20 Years On: The Complicated Legacy Of BOYS DON’T CRY

My hands were trembling as I approached the counter. I was 17, video stores were still the place you got movies, and I was paranoid that the closet doors holding back my crush on my best friend and my discomfort with my body would be blown open simply by renting Boys Don’t Cry. I did it anyway, scurrying away from what I imagined were prying eyes from the clerk (who probably didn’t give me a second thought) to watch this queer classic in the privacy of my room.

The movie was nothing short of a revelation, on par with Natalie Imbruglia making me feel a certain way in her Torn music video and the first time I slipped on my brother’s suit and pretended to be James Bond. To be clear, I’m not trans like Brandon Teena was, but I wanted his swaggering masculinity and understood precisely why the camera basked in Lana’s presence (if you’re alarmed that a cis lesbian so identified with the movie’s version of Brandon, well, we’ll get to that).

The whole thing was aspirational until its bitter end, when the rape and murder of Brandon by former friends John Lotter and Tom Nissen had to be addressed and the crux of this biopic solidified. It was a blow that fit right in with the message I was getting from other media and from my own life: that my feelings were dangerous, that harm would come from them, but this depiction was so vivid that it lodged, for better or worse, deep in my brain.

So it’s fair to say that I’m not impartial in my feelings towards Boys Don’t Cry. Grappling with the effect it’s had on my life is a labyrinthine and ever-changing task, and it’s only a small reflection of the jumbled mess its place in film history has become.

Adored upon release, whisked up as the little picture that could during awards season, minutely dissected by scholars, and eventually coming under vocal criticism for concerns that had initially been glossed over, the film has endured some whiplash-inducing ups and downs in the twenty years since its release, and like all trailblazers, it seems doomed to be evaluated based as much on the changing needs of culture as by the quality of the filmmaking itself.

Interpreting The Truth About Brandon

Picking up the news story of a Nebraskan trans man who was the victim of brutal hate crimes in 1993, Boys Don’t Cry came out long after many viewers would’ve heard the basics in national newspapers. What the average viewer (and from reading through reviews, the average film critic as well) wasn’t aware of was the fight over Brandon’s story that had been raging for years.

Mainstream publications of the time unsurprisingly struggled with pronouns and to get a grasp on what went down in the small town. Reporting from the time was filled with misgendering and sensationalism, but what might surprise you is that these problems extended to queer media as well.

If you’ve heard anything about this, it’s probably the 2018 apology/redo from Donna Minkowitz in The Village Voice, a piece where she cogently admits the faults in her initial reporting of Brandon’s case. Through language that downplayed his identity as a trans man and projected Minkowitz’s (a cis queer woman) own experiences onto Brandon, the article inadvertently reflected the ignorance and antagonism that has existed between trans men and lesbians, furthering confusion about how Brandon thought of himself and would be presented going forward.

Minkowitz admits in the article that she got push-back from trans activists as soon as it came out, who were mobilized after the death of Brandon in a way they hadn’t been before. Still, the larger queer community were just as eager to make him a flashpoint for the violence the community as a whole experienced, and like so many times before, trans voices were pushed to the side and the story was largely filtered through other members of the queer community.

Shu Lea Cheang would bring internet art to the Guggenheim Museum with Brandon (which you can still see here), Susan Muska and Gréta Olafsdóttir won festival awards around the world with their documentary The Brandon Teena Story, and Kimberly Peirce would co-write and direct Boys Don’t Cry. All approached Brandon’s story with great skill, intelligence, and empathy, but none identify as trans.

This has become more of a sticking point in recent years, as people have rightly pointed out that excluding trans voices from trans stories have resulted in blindspots, inaccuracies, and more than a hint of voyeurism. When it comes to Brandon, much of this criticism has fallen on Peirce for making the most wide-reaching interpretation of his story and for casting Hilary Swank instead of a trans actor.

Things got nasty at Reed College in 2016 when Peirce was brought in for a screening/Q&A of the seminal film. Students protested, hanging signs like “f*ck your transphobia” and “f*ck this cis white bitch”, a display that brought much-needed attention but (in my opinion at least) was a misaimed attack.

