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| Is this Ed Wood book from 1973 worth your time in 2025? |
Ed Wood wrote many (!) books between 1963 and 1977, both fiction and nonfiction, but very few of them are in print and readily available to the public today. Despite (or maybe because of) this scarcity, interest in Ed's written work remains high among fans. Dedicated Woodologists still want to study these forbidden volumes, especially after they've read Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992), which contains a lengthy and detailed bibliography section, complete with tantalizing cover art and lurid quotes from the original paperbacks. Subsequent books like Muddled Mind: The Complete Works of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (2001) and Ed Wood's Sleaze Paperbacks (2013) have also focused on Ed's colorful and prolific writing career.
This has created a strangely persistent gray market on sites like Amazon and Ebay. Independent, small-time publishers with no legal claim to Ed Wood whatsoever will boldly put out their own editions of Eddie's books. The prices for such reissues, although not necessarily cheap, are substantially less than you'd pay for actual vintage paperbacks from the 1960s and '70s. The estate of Kathy Wood, Ed's widow, has tried to put a stop to this practice, but it's like a never-ending game of Whack-A-Mole. You knock one down, and another has already popped up.
By far, the most ambitious attempt to get Ed Wood's books back in print came from a company called Ramble House in the early 2000s. They released a whole series of "Woodpile Press" volumes, with each one containing the text from two (sometimes three) of Ed's paperbacks. These reissues did not include the pornographic photographs from the original paperbacks, but they thoughtfully retained the photo captions that Ed had written for them. Unfortunately, Ramble House had no legal right to these works, and the company agreed to stop publishing the "Woodpile Press" books when Kathy Wood's estate complained.
Short-lived though they were, the Ramble House reissues have had a surprisingly long-lasting effect on the Wood fan community. For many Woodites, these latter-day editions have been the only way of accessing Ed's books from the 1960s and '70s, since the originals now fetch outrageous prices on the secondary market. And some current-day bootleggers are still blatantly cannibalizing those Ramble House volumes from twenty years ago.
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| A bootleg edition of Ed's book. |
I'll give you a case in point. A reader named Leonard Johnson contacted me recently to say he was cleaning out his place and getting rid of some books he didn't need, including a copy of Ed Wood's Diary of a Transvestite Hooker (1973). "This is the crappy bootleg edition that someone's been selling on Amazon," he clarified, "not the original." He asked if I wanted it anyway. Obviously, I said yes. When the book arrived in my mailbox a few days ago, I saw immediately that the text and the formatting had been cut-and-pasted directly from the Ramble House edition, including those photo-less photo captions I mentioned earlier. But Ramble House's version contained the text of an entire second book, Ed's final (?) novel TV Lust (1977), and this Amazon edition didn't! That's shrinkflation for you.
Still in all, receiving this book in the mail caused me to spend some quality time with Diary of a Transvestite Hooker. I'd skimmed my way through the text previously in PDF form, but it hadn't made much of an impression on me. The book rehashes numerous themes and plot elements from other Ed Wood books and articles, namely cross-dressing and prostitution, so I didn't give it a great deal of thought. Maybe having an actual physical edition in my hands, even a bootleg, made me pay attention to one of the more neglected titles in the Wood bibliography.
So what do we have here? Well, this Eros Goldstripe paperback is dubiously attributed to "Randy, as told to Dick Trent." Mr. Trent, we already know well from numerous other books and articles. As for Randy, he's a young man who moves to Los Angeles to break into the motion picture business. He has no luck in that department, however, and soon finds himself unemployed and in desperate need of money. He more or less falls into the prostitution business, but as an avid cross-dresser, he considers himself a "specialist" in his profession. Along the way, Randy gains and then loses a pimp named Arthur. At least I think so. The book is kind of inconsistent about whether Randy and Arthur are still in business together by the end.
