The Automatik

Boys Don’t Cry
It would be crass and unfair of me to create some clever tag line for this movie and this subject. The tragic history of Brandon Teena and in fact, of many transgender people, is too serious to treat with a wry, pop-culture quip. I have always been sympathetic towards gender role issues, particularly those revolving around homosexuality and bisexuality. But like a majority of people in the world, I never consciously grasped the huge burden that many homosexuals, bisexuals, and transsexuals must bear. There was a guy I knew once, when I was a teenager and too naive to understand, who was a miserable gay man and wanted desperately to be a woman. In the end, he killed himself because he couldn’t stand living in the body and identity with which he was born.

Never was the reason behind his suicide more clear than after I saw Boys Don’t Cry. Anyone who knows me well knows that I am a hugely emotional person who cries easily and often. When I say, however, that I have never wept more sorrowfully during a film than I did during this one, it should not be seen as anything less than the utmost validation for the capacity of the movie to puncture right through to the marrow. Countless movies have been churned out about shocking acts of violence in small towns, but more often than not the actors are gorgeous creatures with flawless diction or hacks with ugly clothes and bad accents. The latter tends to leave one with the feeling that an episode of Jerry Springer might be more emotionally resonant. Boys Don’t Cry didn’t pretty up the characters or the scenery to make a hyper-emotional point. Brandon Teena was a petty thief, Lana Tisdel worked in a dead-end factory job and neither’s family life was ideal. The squalor of their environment only made the tenderness between Lana and Brandon that much more touching, no matter what their genders were.

I know it is difficult for many people to deal with masculine-looking women, much less men in makeup, regardless of their sexual orientation. Yet the freedom to love someone in the physical and emotional raiment in which you are most comfortable is one of the most significant freedoms that a person can have, and one that many who are comfortable in their skins may take for granted. It isn’t about being gay or straight; it is about aligning your self-perception with how the world sees you, how you live your life as a human being. The ultimate horror of Brandon’s story was that it was a human being whose life was degraded and then stolen.

Why should there be such battle lines drawn between straight culture and gay culture or transgender culture or more specifically, between the male and female genders? I do not agree with those who believe in equality at any cost because the genders are different. On the other hand, if we continue to tolerate a culture of “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus,” true gender equality will never exist. Perhaps a more desirable world is one in which gender lines are softer and more blurred so that the Us versus Them mentality that causes so much pain and suffering would eventually become nothing more than a bad memory.