Reclaiming the trash filmmaker and trans icon from an era that couldn’t comprehend his shape-shifting forms of self-identification.
Every time I write about Ed Wood it hurts. Not because of the extremely personal content of the work, or because of an artist lost to housing insecurity and addiction, but because after a sentence or two, no matter how much I try to avoid it, I’m going to have to use a pronoun. There was no point in Ed’s life where he would have used anything other than he, and he never claimed a transgender identity – not exactly at least. And so maybe it’s not my place to say, but something doesn’t sit right with me.
Ed Wood was always misunderstood. His low-budget/high-passion genre films, Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) and Bride of the Monster (1955) especially, garnered him the title of The Worst Director Of All Time, though this had as much to do with their availability on television as their pokey sets and strange, accidentally off-kilter atmosphere. It’s only fairly recently that his work has started to be properly appreciated. A clear marker of this is Will Sloan’s new book Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA, which finds the compelling and personal pockets within his broader oeuvre without trying to deny the clumsiness of their technique.
When I saw his film Glen or Glenda (1953) for the second time, when I was able to look past its reputation, when I was ready to face it and myself, it felt so painfully intimate, so close to my own experiences as a trans woman that I couldn’t believe it was made by someone who hadn’t been through the same thing. Through multiple framing devices and Ed’s clumsy mix of genre tropes and shoddy self-expression, in the two stories of people drawn to and torn apart by their desire to transition, I could see my own nascent, confused pre-transition feelings. I could see an idea trying to find the language to express itself.
It doesn’t take a trans person to make a trans resonant movie, or even a movie that deals directly with our inner lives – Queen Christina (1933) and Sylvia Scarlet (1935) would be two excellent examples preceding Ed Wood – but it only took a few minutes of rummaging through the definitive Ed Wood biography Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992) to find his former partner Dolores Fuller confirming my suspicions and desires. “Our relationship” she says, “was pretty much like the movie Glen or Glenda, I’m afraid to say”.
Foraging further into the book, I found some truly idyllic stories of Ed hosting dinner for Fuller, or co-writer Alex Gordon, or even Bela Lugosi dressed fully as a woman, he would smile and tell them, “That’s the real me!” And some where he was more playful, finding pleasure in passing and disappearing into Shirley, his female alter-ego. When Glen or Glenda’s make-up artist, Harry Thomas, was invited around to Ed’s apartment to pick up the script, a woman answered the door, and it was only after a few minutes of toying with him that she revealed that she was really Ed.
In a time where it was literally illegal to cross-dress in public, it makes sense that these instances of gender expression were mostly confined to his apartment and often softened by humour. But it’s hard to tell what desires lay underneath his actions. Even if he was still around, you couldn’t exactly ask him. Ed was something of a fantasist, or, to put it less kindly, a bullshitter. Many of his war stories have been proven false in James Pontolillo’s The Unknown War of Edward D. Wood, Jr.: 1942-1946 (2017). But even in his fantasies, he kept drifting back to the same place.
He claimed somewhat credibly to have dressed in drag to stunt double in Sam Fuller’s The Baron of Arizona (1950), and somewhat less credibly claimed to have performed a half-man half-woman act at the circus, creating breasts by “put[ting] a needle in the nipples and bl[owing] it up”. Or, more tragically, is a letter sent to Letters from Female Impersonators magazine in 1961, when Ed’s career had started to fade even further into the margins. It’s from a woman called Shirlee, who shares much of Ed’s looks and life story, but when she reaches Glen or Glenda, she tells it a little differently. Here, her female impersonation act, an evolution of her half-man half-woman one, was so impressive that it “led to an offer to appear in motion pictures [...] in female attire, playing the starring role.”
It’s not exactly the truth, but it’s the kind of painful, vain fantasy that is more honest than any simple historical fact. There’s something so human and relatable about it, to me least. He imagines a world where he’s so good at being a woman – as all womanhood is performed – that he becomes almost indistinguishable from one. I can’t help but imagine the woman inside of him, screaming to get out. I can almost hear her.
But the ways in which Wood expressed his gender were more complicated, and they can’t be neatly mapped onto my own experiences. Many forms of cross-gender expression that would be pulled more tightly towards, if not folded entirely into, a broader idea of ‘transgender’ were still disparate. There were clearer lines between drag queens and cross-dressers as well as, more pertinently, between transsexuals and transvestites.
Wood identified and was largely understood as the latter, someone who just wanted to wear women’s clothes rather than someone who wanted to become a woman. That’s why a chorus of his collaborators, in the documentary The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood Jr (1995), made it a point to say that he wasn’t a homosexual, that he wasn’t attracted to men and was, in fact, something of a womaniser. Whereas for male-to-female transsexuals, there was much more intra-community pressure to get bottom surgery, get a man and return to a heterosexual life.
Looking back on Glen or Glenda with this distinction in mind, some of its compromises seem less like an idea, of a burgeoning transgender identity, not yet understood and more like a different idea altogether. While one of its main characters, played by a real-life and quite mysterious transwoman (Tommy Haynes) is integrated into society as a woman, the other, the titular Glen/Glenda played by Ed Wood himself, has those needs off-set onto his wife and ends the film detransitioned.
He wrote about transsexuals many years later, in a 1972 article for erotic magazine Ecstasy called Problems and the Sex Change. Ignore the hasty fascination with which he describes vaginoplasties and electrolysis and Adam’s apple shaving, as if so compelled by them that they started to take on fearful and trembling qualities. His use of italics on pronouns is more ambiguous. To me it naturally reads as melancholic, but could just as easily be seen as playful or even mocking. But at its core the article is obsessed with defining “true transsexuals” and “true transvestites”; if Wood was a victim of these terms and the gatekeeping around them, then he was also a perpetrator who played his small part in enforcing them.
Ed found himself writing about transness more and more in his later years, when the opportunities for him to make films had even further diminished (though he never stopped trying and managed to direct a few features and many 8mm pornographic shorts in the ’70s). He made a meagre living writing countless articles and pulp novels, a medium of less repute and more freedom, some of which include Black Lace Drag (1963), Death of a Transvestite (1967) and Diary of a Transvestite Hooker (1973). Sometimes Glen or Glenda or Shirley would appear. And Ed would walk around the publisher’s office in full drag – Shirley was no longer confined to his apartment.
But this didn’t liberate him. He was ever more consumed by depression and alcoholism and a deeply felt dissatisfaction. Maybe it came from his failed career or his failed personal life. Or maybe it came from something else inside of him, something fundamentally unresolved. In an article for Hit & Fun magazine in 1971, Ed interviewed Shirley, he spoke to himself. But he didn’t have much new to say, he just told the same old stories he’d been telling for decades. It ends with the promise that, “there is so very much more on the tape.” He died in 1978, drunk and homeless, as Edward D. Wood Jr.
As a trans woman living nearly 50 years later, it all seems so obvious. Ed was a trans woman without the means to understand herself. She was just like me. But our identities are never so objective; we all exist in conversation with our times. I know that transness can only be understood in relation to a society’s construction of gender. But every part of me still wants to push against it and smudge the record, denying simple, inconvenient facts about Ed’s life. To use the pronouns I imagine she would have used in a time she was not privy to. But you cannot use the understanding of the present to resolve the pains of the past. I cannot speak to him, and even if I could, she could not hear.
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