You Should Read Corpses, Fools and Monsters

(If you are in Chicago, you should check out this secret screening where the authors of this book will be providing an intro. I have been assured the film is BANANAS. Dec 5th at the Davis Theater. Moving on.)

It is difficult for me to figure out what, if anything, I should be using this space for these days. Before we knew we were getting another Trump term, I was preparing to publish an essay about transgressive filth that is more fun to watch than TERRIFIER. If you came here for something inspirational or sweet about railing against the darkness, you have misdirected yourself. 

I care deeply about the people I love, and the art I admire, and the base comforts that slake my various hungers. I do not care about electoral politics. I am not prepared to make anybody feel better about anything. We’re here to have a bad time, but at least we’re going to have one together.

The unhappy truth is that no matter how the election shook out, things were going to be bad for trans folks afterwards. There were months and months of increasingly virulent propaganda about us in every venue imaginable. The family I am estranged from is equal parts Fox News fanatics and NPR donors. It doesn’t matter whether red hands or blue hands tie you to the tracks of the infamous trolley problem. No matter what was intended, you are still going to be crushed by the machinery someone else set in motion. The grind of wheels on the track drowns out every self-appointed ally’s apology.

(I am aware that it is very important to the egos of certain people that we pretend transphobia is a cudgel exclusively used by bad-guy Republicans, and that it can be resolved by voting extra-hard for good-guy Democrats. We no longer have time to indulge this comic-book childishness. If you feel this way, I encourage you to grow the fuck up. Go yell at the New York Times before you come for the trans folks who suffer from their propaganda.)

As scary as it is to be a trans person, it’s infinitely more frightening to be a trans person who makes transgressive art. There are trans writers who are going to be safe, their platform insulated from the coming storm by money and position. I am not one of them. I am too poor and unlikable to be a scrappy little mascot for cis folks. My work didn’t blow up or go viral back when it was merely irreverent. I’m not holding out hope that an agent is going to scoop me up and teach me how to play nice for pocket change at this point. 

I’m not trying to be self-defeating, but I am trying to be realistic. I am a transmasculine anarchist pervert who writes essays about the historical importance of horror movies and porn, and I am doing this at a time when people like me are called perverts and child molesters in everyday public dialogue. This is not my moment to shine. It’s my moment to molder in a gutter, my moment to make art and grudgingly lurch towards an uncertain future.

So perhaps this is a strange time for me to tell you to read a book. Shouldn’t I be telling you to do something drastic, something explosive, something that can fix it all? In the future, maybe I will. But right now, while everyone is yelling and deciding who to throw in the electoral wheat thresher, it’s a good idea to ground oneself in other matters. The places I find hope right now are in books and movies, and so I would like to recommend one to you.

Corpses, Fools and Monsters is an indispensable text for any trans person who wants to make art in uncertain times. It’s a comprehensive history of trans people in cinema, but it’s more than that. It’s a book about how queer and trans people survived a society that hates them to make art that outlived them. I have turned to it repeatedly since I finished it a couple of months ago, and it feels even more relevant now. It is a book about a potential trans film canon, sure, but it is also a history worth knowing about.

I linger on our actual history because there is something ugly in the way cis folks fictionalize the real-life circumstances of trans folks. As Corpses, Fools and Monsters notes, trans people have never had much of a say in how we are explained to cis people, and that remains true even if we are the people making that art. 

Most of us who set out to make art about the trans experience instead find ourselves fighting maddening stereotypes, getting duped into praising half-assed trauma porn as “representation,” and giving Pronoun 101 talks to adults who should know better. There’s no room there for our happiness, for our fuck-ups, for us to simply be people as opposed to boogeymen and plot devices. It’s one of the most disheartening parts of being a trans artist, and I suspect it’s why some of us give up on making art at all.

