20 Years Later, “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” Is Still Outside The Binary

The first time I saw a production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch the only song I understood was “The Origin of Love.”

John Cameron Mitchell’s story of a drag queen bitter about her famous ex and botched sex change was on Broadway for a splashy revival and I never missed a splashy revival. I was a 20 year old art student more closeted to myself than to anyone else. Too young and straight to have seen Hedwig before. Too young and straight to understand it now.

But I understood this song. Based on Plato’s Symposium, it describes a past where all people were two before Zeus split us apart. I connected with this idea of soulmates wandering the world looking for their destined other half, because that’s how I made sense of my confused gender. If I could just find the right person, these feelings might go away and I could finally feel whole.

I found it in a girl and then I found it in myself and then I was a girl and then I was myself. And part of being myself meant re-examining every work of trans art I’d ever been exposed to — including finally watching the movie of the play that had left such an impression.

Gone was the polish of the Broadway show, present was Mitchell’s inimitable performance and a crackling queer energy. This was how Stephen Trask’s songs were meant to be heard. Not in a theatre surrounded by rich straight people, but on a couch in an ill-fitted dress next to my cis girlfriend as she grew increasingly concerned with the whole spectacle.

In theory, Hedwig’s forced bottom surgery should’ve offended my baby trans heart too. But the more I watched, the more I liked it. The more I thought about it, the more I hungered for this kind of complicated trans story. Because that’s how my gender felt. Complicated.


Around the time I first watched the Hedwig movie, I belonged to a free support group for trans women. The cis straight therapist who led the group had two rules — everyone had to have their own therapist outside the group and everyone had to be a binary trans woman.

The therapist said she’d been working with trans patients for decades and the experiences of binary and non-binary trans people were vastly different. She said it was important that we had a space as trans women to discuss our similar journeys.

And so people followed directions. As we went around the circle the other girls shared feelings that could be found in any trans memoir or talk show interview. It really did feel like they were all on similar journeys. But not me — I felt different. As the weeks went on, I started sharing my actual feelings, my actual experiences. I started being more honest and less binary. “You’re just a big ol’ queer, aren’t you?” the therapist said one time after I was done speaking.

But the thing is I wasn’t alone. Once I started being honest, some of the other girls did too. They echoed my experiences or shared new ones of their own. None of us are that unique — binary or not. The question is whether defending our experiences to a cishet gaze is worth restricting ourselves and the other trans people around us. The lesson a lot of us have to learn is it’s not. That’s the lesson Hedwig has to learn too. Because there is, in fact, a trans woman at the center of Hedwig and the Angry Inch but it’s not Hedwig. It’s Yitzhak.


While the musical primarily focuses on Hedwig and her relationship with rock sensation Tommy Gnosis, Hedwig’s current husband and bandmate Yitzhak holds equal importance.

Throughout the film, we watch Hedwig take out her anger on Yitzhak as Yitzhak quietly struggles with her own place in the world. She brushes Hedwig’s wigs and then dares to put one on. When someone calls Hedwig faggot, Yitzhak is the first to attack. Playing Angel in Rent — musical theatre’s most famous trans woman — becomes Yitzhak’s dream.

Despite Hedwig’s long hair and Yitzhak’s beard, it’s the latter who is more in line with what my former therapist might call a “binary trans woman.” And Hedwig won’t allow it. For Hedwig transition is when everything went wrong. Surgery did nothing for her except make it harder to get sex work clients and give Tommy an excuse to leave her. She yearns for the way Tommy can be an androgynous rock star who has packaged Hedwig’s true self in a way the public can understand. Hedwig ruins Yitzhak’s chances to play Angel because she’s controlling, but she also does it because she cares about her. She doesn’t want Yitzhak to make the same mistake that she made. She fails to realize that what might have been a mistake for her is not a mistake for everyone.

Yitzhak is played by Miriam Shor in the movie and is always played by a cis woman on stage. (Hopefully in the future, trans women will take over the part.) This casting makes for a powerful reveal when in the end Hedwig let’s go of her own gender performance and hands her wig to Yitzhak. The transformation is immediate. Yitzhak is suddenly the woman she always knew herself to be.

Hedwig accepts that her other half isn’t Tommy and it isn’t Yitzhak. Envying Tommy and controlling Yitzhak won’t settle the turmoil within herself. It’s a powerful revelation that lends the film its happy ending. But this isn’t a happy ending where Hedwig declares herself to be non-binary and asks the audience to please start using they/them pronouns. This is a happy ending where Hedwig, naked, walks down a dark alley into the unknown.

For some of us — binary, non-binary, and everything in between — that will always be our relationship to gender. I’m a woman. I’m trans. I’m non-binary. All those words feel right for me. But I’m still naked walking down that dark alley a little unsure of who I’m meant to be.


My favorite song from Hedwig — everyone’s favorite song from Hedwig? — is “Wig in a Box.” It’s a tribute to drag and the rightness a trans person can feel when first donning a new presentation. What I love most about the song is that it’s not about self-discovery — it’s about self-discoveries. Every verse, every wig, makes Hedwig a different person. And there’s joy to be found in all these different identities.

“Some girls they have natural ease,” Hedwig sings. But I’m not so sure that’s true. Not Tommy. Not Yitzhak. Not even Farrah Fawcett who Hedwig models her most iconic wig after. Because I don’t agree that non-binary and binary trans women have vastly different experiences. I don’t even know what those words mean except that they’re important to certain individuals and I’ll always respect that. Binary, non-binary. Cis, trans. Natural ease is a performance like any other.

