25 years on, 'Boys Don't Cry' remains a milestone in trans cinema

This episode explores the enduring impact of the film "Boys Don't Cry" on transgender representation in cinema, 25 years after its release.

1. "Boys Don't Cry" was a seminal film for trans representation in mainstream cinema.
2. The casting of Hilary Swank, though controversial, was pivotal in bringing trans issues to a wider audience.
3. The film highlighted the struggles and tragic fate of its protagonist, setting a narrative pattern for subsequent trans stories in media.
4. Current cinema is moving towards more nuanced and varied portrayals of trans characters, authored by trans filmmakers.
5. The conversation around trans representation has significantly evolved since the film's release, reflecting broader societal changes.

1: Opening Discussion

Scott Detrow introduces the topic and its relevance. Discussion includes the evolution of trans cinema and the unique contributions of current films.

• Willow Caitlin Maclay: "Trans cinema has diversified significantly in recent years."

2: The Legacy of 'Boys Don't Cry'

Detailed examination of "Boys Don't Cry," its cultural impact, and the controversy surrounding its casting and narrative choices.

• Kimberly Pierce: "It was groundbreaking as the first mainstream film centered around a transgender man."

3: Modern Trans Cinema

Exploration of modern examples of trans cinema that contrast with the narratives seen in "Boys Don't Cry."

• Willow Caitlin Maclay: "We're seeing films that explore transgender identity in fresh and exciting ways."

4: Interview with Kimberly Pierce

Kimberly Pierce discusses the challenges of making "Boys Don't Cry," from funding to casting, and reflects on the choices she made.

• Kimberly Pierce: "I wanted to cast a trans person, and that had its challenges."

• Educate yourself on the history and evolution of trans representation in media to better appreciate current developments.
• Support trans filmmakers and artists by watching their films and sharing their work.
• Engage in conversations about trans representation with others to broaden understanding and acceptance.
• Reflect on media consumption and consider the narratives and perspectives being presented, especially in older films.
• Advocate for authentic casting in films and media portrayals to ensure diverse and accurate representation.

As part of his ongoing look at groundbreaking films from 1999, host speaks with Kimberly Peirce, the writer-director of Boys Don't Cry.

The film starred Hillary Swank, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Brandon Teena, a young transgender man searching for himself and love in Nebraska.

Peirce talks about the challenges she faced in getting the movie made and her efforts to find a transgender man to play the lead role in the film.

Detrow also speaks with critic Willow Catelyn Maclay, who sees the film's legacy as complicated.

People

Kimberly Pierce, Willow Caitlin Maclay, Brandon Teena

Guest Name(s):

Kimberly Pierce

Content Warnings:

None

Scott Detrow
Trans cinema has come a long way. We're kind of having a moment that we've never really seen before. That's film critic Willow Caitlin Maclay. We're having. These directors do very different things related to their own specific experience with queerness, which diversifies the trans image.

Maclay is the co author of the upcoming book corpses, fools and the history and future of transness in cinema. She singled out this year's critically acclaimed films like a 20 four's I saw the tv Glow. I like girls. You know that, right? Totally.

Unknown
That's fine. What about you? Do you like girls? I think that I like tv shows and the indie superhero parody the people's Joker. Um, I'm trans.

Willow Caitlin Maclay
Uh. Uh. Well, I'm sorry. Well, I'm not sorry. Just the latest examples of fish films by and about transgender people that are exploring that identity in fresh and exciting ways.

So we have this influx of trans authored cinema. Not all of these films are super mainstream, but, like, these films are getting out and they're being watched still, Maclay. Says, this is a recent development. This idea of transgender people getting to tell their stories in their own way and centering trans people in film at all still remains a rare occurrence. But 25 years ago, an independent film from a first time filmmaker broke new ground.

Unknown
I don't know what went wrong. You are not a boy. That is what went wrong. You are not a boy. Tell them that.

Willow Caitlin Maclay
They say I'm the best boyfriend they ever had. Written and directed by Kimberly Pierce, boys don't Cry told the true story of Brandon Tina, a young trans man searching for love and connection in Nebraska. Boys don't Cry comes out at sort of the peak of the new queer cinema. But there wasn't a transgender presence in the films from that decade. Boys Don't Cry was the first mainstream film centered around a transgender man.

