copyright 2021, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media
Jump Cut, No. 60, spring 2021

“Something to disclose”—
Notes on Disclosure and the possibility of trans camp

By Sid Cunningham

In the 1964 essay that launched her career as a critic,[1] [open endotes in new window] “Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag claims

“Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation—not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it’s not a ruthless but a sweet cynicism.) Camp taste doesn’t propose that it is in bad taste to be serious; it doesn’t sneer at someone who succeeds in being seriously dramatic. What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures. […] Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of “character.” …[…] Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. […] Camp taste nourishes itself on the love that has gone into certain objects and personal styles. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as “a camp,” they’re enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.”[2]

It is this tenderness I must highlight from the very beginning, as my own defense against what might seem to be the tastelessness or insensitivity of the argument I am about to make. That is, trans culture needs to nurture its own deep-rooted camp impulses, and Sam Feder’s highly acclaimed 2020 documentary, Disclosure, should be celebrated for the subtle manner in which it achieves an alignment between trans viewing practices and camp.

Failure and artificiality are signatures of camp (as noted by Sontag but of course so many others as well); it may seem to be reinforcing cisnormativity to associate these motifs with trans media. It is not that trans bodies are inherently artificial, nor that trans genders must necessarily fail, however. Rather, a mode of enjoying artifice and incongruity is a viable response to the inevitable failures of Disclosure’s object of scrutiny: trans representation in mainstream film and television. In the above quotation, showing us Sontag’s “Notes” nearing the sentimentality of a wedding vow, I highlight this combination of love, tenderness, and appreciation as a plausible way to live with a surge of positive representation that can only fail to deliver everything it seems to promise. The only other possibilities might be disappointment and despair at the happy endings or sense of belonging we are denied, bitterness toward the images promising the fulfilment of our desires, or anger at ourselves for desiring (love, acceptance, an end to gender normativity) in the first place.

I am not the first to apply a camp lens to trans media; Marissa Brostoff does so masterfully in a 2017 article on Caitlyn Jenner’s reality show I Am Cait. She provides an excellent review of the work of earlier scholars like Pamela Robertson and José Esteban Muñoz who have recovered feminist and decolonial meaning in the style often associated with gay subcultures otherwise privileged by gender, race, and class, while pointing out that “camp performance sometimes seems to be everywhere but the transgender body.”[3] There are still scholars (like Halberstam) who argue that the irony of camp is an insufficiently broad affective repertoire to respond to all the pressing political (or antipolitical) projects of our time. As they claim, queer antisociality comes in many other forms which can deliver a much starker, “undisciplined” opposition to heteronormativity.[4] Camp isn’t the best or only response to straight culture, though; it’s a strategy that is productive in particular contexts. It’s a subtle move, one that works best in the centre of enemy territory.

Camp is a defensive strategy, and while it might not produce the most radical of effects, it allows the organization of queer sensibility to take place with little resistance in highly normative spaces that we cannot avoid traversing. Esther Newton’s groundbreaking 1972 anthropological study, Mother Camp, makes this spatial aspect of “camping” quite clear. As one of the professional “female impersonators” whom she interviewed points out, we can understand a performer to be “camping” on stage when they banter with the audience, but the prototypical environment of a “camp queen” is directly amongst her audience at a bar—or, even more dramatically, on public streets:

“She’ll walk down the street and she’ll see you and say, ‘Hi, Mary, how are you?’ right in the busiest part of town . . . she’ll actually camp, right there. And she’ll swish down the street. And she may be in a business suit; she doesn’t have to be dressed outlandishly.”[5]

Camp organizes queer pleasure directly under the nose of heterosexuality. I would argue that camp can serve similarly to enjoy the space mainstream representation allocates for transness while organizing dissensus with the underwhelming ends to which our stories and images are mobilized.

Before progressing into greater detail about how I understand Disclosure to engage in camp humour, it will be useful to address how this documentary has been generally understood (or rather misunderstood) by professional critics. In the following section of this essay, I will highlight how the film’s (typically glowing) reviews read a trans progress narrative of positive representation as Disclosure’s central message. However, these readings differ in important ways from the attitude made most explicit in the closing few minutes of the documentary and in comments made elsewhere by its director Sam Feder.

Positive representation: between the closet and Disclosure

When I was still an undergraduate student, in the awkward early stages of a medicalized transition that made graduate school the most obviously safe short-term career option, I made the mistake of discussing a planned project on trans road movies in terms of “positive representation.” After informing me that this was an outdated and unpopular framework among academics, my advisor graciously handed me a stack of photocopied pages from Out Takes to consult.

In Ellis Hanson’s introduction to that anthology, he describes a disjuncture between, on the one hand, queer activist demands of media “for so-called positive images, representations of sexual minorities as normal, happy, intelligent, kind, sexually well-adjusted, professionally adept, politically correct ladies and gentleman who have no doubt earned all those elusive civil rights for which we have all been clamoring,” and, on the other hand, scholarly critical investments in queer viewing or reading practices which (besides their greater formal, aesthetic, and political nuance) do not postpone queer pleasure in and identification with popular media images until Hollywood produces overt and unproblematic gays and lesbians. While acknowledging the value in outrage which produces an organized queer political community, Hanson disparages it as a form of criticism which “can ask only one question of a film: Does it offend me?”[6]

To Hanson, Vito Russo’s 1981 monograph The Celluloid Closet[7] and its 1995 documentary film adaptation[8] stand in for the intellectual paucity of the entire “positive representation” approach. Out Takes is nearly two decades old now, and the filmic Celluloid Closet a quarter century old, but has all that much changed since then? The 2020 release of director Sam Feder’s documentary Disclosure: Trans Lives on Film[9] is an appropriate opportunity to ask this question, as its formal similarities to The Celluloid Closet are so obvious that many popular reviews immediately note them.

The Celluloid Closet consists of film excerpts intercut with clips of interviews with actors, directors, and critics. Lily Tomlin provides some added voice-over narration, describing broad trends as the film advances through the decades, while the interviewees share their responses which often reference specific films. Disclosure likewise follows a loosely chronological and tropological progression but is much more tight-lipped. It lacks an overt narrator, yet the exclusively trans collection of interviewees suggests a relatively coherent perspective made possible in part through well-established areas of concern.

I will address a number of these concerns later in the essay, but I must emphasize, for now, that a shared area of concern does not mean a consensus of values or critical perspectives. As I explore in more detail below, a large portion of the film consists of interviewees discussing negative trans-related tropes in film and television of earlier decades, often in terms that suggest the influence of a number of trans critics who don’t themselves appear—Julia Serano, Talia Mae Bettcher, Jack Halberstam, and C. Riley Snorton in particular.[10] However, these are nearly always accompanied by dissenting takes from other interviewees. With the absence of an overt narrator, it is harder to understand dissent as bracketed outside of an otherwise unified critical trans perspective.

The trans perspective that Disclosure presents coheres through agreement on the significance or intensity of certain images, but not on what they mean or what effect they have for trans subjects. Understanding the perspective of this multivocal documentary is made both challenging and worthwhile because we must reconcile the pain and pleasure that mainstream visual representation creates for trans viewers, even when strongly divergent affects are produced in response to a single image.

