Reading List/Culture Vulture: One Candy Darling, two Orlandos, and a People's Joker
It's a trans trans trans trans world
When Cynthia Carr told me she was working on a biography of Candy Darling, I thought, oh, that makes sense – a minor figure from the Warhol world who hasn’t had her story told yet. It will be like the biography of Thelma Ritter, someone who wasn’t a big star herself but who worked with lots of people who were and we’d learn some cool stuff about them from her perspective. But the finished product – Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux) – is much more substantial than that. Carr makes a solid case for Candy Darling as someone who was more than a drag queen or female impersonator, like some of her peers in the Warhol circle – she embodied the identity of transgender decades before we had the language we have now. And she suffered all the awkwardness, isolation, loneliness, ridicule, and fear that fall to pioneers who carved out of the wilderness a path that others could follow more easily. Not to mention the medical ignorance of her era. She lacked the resources that allowed Christine Jorgenson, Renee Richards, and Jan Morris to undergo gender-confirmation surgery. It was probably the trial-and-error hormones she took sporadically that caused her tragically early death from cancer at age 29.
From the very first page, Carr establishes the urgent context for her project. “This book is dedicated to the trans community. As I worked on this biography of the transgender pioneer Candy Darling, I saw that community increasingly demonized in ways both cruel and traumatizing. So, dear trans community: May this account of one life make a difference. May you be understood. May you be appreciated. May you be loved.”
In conversation about the book with Justin Vivian Bond (who did the audiobook version) at the Center recently, Carr mentioned that she consulted with ten stakeholders from the trans community to sort out questions that few other biographers have to contend with. The issue of pronouns and deadnames gets complicated when you’re writing a history that includes first-hand testimony and interviews from people who knew Candy as a kid named James L. Slattery from Massapequa Park, Long Island. As Carr writes in her introduction, “What made sense to me in the end was to consider what Candy would have wanted…So I am calling her Candy. However, her family and childhood friends spoke of her as ‘Jimmy’ and ‘son’ and ‘brother’ and ‘he/him.’ To change their words is to deny the context that surrounded her – the disorienting childhood she had to negotiate while living in a homophobic, transphobic world with a boy’s name and boy’s body. I have not sanitized that context. The two different names applied here during the chapters about her childhood illustrate the friction between who she really was and how she was perceived. And, of course, what’s real about a name? This is the story of becoming Candy. The word ‘trans’ implies a journey.”
In her Village Voice “On Edge” columns about downtown culture and in her definitive biography of David Wojnarowicz, Carr has always brought a keen eye, a lively intelligence, great openness, and a clear prose style to her writing about artists outside the mainstream. Her carefulness about navigating Candy Darling’s trans journey makes me love and respect her all the more.
Sad ending notwithstanding, Candy Darling’s chronology makes for entertaining reading, given the endless stream of entertaining characters along the way, famous names as well as eccentric ones (Taffy Titz!). If Candy’s life story is the A plot, the B plot is Carr’s own chronicle of how she got to tell this particular story. She had the good fortune of befriending Jeremiah Newton, a close friend of Candy’s who retrieved a big stash of her letters and journals from her mother’s house after she died in 1974. Newton interviewed many people who knew her when he was contemplating writing the biography himself. Ten years ago he handed all that material over to Carr, entrusting her on the basis of her Wojnarowicz biography. Then Carr got to discover the challenge of telling a story dependent on the testimony of a large contingent of unreliable narrators whose memories may be impaired thanks to time, ego, and prodigious consumption of booze and drugs. Episodes involving Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, and other Warhol personalities are often told from several perspectives because some details remain unverifiable. I laughed out loud at Carr’s dry comment, "Being reliable was not Holly's job in this world."
Many of Candy’s peers in the Warhol demimonde epitomized the concept of “being famous for being famous.” Although Candy often accompanied Andy to parties and openings and made cameo appearances in some of his and Paul Morrissey’s campy low-budget films, she had real acting chops and stage presence. She was, among other things, tall, thin, extremely pale, and very beautiful (as long as she kept her mouth closed to conceal an unusual abundance of missing teeth). She impressed viewers in plays by Off-Off-Broadway titans like Charles Ludlam and Tom Eyen. Her fanciest gig involved replacing an actress in Tennessee Williams’s 1972 Off-Broadway play Small Craft Warnings, in which she played a down-on-her-luck prostitute.
That happens to be the first show I ever saw in New York City on a trip with some friends from my high school in South Jersey. We were fortunate to catch a performance in which the playwright himself played the small role of the Doctor (in a catchy bit of ticket-boosting publicity) alongside now-legendary actors Bill Hickey (also a renowned acting teacher) and Peg Murray. Somehow I already knew who Candy Darling was – as a precocious media-fixated teenager, I must have read about her in the Village Voice or Interview magazine. But also my high-school culture mentor, Jay Junker, turned me on to lots of hip music, including the Velvet Underground. I had bought the album that starts with “Candy says I’ve come to hate my body/And all that it requires in this world…” So I had a head start over those who first heard her name in Lou Reed’s “Walk On The Wild Side,” the racy hit single from his second solo album, Transformer, released in late 1972:
Candy came from out on the Island
In the back room she was everybody’s Darling
But she never lost her head
Even while she was giving head….
