Boys Don't Cry (Fox Searchlight Pictures, Independent Film Channel Productions, Killer Films, Hart Sharp Entertainment, 20th Century-Fox, 1999)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Saturday night, November 26, I watched a couple of intriguing films on Turner Classic Movies, including the 1999 Boys Don’t Cry, co-writen (with Andy Beinen) and directed by Kimberly Peirce, based on the real-life muirder of female-to-male Transgender person Brandon Teena (born Teena Brandon) in Falls City, Nebraska in 1993. Kimberly Peirce appeared on TCM along with regular host Ben Mankiewicz as part of their series in November showing films that were socially and culturally significant, and she had some interesting comments about the genesis of the film. Peirce said that when she originally proposed the project, it was going to be a Civil War-era story about a woman living as a man in order to survive (my husband Charles has run across a surprising number of those stories online). only her film professor suggested that she do a story set in the present day and dealing with a Transman who dressed as a male and assumed a masculine identity not as a survival strategy, but because they felt they were really a man. Just then the real-life story of Brandon Teena’s murder broke nationwide, and Peirce seized on it and developed a film around it. Peirce’s first notion was to get a real Trans person to play Brandon, but she couldn’t find anyone who could act well enough to sustain the movie, Eventually she cast Hilary Swank as Brandon, and Swank prepared for the role by living as a man for several weeks. When people who \knew her and her husband asked “him” who “he” was, she invented a non-existent brother and instructed her husband to tell people, “Oh, he’s my brother-in-law.” The film was shot on a miniscule budget, and though three other “executive producers” are listed in the credits, Peirce herself said the principal producer was Caroline Kaplan because she’d made movies before with first-time directors on low production budgets, and was very helpful in showing Peirce the ropes.

I first heard of Brandon Teena from a book called All She Wanted by Aphordite Jones – the book and film had nothing to do with each other except both were based on the same real-life events – and I read it for a short-lived Queer book club in San Diego in which one of the members was visibly upset that we were reading a book about a Trans person. He had the then-common belief among Gay men and Lesbians that Trans people weren’t “really” part of our community because most Trans people are romantically and sexually attracted to the gender other than the one they identify with and are therefore not “really” Gay or Lesbian. (Peirce herself told Ben Mankiewicz that when she started making Boys Don’t Cry she identified herself as a butch Lesbian, but after she made the movie she realized she was Trans – though she did not insist on “he” or “they” as her pronouns.) Later I smiled when this same individual made the motion to include Trans people in the mission statement of the San Diego Democrats for Equality, and I smiled at the thought that my calling him on his Transphobia way back when might have had something to do with that. Charles and I watched Boys Don’t Cry when it first came out on DVD and we both loved it, though this time around I was a bit bothered at first at how lumpen the characters were. Brandon himself was the product of a one-night stand and had no idea who his biological father was; his mom raised him as a single parent and had to scrounge for the money to support both of them. He created an elaborate fantasy about her family – including a brother who was a success in the music scene in Memphis, Tennessee and a sister who was a model and about to become an actress in Hollywood – and he made his living by forging checks and other low-level sorts of crime.

Brandon attracted a number of girlfriends; the most important one was Lana Tisdal (Chloë Sevigny, whom Peirce asked to audition for the role; told by her agent that Sevigny was above auditioning and if Peirce wanted her for the movie she had to guarantee the role, so she did and Sevigny turned in a fine performance as by far the most sympathetic character in the film), who dumped her rather boorish boyfriend John Lotter (Peter Sarsgaard) for Brandon. Not surprisingly, John was not happy about this, especially since he considered himself a butch man and God’s gift to women (or at least any woman he deigned to show interest in). John had already noticed something “off” about Brandon because he wouldn’t show his dick or take his shirt off, and he wouldn’t roughhouse with the other guys. Later he realizes that Brandon is really, at least biologically, a woman, and this of course angers him even more. He and his friend Tom Nissen (Brendan Sexton III) team up to assault and rape Brandon, and when Brandon surprisingly reports them to the police, they gang up on her again and this time shoot her. One of Perice’s most blatant departures from the real story was having Lana Tisdal present when Brandon is murdered; she wasn’t, and since the whole point for John and Tom in killing Brandon was to eliminate the witness against them on the rape charge. If Lana had been there John and Tom would have killed her too.

Boys Don’t Cry is a film that works on almost every level; Peirce and Beinen wrote a sensitive enough script that we care about Brandon despite the things we don’t like about him (like his life of petty crime), and the whole issue of sexuality is fairly depicted. We get to see a bit of Brandon making himself look suitably masculine, including wrapping his breasts with Ace bandages to mash them down, putting on men’s underwear and sticking something down their crotch to make it look like he has a dick. We also see him and Lana making love, and later during the rape scene Peirce’s direcdtion makes it clear that John ahd Tom are raping her anally to inflict the maximum amount of humiliatioin and both physical and psychological pain. Hilary Swank won the Academy Award for Best Performance by an Actress for her acting here, and she deserved it – though it’s a pity that Peirce couldn’t have found a real Transman to play the role – and the current obsession on the Republican Party and the far-Right in general with Trans people makes this film seem as groundbreaking now as it did 23 years ago when it first came out.