Disclosure titles some of its film clips, particularly those that are directly referenced by trans interviewees, but many arrive decontextualized and thus avoid narratorial presence while also weakening associations to their original context in favor of Disclosure’s narrative progression. This format makes a lot of sense for the heavily tropological approach that most of the film takes. One could, of course, dispute whether any particular film properly belongs to the representational cluster Disclosure uses it for. For example, Peter Debruge’s review of the film in Variety quibbles over the its critique of Ace Ventura’s (1994) “absurd” vomiting and the idea of “negative” filmic representation of trans characters being “directly responsible for suicide and abuse in the culture at large.” However, he does admit,

“there’s no denying that trans lives are at disproportionately high risk, or that greater sensitivity (via shows such as “Transparent” and, yes, even “I Am Cait”) is shifting public opinion in a positive way.”[11] 

The last portion of the Disclosure is most focused on trans representation enacted by actual trans performers, which also brings the film into the most recent history. There is a highlight on actor Sandra Caldwell’s early career and eventual coming out. A wide range of work by other performers is referenced, but the film uses Candis Cayne’s role in Dirty Sexy Money (2007-2008) as a major landmark, along with Chaz Bono’s award-nominated series Becoming Chaz (2011), and Laverne Cox’s role in Orange Is the New Black (2013-2019). Each major example is discussed in terms that suggest progress in terms of positive representation, yet other critical comments always make this ambivalent. For example, Orange Is the New Black garners much praise, yet veteran performer Jazzmun notes that Cox’s character, Sophia, is “still a menace to society.” For all the comments that imply that these recent, high-profile images are in themselves a victory, the most unambiguous consensus among interviewees emerges as a recognition of shifting conditions of trans creative labor.

Where the juxtaposition of film clips and interviews becomes most complex is at the film’s end. After its survey of the recent, most celebrated work by trans performers in trans roles, the last couple minutes conclude with a more macroscopic discussion of the current and future social impacts of increased trans representation. During these final moments we are shown a montage of very brief, untitled clips depicting trans actors in recent trans roles. Most of these clips serve as direct and literal examples of recent celebrated work by trans performers in trans roles, but two notably longer clips suggest more figurative meanings.

The first is a scene from the award-winning film Una mujer fantástica (2017): an extended long shot of actor Daniela Vega walking along a sidewalk into an increasingly impassable current of wind, a visual metaphor for minority struggle and resilience. This is followed by another ten seconds of short clips, and then the last eighteen seconds before the credits are spent on a scene which is truly the most jarring of the entire documentary. This break in format suggests we might read these scenes as a narrating instance, framing and commenting on everything that comes earlier, especially given the degree to which the final scene enacts a dramatic genre shift.

A stony-faced figure appears in extreme close-up, zooming out to reveal white gossamer lace robes and a white horse. A reverse shot, continuing to zoom out even further, places this solitary pasty trans fae among a whole field of similar figures (some gently floating, some mounted on additional white horses, some carrying spears) waiting motionless, humourless, and exhaustingly digitally reduplicated, behind a gigantic closed wooden gate in an endless stone wall. My first thought when I finished watching Disclosure: what is up with all those transgender white walkers at the end? This analogy to Game of Thrones may be unhelpful inasmuch as it suggests undead horror, but there is something distinctly uncanny about the figures the film closes on, and they are made particularly striking because it is the film’s only particularly fantastical image incorporating a trans body, and it appears with so little helpful context. Following the scene of Vega struggling against the wind, and given that this scene accompanies a discussion of the present and future of trans media, one interpretation of this scene could be that these are not-yet-disclosed trans figures, waiting to be welcomed into our world through the gates of representation but still unmarked by the mundane struggles of contemporary trans life.

Is epic fantasy the next frontier of trans media representation? Why not? The genre appears a refreshing break from the tragedy and dramedy genres to which trans characters are currently most resigned in mainstream film and TV. Rather than making an argument for the value of specific genre movements in the future of trans representation, however, I’m claiming that this final moment in Disclosure is one of its most surprising and interesting, for anyone who wants to think about this film as a cohesive whole with a perspective of its own. At the conclusion of this paper I will return to expand on another possible reading of this ending, relying on intertextual and latent meanings of the fairies as well as subversive camp reading strategies Disclosure gestures to elsewhere. For now, I simply want to draw attention to the shift in form in order to show the relationship it has to the moment in which the documentary was released. It’s a strikingly literal manifestation of what Lauren Berlant has been theorizing as “genre flailing,” a grasping gesture towards conventional forms and formulas that promise some defense against the intractability of ordinary crisis.

As Berlant herself describes it,

“Genre flailing is a mode of crisis management that arises after an object, or object world, becomes disturbed in a way that intrudes on one’s confidence about how to move in it. We genre flail so that we don’t fall through the cracks of heightened affective noise into despair, suicide, or psychosis. We improvise like crazy, where ‘like crazy’ is a little too non-metaphorical. We see it in the first gasps of shock or disbelief, and the last gasps of exhausted analogy. But it’s not always a wildly inventive action. When crisis is ordinary, flailing—throwing language and gesture and policy and interpretations at a thing to make it slow or make it stop—can be fabulously unimaginative, a litany of lists of things to do, to pay attention to, to say, to stop saying, or to discipline and sanction. Often in the pinch of a crisis we return to normal science or common sense—whatever offers relief in established clarity.”[12]

Berlant began employing this term, "genre flailing," in her writing in the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States and that serves as her most obvious image of the crisis provoking this flailing. Those circumstances have presented many new iterations of political crises for trans people, yet this can’t be said to be the crisis that organizes Disclosure’s general narrative or its final extravagant genre flail. Instead, the event that serves as Disclosure’s motivating crisis is implicitly “The Transgender Tipping Point”—both the much-discussed 2014 Time article itself and the visibility phenomena it seeks to describe.

The 2014 Time article (accompanied by a glamorous cover photo of Cox) blends a profile of Laverne Cox with an overview of “another civil rights movement […] poised to challenge long-held cultural norms and beliefs.”[13] The article largely conflates the celebrity visibility or trans outness of Cox with that of the visibly gender nonconforming audience attending one of her public talks; a breathlessly voyeuristic description of the crowd opens the article, implicitly figuring all trans bodies (against Cox’s) as immediately readable and unthreatening in a gently comic manner:

“In the beaux-arts lobby of the Nourse theater in San Francisco, men in deep V-necks and necklaces walk by women with crew cuts and plaid shirts buttoned to the top. Boys carrying pink backpacks kiss on the lips, while long-haired ladies whose sequined tank tops expose broad shoulders snap selfies. About 1,100 people, many gleefully defying gender stereotypes, eventually pack the auditorium to hear the story of an unlikely icon.”[14]

The author’s newfound delight in the pleasures of clocking is tempered by later historical references, attesting to the actual long tradition of trans activism (which includes, at minimum, decades of lively debate about the politics of passing, and of the politics of treating passing as voluntary). All the same, the article optimistically claims,

“This new transparency is improving the lives of a long misunderstood minority and beginning to yield new policies, as trans activists and their supporters push for changes in schools, hospitals, workplaces, prisons and the military.”[15]

There is a confidence here, mirrored in the evocative title of the article, that trans people have suddenly arrived as an effectively organized, and more importantly understandable group, and that from this point on our problems will all soon evaporate, turning out to require nothing more than a set of administrative policy adjustments.

Trans activists and scholars have typically been much more hesitant to conclude that 2014 or any year since represents a decisive tipping point against myriad forms of oppression dependent on an institutionalized and culturally engrained system of gender. As an example of what is really a very wide field of engagement, Juliana Huxtable and Robert Hamblin, both of whom are featured in interviews in the excellent 2017 anthology Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, voice serious reservations about the potential rift between the lives of trans celebrities and the lives of those who are most typically subjected to violence on the basis of gender nonconformity.[16] Huxtable claims that,

“there is an actual moment of dynamic and, in many ways, powerful visibility, and perhaps there are reasons why it’s happening that we can point to. I think there are a lot of cultural factors in terms of gender variance that are hot-button issues now. I think, in terms of larger fantasies and narratives around social progress, visibility just fits into an ideal of where we would be at this moment; it’s the next logical step from third wave feminism or cyber culture or the juridical advancements of mainstream LGBT rights.”