The final identity that Hedwig sticks with in the last verse is punk rock star of stage and screen. It’s true for Hedwig. It’s true for John Cameron Mitchell. And I feel it’s true for me. Today marks the 20th anniversary of the film’s wide release and to me its importance has only deepened. I see this movie as a guide for being a queer person and a queer artist amidst ever-shifting language and community divides.

Be comfortable enough in yourself that you don’t try to control other people’s identities. Be comfortable enough in yourself that you don’t try to control other people’s art. But you don’t have to actually be comfortable. It’s just not possible for some of us. And if you get too uncomfortable you can always try someone else.

You can always take another wig off the shelf.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!

Drew Burnett Gregory

Drew is a Brooklyn-based writer, filmmaker, and theatremaker. She is a Senior Editor at Autostraddle with a focus in film and television, sex and dating, and politics. Her writing can also be found at Bright Wall/Dark Room, Cosmopolitan UK, Refinery29, Into, them, and Knock LA. She was a 2022 Outfest Screenwriting Lab Notable Writer and a 2023 Lambda Literary Screenwriting Fellow. She is currently working on a million film and TV projects mostly about queer trans women. Find her on Twitter and Instagram.

Drew Burnett has written 603 articles for us.

11 Comments

  1. “Be comfortable enough in yourself that you don’t try to control other people’s identities. Be comfortable enough in yourself that you don’t try to control other people’s art. But you don’t have to actually be comfortable. It’s just not possible for some of us. And if you get too uncomfortable you can always try someone else.

    You can always take another wig off the shelf.”

    Oof

  2. Love it… that movie will always hold a special place in my heart as the second queer media I was ever exposed to.. in high school! Just before I got the internet! I found the Broadway soundtrack in the library by chance just before the movie came out. I checked it out because it “seemed gay” and it ended up being an enormous step up from the first queer anything that I was exposed to.. which was Rocky Horror 😂 The third queer thing I found was RENT. I was destined to be flaming.

  3. Wow, so interesting to read your reflections. I have had such ambivalence about the film for so many reasons. In particular tho I always had a completely different impression of Yitzhak as a character. I always read Yitzhak as AFAB and gender non-conforming/masc. So (as a butch dyke myself) as Miriam Shor was masc appearing over the course of the narrative I was always happily identifying with her. And when in the end she is characterized as being happy to don the wig and be female identified it always felt like this horrible moment for me (which I chocked up to some misguided idea of giving the film a normative “happy” ending — but which just seemed SO wrong). It’s a bit fuzzy but I also have a memory of their being an additional scene that was shot and cut out of the final film (but which, again my memory is fuzzy, exists on the DVD extras) which actually makes this aspect of the narrative more clear. But it is amazing to think of Yitzhak as a trans woman and obviously that would make it WAAY more of an actual happy ending. A fascinating example of how texts are open to different readings from different audiences. Always so grateful for your film criticism, Drew! Gotta go dig out my DVD and check on this.

    • Yeah, the stage show is really explicit: Yitzhak was a drag queen in [Eastern Europe?] who met Hedwig while they were both performing. Yitzhak wanted to move to the US, Hedwig felt threatened by Yitzhak’s talent, and Hedwig agreed to a green card marriage in exchange for Yitzhak never performing in drag again. I don’t know why they didn’t make that clear in the movie. (Maybe they wanted to make Hedwig more likeable, and less perpetuating-a-cycle-of-abuse-until-halfway-through-the-finale?)

  4. Love this piece so much, Drew! Hedwig is one of my absolute favorite musicals.

    But my favorite song has always been “Origin of Love.” It has always been the song that stuck with me.

  5. Thank you for your writing, particularly about queer cinema and tv. This piece is, by far, my favorite because of how effectively it blends two styles: a reflection about the film and personal essay and creates something better than both!

  6. Thank you, Drew. I hadn’t listened to “Wig in a Box” in years, but turned it up super loud in the car tonight and had the sing-along therapy I didn’t know I needed. So much better!

  7. I advise you to contact this love spellcaster. He can help you cast a love spell to bring your ex-lover back: rob ins onbucler @ gmail . com

  8. I advise you to contact this love spellcaster. He can help you cast a love spell to bring your ex-lover back: rob ins onbucler @ gmail . com,

  9. I advise you to contact this love spellcaster. He can help you cast a love spell to bring your ex-lover back: rob insonbucler @ gmail . com….

  10. I watched this as a film when I was a baby teen, when I knew I was queer but didn’t quite have the words to know I was trans non-binary. I wasn’t allowed to and I got told off and I don’t think I really understood it either – not in the way the characters lived it.

    But it filled up my head and that aching emptiness resonated. I didn’t feel like I thought I was supposed to feel as a trans person and the people I knew didn’t feel that way either but were shifting, journeying, sometimes always not quite being settled with where you’re meant to be, or be going.

    When I was a teenager I thought everything would change when I was an adult, everything would get suddenly better. It hasn’t but it is better, a different kind of better that isn’t perfect but is being more independent and at least having more decisions about my life.

    I’ve only ever seen the film but this work made me see something within myself and I’m always going to be grateful for that. It isn’t my experience but it’s got so much that feels like me and those I love and also nothing like me and I those I love.

Comments are closed.