At the time, it was considered a big moment in queer cinema and in cinema at large. The film garnered critical acclaim as well as winning Hilary Swank the best actress Oscar for her portrayal of Brandon during her Oscar speech. She paid him tribute. His legacy lives on through our movie to remind. But for many trans viewers like Maclay, Swank's casting set an unwelcome precedent.

For the next 15 years, we had this kind of presence about cisgender actors playing transgender characters such as Transamerica, the Danish Girl, and Dallas Buyers Club. McClay also argues the film's subject matter and arc also proved troubling since just like another influential film about queer people from that decade, 1990 three's Philadelphia boys don't cry ends in tragedy. The end result is that this character is raped and murdered. And you kind of take in this notion that, like, you know, if this is the only film about transness that is worthy of mainstream attention, then, you know, you kind of internalize that feeling. About yourself still, McClay credits the film as the first of its kind to ask mainstream audience to empathize with a transgender.

We have to keep it, obviously, because it's a teaching moment for, like, how transness was perceived at the time. It has an undue burden in representing trans masculinity going forward. And I do think that Kimberly Pierce would probably do things differently if she were making the film now compared to then. Consider this. Boys don't cry was a landmark in trans representation.

Scott Detrow
Coming up, we'll hear from the film's writer and director about the challenges of getting it made and whether she would do anything differently if she made it now from NPR, I'm Scott Detrow.

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Scott Detrow
It's consider this from NPR. When boys don't cry came out 25 years ago. Transgender people were rarely depicted on screen at all. If they were, it often wasn't positive. They might be deranged killers like in Brian de Palma's dressed kill or deceitful con artists like this.

Key plot point from ace Ventura Pet detective Einhorn is Finkel. Finkel is Einhorn. Einhorn is a man. It was into this climate that Kimberly Pierce began researching and working on the screenplay for boys don't cry. It's kind of amazing for me to go back and rewatch it and put myself back in my shoes when I was pretty much a kid in grad school at Columbia grad Film.

Unknown
And remember how overwhelming it was to read about Brandon in the Village Voice. What blew me away was his enormous power of his imagination, his desire, his will to live, how he lived as who he was, and how he wanted to live in love when so few people did that at that point, and particularly on the scale that he did. So I look back, and I'm still really moved by Brandon. I do have one question just about the nuts and bolts of making the film itself, because it's hard enough for any student filmmaker to get to the point of a widely distributed feature film. It was probably hard enough for a woman in the mid to late nineties looking at who dominated the film industry.

Scott Detrow
Probably even harder to make a thoughtful film about a transgender person in that period of time. What was the biggest challenge you faced as you tried to get this story out there? Well, there were so many. And at that point, I was thinking I was probably trans. I was somewhere between a butch lesbian and a trans person.

Unknown
I didn't know exactly when I fell in love with this person. And I said, this is the story I want to make. It just didn't make sense to people. And one of the biggest questions that came back was, well, you must decide. You need to decide.

Does Brandon want to be a man, or does Brandon want to sleep with women? Right? Is Brandon basically a trans person or is Brandon a homosexual? And there was such a divide in that question. So I was told that my idea of making a movie was not a movie.

So there was an initial problem, even of conception that my society and my didn't really understand what I was trying to do. But eventually we did. And then once we got past that journey, it was like, okay, great, Brandon can be my protagonist. So the second thing was, I was trying to now write a story which was challenging, so that people could watch it and could fall in love with Brandon and not hate him and duplicate what had happened to him. But I also then needed to get money, and I needed to get a crew with a sympathetic portrayal of a trans person.

Prior to that, we didn't have sympathetic portrayals. Trans people weren't really our protagonists, and they weren't in feature length films, and they weren't in feature length films that could be released to the mainstream. So those were huge challenges. I mean, there were many more that came with finding an actor. That took us easily.

I think it was three years. No, it took five years, and it was 300 people that I interviewed, and it's an amazing journey. I wanted to cast a trans person, and that had its challenges simply in terms of who was available and who was, you know, able to carry out the role. I mean, a movie role is a complicated thing. Not to say that a trans person can't play it.