“But it’s an empty gesture in a lot of ways. And it’s a gesture that I’m always questioning. Are they—meaning the audiences obsessed with and consuming media about transness—tapping into a derivative pornographic obsession with transgender bodies? Or are they putting me on display as a circus freak show, in a ‘We’re all secretly laughing at you’ sort of way? That’s the anxiety that I’ve gotten from the whole situation, because I think that the policing and the violence against trans people have a direct relationship to that increase in visibility. The people who gain visibility—those whom the media deem to be relatively ‘passable’ in one sense or another—end up being used as examples to police trans people generally.”[17]

We can certainly hope that the respectability of Laverne Cox, Jen Richards, Chaz Bono, or any variety of mainstream trans celebrities might help change cis hearts and minds towards the trans people they encounter in their own lives. As Huxtable points out, however, the trans celebrity could just as easily function as an unrealistic ideal of proper transness, which leaves many people consigned to an abject “bad trans” position.

Hamblin, following attention that the South African media gave to his transition as a white trans man, came to understand that this attention on him as an exemplary highly privileged trans person was actively unhelpful, that his “narrow and privileged view of transgender emergencies was redundant” when “black transgender people were acutely visible and in danger in society, and their rights were nowhere in reach.”[18] Hamblin chose to leave the trans rights organization he had founded and instead work on contributing trans-specific programming to an existing Cape Town sex workers’ organization. I bring up these examples of skepticism about the value of trans celebrity visibility not because I wish to imply that Disclosure is operating in a framework that was already stale at the “Tipping Point” moment. Instead, I want to point out that it can be productive to understand Disclosure as fundamentally organized around feeling out this ambivalence. Is mainstream visibility harmful? Is it ever helpful? If trans visibility cannot produce meaningful positive social changes, then what type of relationship is it possible for trans people to have to popular media? These are the questions that animate the film.

Director Sam Feder has been quite clear about his intentions in this area. Jump Cut published an interview with him in Fall 2016, at which point he was already working on Disclosure. In the interview, he observes that:

“With media attention declaring a shift in visibility as a ‘tipping point,’ I hear liberal allies noting this as a success for trans people in general. However, I don’t see success reflected in our lived reality except for the uplift of a few actors. Visibility is not always or necessarily a good thing. It can leave some people more vulnerable to harm, particularly when we consider the intersections of race, class, citizenship, religion, ability, etc. The recent increase in opportunities for visibility is often framed as success, presuming an improvement for all trans lives. This quick move to call this particular visibility ‘success’ performs two erasures: of the ongoing (or increased) struggles in trans people’s lives and of the previous visibility of trans people in media.”[19]

There is a striking similarity here to Cox’s comments which conclude the film, as we are shown an image of her photo on the cover of Time’s “The Transgender Tipping Point” issue (just before the montages and two figurative scenes I mention above): “We always have to be really skeptical when a few people are elevated, and the majority of people are still struggling.” These comments from Cox are expanded on by Chase Strangio, who the film credits as “Attorney at ACLU” (the American Civil Liberties Association):

“The trans person on the red carpet, or the trans character on television and film, those sort of representations of transness may incite rage in a viewer. And that viewer doesn't have access to the character. They have access to the person on the street. I think that makes it especially important for us to be pushing for actual material redistribution. Otherwise, all we're doing is elevating some people into the sphere of the powerful and not in any way working to disrupt the systems that exclude most trans people from material survival.”

The audio then switches to Susan Stryker (historian, documentarian, and founding editor of Transgender Studies Quarterly), who tells us,

“There is still a lot of work to do, and we can't think that just because you see trans representation that the revolution is over. You know. It's not. Things can spin on a dime. Having positive representation can only succeed in changing the conditions of life for trans people when it is part of a much broader movement for social change. Changing representation is not the goal. It's just the means to an end.”

The final minute of narration is once more in Cox’s voice, and she leaves us with open-ended, but cynical, speculation:

“I wonder if people who watch and love these shows, I wonder if they will reach out to trans people in need and work to defeat policies that scapegoat us, policies that discriminate against us, policies that dehumanize us. Because until that happens, all that energy from the silver screen won't be enough to better the lives of trans people off the screen.”

These comments certainly could be taken as a simple call for positive representation which is part of a wider progress narrative. There is much evidence that this is how many mainstream critics view the film. We can see this in the Rotten Tomatoes film synopsis, for example:

“Disclosure engrossingly illuminates the history and effects of the way transgender lives are depicted onscreen—and outlines how much progress still needs to be made.”[20]

Yet to arrive at this understanding of the film seems to mean total disengagement with Strangio and Stryker’s comments about ‘revolution,’ ‘material redistribution’ and how ‘[t]hings can spin on a dime.’ Even Cox’s own words trouble the narrative of progress as a positive correlation between mainstream representation and trans political agency or liberation. The physical attack from a stranger she experienced November 2020 when walking with a friend in an L.A. park is even more chilling evidence that even Cox herself is not granted immunity from transphobic violence by grace of her celebrated media role.[21] By leaving these comments questioning the value of trans celebrity visibility for the documentary’s last few minutes, the impression is left that the film makes the relationship between mainstream trans representation and progress towards trans liberation less certain, not more.

If we look at Cox’s own work as an example, both on and off screen, this rupture may come into clearer focus. Cox is the face of “The Transgender Tipping Point”—her role as a celebrity, and the role she played on Orange Is The New Black, serve to reassure a cisgender mainstream public that yes, it’s possible to enjoy a trans protagonist and envision a present-future where trans subjects are properly incorporated into liberal politics. While Cox’s activist work around prison abolition suggests a considerably more radical approach, this doesn’t mean that the role she plays as a celebrity cannot primarily serve to produce milquetoast (and apolitical) enjoyment of trans inspiration porn or pity. So how else might we view Disclosure, or view mainstream trans media representation? We’re not hungry simply for a greater quantity of representation—a suggestion Jen Richards makes in the documentary, and which Variety duly records in the closing sentence of its review, as if this was the most insightful concept presented by the film. What we want (by which I mean myself, by which I mean trans people, by which I mean everyone) is fresh genres with new affects.

This problem has received recent attention in trans academia, as our field groans for fresh perspectives under the burden of 30 years of scholarship while we nevertheless are forced to continue marketing ourselves as a nubile emerging subdiscipline. This may be best articulated in the entertainingly edgy dialogue, “After Trans Studies,” between Andrea Long Chu and Emmett Harsin Drager that was featured in Transgender Studies Quarterly’s Winter 2019 issue. While generally critiquing the reflexive anti-normativity of trans studies, our disparaging theoretical treatment of passing, and the degree to which our field uncreatively reuses queer theory concepts, the dialog also uses a psychoanalytic/affect-oriented approach to indicate that different approaches to genre might be the most generative movement today.

Harsin Drager claims.

“In trans studies, it seems to me that we are telling a story of our victimhood (tragedy) or a story of our resistance (romance). I am much more interested in a satire, a genre about how truly disappointing and sometimes even boring it is to be a trans person in this world.”[22]

This description of the scholarly field can equally serve as an indictment of the primary gestures of contemporary mainstream trans representation in television and film. In attempting to free ourselves of the bad tropes of the past, we are left with a very narrow horizon within which we can take pleasure in seeing trans people. We tie ourselves in knots trying to figure out how to represent oppression in a way that renders us dignified and respectable. We risk “humorlessness,”[23] because we so deeply need for the trans object represented to finally appear unquestionably worthy of love and attachment. This burden is simply too much for any trans body to bear, onscreen or off.

