Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex: "From Birthday Suit to Shrouds" (1971)

This gentleman is neither in his birthday suit nor a shroud.

NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).

The article: "From Birthday Suit to Shrouds." Originally published in Flesh & Fantasy (Pendulum Publishing), vol. 4, no. 4, November/December 1971. Credited to Edward D. Wood, Jr.

Excerpt: "The broad minded employer knows he can get tremendously more work and more proficient work from such employees if they are happy in what they wear. The transvestite is a depressed creature when he is denied his expressions through dress. Of course the employers who are this broad minded are few and far between, but as time goes by and the sexual revolution really takes hold, there will be many more. One might be surprised at how many bankers, lawyers, doctors, etc., who are transvestites themselves."

Remember the heyday of fur coats?

Reflections: Drag performer RuPaul has famously declared, "We're born naked, and the rest is drag." I think Ed Wood would have agreed heartily with that statement. In the 1971 article "From Birthday Suit to Shrouds," he phrases it just slightly differently: "All of us to a man or woman are born into this world NAKED . . . yet when most of us die we are put to rest in clothes." Eddie might have thought more about clothing than any writer of his generation, male or female, and this article is basically his master's thesis on the topic.

A wide-ranging essay about the historical and sexual importance of clothing, "From Birthday Suit to Shrouds" is similar to many of Ed Wood's articles from the early 1970s. Once again, Eddie talks about the "sweater girls" of the 1940s and how the censors of the Hays office tried to ban them from movies so that American servicemen would not be overstimulated. Once again, Ed alludes to fetishists having certain "love objects," often items of clothing such as panties. Once again, Ed talks about how the "true transvestite" is likely to be heterosexual. Once again, he emphasizes how masturbation is integral to transvestism. This one article is like a roll call of his greatest hits.

So what stands out here? What makes "From Birthday Suit to Shrouds" different from the articles around it? Well, for one thing, Eddie somehow manages to incorporate one of his other major obsessions: death. The gloomy tone is set by the article's very title, which is strikingly similar to that of Ed's 1968 book Sex Shrouds and Caskets. Before Eddie even begins to discuss the sexual aspects of clothing—which he eventually does at great length—he goes off on a strange tangent about people being buried in their best clothes and how men used to have only one good suit that they wore on Sundays to church. Did the readers of Flesh & Fantasy want to consider their own mortality while reading a porno mag? If they read this article, they had no choice.

Another factor that distinguishes "From Birthday Suit to Shrouds" is its emphasis on fur fetishism. We're all familiar with Eddie's penchant for angora sweaters, but this time, he talks more about fur coats. He writes: "About the first thing a young girl thinks of once she becomes oriented that she is a girl and she must do things in girlish ways, is about acquiring a fur coat." This may be an odd statement from our modern point of view, since fur coats have long since fallen out of favor, especially among the young. However, I can still remember when these garments were coveted status symbols. For decades, it seemed like every wife on every TV sitcom was goading her husband into buying her a fur coat. Maybe the 1998 Seinfeld episode "The Reverse Peephole" finally killed the fur coat plot for good.

My own mother never owned a fur coat, but I remember other moms in our neighborhood getting them for anniversaries, birthdays, etc. And no Michigander who grew up in the 1970s and '80s can forget those ubiquitous ads for Dittrich Furs out of Detroit. Wonder what Eddie would have thought of them? I'm sure he'd have been utterly transfixed.

 

One last note, Eddie uses the term "osthresiolagnia" to describe a fetish in which "the odor [of leather or rubber] becomes important to the sex act." This term was unfamiliar to me, but it turns out to be a very real thing. Ed has slightly misspelled it, though. It's osphresiolagnia. Don't say Eddie never taught you anything. 

P.S. This is yet another article that I had already reviewed on my blog. I realize now that I got the title slightly wrong when I examined this story back in January 2020. In his infinite wisdom, Ed Wood chose to pluralize "shrouds" but not "birthday suit." Go figure.

Next: "Problems and the Sex Change" (1972)