The Sun Always Shines On TVs

I FIRST see Tim in a sleazy Leeds cabaret. Pattie, the girl I’m with, points him out in tones of delicious intrigue. He’s perched demurely on a bar-stool in full immaculate drag, smoothing his dress fastidiously with some frail dignity, discreet make-up and 1930’s decadence cigarette-holder.

Over the following weeks I get to know Tim much better. Pattie is fascinated by him. We exchange confidences. He has a flat in Headingley where he gives guitar lessons, TV-ing only at weekends when he dons padded bra, layers of latex, lipstick, powder and paint. He’s unpredictably intelligent, a quietly-spoken gentle man with soft, almost hairless hands and a social instability that he doesn’t quite understand.

We sit on the floor with a lavalight crawling patterns as he tries to explain. At one stage he’d thought he was gay. He’d experimented with boyfriends. He enjoyed it when they gave him head. But then, who doesn’t enjoy a blow-job? But no, he now knows he’s not gay. He just feels at ease in frocks. I find him a little unsettling, but Pattie is increasingly mesmerised.

She begins helping him apply his make-up, suggesting shades and techniques. They develop an intimacy that eventually excludes me. And following a break-up over some stupid sexual misdemeanour, she moves in with him. They now share his flat. Occasionally I see them on adjacent bar-stools at the Leeds cabaret. All girls together.

Love is a many-gendered thing.

I think of Tim now that cross-dressing is high on the sexual agenda. Now that Frock of the New is suddenly pressing all the right G-spots from S&M to M&S, while suggesting new dimensions of the Joys Of Sex in a dress.

The catalyst – or the pretext – is Mrs Doubtfire. It’s a movie that rides the gender fault-line in the guise of a comedy of family values, with politically correct peripherals. You know the story. Williams-as-man is a post-divorce out-of-work voice-over actor who faces losing access rights to the matrimonial brats. Hence Williams-as-woman; a cosily upholstered sexagenarian Scottish widow, a cuddlier, bosomier, more maternal matron who bluffs himself off as a housekeeper/ nanny for his own children. Suspend disbelief. Enjoy the wrong-toilet gags, the sequence where he sets fire to his false tits (“my first day as a woman, and already I’m getting hot flushes”), ignore the absurdity and it’s a mildly funny film.

But does it help or hinder a real understanding of cross-dressing? It neuters both the lure and threat of transvestism. It’s been done better. Ask Tim. In another universe Transformation TV is a German-run satellite late-night station beaming down TVs on TV, for TVs. Test transmissions went out through the Astra satellite from 18th December 1993, and they’re now negotiating for a regular band. They claim it as ‘narrow-casting’ (as distinct from Broadcasting) because their intention is not to titillate a mass audience, but to focus on, and talk directly to dedicated transvestite viewers only.

Their cameras probe into the kind of tawdry shemale sub-world where podgy middle-aged married men re-emerge as glam-queens in a derangement of handbags and hormones. Where truck-drivers come out as Widow Twankey lookalikes in high heels and fishnets. It’s these uneasy Pantomime Dame transfigurations that raise all the awkward questions that Mrs Doubtfire lampoons.

Transvestism carries out a constant gender terrorism by full-frontally attacking the traditional sexual hierarchy. That’s why those with vested interests (no pun intended) retaliate so viciously at the merest hint of Transformation TV. Olga Maitland, rentamouth Tory reactionary, voiced her disgust and outrage at the first suggestion of it penetrating and morally polluting our airwaves. All manner of televisual atrocity is allowed direct into your front room on every channel. But serious men in frocks? There are queer dimensions to Drag that confront and disturb in ways that healthily hetero ballistic mayhem does not.

There’s little in Mrs Doubtfire that steps outside the traditional methods the media has of dealing with TVs. The first strategy is titillation. It takes you far enough to flirt, but does it in a safely straight context. The second strategy is ridicule.

An American poet called Jesse Glass stayed over with me for a month. We went to gigs and clubs together, and he watched some television. Before he left he said “why do so many comedians on British TV dress up as women?” I had no ready answer. It was something I’d never really considered. Perhaps it’s something to do with the legacy of the English Public School system? But think; Les Dawson stole his dressed-up and dressed-down housewife routine from Music Hall star Norman Evans, and between the two incarnations it’s difficult to think of any comedian who has NOT got frocked up for laughs – Dick Emery, Benny Hill, Morecambe and Wise, the entire Monty Python team, right through to the Alternative Cabaret turns like Eddie Izzard.