At the conclusion of this article, I further address how we might distinguish a camp break from this critical deadlock with one that is more broadly satirical. In arguing that Disclosure is an ironic, campy love letter to the politics of positive representation—which assumes the ultimate failure of this approach, and is thus a fundamentally different approach from that of The Celluloid Closet—I still recognize that there is a good deal of sincere consensus between interviewees on tropological concerns, much of which displays the influence of some of the most prominent media critiques from the field of trans studies in earlier decades.

Authenticity and convention

One of these concerns is the matter of casting and authenticity. The Celluloid Closet doesn’t concern itself too much with actual correspondence between queer characters and queer performers, and seems to see straight participation in queer filmic moments as a positive moment of allyship; hence we are shown an interview where Tom Hanks talks up the value of “little Tommy Hanks” helping to make an AIDS patient “likeable” and “unthreatening” in Philadelphia (1993). In contrast, the cisgender casting issue is raised near the end of Disclosure, and it’s discussed as an ongoing, contemporary problem. Given this, special significance accumulates around moments in the documentary where trans interviewees enjoy or otherwise refuse to dismiss their investment in the work of cis performers playing with gender.

While Zackary Drucker speaks positively of Divine’s camp performance in Hairspray (1988), (as well as Holly Woodlawn, and Candy Darling, and Jackie Curtis in Paul Morrissey films), Drucker’s praise is grounded in the fact that these are, in fact, implicitly cis (woman) roles. She recalls renting the Hairspray VHS as a child, “and having the sense that, Edna Turnblad, there was something different about her […] those kinds of […] slippages are really meaningful for a young person.” These roles seem designed to tease and intrigue a careful viewer, and they gesture towards a queer world beyond the temporary, parodically heteronormative fiction that these performers participate in. Something less subversive has been taking place in explicitly trans film roles in recent decades. Cisgender male actors continue to be cast as trans women and, as Disclosure points out, they continue to be rewarded in such roles.

Disclosure highlights this phenomenon starting with Chris Sarandon in Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and John Lithgow in The World According to Garp (1982), continuing up to the more recent performances of Cillian Murphy in Breakfast on Pluto (2005), Jared Leto in Dallas Buyer’s Club (2013), Jeffrey Tambor in Transparent (2014-2017), and Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl (2015). Given the revelations of Tambor’s sexual misconduct on set (attested to in Disclosure by Trace Lysette) and Redmayne’s defense of author J.K. Rowling’s flirtation with fringe transphobic feminist discourse,[24] suspicion toward big name cis male actors in transfeminine roles seems quite reasonable. With the exception of Tambor, these critically acclaimed and award-winning (or nominated) roles are in film. The trans actors interviewed or mentioned in Disclosure, in contrast, primarily appear in mainstream television roles.

Where The Celluloid Closet has nothing to say about the medium, with Disclosure the time has apparently arrived for queer television to be taken seriously. This attention could be merited simply because trans performers have achieved a level of success in trans roles in prestige television drama and dramedy like Pose (2018-), Sense8 (2015-2018), Orange is the New Black (2013-2019), and The L Word: Generation Q (2019-)(to name a few recent examples that are dealt with in the most celebratory fashion by Disclosure) that has not yet been matched in feature-length Hollywood films. However interviewees pay just as much attention to trans content in earlier TV history. While the documentary seems to be the most hopeful about recent television, there are glimmers of potential in interviewees’ responses to earlier depictions—mostly those that happen in comedy and reality genres.

Laverne Cox is one of Disclosure’s producers, but she also serves as an anchoring voice for the film through her interviews. Along with Jen Richards, Cox’s clips appear most frequently, and it is her perspective in the interviews that both opens and closes the documentary. After we are shown a clip from Sense8 where Nomi (played by Jamie Clayton) asks her girlfriend, Amanita, “Do you know that feeling when you’re sitting in a movie theatre, and everyone’s laughing at something and you just don’t get it?” we hear Cox’s voice connecting this affective discrepancy to a wider pattern of trans abjection and marginalization, as she confesses “I never thought I’d live in a world where trans people would be celebrated on or off the screen.” While the first clip of dialogue references the space of the movie theatre, it turns out that the more intimately domestic space of television viewing might be even more relevant to trans subjectivity and viewing practices.

The first clip of Cox’s voice is followed by a brief introductory montage gesturing to the film’s range of concerns. Three minutes in, the montage ends and we return to Cox discussing her childhood. It is a curious moment that implies an alignment between the beginning of this divergent viewing response and the beginning of a conscious transgender identity. Cox tells us.

“What’s interesting for me about growing up in Mobile, Alabama, and then having my first interactions with what it meant to be transgender happening on television, is that even when the characters weren’t necessarily trans identified, I think those characters affected how I thought of myself as a trans person and how the general public probably thinks about trans people. And one of those early images for me was the character of Geraldine from The Flip Wilson Show.”

After we are shown a brief clip of Geraldine singing, Cox continues,

“I remember I would watch it with my mom and my brother, and my mother loved Geraldine and would laugh at that character, so it was something that existed in the realm of humor.”

The issue of humor in this instance of televisual cross-dressing is complex, and not just within this nuclear family microcosm of viewership. As Marjorie Garber noted nearly 30 years ago, Flip Wilson achieved mainstream success precisely because of his Geraldine performances.[25] Wilson’s biography attests that he “saved” this “brassy, sexy, liberated ‘woman’ [who] was the apotheosis of Flip’s drag characters” for a 1969 Labor Day special which captured 42% of viewership in its time slot. That special led to the contract for The Flip Wilson Show (1970-1974), which was historically groundbreaking both for Wilson’s then-uncommon producer billing (with an accompanying greater right to syndication profits) and for being the first show starring and titled after a black performer to garner such widespread success. A January 1972 issue of Time magazine featuring Wilson’s face (out of drag) on the cover heralded him as “TV’s First Black Superstar.”[26]

While Wilson understood that Geraldine “could get away with things that were still transgressive for him” and believed that “Geraldine’s success indicated his rapport with both sexes,” Garber recognizes that this “transvestite in her wig and Puccis [who] opened the door for blacks to mainstream TV comedy” is nevertheless troubling inasmuch as this representational and economic success seems to have only been made possible by the marketability of “a stereotyped racial portrait of the dominating black woman […] at a time of political militancy among blacks.”[27] The Geraldine role, and the cultural position it carved out for Flip Wilson, is troubling because it raises many questions about the invisible limits on how female, black, and queer bodies can circulate, and at whose expense laughter happens. As much as Geraldine is the author of memorable quips like “when you’re hot, you’re hot. When you’re not, you’re not” and “what you see is what you get.” there is also the dangerous possibility that she is fundamentally not in on the joke—the humor of her scenes exists outside of her awareness.

The Flip Wilson Show clip shown in Disclosure features Geraldine fawning over and singing along with Ray Charles, while a multiracial studio audience in the background laughs. In the absence of a clear line between genuine expressions of femininity and sexual interest and those that are mocking or intentionally artificial, the irony of this scene is carried by Geraldine’s non-acknowledgement or obliviousness to the audience. Through the entire segment, she wriggles around the piano and remains focused intently on Charles, who, in contrast (as the “straight man”) is focused on the musical performance itself.

Cox’s comments on this scene are ambivalent. Her mother both loves the character and laughs at the character. Cox’s earlier reference to the movie theatre and the experience where “you just don’t get it” suggests these scenes are not laughable for her (in childhood), but still, she may be able to enjoy these visions of gender-crossing, particularly when they begin to verbalize strategy. She concludes the clip saying, “whenever there was something ‘trans’ this or ‘sex change’ that, I would be very interested and I would sort of lean in, but very, sort of, discreetly.”  Instead of experiencing vicarious embarrassment in this moment of identification with a clownish trans image as the affective break from the cisnormative response of laughter, Cox provides us the possibility of enchantment. She recognizes the dangerousness of the discrepancy between her response and that of her family members, and defends herself not against investment in the comedic trans figure (which is one way we might understand her family’s laughter) but against disclosing a divergent affective response, or one with a slightly different object.

