Documentary explores trans roles in Hollywood
Portrayals of transgender people in movies and television are a vast and complex subject, but Netflix’s new documentary “Disclosure” does an admirable job of covering many issues and contradictions that a century of mostly insensitive screen depictions have raised.
Director Sam Feder (“Kate Bornstein Is a Queer & Pleasant Danger”) may have overlooked a few things — and one might wish certain tropes and concepts received the same lengthy discussions that others do — yet still, “Disclosure” feels epic. The film, which premieres Friday, June 19, ahead of San Francisco Pride, impresses not only with its many wellchosen film and TV clips but also with the keen cultural/political intelligence, and equally stirring emotional revelations, of its deeply engaged commentators.
Among the lineup of creatives, critics and scholars
Feder brought to the project are actressproducer Jen Richards, Emmywinning director Yance Ford and journalist Tre’vell Anderson. They’re all transgender and equipped with sharp social and aesthetic insights. Best of all, they share moving personal anecdotes about how they’ve been affected by what they’ve seen, inside themselves and in the world.
Laverne Cox, the breakout star of “Orange Is the New Black” and an executive producer of “Disclosure,” reveals how as an African American child in Alabama, she would discreetly lean in to shows with sex change plotlines. Watching Milton Berle do his klutzy drag burlesque, though, made her hate everything trans about herself.
As actresswriter Bianca Leigh notes about Hollywood’s tendency, since the early silent movie days, trans characters are usually brought on for almost invariably demeaning laughs: “Trans jokes?
Really? Most of us have a good sense of humor. We’ve had to have a good sense of humor. But we don’t want to be the butt of jokes.”
Trans actors, they point out, also don’t appreciate being the character that gets killed by some raging transphobe in cop shows, or that die like clockwork on medical dramas. (One trans actress didn’t even realize she’d booked two characters with fatal cancers on the same day until she arrived on the sets.)
Then, of course, there have been decades of demented, transidentified killers in movies, something to keep in mind if you’re celebrating the 60th anniversary of the release of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film “Psycho” this week.
And how are transgender viewers supposed to process what they see in such basedonatruestory films as “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Boys Don’t Cry,” which altered or erased entire individuals from the actual events?
Whitewashing or misrepresentations of marginalized people of color, the relative lack of transgender men in media, differing opinions within the queer community about gender reassignment and assimilation — all are examined, and they’re just a fraction of the angles “Disclosure” tackles. That includes disclosure itself, in terms of why the revelation of one’s gender is considered such a crucial, dramatic plot point in movies like “The Crying Game” and “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.”
Still, though anger and hurt flow throughout the documentary, there’s also delight. Chaz Bono, born to superstars Cher and Sonny Bono as Chastity, admits he’s a lousy dancer but felt he had to go on “Dancing With the Stars” for the good of the trans community’s mainstream exposure.
And “Disclosure” acknowledges the transgender community’s strides in Hollywood, which is improving, and bringing hope, with transmade hits such as “Pose” presenting honest stories. But like this week — when Gay Pride Month and Black Lives Matter demonstrations came together, the Trump administration weakened trans health care protections and the Supreme Court protected LGTBQ workers’ rights — mainstream media is probably at a twostepsforward, onestepback stage as far as transgender people are concerned.
At least that’s better than the other way around, which it had been for so long.