One of the many pleasures of Madonna’s erotically charged video for “Justify My Love” was attempting to figure out who in the video was what, biologically speaking. The video itself provided some helpful clues: if I remember correctly, most of the women (besides Madonna) were sporting mustaches. But for a moment at least the video held out the possibility not only of misidentification but of misdirected desire. Putatively normal heterosexuals might find themselves lusting after a person of the wrong sex–a possibility that undoubtedly underlay much of the public anxiety the video provoked. And of course though the performers’ sexes were not immediately obvious, they all oozed sexuality of some sort. In fact Madonna has become the veritable queen of sexual ambiguity–wearing artfully adapted men’s suits onstage, immersing herself in gay culture, coyly hinting that her own sexuality is polymorphous perverse. “I want you all to know that there are only three real men on this stage,” she announced to her fans at one performance. “Me and my two backup girls.”
Garber wants to focus instead on the indeterminacies of gender, to explore “the extraordinary power of transvestism to disrupt, expose, and challenge, putting in question the very notion of . . . stable identity.” The cross-dresser is a figure suspended precariously “betwixt and between” the traditional categories–and thus a challenge to all fixed categories. Garber quotes from a French novel of 1835 in which the sexually ambiguous, cross-dressing main character laments that she (he?) has become stuck in between: “Unless I fall in love with some young beau, I shall find it hard to lose this habit, and instead of a woman disguised as a man, I shall look like a man disguised as a woman. In truth, neither sex is really mine . . . I belong to a third sex, a sex apart, which has no name.”
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This would seem reasonable enough, but cultural analysts are all too prone to stuff the ambiguities of transvestism into oversimplified accounts that deny or obscure the subject’s complexities. When the jazz musician Billy Tipton died in 1989, he was discovered to have been “really” a woman in drag, hiding her sex from the world and, if we are to believe it, from her wife and adopted children. Everyone, from newspaper reporters to members of the family, attempted to keep the complexities of the situation to a minimum. “He’ll always be Dad to me,” one of Tipton’s sons told the media. The New York Times explained the story as a simple case of economic necessity: in a male-dominated profession, Tipton adopted male drag “to improve her chances of success as a jazz musician.” But as Garber notes, any such simple stories of economic necessity cover over much more than they explain. The couple was said not to engage in sexual intercourse, for example–Tipton told her wife that she had been injured. And clearly it wasn’t “economic necessity” that led Tipton to continue her masquerade in private as well as public life. Like the case of d’Eon, the story of Billy Tipton cannot be reduced to a single unambiguous meaning.
Still, the “politics of drag” are not always radical; indeed, sometimes cross-dressers aren’t even political. Garber quotes Oscar Montero, who notes that “drag may be so incorporated into the fabric of society . . . that it ceases to provoke and becomes entertainment.” (And often bad entertainment at that, as anyone can see who’s watched the gargantuan Argentinean comedian Porcel slouch through his drag routines on Channel 44.) In some cases transvestism is identified with the institutions and prerogatives of the elite: witness Harvard’s cross-dressing Hasty Pudding club. A photograph in Garber’s book shows a smiling, lipstick-smeared Clint Eastwood, wearing a flag-bedecked bra over his suit, receiving the Hasty Pudding man-of-the-year award in 1991. I’m not sure how to classify this odd event, but it doesn’t seem to be a step forward.
But for all the protestations of normality, Glen or Glenda? is one of the strangest films ever made. The more elaborate the explanations (after bodily comfort, the film moves on to the realm of psychoanalysis), the stranger the story becomes. Glen finds himself chased by a “big green dragon” in his dreams; Bela Lugosi, with lightning flashing around him, recites ominous nonsense about “snips and snails and puppy-dog tails.” Even the film’s happy ending–Glen is cured by transferring his feminine fantasies to his fiancee–can’t erase the bizarre effects of the rest of the film. As Garber notes, “slippage and confusion seem to be constitutive rather than accidental features of the attempt to define transvestism.” Perhaps we’d best leave it at that.
