Dina’s Diner 6/8/15

HAVE YOU HAD ENOUGH CAITLYN FOR NOW?

Guess who.

The syndicated opinion columnist Kathleen Parker wrote a piece headlined “Do We All Need to be Part of This Coming Out Party?” in the wake of the great Caitlyn Jenner tidal wave of publicity. I saw it in my hometown newspaper on June 4, 2015.

Ms. Parker took a skeptical tone — not about Jenner’s transition itself — but about the media onslaught of attention it has garnered. She wrote, “What concerns me here is the cultural, primarily media, treatment of the Jenner case in particular — and the assumption that we all need to be a part of this.” After the first couple of breathless days of coverage of Caitlyn’s Vanity Fair cover shoot, I had to ask myself something similar.

Here is an incisive paragraph from Parker’s column: “Though many of us remember Jenner as the stunning 1976 Olympic decathlon gold medalist, the erstwhile Wheaties model is best-known to a younger generation as Dad in the reality television series Keeping Up with the Kardashians. To put it bluntly, the former Bruce and the latter Caitlyn have been media personalities-for-hire for most of their existence. Is it really appropriate to elevate Jenner to such heroic and adjectival heights as “bold” and “courageous,” when many transgender people will conduct their own struggles privately, and, indeed, courageously?”

To parpahrase the old “tree in the woods” question, “if a transition happens and the person isn’t a celebrity — has it really happened?” Sometimes it seems that nothing counts unless we can find some celebrity to carry the banner and garner all the attention. Later on, I write about TG celebrities who came along earlier than Jenner — and are largely forgotten now because they didn’t have the modern media machine behind them.

The overuse of the words “brave,” “courageous,” and “bold” also leaves me a little cold for the same reason. Not that money is everything but if you had Jenner’s resources and the knowledge that a reality television series would insulate your transition from the harsh realities (ironically) of normal life, would it be easier to pull the trigger and come out? I kind of think so. Meanwhile, working transgender people struggle with the decisions and realities of transition without fanfare everyday all over the world.

So let’s hope Caitlyn’s transition will be another positive for societal acceptance of less fortunate trans people and the concept of transgenderism in general. But for now . . . can someone please change the channel?

CREATING HIS OWN REALITY

Hogancamp and Marwencol

The New York Times Arts section had an article about artist Mark Hogancamp in the May 13, 2015 edition. The Times photo (shown here) caught my eye because Mark Hogancamp was dressed as a World War II bomber pilot wearing pulled-up trousers and women’s high heels. Always an attention-grabber.

It turns out that artist Hogancamp has an interesting backstory. The Times article said: “A vicious assault 15 years ago, by five men outside a Kingston [New York] bar, left Mr. Hogancamp with brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder, which he combats in an unparalleled and cinematic way. He is the creator of Marwencol, a small universe that sits next to his trailer, filled with World War II narratives in one-sixth scale miniature and populated by Barbies and other dolls. The alternate Mark Hogancamp, an action figure in a bomber jacket, exists here.” In another online article, I discovered that Mr. Hogancamp was attacked by the assailants because he was crossdressed at the time. He was in a coma for nine days and had to re-learn many motor skills and memories in therapy.

Hogancamp’s creation of Marwencol — imagined as a small Belgian village caught in the crossfires of WWII — has become something of a life’s work for the artist. It has spawned a PBS documentary about it and, soon, a fantastical motion picture starring Steve Carrell as Hogancamp and his whole Marwencol universe (Robert Zemeckis directing). Hogancamp’s art lies in both in the creation of the doll-figure inhabitants and buildings of Marwencol and in the photographing of the scenes he creates combining army soldiers and civilians. One of his favorite Marwencol natives is a femme fatale known as “Deja.”

According to The Times, Hogancamp and his Marwencol are getting a large exhibit at the Allouche gallery in Manhattan. The gallery owner, Eric Allouche, said he liked Hogancamp’s photos even before he knew the whole story of the artist or Marwencol. A book of Marwencol photos is also set to be published soon.

