In contrast to these stories of growth, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's In a Year of 13 Moons (1979) is a relentlessly pessimistic tale that evokes the continued suppression of difference in Fassbinder's post-war Germany. The film chronicles five days leading to the suicide of Elvira Weishaupt, born Erwin.

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Erwin had fallen in love with a man who said, offhandedly, "Too bad you're not a girl." After having a sex change, Elvira was rejected. Now she wanders through the slaughterhouse where Erwin once worked, recounting her history amid meat-hooked corpses of cattle that rain blood onto the floor.

The Transsexual as Metaphor

Unlike the dramas of Fassbinder and others, where such issues as essentialism and intolerance arise from narratives of transsexualism, Sally Potter's Orlando (1993)--based on a novel by Virginia Woolf--features, rather than a clinical case, a more metaphoric transsexual character.

After two centuries of adventures--romance, war, a princely inheritance--ageless Orlando goes to sleep as a man, then wakes, lets down a cascade of red hair, and looks in the mirror. "Same person," she says. "No difference at all. Just different sex."

Characters speak parables linking gender and ownership, as Orlando's personal journey spans four centuries and parallels the decline of the British Empire.

Liberation finally comes for Orlando when, as the parent of a young child, s/he no longer owns or is owned. And, as the child runs through a field of daisies, Orlando admits to no control over what it will do or be. In short, Orlando's transsexual experience has created a sexual escapee, "no longer trapped by destiny."

Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992) folds the tale of transsexuality into other kinds of stories in order to raise still broader questions, not only about gender but also about racial, religious, and political identities.

This artfully-constructed film begins with a carnival scene by a bridge, evoking its preoccupation with borders and crossings. When Jody, a British soldier in occupied Ireland, is captured at the carnival and held hostage by the IRA, he points to the irony of his position as a black man representing a racist country. Before he is killed, Jody asks one of his captors, Fergus, to look after his girlfriend.

Deserting the IRA, Fergus crosses political, racial, and sexual borders to fall in love with Jody's girl Dil, a beautiful light-skinned black woman who turns out to be anatomically male.

Dil "fools" not only heterosexual Fergus but also the audience as well. She seems to be a blend of races and genders, confounding mainstream clarities, throwing all political, racial, and sexual identities in the film into doubt. Eventually, Dil kills one of Jody's former captors, and Fergus winds up in prison for the murder.

"Dil is Jody's revenge," writes critic Judith Halberstam. "Dil is the snare that awaits all literal readings of bodies, sexes, races, nationalities."

Reductive and literal readings of transsexualism have led to five decades of films preoccupied with "the chop." The Crying Game illustrates, perhaps more than any other exception, that cinematic exploitation of transsexuals as jokes or shock devices ignores a subject rich in human and symbolic complexity.

The queer community has used documentary film to resurrect historical memory and to permit the marginalized to bear witness, as well as to build an image base that reflects our diversity and counters distorted representations.

Since cinema began, Hollywood has been fascinated with finding ways of representing homosexuality.

Intersexuality (formerly referred to as hermaphroditism) is a congenital anomaly in which an individual's external genitalia or internal reproductive systems fall outside the norms for either male or female bodies.

"Transgender" has become an umbrella term representing a political alliance between all gender variant people who do not conform to social norms for typical men and women and who suffer political oppression as a result.

Too often cinematic drag is reduced to a mere joke, a harmless tease that tacitly reassures us that people can change their clothes but not their sexual identities.

Responsible for bringing the much-acclaimed New German Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s to the attention of international audiences, Rainer Werner Fassbinder used cinematic conventions of Hollywood to deliver ideological arguments of the New Left.

Actress, singer, and writer Christine Jorgenson was not the first male-to-female transsexual to undergo sex reassignment surgery, but the publicity surrounding her case enabled her to educate the public about the differences between homosexuality, transvestism, and transsexualtiy.

A sharp social critic, novelist Armistead Maupin places his gay characters within a large framework of humanity, creating a social history of San Francisco during the tumultuous decades of the 1970s and 1980s.

Twenty-year-old Brandon Teena was brutally murdered on December 31, 1993 on account of gender non-conformity.

The multifaceted Gore Vidal is important in the gay literary heritage because of the straightforwardness with which he has pursued gay themes and included gay characters in his work.

A director, writer, producer, and photographer, John Waters became well known in the early 1970s through his filmic collaboration with actor--and drag queen--Divine.

Transvestite director Ed Wood died a penniless alcoholic, but posthumously became the center of one of cinema's most enduring cults.

Passionate friendships with women were essential to the life and work of novelist Virginia Woolf.