It occurs to me as I write this that a key attribute to being a queer kid is that you learn to develop an extreme sensitivity to norms of gender expression, for survival. And you are always attentive to deviations from those norms, which are acceptable and which have dangerous consequences. You’re always on the lookout for people who are different in one way or another, and that’s how allyship and solidarity are built. The people driving legislation and campaigns against trans rights and gender-confirming treatment for adolescents clearly have never met a trans person in their lives; fixating on bathrooms and athletic competition means projecting one’s own uneducated fears onto others. My inclination to sniff out other queer folks led me to many soul-nourishing, mind-expanding cultural experiences, while my heterosexual friends and family members had no particular reason to know, for instance, who Candy Darling was.
I bought a copy of the hardcover so I could have Carr inscribe it, but I actually consumed the text as an audiobook. Doing character voices for direct quotations, Justin Vivian Bond hilariously manages to make everyone sound like they’re in a John Waters movie. In the midst of binge-listening to it on Spotify, I watched Paul B. Preciado’s curious film essay Orlando: My Political Biography. I rented it primarily as preparation to see the revival of Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of the Virginia Woolf novel at Signature Theater, starring Taylor Mac. But I realized immediately that Preciado’s film represented the cutting edge of the trans experience that Candy Darling could only tentatively, wistfully dream about in her diary.
An academic, philosopher, and activist, Preciado put himself on the map with Testo Junkie (2008), which included graphic reports of his year-long unsupervised experimentation with male hormones, interspersed with his analysis of what he termed our “pharmacopornographic era.” An Apartment on Uranus (2019), a collection of columns he wrote for the legendary left-wing French daily newspaper Libération and other European publications, details the years-long painstaking process of getting his name legally changed to reflect his correct gender identity. The Orlando film uses Woolf’s novel as a jumping-off point to widen the lens on the trans conversation as it exists today. Inspired by Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West, the title character of the novel time-travels from the 17th century, where he is a pageboy for Queen Elizabeth I, to the 20th century. At the age of 30, he goes to sleep, wakes up a woman, and lives for 300 years without aging. While admiring Woolf’s daring to acknowledge trans identity as early as 1928, Preciado gently points out that, for trans folx, transition is not nearly so quick and easy.
The film is a quirky collage of literary essay, documentary, and playful community diary. Preciado assembles a cast of 20 Orlandos, each a trans person with an individual story. We see their struggles with the medical and legal establishments but we also witness a kind of joyful community of kindred spirits. The culminating scene finds them in court, each receiving their passports with their chosen names, presented with compassionate authority by a judge played by Virginia Despentes (the edgy filmmaker and writer who was formerly Preciado’s love partner — a fun cameo). For enlightenment about trans experience, it’s right up there with Disclosure, the Netflix documentary about trans representation in the media historically.
The vivacious Signature Theater production of Orlando demonstrates yet another approach to adapting Woolf’s novel. Like Sally Potter, whose 1992 film with Tilda Swinton incorporated Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth (above) and a cameo by Jimmy Somerville of Bronski Beat, director-choreographer Will Davis has a ball assembling a juicy cast of queerdos who confidently lean into the theatricality of this fantastic fable. Besides Taylor Mac, who was born to explode all categories of gender expression, there’s Nathan Lee Graham’s deliciously imposing bare-chested Queen Elizabeth, playwright and performance artist Lisa Kron looking unprecedently foxy in a leather bustier, and the never-predictable Jo Lampert. Less well known to me are Janice Amaya, Rad Pereira, and TL Thompson, all of whom hold their own in this company, who radiate an even more undiluted air of joyful queer community. My favorite moments were the dance breaks Davis devised to mark the shift from one century to another — pure silly fun.
Wouldn’t you know, the free movie of the week for MUBI subscribers turned out to be The People’s Joker, Vera Drew’s dazzling exercise in fanfic-as-trans-coming-out-story. An editor and digital technician who’s worked mostly in alt-comedy and web series, Drew spent time during the pandemic lockdown indulging in Steven Soderbergh’s pastime of creating a new edit of a beloved film – in this case, Todd Philips’ 2019 Joker starring Joaquin Phoenix. If best-selling albums can be made by indie musicians on a laptop in their bedroom, apparently so can a movie if the director is suitably adept with DIY animation, punk aesthetics, and the guts to walk the thin line between “fair use” and copyright infringement. Drew mashed up elements of Batman comic books and movies with her own personal history as a queer kid from Middle America who seeks fame and fortune by following in the footsteps that lead from the Upright Citizens Brigade in Los Angeles to Saturday Night Live.
Along the way, Drew discovered a deep identification with the Joker as dangerous outsider and cast herself as Joker the Harlequin in this wild, hilarious parody-homage. I’m not a comic books/Batman nerd like my husband The Big Honking Geek, so many of the abundant genre references and cameo appearances (Bob Odenkirk, Robert Wuhl, Maria Bamford) meant nothing to me. But I dug the film for its trippy visuals and moment-by-moment inventiveness, right up there with the last two animated Spider-Man/Metaverse films on a fraction of the budget. And it reminded me in some ways of Tarnation, Jonathan Caouette’s ground-breaking queer experimental family-history documentary. The IFC Center is selling cheeky T-shirts that say “I saw The People’s Joker and Now I’m Trans.”
And, because the universe seems to like to work this way, walking to the subway afterwards we ran into a certain trans music icon riding her bicycle down Broadway. Our hearty greeting – “Hi, Anonhi!” – earned us a big sweet smile.