Despite its title, Diary of a Transvestite Hooker—misidentified as Death of a Transvestite Hooker in Nightmare of Ecstasy—is not formatted as a diary at all. It's more like a memoir. Since Randy is describing his exploits to author Dick Trent, does that mean this book should be counted as one of Ed's nonfiction efforts? That's debatable. Randy is purely imaginary, as are his adventures in Hollywood, so at best this book is fictional nonfiction. There are long passages of Diary of a Transvestite Hooker that read like chapters of an Ed Wood novel. If you want to classify this book as a novel, I wouldn't disagree.
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| A fun guy: Judge Morris Schwalb. |
Elsewhere in the book, the narrator starts discussing the sexual practices of Japan, including its notorious geisha houses. I rolled my eyes a little when I got to this part, because Eddie already wrote about this subject extensively in the book Drag Trade (1967) and the article "Japan—Sex and Today" (1972). I really didn't need a third tour of Japan. I suppose Eddie needed to pad the word count for Diary of a Transvestite Hooker and did so by recycling some material he'd already written for other publishers. You could argue that these parts of the book nudge Diary in the direction of nonfiction. Again, I wouldn't disagree.
At the heart of the book, however, are the passages in which Randy describes his various experiences in the gay prostitution trade, sometimes as a streetwalker, other times as a high-end "call boy." These are the most novelistic parts of Diary of a Transvestite Hooker and the most engaging as well. Not that Randy is an especially complicated or compelling character in the Ed Wood canon. Life just sort of happens to him, and he flatly accepts it without a great deal of introspection.
Some of Ed Wood's literary protagonists can become quite philosophical and dreamy in their narration. Others regale us with long, involved flashbacks to their childhood. Not Randy. He's very matter-of-fact and unemotional in describing his wild life to Dick Trent, almost like that masked criminal from the 1950s whose shockingly blasé interview went viral on the internet a few years ago. You barely get the sense that Randy has a past, a future, or an inner life. We do learn that he has a fetish for angora, despises male attire (especially jockey shorts), and adopts the professional pseudonym "Shirley," but this is all well-worn territory for Ed Wood fans.
Randy may not be all that interesting, but some of his adventures definitely are. One night, for instance, he's hired by a butch, overweight lesbian named Lydia. Now, what could a stereotypical "bull dyke" possibly want with a transvestite prostitute like Randy? Well, it seems she's fallen in love with a man named Andy but has never made love to a male in her life. Randy possesses all the proper biological equipment of a man—in fact, he's very generously endowed—but still looks like the female lovers that Lydia is used to. Get it? In another story, Arthur sends Randy to be the entertainment at a private party held by a wealthy man in a remote mansion. (What is it with Ed Wood and these secluded sex parties?) Everything is going well until the host decides to screen some gay porn films and finds, to his horror, that Randy stars in one of them! This is treated as a major social faux pas, and Randy is quickly shown the door.
Then there is the incident that serves as the book's climax. Perhaps a little context is needed here. Throughout Diary of a Transvestite Hooker, Ed Wood focuses on the economic hierarchy of the prostitution field, and he makes clear distinctions between call girls, streetwalkers, and fleabag whores. This is a topic he's revisited over and over in his writing, and it absolutely dominates this book. Randy thinks of little else. By the conclusion of the book, he's come down just a little in the hooker trade and has returned to the life of a common streetwalker. An undercover cop tries to nab him, but Randy knocks him unconscious and runs away, mistakenly thinking he's killed the man. Ed writes:
And I slammed out with both hands to the man’s chest and jaw knocking him back against the wall where he hit his head and slid down to the sidewalk where once more his head hit the cement ... and the blood started rivering ... he would not die ... but I would run ... and run ... and run ... and think I had killed the young vice squad cop ... and run ... and run ... and run ... into infinity ....
This is remarkably similar to an incident described in Jake LaMotta's remarkably candid (read: damning) autobiography, Raging Bull (1970), though I doubt Eddie was aware of it. Jake apparently spent much of his life thinking he'd killed a man in his youth, only to be surprised when that very man appeared alive and well in front of him years after the fact.