Man as woman is funny. And it’s funny because it itches forbidden desires suppressed deep in the psyche, because its deliberate absurdity ridicules safe heterosexual moral standards. We laugh at what makes us nervous, because by laughing at it we remove its threat: the disturbing suggestion that men might benefit from opening themselves to their own feminine aspects.

But Drag is international, and multi-media. Glenn or Glenda is a trash-exploitation 1950s movie from eccentric auteur Edward D. Wood. Despite being inept and unwittingly comic in black and white retrospect, it did confront cross-dressing sympathetically as ‘Glenn’ confides his secret habit to his fiancée.

In semi-documentary style with deep meaningful commentary it records her shock and confusion at the revelation, until she thinks it through, and generously agrees to share her wardrobe with him. It’s a rare example of openness, which might just be explained by a closer examination of Wood’s own private life! But elsewhere in movie-land, conforming to the strategy of safe titillation, the plotline demands a motive other than ‘gender dysfunction’ for dressing-up, while the actors involved claim they do it only for the challenge. Well, they would, wouldn’t they?

Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis were on the run from Mafia hitmen when they took to skirts to join an all-girl band, which happened to include Marilyn Monroe, in Some Like It Hot. Robbie Coltrane drops into the same routine for the more recent Nuns On The Run. Alec Guinness cross-dresses in Kind Hearts And Coronets with more sinister intent, as will pervy serial killers form Psycho to Silence Of The Lambs. Then Kurt Russell switches the motivation again, as an undercover cop in the unconvincing guise of a woman in Tango And Cash.

There are more psychological dimensions to Tootsie. Dustin Hoffman is an out-of-work method actor who becomes a soap opera hit as ‘Dorothy’. He goes through all the usual comic clichés – sharing a bed with the girl he fancies who thinks of him as a woman, just as Jack Lemmon lusted for Monroe. Such sequences reinforce the underlying normality that beneath the lipstick, powder and paint, these men remain men. But Tootsie takes it further. ‘Dorothy’ is more successful as a woman, more confident careerwise, and more feminist than real women. He/she even propagandises feminist values to the erstwhile airhead object of his affections. Perhaps only a man can be a New Woman? Mrs Doubtfire is a less effective cross-dressing Tootsie revamp. Here cinema’s New Man in drag returns in defence of the Nuclear Family via role-reversal, rather than opening out the dialogue into more potentially subversive areas.

More effective is Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game. Here, it’s only mid-film that the beautiful black nightclub singer is discovered to be male, played to poised perfection by Jaye Davidson. There are pitifully few other exceptions to the Drag convention. There’s the visually sumptuous Farewell My Concubine, and Harvey Fierstein’s semi-autobiographical Torch Song Trilogy, the story of a fast-talking, gravel-throated star drag queen at Brooklyn’s Club East Fourth, a sexually suspect fusion of Tom Waits and Marlene Dietrich. (Harvey guests as the gay make-up artist responsible for the Mrs Doubtfire transformation.)

Or you can walk on the wild side with Andy Warhol’s Superstar Trannies. Loving the sleaze, but portraying it directly, without cinematic artifice. Holly Woodlawn was a Warhol drag queen. It was s/he who Lou Reed documented hitch-hiking across the USA, who “plucked his eyebrows on the way/shaved his legs, and then he was a she . . .”. “I’m fascinated by boys who spend their lives trying to be complete girls,” admitted Warhol. “I’m not saying it’s not self-defeating and self-destructive, and I’m not saying it’s not possibly the single most absurd thing a man can do with his life. What I’m saying is, it is very hard work to look like the complete opposite of what nature made you, and then to be an imitation of what was only a fantasy woman in the first place.” (Warhol by Victor Bokris).

Lipstick, powder and paint. Is you is, or is you ain’t . . .?

Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman. Especially when you’re a man.

The soundtrack for Mrs Doubtfire cunningly selects Aerosmith’s ‘Dude Looks Like A Lady’, and then ‘Walk Like A Man’, a song with levels of meaning exploited first in Italianate doo-wop by the Four Seasons, and then as gay disco by Devine. But between them hangs a cleverly disguised tail. In rock ’n’ roll it has always helped to flaunt cross-dressing credentials. Kurt Cobain plays with slag-aesthetic for photo-shoots. Smashing Pumpkins do it too. Evan Dando did it at Glastonbury. Queen’s video for ‘I Want To Break Free’ gender-switches into a surreal Coronation Street with Freddie Mercury as Bet Gilroy. U2’s video for ‘Even Better Than The Real Thing’ hangs out with transvestites, suggesting that it’s even better than the real thing.