One interesting and ironic footnote to Hogancamp’s Marwencol story happened recently. One commenter (Terry Coffey of Salem, Oregon) to an online news site extolling the “bravery” of Caitlyn Jenner’s transgender coming-out unknowingly used a photo of two soldier figurines from the Marwencol series he found online. He said that the soldiers represented “real bravery” rather than Jenner’s story. When he found out that he had used the photo of a crossdresser who had been severely beaten and was using the soldier dolls as therapy, he wrote a long Facebook post apologizing for his own bigoted views. (Look it it up online for an interesting read.) This is the conclusion excerpt of his post: “I could have chosen any one of hundreds of photos depicting bravery, but I chose this one. Do I think it was an accident? No, I don’t. What happened to this man was cruel, wrong, and unforgivable. Hate helps nothing. Love wounds no one and God heals all (and irony makes you think).”

Beautiful. Art really can change people’s lives — both the artist and the viewer.

WALKING IN HIS — UH, HER — SHOES

Candace Lau

I saw an article online headlined “This Woman Crossdressed, Hitchhiked Across the Middle East” in mid-May 2015. The article originally appeared on the Yahoo.com Travel page by Paula Froelich on May 15, 2015. The article told of a chance re-encounter between Ms. Froelich and Candace Lau in the Jordanian desert.

Candace Lau is an Autralian photographer of Asian heritage who took two years off to hitchhike around the world by traveling lightly and as cheaply as possible. Candace and Paula first crossed paths in Afghanistan where the former was sightseeing and the latter was participating in some type of skiing event. I don’t imagine that Afghanistan tourism is pulling in hordes of people but at least these two found each other.

Fast-forward to May 2015 and Paula (working for her Yahoo Travel gig) is traveling through Jordan’s desert in a tour bus when she spies Candace on the side of the road with thumb out. The video accompanying Paula’s article has a story of how Candace disguised herself as a young Asian male when traveling through the extremely conservative regions of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. She says that much of the Middle East is safer than the West for hitchhiking — except for the disdain for independent females in some parts. She told reporter Paula, “I tell the males I am a guy. I tell the females I am a girl.”

Even though she is twenty-eight years old, Candace has her own matriarchal issues, it seems. She hasn’t told her own mother what she’s doing. “She thinks I’m in Austria working,” Candace said. “I didn’t want to worry her, so . . . but I will tell her everything when I go home at the end of this year.”

MISSED IT BY THAT MUCH!

Candis Cayne

Some short while ago, I read something that referred to transgender celebrities who pre-dated the current crop of Laverne Cox, Janet Mock, Andreja Pejic and (now, of course) Caitlyn Jenner. They say timing is everything but nobody has a say in the timing of their own birth. So to be born just a little too soon can mean the difference between fame and fortune or relative obscurity.

One of the transgender celebrities who first made a name for herself in the 1990s is Candis Cayne. She started in the gay bar drag world in New York but broke through to mainstream film and television appearances in the 2000s. She continues to snag film credits to this day as she approaches 44 years of age. According to Wikipedia, Candis was the first transgender person to play a recurring role in a network series.

Alexis Arquette

Alexis Arquette has also been around in male, androgynous, and female personas since the 1990s and continues to gain some credits in film and television. She is now 45 years old. She began to transition to full-time female in 2007. As most people know, she is a member of a showbiz family that includes members of varying degrees of fame. Alexis has a more outsize personality type so had she hit the scene a little later than she did, perhaps she would be a bigger star in a more forgiving cultural atmosphere.

Jayne County

Some others to mention are: Jayne County, a rock singer (formerly known as Wayne County) who performed in the ’70s and beyond. Jayne is now 65 years old; Holly Woodlawn, one of Andy Warhol’s circle of performers, now 68 years old, who still acts in independent films and shorts and stars in her own touring cabaret show; Chaz Bono, who may not really be a performer but was one of the first celebrities to announce his transgenderism — and as a female-to-male. The child of Sonny Bono and Cher is now 46 years old. Some of us are old enough to remember Chastity Bono as a little girl on her parents television show in the 1970s.

The performing arts favors new faces — young faces — so being born a bit too early for a trend that hits later is just one of those things. Who knows how many others may have come out if they had the more welcoming atmosphere of today — and tomorrow.

Tags: crossdressing, featured, opinion, Transgender

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