It's just when you're making a movie, you are looking at who you can get in the moment in history that you are trying to make that piece of art. Given that and given how hard you thought about that and how much you wanted to make that work, and the fact that, you know, Hilary Swank, of course, goes on to win an Oscar for this role, I'm wondering how you have processed the criticism over the years that has come around the casting choices. I have a humility around art making, which is, I know that my job is to serve the story and to serve the characters and to serve history. And, I mean, I've devoted my life to that. So I feel at peace with the fact that I overturned every stone possible to find a trans person who could play the role.

You know, in the mix of hundreds and hundreds of people who auditioned this person, Hillary Swank does an audition where we saw the ingredients that we needed, and Hillary did a fantastic job. I always will credit her with that, and there's a reason she won that Oscar. Now, the question of, could I have cast a trans person if they had existed and appeared before us? With all my digging, I would have been the first to do it. So I accept any criticism, but I would like people to understand Brandon had not had any surgery.

Brandon had not had any hormones. Brandon was. We have to be very careful here. Brandon felt that Brandon was a man. Brandon was a man.

And yet, if you had gone too far down the journey of any kind of surgery or hormones that might have been challenging in the filming. So I'm not saying that we couldn't. I'm just saying to everybody out there, I did so much to try to make this authentic, because I'm transforming we. As we thought about this segment and rewatched the movie, a lot of conversations just about how wildly different the world is in mostly very good ways between 1999 and 2024, when it comes to people understanding trans people, people knowing trans people in their lives, people understanding, not forcing people into categories in the way that happens in the movie, because that is what was happening in real life. And there was this one scene that we kept coming back to where Brandon is talking to Chloe about Brandon's past.

What were you like before all this?

Were you like me, like a girl girl?

Yeah, like a long time ago. And then I guess I was just like a boy girl. I feel like even Brandon is struggling to find the right words to describe his situation. I mean, did that feel accurate to that moment and how people kind of struggle to think things through just based on general understanding being much different? Well, look, you probably could have found somebody who was in Brandon's body and said, I was always a man.

You might have found that. So I'm not gonna say that's impossible, but to my research, Brandon had a journal entry. We had read Brandon's dating history. Looking at all that stuff, it made sense to me at the time to say that Brandon was struggling with where he was going to end up because he didn't have a culture that gave him the language. On the topic of then versus now, are there big things or small things you would do differently if you were making this movie in 2024?

You know, I'm humble. If there's things that I could do better, I'd certainly do them. It's not a thing I think about, because the movie, you know very much what you're trying to do with anything you write or direct. You're trying to make it work. And we got the movie to work.

I mean, certainly with casting, I would try to honor trans people and try to cast a trans person. But again, that's what I tried back then. So I would always have to see what the world delivered me and how I could tell the story in a way that was, you know, my main goal was to capture Brandon, help you fall in love with him. We're having this conversation as part of a series of segments we're doing looking back at the movies of 1999. And there are so many big, bold movies like the Matrix and Fight Club movies like the Blair Witch Project.

Scott Detrow
How do you think your film fits into that mix of movies? I think I found my tribe. I'm proud that boys exist in that moment. I think boys came out of an explosion of all of us looking at the mainstream and saying, hey, we want to have the power to tell our stories, you know, in this medium. But what it's conveying to us is restricted in a way that we don't believe in.

Unknown
Let's go back to our own personal stories. I think that's why those movies are all really great and unique, and they launched the careers, really, of the next generation of film directors. Kimberly Pierce is the writer and director of Boys Don't Cry. Thank you so much for talking to us about it. All right.

It was really fun. Thanks. This episode was produced by Mark Rivers. It was edited by Adam Rainey. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigun.

Scott Detrow
And one more thing before you go, you can now enjoy the consider this newsletter. We help you break down a major story of the day. You'll also get to know our producers and hosts and hear some moments and read about some moments of joy from the ALL things considered team. You can sign up@npr.org. considerthisnewsletter it's consider this from NPR.

I'm Scott Detrow.

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