“My Gender is Tender”

Jackie Curtis said this, half ironic, half provocative, in a filmed interview made by Andy Warhol. Thirty years ago, Curtis was an early, quite incandescent transgender figure: Warhol's star, a liminal beauty, a poet, an artist, a gifted playwright. And as he himself wryly observed, he was on his way to the inevitable signature Warholian superstar manifestation-early death from drugs. He died at 38 in 1985. Curtis also appears in an experimental film on the work of Wilhelm Reich called Mysteries of the Organism, and he walks through that film manifesting, indeed insisting on, enigma and uncodability.

He had an interesting lineage, growing up in his grandmother's saloon. A famous bar in the 1950s, Slugger Ann's was one of those icons of a now long lost bohemian New York world. Curtis was always at home on the edge. A girl and a boy, a girl in a boy, a boy in a girl. “I'm not a boy, not a girl,” Curtis maintained. “I am not gay, I am not straight, I am not a drag queen, I am not a transvestite.” In 1976, the year of the interview, his gender may be tender, but it is also defiantly set against intelligibility.

In the mid-1980s, eerily and perhaps ironically as Jackie Curtis is destroyed by heroin and perhaps also by outsiderness mixed with celebrity, a young 11-year-old in Tarnation, Texas, turns on a camcorder in his bedroom, and, wearing a kerchief and blouse, looks into the camera and in a strong southern drawl begins a monolog in which he, as a young girl, recounts rape, assault, and finally vengeance.

We know this because that 11-year-old grows up to be a filmmaker and, at 25, Jonathan Caouette puts this childhood memory/artifact in his autobiographical documentary Tarnation, made in 2005. Tarnation is a memoir, an experimental documentary film drawing from home movies, still photos, and personal videocam filming done over the filmmaker's childhood.

I will return to a discussion of this potent film text and the young Jonathan's use of trans and drag in a moment of sel