“You can sacrifice your sacro
Working in the back row
Bump in a dump till you're dead
Kid, you gotta get a gimmick
If you wanna get ahead…”
…sings actress (and, later, Green Party candidate) Faith Dane as Miss Mazeppa in the 1962 musical comedy Gypsy. Three strippers at a ‘third-rate burlesque house’ bump, grind, and show off their own gimmicks to a shy Natalie Wood playing the titular — though unfortunately self-named — burlesque superstar Gypsy Rose Lee. One “uh, uh, uhs” after bending over backward with a trumpet. Another punctuates her shimmies and shakes with the lighting of her Christmas tree outfit. The most worldly of the trio, Tessie Tura, demonstrates her ballet training before bumping and pumping it like the others. The message couldn’t be clearer: “to have no talent is not enough, what you need to have is an idea that makes your strip special.”
In the vaudeville and burlesque world, the gimmick is that single element or idea which distinguishes the performer — such as Dita Von Teese’s famous larger-than-life martini glass, Josephine Baker’s banana skirt, or Violet Chachki’s impossibly tight-laced waist. While all of the performers may be more or less doing the same thing, hustling for applause by moving and contorting their bodies, it is the gimmick that captures attention and builds the kind of prestige that can allow a career to flourish.
“You gotta get a gimmick
If you wanna get applause!”
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Trying to take a selfie with one of my best exes, S., outside the Brooklyn Museum last fall, I thought of this scene. We’d just sat down after a long and winding conversation on the state of trans art and cultural production as we’d wandered through the gallery after lunch.
In particular, as we took in Tourmaline’s gorgeous short Salacia and then slowly drifted through the museum’s Arts of Asia collection, S. had wondered aloud about our particular trans artistic and social scene’s reliance on identity as seemingly the only measure of our personal and professional worth.
“You have to have something more than that,” he said, while we stared into a case of Buddhist icons. “Who are you beyond the label? What do you like about your self, and your work, beyond its category?”
The topic had come up because S. was feeling like a big brother toward a younger artist that the two of us had, each in our own way, taken under our wings. The artist was riding a high wave of interest in their work, but we had both taken note how it was being described and evaluated solely based on their gender, their race, their immigration status, and not for the thoughtful and bold choices the artist was consistently making.
We’d seen what became of artists positioned this way in the scene we’d come up in during the late 2000s and early 2010s. Artists whose work was lavished with praise that referred only to their particular sequence of marginalized identities, as though to say ‘isn’t it marvellous how this pitiful creature manages to put paint on a canvas like a real person!’, and who had just as quickly been discarded when liberal institutions, curators, and audiences inevitably found a new group to pity and applaud. These dynamics had irrevocably shaped our own artistic and self-making practices for better or worse, and, feeling prematurely old in the later half of our thirties, we wondered how they might affect those coming up now.
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It’s not a new turn in trans life to have our lives and our work reduced to a ‘gimmick.’ Indeed, it’s been the primary mode through which trans people have existed in public life for over a hundred years — at least in North America and Europe. It’s why so much of trans life on screen hinges upon the moment of ‘the reveal’ and ‘the transition.’ These are the moments in which cis audiences are most titillated by the mere facts of our bodies and thus, for them, these are the only moments in which we exist.
A recurrent theme in trans photography and film of the 1920s is the staging of images of smartly, or dowdily, dressed men and women in one picture, followed by an identical picture of this group in the nude. Sexologists marvelled at these unveilings as demonstrating their latest discoveries: that gender was a role that could be adopted, and that there were some abnormals who did so either out of perversion or some latent and as yet undiscovered intersexuality.
We can imagine that some of the models posed out of a belief that in so doing they might increase understanding among the public — Magnus Hirschfeld’s primary goal — and that others still did so simply for payment. But not all of them were taken willingly. Police photography from the period is almost indistinguishable in its simultaneously cold and lurid gaze upon trans and cross-dressed bodies. And those caught in the spotlight of law enforcement and public scrutiny often had to make the most out of a dangerously limited set of options.