The valuable thing about Corpses, Fools and Monsters is that it balances that frustration with multiple truths about transness and art. Yes, the majority of trans images that cis people experience are not made by us, and are often tainted by phobias and cultural forces beyond our control; yes, trans people have barely been permitted to live full public lives, and upswings in social conservatism really do lead to things like us losing health care and being subject to the violent boots of the state; and yes, many of the people who made foundational trans art did not achieve fame and fortune, or even manage to live very long after they made it.

And yes, despite all of this, trans and queer people have made art the entire time. They have made it with such relentlessness that despite decades of brutal repression and state censorship, two people were able to write a book about it. That alone cheers me up.

It is a joy to read this book because it is rare to find well-written and accessible general film history as explicitly positioned within the context of day-to-day trans existence. The book’s mentions of historical events like Casa Susanna are well-detailed but happen with little hand-holding or exposition. These small moments feel decisive in the text because they make the common knowledge of trans people an essential context to understand, privileging “our” cultural history over one that frequently disincludes us. Cis people might have to look up a thing or two when they read this book. As a trans person with a decent level of media literacy, I learned plenty but I still felt right at home. Getting a book like this published from a trans perspective is a significant accomplishment, especially right now.

It is also a relief to read a book that prioritizes the history and culture of trans people over the cis person’s fascination with things that might kill us someday. Every trans person knows what a miserable experience it is to watch sincere trans representation made by straight people. It’s agonizing because of the alarm clock ticking behind the narrative, an inevitable countdown to a sad and important climax: definitely a cruel confrontation, maybe a queerbashing or a rape, but most often a misgendered dead body or two. 

The history of trans people as depicted from cis folks is one of tragedy and death, a gothic engine of misery that is never quite probed enough to reveal the cisheteropatriarchal reasons for our inevitable demise. When you watch a film like DALLAS BUYERS CLUB as a trans person, Jared Leto’s saccharine weepy-eyed burlesque of tragic transness is obviously shallow and upsetting. To be told that it was a masterpiece worthy of an Oscar afterwards is salt in the wound. Corpses, Fools and Monsters provides an even-handed explanation of why the performance was bad AND why cis people liked it so much in two brief pages. I would like to make every cis film critic read it, and maybe staple it to several people’s foreheads.

Experiencing transness through the lens of cis filmmakers is frequently a soul-rotting experience. Which leads us to the real gift of Corpses, Fools and Monsters: the reassurance that lots and lots of people like me have made lots of different kinds of art about their lives, and the things that survived are worth fighting to keep. It took me a month to read this book, and that’s not because it was a slog. It was because I had to keep stopping and watching the movies it recommended to me, either for the first time or in a completely new light. 

I could provide you with a list of my favorites, and I will be writing about some of them, but I truly believe you should read this text for yourself and follow up on anything that sparks your interest. The book has an admirable scope of geography and genre, and you’ll get the most out of the cornucopia it provides by simply letting yourself explore. Many of these movies were not loved in their time, and many of the people in them died young or penniless or simply disappeared. The art they made remains. 

And in the end, the way art can persist past the struggles and constraints of my single life is the most valuable thing I took for myself from this book. As I frequently remind my readers: I am a fat trans dude who lives in a country that is trying to make me disappear, making transgressive art in an era of paranoid conservative censorship. It isn’t cynicism that tells me not to hold my breath about a publishing contract. There’s not going to be a bag of money. I may never find the adoring audience waiting to toss me my flowers in my lifetime. My best-case scenario is survival, just like the trans folks who made art in troubled times before me. Second verse, same as the first.

None of that matters to me, just like none of that turned out to be relevant to the people who made the art that inspired me. What matters to me — my greatest hope, my only hope —is that the work I make will outlive me. And someday, maybe a trans kid who is full of doubt and fear about their ability to create when the world is trying to eat them alive will stumble on something I made, and realize there is an entire hidden world of people like them waiting for their contributions. 

And hopefully, they will pick up a laptop and get to work. And if I am very lucky, they will learn about my work from a book like Corpses, Fools and Monsters, a text that makes our hidden histories of survival vital and accessible at a time that trans people need it the most.