But the Rolling Stones did it as far back as 1966, with a tarty Brian Jones in Andrews Sisters uniform to promote ‘Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadow’. Jagger went one better for his movie Performance, which remains the most lushly seductive advertisement for androgyny yet. David Bowie’s ‘Boys Keep Swinging’ has the thin white one en femme in various girlie disguises, destroying the illusion by blatantly smearing his lipstick with the back of his hand.

Elvis Presley cross-dressed at least once. In the abysmal movie Girl Happy he dons skirts as a pathetic plot-device enabling him to escape from jail.

And even Paul McCartney crooned “Sweet Loretta Morgan thought she was a woman/but she was another man . . .”

Ru Paul is a 6’7” TV who co-hosted this year’s Brits Awards fancy-dress ball. S/he also stands in for Kiki Dee on Elton John’s current dance-mix of ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’. Beyond that only New York Dolls and Jayne County are more disconcertingly REAL. And that’s the genuine upsetter. They’re the real Lost Boys of the gender-identity crisis. James might sing about “dressed me up in woman’s clothes/messed around with gender roles” (on ‘Laid’), but Jayne (formerly Wayne County) took it all the way.

Meanwhile, in another universe, ‘TV Changeways’ takes this tainted love from the screen, the CDs and the videos, and takes it to Birmingham, London and Dublin. “Spend four hours being pampered as only a woman can be. We provide absolutely everything to transform you into a beautiful glamorous woman.” Transformation Shops offer a similarly exotic range, with mail-order facilities for the faint of heart – “Imagine yourself gradually transformed into a shapely, beautiful female. Sexy satins and silks to caress your skin, tight lacing corsetry to encase your body. An Aladdin’s Cave with everything a cross-dresser could wish for.”

‘TV World’ does it mail-order with a catalogue “featuring dozens of genuine transvestites showing unique products that convincingly re-shape the male body.” It even offers ‘false boobs’, “realistic copies of the real things that can be altered to fit any size bra,” or can be worn bra-less with the ‘specially-formulated adhesive to ensure safe and secure fixing’.

Of course, what they offer is a romance of fantasy womanhood that deals only with surface female traits – no drag queens menstruate. They’re less women trapped in men’s bodies, more men tarted up in a bondage of feminine camouflage, the myth of glamour, a flattery of imitation. But this is where TV dreams come true, beyond mere rock singers and movie stars flirtily frocking-up like serial killers in drag to twitch the commercial libido. This is another aspect of Transformation TV’s narrow-casting to dumpy middle-aged married men who play out Monroe or Liza Minelli games of decadence in suspender belts and lingerie, got up in slinky little cocktail numbers, or re-emerging from boutiques as glamour queens in corsets.

Sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, even if it means doing it in bra and lace knickers. And that’s what genuinely assaults the gender status quo. When it’s your neighbour. Your uncle. You. And Tim.

“The first and most basic duality you learn in life is the male-female one.” We sit on the floor of Tim’s flat with the lavalight crawling patterns, as he tries to explain. “Every aspect of life is built around that duality. And anything that challenges it, challenges the most fundamental assumptions of society. Attractions are meant to be directed at the opposite sex in others, not at the opposite sex within yourself.

“But sexuality is not a black and white thing. Maleness and femininity are not absolute states. Sexuality is more a spectrum of colours that merge gradually from one shade into the next, and they’re all equally worthy of expression. The male that exists within the female. And the female that exists within men. TV-ing is a way of touching those aspects of yourself that you’re otherwise forced to deny. TV-ing is a way of touching the tender and creative female aspect within me.”

A lot of this is basic Jung; his theories of the animus and anima – the maleness within a woman, and the femaleness within a man. It’s an established part of psychoanalysis that traces back to Sigmund himself. A tradition that recognises that patriarchy is in many cases based on the sublimation of those female aspects within the male. As writer and academic Anthony Easthope explains “The masculine ego is so much more aggressive because it feels it must actively defend itself against its own divided sexuality,” which leads to the exaggerated displays of what are stereotyped as excessively masculine behaviour.

According to this scenario, encouraging the expression of the female aspects within men attacks fascist aggressive behaviour at its root cause. Which is why transvestites, Transformation TV and TV Changeways are dangerous.

“Transvestism is a gauge of tolerance,” writes Vasquez Montalban. TVs appear in public “like snails when the historical downpour abates. Transvestites act as prophets in times of radical political change. They train the public eye, showing people that appearance is ephemeral” (in Barcelona from Verso Books).

Robin Williams’ bosomy male heroine slots awkwardly into all this. He’s too close to the edge of parody and safe conformist ridicule to open up the dialogue. Its effect is to reinforce stereotypes rather than attack them.

It’s been done better.