Trans, cross-dressed, and other gender deviant people populated early vaudeville stages throughout North America and Europe in this same period. From the ubiquitous bearded ladies to the early female and male impersonators like William Dorsay Swann and Ella Wesner, these performers capitalized on the fascination and revulsion that cis audiences had for gender inversion while dodging the increasing criminalization of cross-dressing on the streets of many major metropolises from the mid-19th century through to the mid-20th.
Off the vaudeville stage, Victorian and Edwardian audiences enjoyed the sights and sounds of literal human zoos. One variety of these exhibitions were called dime museums. Clare Sears describes these venues in Arresting Dress:
“Dime museum freak shows emerged in most major U.S. cities after the Civil War and peaked in popularity in the 1890s. The dime museum had its institutional roots in the anatomical museum, a place of medical and moral education that featured models and preserved body parts displayed in glass cabinets, with frequent emphasis on fetuses, diseased genitalia, and the dissected organs of notorious criminals and ‘freaks of nature.’ Dime museums built upon the anatomical museum tradition by adding two categories of live performers: sideshow circus artists and freaks.”
In January 1895, a man named Milton Matson “was arrested in San Francisco in the room of his fiancée, Ellen Fairweather, on charges of obtaining money under false pretences. Following his arrest, Matson was taken to San Jose County Jail and locked up in a cell with several other men, where he remained for two weeks, until the jailer received a bank telegraph addressed to Miss Luisa Matson and identified Matson as female. After complicated legal wrangling, charges against Matson were dropped” (Sears, p. 103). While Matson walked away as a free man, allowed even to leave in men’s clothing, he was now subject to intense public scrutiny. The stealth that enabled him to live his life and gain employment undisturbed had been removed, leaving him vulnerable to the prying eyes of a San Francisco press riveted by tales of gender deviance.
Quickly, the manager of a local dime museum seized upon the opportunity and convinced Matson to take a job as a living gender freakshow. All he had to do was sit around in men’s clothing all day while those curious gawked at him, and he would earn a small wage. He spent five weeks displayed as “The Bogus Man.” The act proved so popular that other dime museums rounded up their own ‘bogus men’ to compete.
Matson understood that he was wringing this gimmick for every dime he could, quipping, “I’m beginning to think it pays to be notorious.”
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Though the dime museum exhibition of Real! Live! Transvestites! might seem shocking today, it and situations like it set the tone for over a hundred years of trans representation in the public sphere. Limited examples of pushback in the mainstream were sprinkled throughout the century — for example, Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg — alongside thriving but wholly underground art scenes, such as Mirha-Soleil Ross’ Counting Past 2 film festival in the 1990s. But it was really in the 2010s that we witnessed a dramatic and, importantly, sustained shift in the terms of engagement. While it would be easy to point to TIME Magazine’s seismic 2014 Transgender Tipping Point cover as the definitive moment this shift occurred, it’s obvious that this was just the crystalization of a process which had already been underway for some time.
One emblematic piece of that story is the 2013 publication of Nevada by Imogen Binnie. The first novel published by now-defunct publisher and literary scene Topside Press, Nevada was a breath of fresh air in a trans book world dominated by largely-ghostwritten transition memoirs, ‘whats this all about then’ explainers by the world’s worst scientists (see, “The Man Who Would Be Queen”), and award-winning novels written by cis authors which ranged from the very good (Zoe Whittall’s Holding Still For As Long As Possible) to the dreadful (Eugenides’ Middlesex and other ‘gender novels’). Just like sexological photography and dime museum freak shows, much of this work’s primary purpose was to educate the public on the downtrodden and often pathetic transsexual and transgender lives they chronicled.
Binnie gave us a story that broke from convention by assuming three key things: 1) that trans people exist and know each other as a quotidienne fact in the world; 2) that a medical process is not the only interesting aspect of trans life; and 3) that trans people have complicated lives after our transitions which are worthy of literary examination. Nevada had no interest in teaching you about trans life per se, in fact if anything the story was about the dangers of trying to teach everyone you meet.