Lee Edelman notoriously advocates for a radical “embracing” of the negativity ascribed to queerness[28]; in the final section of this essay I further discuss how his formulation of reproductive futurity can serve as the object of trans camp, using Disclosure’s final moments as an example. This moment and others tarry with the problems of negative representation— the histories, stereotypes, and hurt they can evoke for marginalized audiences—but they leave open the possibility that a viewer might enjoy them or even laugh for other reasons. Cox’s reminiscence of trans images from her childhood is mostly focused on work by black performers, much of which could be understood as negative in a variety of senses.

Geraldine is a bad, comedic object who ushers in cisnormativity through farce, inasmuch as we understand her visible gender-crossing as the main source of comedy or as inherently ridiculous. Geraldine also represents the negativity associated with the “Sapphire” trope, as LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant points out in her genealogy of major comedic roles leading to the fat black drag “Sappmammibel” films of the 2000s (featuring Tyler Perry’s Madea character, Martin Lawrence’s Big Momma, and Eddie Murphy’s Rasputia).[29]  Beyond the critiques that Wilson’s work as Geraldine (or other such black comedic drag roles) serve to reinforce negative stereotypes about transfemininity or black femininity, we must also consider fears that drag is a manner of erasing or undermining black masculinity for the enjoyment of white audiences.

Cox describes and historicizes this emasculation problem herself in another interview sequence in Disclosure:

“There's all sorts of theories of black male comedians doing drag and that needing to be a rite of passage.[…] there is a history of emasculating black men in this country. Like, a literal history, during slavery and during Jim Crow, when black men were lynched, often their genitalia was cut off. And so, a black man donning a dress is this emasculating thing. And I do feel like the relationship that a lot of black people have had to me is about that legacy of trauma around...the historic emasculation of black men in America. Putting a black man in a dress, in some people's minds, takes away the threat. ‘Oh, we can laugh now.’”

These comments are illustrated with a brief, early ‘90s clip of Jamie Foxx in drag on the sketch series In Living Color (1990-1994) and a longer excerpt from the series White Famous (2017). The latter depicts rising comedian Floyd Mooney (played by Jay Pharoah) being advised by Jamie Foxx (as himself) to further his career by wearing a dress; this leads into a scene of Floyd imagining himself screaming in horror after realizing the dress given him has caused his penis and testicles to disappear. In the White Famous episode this emasculation fantasy scene is part of Floyd’s broader fear of “selling out” and the demands of so-called crossover success. Foxx, who wears a pleated skirt, constantly threatening to expose Floyd to his genitals, figures this sell-out future through an absurd and grotesque blend of hypersexuality and castration.

While this is a comedic scene about drag emasculating black performers, it is ambiguous whether the real butt of the joke is Foxx’s “selling out” of his masculinity, or Floyd’s hysterical and ineffectual defense of his. Noting the similarity between her use of negative black media texts and camp reading strategies, Raquel J. Gates suggests that “the negative image functions as the repository for those identities, experiences, and feelings that have been discarded by respectable media”[30] and that the desire to eliminate them unreasonably assumes

“that media representations have a direct and straightforward impact on people’s ideologies, that media images matter more than histories of institutional oppression, and that audiences always interpret images in predictable and knowable ways.”[31] 

This unpredictability manifests in Disclosure not only between interviewees but in the varied responses a single person might have to difference instances of negativity. As the documentary progresses through its survey of cis actors performing in trans roles and the ensuing negative tropes, we are shown Cox running through a gambit of affects. A laugh track greeting the arrival of a burly cross-dressed male actor in a Married With Children (1994) clip follows a brutal anecdote from Cox about people bursting into laughter as she enters the subway. But while other interviewees speak seriously of the negativity of the trans serial killer trope, Cox is depicted laughing over Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and the repression that such work could imply.

The documentary is most fascinating when it provides interview clips that depart, in this manner, from the affect appropriate to the genre, or from the majority response among other interviewees. Comedy is generally discussed in the film with plenty of suspicion. The film includes many interview clips which critique tropes most closely related to the “deceptive transsexual” and “pathetic transsexual” figures described by Julia Serano in 2007. Serano and her work in the area of pop cultural critique in Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity are never directly referenced (although she is thanked in the credits), but the influence of her work is deeply imprinted on most of the younger interviewees. The “pathetic” trope describes images where the trans character (in this case, always a woman) is depicted as incapable of passing, and therefore unthreatening and typically ridiculous, while a “deceptive” trans character initially passes—only to have her transness revealed later. Like Serano, Disclosure traces the gesture of vomiting as a response to the inadvertent discovery (or disclosure) of a passing “deceptive” trans woman from the dramatic context of The Crying Game (1992) to the comedic context of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994) and a succession of less memorable imitations.[32]

Serano furthermore claims that “‘deceivers’ are most often used as pawns to provoke male homophobia in other characters, as well as in the audience itself” and that this dynamic is “most evident” in talk shows and reality television.[33] Many of Disclosure’s interviewees are likewise suspicious of the vulgar spectacularity of these genres—Ser Anzoategui describes these shows as a “circus,” while they are a “car crash” to Trace Lysette. Yet Disclosure’s interviewees are divided about this format. Multiple interviewees mention the 1998 appearance of Reno Prestige Wright on The Jerry Springer Show (1997) as one of their first encounters with black transmasculinity. Trans and intersex model Caroline Cossey’s (a.k.a. Tula’s) appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show (1990) is remembered for the unhesitatingly blue questions of its host—“How did you keep people from knowing you had a penis? […] W-Was it a real small penis? ‘Cause I’d have trouble tucking mine away, you know? […] Can you have an orgasm?” This talk produces cringe for Laverne Cox: she exhales heavily and mirrors Tula’s nervous laughter, adding, “that’s really hard to watch now.” Ser Anzoategui instead remembers the Tula-Hall interview with admiration, praising her “grace […] her humor and her wit,” after we are shown a clip of Tula’s glib reply to the “orgasm” question. She says that “like most women say, you know, it depends on the guy,” to which Hall bashfully giggles and rocks, hands between his knees.

While the salacious tone of this talk show programming may not have been exceedingly kind or gentle to its trans guests, it all the same served as a channel through which trans bodies and trans self-expression could be distributed and recorded.[34] Despite misgivings about exploitation, Jen Richards “admit[s] it was also really cool just to see actual trans people on television,” and Zackary Drucker observes that “so many of those people [who appeared as trans guests on daytime talk shows] are monuments in our community.” Drucker nevertheless acknowledges, laughing

“it was a hustle for them. It was an opportunity to get paid and to tell their story. And it did reach us.”

Not only could witty trans celebrities like Tula use the less scripted format to occasionally get the last laugh, but it was also possible for relatively radical trans politics to be voiced in these venues. For example, we see Kate Bornstein describing the concept of gender identity in a 1991 clip from The Phil Donahue Show. Later, a clip from The Joan Rivers Show depicts Leslie Feinberg jokingly deflecting the pathologization of trans people by suggesting that instead, vicious homophobia and racism among the Ku Klux Klan or conservative politicians merit analysis: “How about talking about why Jesse Helms needs some therapy?”

