resistance. Finally, I knew myself, but so many of the people I latched onto didn’t know themselves well enough yet. They were drawn to me with curiosity rather than internal or external recognition. It was a lot of transphobia for the seasoned lesbians and self-doubt from the newbies surprised to find that my genitalia didn’t actually mean less confronting of their burgeoning bisexuality.
Nevertheless, I threw myself into dating with Charity’s fervor. In fact, for years I described my job at Autostraddle as writing about film, sex, and dating. Again and again I sang “If My Friends Could See Me Now” sometimes swapping out friends for strangers on the internet. Of course, Charity’s magical night of romance described in this song ends with her hiding in a closet because her date is ashamed of her.
Years later, years into a relationship with someone far more likely to put me in a spotlight than a closet, I saw another film that gave me that Sweet Charity pang of recognition. Now living part time in Toronto to be with my partner, I was lucky enough to be loved and lucky enough to enjoy the TIFF Cinematheque’s year-round programming. A couple years ago this meant getting to see half a dozen films from Hungarian auteur Márta Mészáros in the span of two weeks. Unfamiliar with her work, I quickly became enraptured with her ability to capture both the interior and exterior lives of women.
My favorite film of hers is called Riddance, a portrait of a young woman named Judka, a factory worker who pretends to be a student so her bourgeois boyfriend will show her around. It’s a story of a girl torn between her desire to be loved and her desire to love herself, the urge to push back against societal convention while unsure of the sacrifice that entails. Mészáros loves women and specifically her characters too much to let this be mere tragedy — even the Nights of Cabiria/Sweet Charity kind of tragedy with a final touch of hope. Instead, through its gaze, the film feels like a celebration of its protagonist. Erzsébet Kútvölgyi who plays Judka is shot with so much affection and beauty. I’m not sure human skin has ever been captured on screen with such awe. It’s not a queer gaze per se, but rather a gaze of recognition, the love for a younger woman only possible from an older woman who has finally managed to love herself. It’s the cinematic equivalent of “Ladies” by Fiona Apple.
This celebration of the feminine within a story about romantic rejection and projected shame immediately solidified the film in my canon of movies about cis women that every trans woman should see. Even though I watched this film while loved so fully in real life, I looked at Judka and saw a quintessential trans experience. The contrary evidence in my shared bed every night and every morning hadn’t changed the belief that to be trans is to be loved poorly.
To create a canon of cis movies for trans girls is to rely on generalizations. When contemporary trans women repeat a dated transsexual vs. transvestite paradigm, it frustrates me because it’s often self-hating and because it feels insufficient. If we’re going to repeat stereotypes, there are at least four or five subgroups of trans women we could classify to dehumanize ourselves.
Maybe this is why the easiest point of connection I can find in all our differences is a quality that doesn’t have much to do with us at all. Instead, it relies on how we are perceived by others. Cis people — and, let’s be honest, even sometimes other trans people — project an unworthy otherness onto us that can become our most universally defining feature.
It’s this perception I recognized once again last week when I started a movie called Me, Natalie in order to see a young Al Pacino’s one minute of screen time. Rather than being annoyed by his brief appearance like most of Letterboxd, I found myself taken with Natalie’s story. I cried watching this film about a girl stepping into adulthood eager to abandon a life of self-hatred.
After an obliquely-shot flashback montage of Natalie’s childhood, we get our first look at this teenage girl who has been described as ugly by everyone around her. This first glimpse feels like a reverse emperor’s new clothes. We’ve been told she’s ugly, so the assumption is she’s ugly. But it’s just famously beautiful Patty Duke with fake bucked teeth and a subtly enlarged nose. Her face is more memorable than the “pretty girls” around her, but, in my opinion if not society’s, even more beautiful.
Natalie also has charm and this becomes even clearer once she leaves home to join the art scene of the late 60s West Village. There she meets a painter who, like destiny, goes from enemy to friend to lover. All the while Natalie — and those around Natalie — insist on her ugliness. Even this painter describes his attraction to Natalie as transcending physical beauty.
Patty Duke won a Golden Globe for her performance and, despite satisfying most conventional beauty standards even after prosthetics, it’s her performance that makes the film so special. Her casting also creates another layer to the film. Rather than feeling like a story about someone whose appearance truly falls outside of celebrated norms, it becomes a story about someone beautiful who nevertheless is labeled the opposite. In Natalie’s case, her point of identity that makes her so other is her Judaism. This is heavily implied in the film and made explicit in its novelization. She’s not ugly — she’s just Jewish.
As a Jewish trans girl who just got FFS while opting to keep my big, crooked nose, the film’s sentimentality hit me hard. For years, I claimed to never want FFS, only to change my mind once I had good health insurance. While the incision point on my scalp still heals, I’m starting to reckon with the choices I made and didn’t make. I sought out a surgeon who agreed to prioritize subtlety and safety. Now I look in the mirror and can’t believe my Adam’s Apple is still so big.
I’m writing this essay while my partner’s arms are wrapped around me. I’m typinh on my phone instead of my laptop because I don’t want to wake them up and I don’t want to remove my spoon from theirs. This person loved me when my Adam’s Apple was even bigger, when my hairline was receding instead of yanked forward, stapled, and bloody. My trans story is no longer one of romantic rejection and yet these films are still where I project connection through my transness.
Before starting this piece, I challenged myself to think of joyous movies about cis women that felt part of a trans woman canon. I rejected every example I considered. I got stuck on the fact that, while yes they resonated, they also felt more broadly about women — cis and trans. But is that not also true of these stories of romantic rejection? Were those films not explicitly about the rejection experienced by cis women for being sex workers, working class, and Jewish? Therefore, the only reason I’m making this distinction is because I’m holding onto rejection as a defining trans trait.
As a woman consumed with artistic passion, why can’t The Red Shoes be part of my trans canon? As a dyke who has found connection with my fair share of divorcées, what about Desert Hearts? As someone who in this exact moment is cuddled in bliss, what about any number of cheesy romcoms that capture a mere fraction of the love I’m lucky enough to receive and give every day? Am I not as trans while loved as I am when rejected?
Last week also marked eight years since I began transitioning. (I guess eight is enough to let the day go by unnoticed.) Throughout those years, I’ve had to fight off the myopia that gave my misery too much importance. It’s a struggle reflected in Me, Natalie when she connects with a character much like Charity. (The films came out the same year.) Where Natalie saw a beauty she envied, the world saw a stripper as unworthy of love as Natalie’s big nose. Society provides so many reasons to dismiss people, most of us have at least a few. My transness isn’t unique — it’s not even my only quality that society deems unlovable.
What transness has done is given me myself. It’s allowed me eight full years of self-discovery as I’ve grown closer to the things that make me me. Whether I like it or not, it gave me my womanhood.
In the final moments of the film, Natalie writes a letter to her artist lover. She pities her lover’s wife and is surprised to find herself pitying a woman so beautiful. In this moment, she’s able to let go of her envy, able to not only be loved by others, but to love herself. She writes, “If I’m miserable today, tomorrow maybe I’ll be happy. And maybe I won’t. But if I’m miserable, it’ll be my miserable. And if I’m happy, it’ll be my happy, and I can’t do it any other way.”
If Me, Natalie is in my canon of cis woman trans cinema, it’s because of this speech, not romantic rejection. Isn’t this what transness has been about for me? Not being othered, not even being loved, but experiencing both as myself.
When I’m miserable, it’s my miserable. When I’m happy, it’s my happy. Me, Drew.