Sharply funny, almost unbearably hip, and punk to the core, Nevada was the perfect encapsulation of what Topside editors Tom Léger and Riley MacLoed were trying to argue: that trans people are more than a gimmick. While many criticisms can and have been made of Topside Press and its surrounding milieu (see Amy Marvin’s recent essay in TSQ), back in 2013 this was a bold and daring vision for an artistic world that neither defined itself solely through identity nor reduced it to an incidental footnote.
As Nevada gears up to be republished by mainstream publishers FSG in America and Picador in the UK, I’ve been reflecting a lot on how much this short novel was responsible for creating a world of books that could not get published before it. Before Nevada, it was fairly easy to breeze through all of the available trans novels written by trans writers — now, it would be nearly impossible due to the sheer volume of titles alone. Topside Press alum (or escapee, if you will) Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby has been only the tip of this particular iceberg.
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Who are we after the gimmick? What do we like about our selves and our work beyond mere representation?
In the decade since Nevada, trans art has — in fits and starts — burst through to the mainstream. While it might not be at the forefront of every artists’ mind, I can feel a current running through many works now which strains beyond the marketing of identity.
It would be absurd to try to read Shola Von Reinhold’s debut novel LOTE as a book that “explains the trans experience to the public,” for example. About to be published in the United States by Duke University Press after winning awards on this side of the Atlantic, LOTE is easily one of the smartest art world satires of the 21st century thus far, and Von Reinhold and their protagonist skillfully elude the terms of categorization entirely. A book concerned as much, if not more, with race and class relations than gender, LOTE exists in a world that Nevada could only dream about.
Similarly, the recently published At Certain Points We Touch by Lauren John Joseph is a literary novel that cannot be reduced to a gender 101 tool. A glamorous story about grieving the death of a lover who was, in some ways, objectively a bad person, At Certain Points We Touch seems almost entirely uninterested in something as base as mere ‘representation.’ The nonbinary protagonist in John Joseph’s novel provides us not a lesson on the meaning of gender, but instead a fresh perspective on universal themes of love, grief, and class. (An aside: in my opinion, LOTE and At Certain Points We Touch make an excellent double feature. I suspect that quite a number of professors will teach them together.)
This is not to say that identity based work cannot still be thrilling. At BFI Flare film festival in London this past week, I sat down in the small studio theatre to watch a new documentary, North By Current (2021). Directed by Angelo Madsen Minax, North By Current is a heartrending examination of how one trans man’s family processes the sudden, tragic, and violent death of his two-year-old niece. Shot over several years, the film delves into how class, religion, domestic violence, and addiction have shaped this family, and braids the grieving process over the niece with the still-active intrafamily conflict over the filmmaker’s transition. Minax is not Milton Matson sitting on a stool in a dusty dime museum, but instead is the shaper of the terms of our engagement not only with his body and emotional life, but with those of his family members as well.
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The promise of the gimmick is explained quite simply by the dancers in Gypsy:
“Get yourself a gimmick
And you too can be a star!”
It is through the working of a gimmick that generations of trans people have taken as much advantage of the violent, dehumanizing gaze of the cis public as they could. We’ve made careers out of running workshops for corporations, shimmying on burlesque stages like Christine Jorgensen, and writing cookie cutter transition memoirs about how we just loved trucks or dolls when we were little girls or little boys, respectively. Indeed, many of us still eek out a living doing so, and I’m certainly not knocking it as a means to an end. As the old adage goes, “if you’ve got it…”
While the gimmick certainly draws (cis) attention and pays bills, at the same time it often obscures our meaning and reduces our work. We are transformed into sociological objects or feel-good public representations — both outcomes that aid the liberal digestion of trans life at the expense of actual trans people, politics, and priorities.
But there is something beyond the gimmick. A shimmering, sometimes ephemeral quality that more and more of us are able to get hold of and bring up toward the surface. We are more than the strings of our identities, the shapes of our bodies. Trans not as a gimmick but as a lens through which we can perceive and illuminate the world.
xx
M