Disclosure owes a debt to Bornstein not just for her appearances, but also for her arguments (in her part-autobiographical/part-theoretical monograph Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us) about talk shows as a venue. While accepting that the format does generally frame trans guests as “freaks,” she stresses that she “respect[s] the format.” In contrast to earlier travelling sideshow “freak” acts, Bornstein claims that the financial structure of television results in more sympathetic and less controlling hosts, so that “the freaks have an opportunity to speak their own words—for the first time, and to a broad audience!”[35] Bornstein’s approach seems to influence the way this genre is received by interviewees, but it would be likewise reasonable to assume that Bornstein’s perspective is embraced by director Feder, given that his previous work was a collaboration with Bornstein that adapted one of her autobiographical books, A Queer and Pleasant Danger, for the screen.

To conclude this survey of Disclosure’s survey of mainstream trans visual history, I want to briefly address another, even older, work that generates joy and approval in Disclosure’s interviewees. The image—once more absent a real trans body—is of Bugs Bunny cross-dressing.

“Well, what did you expect in an opera? A happy ending?”

Midway through the documentary, historian (and documentarian) Susan Stryker tells us,

“When I was growing up in the '60s, I watched a lot of television, watched a lot of movies, and the only, only positive representation I saw of anything transfeminine was Bugs Bunny […] When Bugs Bunny was doing "girl," Bugs Bunny was desirable and was powerful.” Lilly Wachowski likewise recalls that “Bugs Bunny […] activated, in my trans imagination, this idea of transformation.”

“I would always look back on that episode with a certain glee about the transformative aspects of it. And that Bugs looked, you know, really cute. I liked that part.”

As she speaks, clips of the 1957 cartoon “What’s Opera Doc?” play, depicting an armoured, Siegfried-esque Elmer Fudd duetting with a languid Bugs Bunny, bedecked in blonde plait, winged golden helmet, fluttering eyelashes, and matching hot pink skirt and eyeliner. Wachowski wryly acknowledges, all the same, that this cartoon could also be understood as representing “[t]he original trans panic defense in cartoon form,” as we are shown a clip of Fudd in a murderous rage after Bugs-as-Brünnhilde’s helmet falls off during a kiss, revealing rabbit ears.

This cartoon is one where Elmer seems to best Bugs, through his greater than usual magical powers of destruction. Upon discovering Bugs’ finally lifeless corpse, however, Elmer is distraught with remorse, sobbing and cradling the body as he ascends a rocky precipice. Disclosure shares this last scene, which concludes in characteristically cartoonish fashion, with Bugs’ head popping back up to address the audience: “Well, what did you expect in an opera? A happy ending?” In playfully commenting directly on genre, and genre’s relation to audience expectations of emotional payoff, this conclusion brings the cartoon into the realm of satire. The failure of the cartoon to provide the conventionally comedic Looney Toons ending is highlighted, as is its failure to treat Wagner’s original opera with appropriate dignity. Just like Bugs, Wachowski takes delight in the whimsical transformations that the cartoon’s high burlesque parody makes possible, whilst shrugging knowingly at the violent generic framework which enable them. I propose that this artificial genre vacillation is not just a camp moment, and a “tender” moment of camp spectatorship (as Sontag puts it), but ultimately a compelling example of the ready alignment of a trans gaze with camp.

To return momentarily to The Celluloid Closet: for all of its worrying about tragic or villainous homosexuals, or the love that dare not speak its name on film, it cannot totally avoid producing camp. Russo’s book, like the film, does not celebrate camp; Ellis is right to point this out. It explicitly addresses camp as a side effect of censorship.[36] Yet people consistently come away from that film with a new manner of enjoying camp in spite of this. Do we not now delight in Ben-Hur (1959) because, after watching Gore Vidal’s interview, we can laugh at Charlton Heston’s ridiculous inability to read the homoerotic subtext in which he was immersed? This is precisely the subversive potential of camp: it guarantees access to pleasure regardless of our political status. Cisnormativity and heteronormativity, in a camp framework, are not just the impossible ideals on which rest our precarious respectability or sovereignty. More importantly, they are forms of shallow and incurious spectatorship, which miss out on the enjoyment offered by all manner of objects outside rigidly defined gender-genre conventions.

This is what Disclosure seems to be hinting at in its few positive encounters with comedy. A lot of the documentary, however, is consumed with horror and drama—bad representations of trans figures, inevitably performed by cis actors, which are then refracted through the reactions of the interviewees to produce a sustained trauma narrative.

The story of trans victimhood

In an interview with Time following the release of Disclosure, director Sam Feder voiced disappointment in the dramatic framework of trans life as represented by the Academy Award-winning Chilean film A Fantastic Woman (Una mujer fantástica) (2017):

“The film was not made for trans people; it was made for cis people to feel good about feeling bad for trans people. That’s a lens I’m often pushing up against, thinking about who is this for, and how is it supposed to make people feel and how are people reacting to that feeling. A Fantastic Woman was lauded but it was so disheartening to know that that’s where we still are, that the only access to allyship was through pity”[37]

All the same, it seems that consuming trans anguish is one of the main routes by which discerning cis audiences enjoy Disclosure. For example, Variety’s endorsement of the film, which is preceded by the tagline, “[a]n upbeat 'The Celluloid Closet'-style survey of trans representation, Sam Feder's look at gender expression on-screen is a cinephile's delight, crowded with clips and queer readings of classic film and TV depictions,” draws readers in with a first paragraph promise that the film (and, by extension, review) will allow them to “imagine how agonizing it can be for those who gaze upon the screen searching for something they can recognize, only to find unflattering, inaccurate and scornful representations staring back.”[38] The Guardian likewise promises a “ghoulish” survey of trans representations,[39] while The New York Times tells us that

“it is the sheer abundance of banal, thoughtless cruelty that jolts, and Disclosure is careful to note how cruelty multiplies when transgender people are also black. With each successive trip to the grim vaults, the hard-won dignity of the film’s transgender speakers is brought into sharper and sharper relief.”[40]

Nor do reviews like this necessarily promise much in terms of an extension of respect by cis viewers for trans people (from the trans A-list to the average trans person) as the film hopes in its final minutes of narration. The Variety review, for example, celebrates how

“‘Disclosure’ achieves something so few other movies do: By showcasing strong, confident trans celebrities, the film offers a stark alternative to the homely portrayals audiences see when actors like John Lithgow (‘The World According to Garp’) or Chris Sarandon (‘Dog Day Afternoon’) are cast as trans characters.”

In these terms, trans celebrities (most famously successful for work in front of the camera, but all necessarily in a position of exaggerated economic and cultural capital) can be recognized as strong and confident, but emphasizing the need to avoid homeliness (rather than inauthenticity) hardly seems to be any real departure from the cisnormative gaze.

Isn’t this the very problem that Cox articulates at the end of the film? The type of glamor she represents might not do much to redeem the dignity of ordinary trans people, who by all means might exist much closer to the dowdiness of Sarandon or Lithgow. This might not be a problem that we should expect to be solved by trans stars so much as by more trans writers and directors, as Disclosure itself suggests through comments on Pose and its creative working environment by Pose actor MJ Rodriguez and media maker/writer Tiq Milan.[41]

One could despair at the degree to which responses to Disclosure seem to enact the very delight in trans trauma that Feder has critiqued, but the film ultimately rescues us from this with prescient irony. Disclosure, the film’s title, suggests a trans “coming out” of sorts, but in the context of narrative film and television it’s reasonable to think of the term as not just an action done intentionally by a real trans person or a trans character, but also as any manner in which the screen might symbolically “disclose” knowledge of transness to an audience.