I don’t read Peirce as having any malicious intent with Boys Don’t Cry and so don’t think she deserves personal attacks. It’s true she cast Swank, and it’s true that even then people were pushing for trans actors to play trans characters. What gets glossed over is that she did try. She spent years casting the part, including seeing trans actors, and Swank was the only person that popped. The overwhelming praise and Oscar for her performance, and the fact that much of Brandon’s determined, dreamer qualities overlaps with the character Swank won a second Oscar for, backs up Peirce’s eye. Honestly, I don’t think Swank‘s casting is the most concerning aspect of Boys Don’t Cry. I’m more alarmed with the perspective issues and the preoccupation with Brandon’s body that perhaps would not have appeared/been emphasized if a different filmmaker had been at the helm.

Peirce has long referenced Minkowitz’s botched article as inspiration, and like its abrupt shifts in the treatment of Brandon’s identity, the ending of Boys Don’t Cry sees Peirce suddenly veer away from showing Brandon as he apparently saw himself and brings his pre-op body to the fore. We get lingering shower shots, a conversation where he’s cagey about describing himself as a man, and a sex scene post-rape that is bizarre on a number of levels, in no small part because it is talked about by the characters as if it’s suddenly lesbian sex.

This isn’t how Brandon’s identity was handled earlier in the film. When he gets his period it’s an upsetting but brief blip, with his identity quickly reasserted by getting a very high Lana home in the most gentlemanly way possible. And when Lana catches a glimpse of binding during sex, care is taken to show how she glossed over it in her mind, so entrenched was he as a man that it didn’t shake her.

The film, in the end, comes off a bit unsure about Brandon’s identity, not in an overwhelming way nor in a way that can be chalked up to a disingenuous director. The film is as rooted in its time as any, and the battle over who Brandon was, without his input, was still being waged between factions of the queer community that didn’t entirely understand each other. In a way, the confusion this led to onscreen let me, a cisgender but very masculine leaning woman who squirms when asked to pin down my gender, to identify with its version of Brandon even more. But that doesn’t make it right.

The Positioning Of Masculinity

If Boys Don’t Cry’s grasp on Brandon’s identity isn’t laser focused, what does hold up is its portrayal of his masculinity, cutting a path that has been praised over and again while rarely being matched.

In his review of the film, Roger Ebert pointed out that it plays like a tragic romance, picking up on Peirce’s stated desire to make the film more than just a recitation of events. She took great liberty with reality, mixing the crux of Brandon’s story with influences as wide-ranging as John Cassavettes, The Wizard of Oz, and Raging Bull’s Jake LaMotta. What came out was a film embedded with so many tried and true cues that even casual filmgoers effortlessly pick up on the meaning of its highway motif, Brandon’s bad boy appeal, and the love triangle that cannot have an easy resolution.

At the center of this triangle is Lana, played by Chloë Sevigny as exactly the magnet she needs to be. I could go off on a whole tangent about the way Peirce and cinematographer Jim Denault introduce her, the way they blend fantasy and reality to capture the optimistic fervor of falling in love, but that’s really beside the point (but also, holy crap is it a perfect example of how good Peirce’s filmmaking is here).

What’s the real source of danger in the film is the squaring off of John and Brandon, and Peirce couches their competition for Lana as a competition of masculinity. From his affectionately given nickname “little man” to his constant displays of dominance, the running thread of John’s insecurity with himself and Brandon’s encroaching importance in Lana’s life was initially downplayed upon the film’s release, but as more and more writing has illuminated how Brandon is positioned as the masculine ideal in the film, it inevitably brings up the failings of his rival.

Peter Sarsgaard is flat out amazing as John, with his sad eyes and jittery boredom reflecting the failure his life has become. He’s already been to jail, seemingly has no job, and wiles away his time drinking no matter the hour. What he has to offer Lana is their shared history. What Brandon offers is a future.

Coming into town spouting plans for Memphis and doing little favors for all the ladies in his newfound family, Brandon seems like the kind of dependable, attentive man all of them are searching for. Never mind that his aspirations are made up on the fly or that his gifts are stolen (the movie isn’t so clichéd that it makes him a saint), the point is that he pays attention to and lifts up the women around him, a stark contrast to the way John belittles and dominates them in order to assert his own frail masculinity.

Peirce was working from an almost non-existent history of trans men on film, with the few examples of trans characters before and after Boys Don’t Cry predominantly being trans women. That we so eloquently got a portrait of a trans man with, if not an entirely healthy relationship to his masculinity, definitely the most secure of the men around him is a minor miracle, and one that you would hope would be built on by latter films.

