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| This is like a cubist version of the Glen or Glenda poster artwork. |
NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).
The article: "Problems and the Sex Change." Originally published in Ecstasy (Pendulum Publishing), vol. 4, no. 1, February/March 1972.
Excerpt: "The male nose has always been more prominent than most females. Therefore the transsexual who wishes to have the complete features of the female will also find that plastic surgery to the proboscis is all important. The ears follow a close second. The male has always had larger and stronger looking ears. We find that in nearly all of the transsexuals, no matter how effeminate he might be the ears are a stand out along with the Adams apple."
Reflections: In Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994), there's a scene in which producer George Weiss (Mike Starr) complains to Eddie (Johnny Depp) that the much-touted sex change operation in Glen or Glenda only occurs "five pages before it ends." He adds, huffily: "The rest is about some schmuck who likes angora sweaters!" Ed's weak rejoinder: "I don't think he's a schmuck!"
I've never actually seen the Glen or Glenda screenplay, so I can't do an exact page count. By my calculations, however, the sequence involving Alan/Ann ("Tommy" Haynes), the male-to-female transsexual, occurs about 80% of the way through the movie. This is significant, since Glen or Glenda's entire reason for existing was to cash in on the Christine Jorgensen sex change story. Audiences had to wait for nearly an hour to get to this part of the film.
When this sequence finally arrives, it focuses with grim intensity on the ordeal that Alan went through to become Ann. Dr. Alton (Timothy Farrell) tells us about the emotional agony Alan suffered as a child, shunned by both his classmates and his own father (Captain DeZita). Once Alan was drafted, he had to hide his cross-dressing from his fellow soldiers. Eventually, he learned about sex change operations and decided to have one himself. But this is no easy way out, as Dr. Alton explains:
During the following two years, he was to go through the tortures of the damned, but never was there a whimper from him because he knew that at the end of it all, he would at last be that which he had always dreamed. Hundreds of hormone shots were injected into various parts of his body. Alan's face was worked on with plastic surgery to smooth out the female elements... long, tedious hours of work. The big day... or the starting of many big days, for it was to take many. The series of operations are performed, slowly and at intervals, to prevent any unnecessary shock to the nervous system. Still, the hormone shots continue... day after day, week after week, month after month, and even then, when the operation is over, the sex is changed, the shots must continue as long as Alan lives.
And that's just the medical part of it! Ann had to learn how to do her own makeup and hair. She also had to learn "the duty of a woman in her sex life." It sounds grueling, but Dr. Alton insists that Ann "loved every minute of it." Okay, doc, if you say so.
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| Reading material for Ed Wood. |
Ed Wood's 1972 article "Problems and the Sex Change" is very much in this same vein. Twenty years had elapsed since George William Jorgensen, Jr. became Christine Jorgensen, but male-to-female transsexuals still faced a series of medical, emotional, societal, and even legal hurdles. Eddie wants us to know—really wants us to know—that it's not all "peaches and cream" for the Christines of the world.
In this story, Ed revisits many of the same tribulations he'd mentioned in Glen or Glenda, including those hormone injections and the need for plastic surgery, but he adds a few more. Silicone, for instance, may cause cancer. Surgically-constructed vaginas may grow together "which would mean another very painful operation." Then, there is the legal hassle of being recognized by the government as a female. Even once you get past all those hurdles, there is the possibility that orgasms will either be nonexistent or extremely uncomfortable. Ed further alleges that transsexuals are not supportive of one another. "So many are jealous of their sisters under the knife ever becoming their equal," he writes. Doesn't exactly make you want to run to your surgeon, does it?
Throughout "Problems and the Sex Change," Eddie repeatedly cites the 1966 book Sex-Driven People by R.E.L. Masters. I was not familiar with this book or its author, so I knew I had to find out more. As it turns out, Robert E.L. Masters (1927-2008) was a prolific sexologist of the 1960s and 1970s whose books include The Homosexual Revolution (1962), Patterns of Incest (1963), Sexual Self-Stimulation (1967), and Eros and Evil: The Sexual Psychopathology of Witchcraft (1974). He is not to be confused with gynecologist William H. Masters (1915-2001), though both Masters were influences on Ed Wood.
Here's another obituary for Robert Masters. It doesn't mention Sex-Driven People specifically, but it does say he "published eight books in the field of sexology and natural history which became classics in their field." It also mentions his friendship with Elvis Presley and the fact that one of his books inspired a John Lennon song. (And this story checks out!)
Ed Wood concludes this article on what I guess could be called a note of hope:
So many who have had the operation have looked to the hopeful in the angora sweater and skirt and said, "What makes you really think you want to be a girl? You've got to be sure you know. I mean. Not everyone that I've met really want to go through with the operation like I did. After all. The psychiatrists told me for sure that I was the right type. That's the key word you know girl, you've got to be the right type." Then she might flip her own skirt and sip her martini. She'd made the scene.
I'm not exactly sure what any of that means, but I'd like to congratulate Eddie on managing to work two of his loves, angora sweaters and martinis, into this article at the last possible opportunity. A buzzer-beater, so to speak.
Next: "Indecent Exposure" (1971)