“I kind of hate the idea of disclosure”

Who discloses, to whom, and what is disclosed in Disclosure? Some of the interviews include a coming out of sorts, in that those interviewed make reference to their identity while describing their experiences related to trans media. There is also the brief focus on interviewee Sandra Caldwell’s public disclosure, after a successful, decades-long career performing while stealth. In her interview for the documentary, Caldwell jokes that her “outing was in the New York Times”—referring to a 2017 article which profiled her. The scene appears in the last ten minutes; this story of the trans elder now living, working, and receiving fresh attention after outing herself in order to audition for a trans-specific theatre role as Mama Darleena in Philip Dawkin’s Charm implies that things have changed, and not just for trans youth. Yet the New York Times story itself, and then subsequent attention from “ABC and NBC, and, yes, Fox” could also suggest that there is greater media interest in particular types of trans autobiographical narratives than in the actual work of trans performers. I have found no subsequent media coverage of any more recent work by Caldwell on stage or screen. However, Disclosure quite self-consciously avoids centering the typical drive to demand that trans subjects make a full, satisfying account of themselves and their gender. That type of storytelling is instead problematized and historicized.

When we are shown scenes of figures like Kate Bornstein, Leslie Feinberg, and Reno appearing in varyingly salacious daytime television scenarios, the interviewees are appreciative of the visibility it created and the possibilities it opened for them, while critical of the objectifying cisgender gaze that engendered these moments. We have progressed, the film shows, through the increasing agency of trans celebrities to push back against this form of scrutiny. This narrative is represented through an excerpt of two 2014 interviews by Katie Couric, wherein actresses Carmen Carrera and Laverne Cox both firmly but gracefully reject Couric’s line of questioning about their genital configurations. In the subsequent interview Couric apologizes for her tactlessness; we see a sort of reconciliation and Couric can be proud of her nascent solidarity.

The documentary’s title occurs only twice in its dialog, and both instances are part of a comment that actress and writer Jen Richards makes at the midpoint of the film. Richards brings up the term in order to disavow the usefulness of disclosure as a concept. In an interview clip (which is intercut with footage from Without a Trace (2005) and Picket Fences (1992)) she tells us,

“When you start watching trans clips back-to-back you see how often all the people around the trans character feel betrayed or lied to. But frankly, I kind of hate the idea of disclosure in the sense that it presupposes that there is something to disclose. It reinforces their assumption that there is a secret that is hidden and that I have a responsibility to tell others, and that presupposes that the other person might have some kind of issue or problem with what’s to be disclosed. And that their feelings matter more than mine.”

Richards critiques the pressure for actual trans people to out themselves as a demand of trans politics, or normative ethics, or as a token of honesty or intimacy in some other sense. It makes sense, however, to extend this critique to the way popular media depicts the rewarding or punishing of trans figures for the relative transparency of their embodiment of gender, or the manner in which it is narrativized. To defend passing among trans people or characters verges on abandoning the call for explicit, positive, and authentic trans representation. If the only characters that can be recognized by a cis audience as legitimate trans characters are those who make their gender unambiguously legible to the camera, if not other characters, then how much understanding or empathy can we really expect to be generated?

This, along with the discussion of scenes in films where trans characters are dramatically revealed as trans—either by their own volition or by another’s, often through some gesture of sudden disrobing—suggests the influence of trans scholar Talia Mae Bettcher’s writing on “Appearance, Reality, and Gender Deception,” where she argues,

“Surely the very notion of 'honesty is the best policy' needs to be re-thought once we recognise that truth-telling is impossible? To what extent does the tactic of self-revelation, when represented as unproblematically valuable, require of transpeople an oppressively impossible honesty? Surely secrecy, duplicity, and deception ought to be recognised as important tactics in not only personal survival, but in resistant politics more generally. Indeed one might also argue that given the options, successfully passing in the category of one's preference as 'nontrans' is actually the only available strategy in which, if one can successfully pull it off, one can actually claim authenticity in a world that denies it to us. By contrast, 'coming out' and 'self-revelation' appear to play right into the problematic context of 'discovery of the hidden reality' itself connected to accusation of deception. It is little wonder, therefore, that this account is in danger of re-inscribing the very transphobia it fails to explain.”

If Disclosure treats its own subject matter with such irony, and ends by questioning the practical value of increased mainstream trans representation, why labor over it so? I will address this question, and the object of Disclosure’s camp critique, by turning to one further scene with Jen Richards, where she voices the film’s most ambivalent reaction to trans media that is otherwise presented as positive.

Humouring trans futures

What does the ultimate trans ally look like? A father, gesturing emphatically. His eyes are wide with wonder as he looks up from his chair in the support group circle and into the cameras of Caitlin Jenner’s reality show crew, affirming how fabulously fortunate he is to have a trans child. He tells the group surrounding him, and reality TV cameras,

“If you have a transgender kid, you are living with a unicorn, an amazing human being. To be next to someone so brave, so cool, so close to themselves. The reality is Avery has been on point from age two, apparently. Know what I mean? So, the reality is it's such an honor.”

Subsequent shots capture parents around the room, smiling and nodding piously, and a woman sitting a few seats away, interjects “It's so true what he's saying.” The scene, near the documentary’s end, is the only one besides the final scene and the scene on Bugs Bunny that invokes the truly fantastic. In the father’s heavenward gaze, and unicorn analogy, we bypass the mundane realities of nuclear family squabbles and a broader culture of transphobia. This is not to say this is the dynamic of the real family pictured in the film, but rather the narrative end to which their image is applied.

Notably, this is a rare moment that is almost completely absent trans people. It is a scene taken from the fourth episode of the trans Kardashian empire spin-off I Am Cait (2014), depicting a support group-type setting for cisgender parents of trans children that Jenner visits, hosted by Chaz Bono. The very brief clip included in Disclosure is framed by the much lengthier and emotional response it evokes in Jen Richards, despite her stated distaste for Jenner’s persona and politics. She recounts,

“I was watching this father, and it just... it hurt because... I had to be okay with my mom saying, ‘I will never call you Jen because Jen murdered my son.’ I had to– I had to be okay with that in order to survive myself, you know? […]I have to deal with those things. Like, I have to live with those things. And I have to make that okay. I have to understand their position and be okay with it. And when I saw that father go so much further than I thought was even possible, it hurt, I couldn't bear it, because then, all of a sudden, all those people who couldn't accept me, when I knew it was possible to go beyond acceptance […] No one's looked at me that way. How could I look at me that way? I had to see it. And now that I have, I want that.”

Richards narrates a profound sense of loss in her own life due to the ruptures of sociality that her closest family and friends enact in response to her perceived gender transgressions. Her sense of self emerges in the absence of “acceptance,” and yet is also organized around desire for this “love and respect and awe” that are “beyond acceptance.” Richards and Disclosure gesture towards the possibility that this reality TV moment (or moments like it) delivers a utopic image that will ultimately produce the better society it promises. This is not really that far from the positive representation project for which The Celluloid Closet has received so much criticism. Yet Disclosure exceeds the approach of the earlier documentary through its greater emphasis on the varied emotions of its interviewees, and in this takes us in a direction that is more acutely ironic.

