The Christine Jorgensen Story (Edward Small Productions, EdProd Pictures, United Artists, 1970)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, November 24), as part of a month-long salute on Turner Classic Movies about Trans images in film, TCM showed the rather strange and fascinating 1970 film The Christine Jorgensen Story. Christine Jorgensen (played in the movie as a boy by Trent Lehman and as an adult by John Hansen) was born George Jorgensen, Jr. in the Bronx, New York City. His father, George William Jorgensen (John W. Himes), was a construction worker and expected George, Jr. to follow in his footsteps, especially since he and his wife Florence (Ellen Clark) had already had a daughter, Dolly (Pamelyn Ferden as a child, Lynn Harper as an adult), and he was looking forward to a son. Alas, as a boy young George, Jr. gravitated to playing with his sister’s dolls and, in one flashback scene, wearing one of his sister’s dresses and putting on their mother’s lipstick (wretchedly). When he builds a crooked toy building with his Erector set (I remember Erector sets from my own childhood; they were essentially the Legos of their time) and the other guests at his family’s Christmas party make fun of it, he smashes it to smithereens. When he tries to play football with the other local boys – something he’s drafted to do when he’d rather play jump-rope with the girls – he catches the ball but then immediately drops it, and the boys bully him and call him “Georgette.” When George, Jr. is drafted into the Army during World War II – again, something he was drafted for – he washes out of basic training and is told he’ll fight his war stateside in offices. There’s also a flashback scene late in the movie (this film has more flashbacks than anything since Citizen Kane) in which George and his army buddies go out to a whorehouse, only George is unable to perform sexually with Angela (Sondra Scott), the prostitute he draws (who’s so sleazy she’s a rotten advertisement for heterosexuality anyway),and as he apologizes to her she takes his failure as a personal and professional insult. (This scene reminded me of a story I heard from a Gay man who’d been in the Navy and had been stationed in the Philippines when he got in a similar challenge from his sailor buddies. But the way he told his story, he spent the requisite amount of time with his hooker without doing anything, and she was grateful for the momentary rest.)

After the war George gets a job as a fashion photographer for advertising agencies and he turns out to be quite good at it, only his job ends abruptly on a beachfront shoot when one of the female models, Loretta (Elaine Joyce), questions his masculinity. George has already started to pack his bags and head back to New York when his boss, Jess Warner (Rod McCary), intervenes and tries to talk him into staying. Alas, he does much more than that; though we’ve previously seen him with a woman, his overtures to George had so much the air of Gay cruising about them that we’re not at all surprised when Jess tries to rape him. George flees with his virginity intact but then heads to the wharf and contemplates suicide. He’s talked out of it by the other model on the shoot, the more sympathetic Tani (Joyce Meadows), but he spends the next few months of his life reading every sexology book he can get his hands on from the New York Public Library. He knows he’s not a straight man and not a Gay man either, but just what he is eludes him until he reads a book by doctor and researcher Professor Estabrook (Will Kuluva) called Man and His Glands. Professor Estabrook has developed a theory that humans’ behavior is determined by their glands, and he’s astonished that young George attends all his lectures, reads all his books and journal articles, and is genuinely interested in his theories while his colleagues scoff at him. Estabrook draws a sample of George’s blood, he has it tested, and he finds that George’s blood contains a high concentration of the female hormone estrogen, equivalent to the normal amount for a woman but not a man. Estabrook tells George that American laws prohibit gender-reassignment operations in the United States but there’s a doctor in Denmark, Victor Dahlmann (Oscar Beregi, Jr.), who’s interested in performing one if he can find the right patient. Since the Jorgensen family’s ancestral home was Denmark, it’s relatively easy for George to arrange a trip there under the guise of visiting relatives and (at least in the movie) signing on to do a photo essay of Denmark’s famous landmarks. George settles in Copenhagen and stays with his Aunt Thora Petersen (Joan Tompkins). He sees a photo of a teenage blonde woman and asks Aunt Thora who that was. “My daughter,” he says. “I didn’t know you were ever married!” George exclaims. “I wasn’t,” she says, adding that the girl died in her teens.