Unfortunately, developments on this have mostly stalled, with the only subsequent example of anything similar I can think of being the highly controversial recent release Adam, which Oliver Whitney has broken down and defended much more eloquently than I proved capable (see his reporting for Vulture on the debate and his review of the film for Vanity Fair). A shame, then, that arguably Boys Don’t Cry’s strongest contribution to film history remains an anomaly.

Building A Martyr

No matter how much Peirce wanted to play with Brandon’s story, the crux still needed to be the hatred and murder that propelled him to the national stage. His death, out of the numerous murders of trans people that have and continue to occur, had been raised up as a symbol, and Peirce was incredibly successful at isolating the parts of his story that made it so resonant. That also left a lot by the wayside, and any time you start looking at what got cut from this kind of movie you will find the difficult complications that a filmmaker wasn’t able or willing to contend with.

The long cited and most troubling thing dropped from Brandon’s story is Phillip DeVine, a black man who used a prosthetic leg who was shot and killed along with Brandon and Lisa Lambert. Lambert had temporarily taken him in just as she had done with Brandon (although for entirely different reasons), and while Lotter and Nissen allegedly killed these two solely to eliminate witnesses, it’s near impossible to imagine that a black character wouldn’t add layers to a story about the insecurities and hatred festering in rural, lower class American communities.

Peirce acknowledges as much, having long defended her exclusion of DeVine from Boys Don’t Cry for the sake of time and a clean narrative. In essence, she’s stating that her story is about Brandon and the beautiful and tragic aspects of his life as a trans man in rural America, something the raucous praise for the film, even from people with little knowledge of a life like his, can attest that she pulled off.

You should rightly be asking how one can examine violence against trans people without addressing race, as any crunch of the numbers shows that it disproportionately affects trans women of color. And yes, you can argue that Brandon simply wasn’t a person of color, making it irrelevant to this particular story. That’s skirting, though, the very question Peirce had to answer in making Boys Don’t Cry a success: what was it about Brandon that made his story emblematic and affecting?

He was, by all accounts, an incredibly charming guy, and charming works like gangbusters onscreen. Swank got that aspect of him down pat, used that to connect to the audience, and rode it straight to an Oscar. That Oscar cemented a place for the film, meant people would go back to it for evaluation, and that it would be available to me in some rental store in middle America years after its release.

You know what also helps that kind of appeal? Whiteness, able-bodiedness, hell even strong masculinity are all comfortably familiar traits for characters in film, and for a movie already trying to get an audience to connect with a trans character in a way many had never have done before, adding in other layers to consider may have been too much.

In a way, what I’m saying is that Peirce wasn’t wrong; the exclusion of DeVine does focus the story and allow her to meticulously build Brandon into a character audiences far and wide would accept and love (a hilariously idiosyncratic but telling aspect of this is her constant talk on the DVD commentary about song choice and how long she held off having a female vocalist, thinking that associating male vocalists with Brandon would reinforce his identity as a man).

And you can’t dismiss the fact that Brandon had been raised up as a martyr before Peirce ever made a movie about him. The very aspects of him she sold in Boys Don’t Cry are likely what made him rise in the first place because American film’s affinity for white, able-bodied men comes from the culture’s affinity for them, and that made his story easier to sell no matter the medium.

Carrying The Load

You could go on for days, weeks, even years breaking down the successes and failures of Boys Don’t Cry, and people have been doing just that because it’s still one of the few films of its size and success to have centered on a trans man. That’s why so much has been written about it, why it was played at Reed College in 2016, why it holds such a prominent place in my head, and what is ultimately its downfall.

Any film that must be continuously referenced and examined because it’s one of the few of its kind will become a target for critique, and unless there’s room in the cinema landscape for other films to build on and respond to it, then it will be bombarded by a changing culture that its legacy can never interact with.

As Alonso Duralde said in his review of the groundbreaking mainstream queer film Love, Simon:

“Queer pundits will no doubt take “Love, Simon” to task for being too white, too cisgender, too heteronormative. And they won’t be wrong. But even if this is “Call Me By Your Name” through the lens of the Disney Channel, there’s a place in the culture for adolescent gay kids to enjoy the shiny, shallow, pop-song-infused coming-of-age stories that their straight peers consume on a daily basis. The first one out of the gate always plays it safe; the trick now is to keep the gate open.”

Queer pundits did take Love, Simon to task, and they’ll continue to pile on more critiques if that gate isn’t kept open. The gate wasn’t kept open after Boys Don’t Cry, and that pretty much sealed its fate.

What do you think of Boys Don’t Cry? How do you think its legacy has changed?