The irony in this moment is primarily that the trans child in question—like the unicorn figure with which Avery is associated—is wholly absent from the film’s diegesis. If possibly present elsewhere in the I Am Cait episode, it is very brief and Avery is silent. In the original context in which the clip appeared, the scene is juxtaposed with the partial resolution of issues that emerged when Jenner voiced embarrassing or damaging criticisms of her castmates/family in the interview that accompanied her infamous Vanity Fair cover. The recap published at the time by Entertainment Weekly therefore reasonably concludes that “it’s obvious that Caitlyn isn’t here to help these people. They’re here to help her become a more generous parent.” Jenner must not let her newfound access to femininity or fame come at the cost of family-professional loyalty. As Entertainment Weekly puts it,

“their family needs a united front so that they can understand each other. [Kim Kardashian’s] family first message is so human, you might forget that we’re talking about the Kardashians here.”[42]

The resolution of trans humanity through family is understandable, given the widely-recognized trauma of family rejection of queer children, yet anyone well enough versed in queer theory might catch a whiff here of the conservativism inherent in reproductive futurism. As queer theorist Lee Edelman argues, reproductive futurism is an inherently reactionary form of politics and narrative that invests in the child as figure, in order to ultimately maintain a future for both the oedipal family structure and the neoliberal state. At the conclusion of Disclosure, we are not dealing with a future occupied by actual trans children, but rather “the child, that is, compelled to image, for the satisfaction of adults, an imaginary fullness thought to want, and thus to want for, nothing.”[43]

By presenting the trans child as not only marvellously novel but also superhumanly self-knowing and static in their remarkable gender incongruity, the trans child can function (somewhat surprisingly) to stabilize the family. Through accommodating and loving the fantastical trans child, the image of unconditional parental love is reified. More importantly, gender divergence is contained—not just because the child can be understood as androgynous but stable and certain, but because the inherent uncertainty and instability of the parents is surreptitiously made cisgender. The emotional overinvestment (displayed by both Richards and Avery’s father) in this trans child whose unshakeable self-knowledge can deliver a future that is simultaneously exciting and free of trauma or conflict betrays itself as not a true resolution but rather a (re)productive fantasy. The trans child is undepictable and figurative.

This type of response, where trans difference (and particularly that of gender-nonconforming/gender-creative children) is engaged with as something marvelous or delightfully surprising, has started to seem like the only remaining way that a trans story can appear unambiguously positive. Mermaid figures, in particular, have an affinity with trans child narratives, trans youth service organizations, and perhaps also transfeminine children themselves, as Nat Hurley has convincingly demonstrated. While the parents, doctors, and caregivers of trans children are reassured by how mermaids manage to blend bodily hybridity with innocent, conventional, stable, and knowable femininity, a meaning which aligns relatively well with the narrative of Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989), trans children, on the other hand, have good reason to be drawn to the sublimated narrative of agency and abjection that is expressed in a much more brutal (and imperialist) form in Hans Christian Andersen’s version of the story.[44]

The lingering trans fae at the end of Disclosure serve, in a similar way to the mermaid fantasy figure, as a reconciliation of an ambiguous body with white femininity, youth and innocence. If we assume a liberal progress narrative is being expressed, both verbally and visually, the crowd of fairies might serve as this type of putatively positive image, projected as the cutting edge or near future of trans representation, and, further, as the not-yet-disclosed. Presumably, trans people who will come out into this world of more and improved positive trans representation and the better, less traumatizing world that must surely accompany it, are just waiting to dazzle us with unisex high fashion, drag makeup, strange prosthetics, and magic.

The last scene, as it turns out, is excerpted from the second season finale of The Magicians (2015-2020). The central character in these shots, the Fairy Queen, is played by Candis Cayne, but her look for the role is so heavily stylized that she is nearly unrecognizable. Despite the praise Cayne has received (including in Disclosure) for breaking ground with her recurring role as trans mistress Carmelita (2007-2008) on Dirty Sexy Money, there has not been nearly the same attention (in Disclosure, or elsewhere) to her 2017-2018 role as the Fairy Queen. This may be partly because there’s nothing in the series that serves as a realistic reference to trans life that would fulfill the demands of representation—like a transition story or physical “evidence” of change. There’s no reason Cayne couldn’t be understood as playing a cis character.

Attempting to deliver a positive fantasy where trans people exist as a source of wonder for a cis majority without our bodies, practices, or relationships becoming subject to bio/necropolitical repression (and the collective trauma it produces) must fail. On a surface level, the Fairy Queen and all her subjects might be understood as queer or gender-nonconforming, inasmuch as they represent a particular, narrow image of androgyny: relatively thin and hairless, with chalky, smooth, skin and loose, but vaguely aristocratic, garb. Reproductive futurism, and the assimilative politics that accompany it, is not just about the microcosm of sexual reproduction or the heteronormative nuclear family but also about the reproduction of so many other cultural norms. 

Yet these fairies don’t only serve as the disappointing surface realization of a good trans subject, they also can usher in a deeper level of negativity—much like mermaids. In the context of The Magicians, like many other narratives inspired by fairy tales, they are antagonistic and much more frighteningly inhuman. The clip included in Disclosure, in its original context, actually depicts the arrival of a formerly invisible invading force, who serve as the major villains for the first half of the third season. The fairies coerce and exploit the kingdom’s rulers behind the scenes; they attempt to geoengineer the land in order to plant their eggs; they steal children from human parents and replace them with difficult and disloyal ones. The serial narrative arc would fall apart under close scrutiny if it were taken as an earnest extended allegory of trans oppression. However, in the intertextual context of Disclosure, the reference to this campy villain role (and the latent negativity of fairy tales in general) subtly undermines the fantasy of trans futures as a strange but undisruptive addendum to existing social structures, and the sense that the documentary celebrates a progression towards authenticity, transparency, and positivity in trans representation.

How to escape the overdetermined trans narratives of traumatic abjection and heroic resilience? The strategy of Disclosure is to directly and excessively affirm all the conflicting and impossible things these genres demand and thus ascend to the realm of camp. Let us finally be, as Sontag puts it, “too much.”[45] By abandoning the pretense of serious representation and finally letting the trans character appear as purely figurative, we might acquire the distance necessary in order to enjoy it and to better recognize the origins of the desires that engendered it in the first place. This is a trans gaze pulling back to see what object we have become while passing through mainstream genres. In other words, irony. Yet Disclosure doesn’t whole-heartedly commit to the acidic, critical tone that makes satire (or, more specifically, Juvenalian satire) easily recognizable; for this reason it makes sense to use the term camp and to avoid reducing it to simple queer satire. The structure of satire, as influentially formulated by literary critic Northrop Frye, requires both “wit or humour” and “an object of attack.” He therefore claims that

"[a]ttack without humour, or pure denunciation, thus forms one of the boundaries of satire; humour without attack, the humour of pure gaiety or exuberance, is the other.”[46]

Disclosure does not go so far as to denounce the politics of positive representation, or the investment cis audiences might have in trans images. It gently questions the effects of this phenomenon, but in a manner that is much more tender.

The utopic desire that Disclosure articulates, it articulates sincerely. In the grave, uncomfortably long monologue responding to the I Am Cait scene featuring Avery’s father, Jen Richards devastatingly and methodically outlines the manners in which her own life has been marked by a traumatic lack of the unconditional and ungendered love that he represents. Her final comment, “I had to see it. And now that I have, I want that” is heartbreaking. Viewing the televisual promise of this trans-familial good life, even when we recognize its inevitable failures, leaves a bittersweet ache. So perhaps trans camp isn’t necessarily about destroying the object of satire so much as displaying and testing the other’s fantasies as much as one’s own have been tested.

While (as I’ve mentioned) Halberstam has critiqued the conventions of the “camp archive” in relation to the stronger affects of other forms of queer negativity, we can understand why the trans relation to parental love, childhood agency, and the possibility of reconciliation or acceptance prompts a relatively subtle form of intervention. Disclosure enacts this, among the other ironic gestures that I’ve noted, with its final flail towards a fantastical future that can only fail to be serious. The gang of pallid, ageless, and androgynous figures at the film’s end can be understood as the promised, magically resilient trans children that will both preserve and enliven our world, if we can only open the gates of representation. If we understand that this future cannot be taken seriously, and that these images of the not-yet-disclosed trans child are in some sense a ridiculous, defensive fantasy, then the only children that we have left to turn to are the children who did have a future—desires and trauma and all—becoming Stryker, Cox, Wachowski, and others. Instead of mining trans lives for tragedy, or essentializing trans difference to romanticize social cohesion, Disclosure teases us to risk enjoying gender and genre-crossing without the safety of disclosure. Without that, the common ground is camp grounds.

Notes