George comes out to Aunt Thora and tells her the real reason he’s in Copenhagen. He gets in touch with Dr. Dahlmann and is ready to sign the consent form for the operation immediately even though Dahlmann tries to explain just how complicated the procedure will be and the potential risks. (One irony is that George can’t read the form because it’s printed in Danish, though Dr. Dahlmann’s later case notes on him are in English so the audience can understand them.) Then we get several minutes of medical porn as we’re treated to close-in shots of the surgery in progress, not enough to create problems with the motion picture ratings code – though after all the surgeries are finished we get some nice shots of John Hansen’s chest as we’re told the breasts are expanding because of all the estrogen he’s taking. (One of the original researchers on the birth control pill likewise grew a set of breasts from the female hormones he was working with, though they went away again when his work on the project ended.) When she emerges from the transition she asks Aunt Thora if she can take the name “Christine” after Aunt Thora’s late daughter, and the aunt agrees. For the rest of the film Christine Jorgensen is subjected to huge media exposure, almost all of it sneeringly negative, calling her a “he-she” and various even less pleasant things. Aunt Thora’s home in Copenhagen is set upon by reporters who demand to get Christine’s side of her story after the barrage of negative publicity – started, we learn later, by a worker in the office responsible for giving out American passports in Denmark, who for $200 leaked the information to the media that an American woman who used to be an American man was applying for a passport in her new identity. This is something that she wouldn’t be allowed to do today, thanks to an executive order from President Trump that states all U.S. passports must be under the person’s gender at birth, just in case you’re tempted to believe that the road to acceptance for Trans people has gone in a straight line forward since Christine Jorgensen’s time. Christine returns home in her new identity and wins the acceptance of her parents, who are reluctant at first but realize that’s the only way she’ll still be part of their lives. (The real Christine Jorgensen gave an ultimatum to her parents: treat me as the woman I am or you’ll never see me again.) Christine also meets a reporter, Tom Crawford (Quinn K. Redeker), for Globe magazine (read: Life), who wants to interview her at length and really tell her side of the story. Tom is also sexually attracted to Christine, but she’s too scared of a relationship even though Dr. Dahlmann told her she could function as a woman sexually and be intimate with a man.

While I was watching The Christine Jorgensen Story I was thinking of my comment about the 1934 film Imitation of Life, “I get the impression the filmmakers wanted to make an anti-racist movie but didn’t quite know how.” Likewise, the makers of The Christine Jorgensen Story – producer Edward Small, director Irving Rapper (both of them at the ends of their careers; it was Small’s last film and Rapper’s next-to-last), and writers Robert E. Kent and Ellis St. Joseph – wanted to make a pro-Trans movie but didn’t quite know how. Certainly there’s a sense of liberation from old Hollywood hands like Small and Rapper that at last, with the breakdown of the old Motion Picture Production Code, they could get away with making a film that would have been completely verboten between 1934 and 1968. But there’s also the age-old problem with stories about Trans people: how do you cast them? I remember reading a quite impressive book called Trans-Sister Radio and thinking it would have made a marvelous movie, only the one conceivable way of casting it would have been to find an actor who was actually Trans and film them on both sides of a gender transition. The film Transamerica pulled it off by having a woman, Felicity Huffman, play the Transwoman central character and only showing her post-transition (and she won an Academy Award nomination for it). John Hanson wasn’t a bad choice overall; he’s sufficiently ambiguous in his gender presentation he’s believable as both a man and a woman (though as Christine he looks less like a womyn-born woman and more like a very good drag queen). The problem is he wasn’t an experienced actor, and there are flashes of brilliance in his performance in which he really dramatizes vividly the character’s dilemmas. Unfortunately, they remain only flashes and for most of the movie he delivers his line in a flat first-day-of-acting-school monotone, while the voiceover narration he gives doesn’t sound that credible as either a man or a woman. One imdb.com reviewer, Christopher Greenleaf, compared this film to Ed Wood’s infamous Glen or Glenda? (1953) – which was originally supposed to be about Christine Jorgensen, only she wanted way too much money for the rights – and argued that, despite the celebrated technical ineptitude of Glen or Glenda?, “Wood was way ahead of his time and actually delivered a much better and (believe it or not) more serious picture.”

That’s overstating it more than a little bit, but The Christine Jorgensen Story (like the life story of its subject) is at once an odd footnote in the history of exploitation cinema and a well-meaning attempt at telling the story of the first post-op Transwoman (she wasn’t, but at least she was the first who went public with her story and used her 15 minutes of fame to advocate for the rights of fellow Trans people) with some sensitivity and depth, Just about everyone who writes about this movie mentions that Irving Rapper directed Bette Davis in three films – Now, Voyager, The Corn Is Green, and Deception – which is actually a fair criticism of what’s wrong with it. Like Vincent Sherman, Rapper could handle a self-starting star like Davis or Joan Crawford but was virtually hopeless with the cast of mostly non-actors, or at least lousy actors (Joan Tompkins as Aunt Thora is the only cast member who really makes her character come alive), he had here. It also doesn’t help that Edward Small had a pretty minuscule budget – maybe not as low as Ed Wood’s for filming Glen or Glenda?, but too little to avoid such anachronisms as the streets in both New York and Copenhagen being full of late-1960’s cars for scenes supposedly taking place in the early 1950’s. Though the film was nominally based on Jorgensen’s autobiography, and Jorgensen got a credit as one of the technical advisors, it was highly fictionalized in ways that make me want to read the book just to see what the filmmakers got wrong, especially since one ominous sign was the co-writing credit to Robert E. Kent. My defining anecdote about Robert E. Kent was the one about how he was a major baseball fan, and in the studio’s writing room he’d regale his colleagues with accounts of the ballgame he’d seen the night before while his fingers would fly over his typewriter keys banging out the cinematically appropriate clichés for his latest script. I’d like to think that Kent delivered at least a little more thought to his work on The Christine Jorgensen Story than usual.