Messages From the Torture Trans Department  – The Village Voice

During the counterculture chaos of 1960s and ’70s New York City, amidst the avant-garde art scene eddying around Andy Warhol’s Factory, the transgender actress Candy Darling was striving to live her best life as a woman. Born into a body that never felt like her own, Candy found purpose in this haven, where gender norms were challenged, identity was fluid, and the mashup of celebrity worship and creativity reigned supreme. For the 20-something disrupter, who portrayed a range of characters in Warhol’s and other off-off indie films, fitting in meant embracing her true self, even as society outside the Factory walls rejected her Tinsel Town aspirations and the transsexual revolution she might have been unaware she was pioneering. Candy’s critique of “Tricky Mother Nature” (who messed around and birthed an effeminate boy when she wanted a girl), her brief dalliance with Christian Science, and her laments conflating the struggles of racial and transgender identities are what author Cynthia Carr is exceptionally adept at demystifying in her new biography, Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar.

The backlash for promoting Candy’s story was swift and polarizing. Two weeks before its official publication, on March 14, I had written a Facebook post appreciating and upvoting Candy Darling. This enraged an expatriate conservative fringe from Brooklyn’s West Indian community. Instead of taking the fight directly to me on social media, the self-titled “West Indian Culture Vultures” blew up my cell phone with passive aggressive, homophobic chantdowns. Days later, I attended a private memorial for a friend in the “Little Caribbean” neighborhood of Flatbush, where a bunch of us were honoring “a playa” we knew had lived a closeted life as “a gay man from the islands,” but who had suffered from a quiet desperation we all believed, in the end, had suffocated him.

Candy’s swaggering insouciance may have ushered in the modern version of the radical trans feminista sashaying down international catwalks.

At this somber event, a handful of these Vultures — with whom I had clashed throughout the years over gay rights, discrimination, and privilege — swooped down from their moral high ground like a murder of crows, circling their prey. As customary, the Vultures had shown up uninvited, bearing a silver crucifix, a chalice of holy water, and a bundle of lavender-scented incense sticks soaked in two petit quarts of garlicky coconut oil. These were the “spiritual tools,” they told me, that they would use to perform the ceremonial libation for “disemboweling the homosexual” who had embedded “itself” in the ostensible lady-killer.

But actually on this late evening, the Vultures, from what I referred to as the Torture Trans Department, had come for me. I could tell this from the political malodor wafting from their vented spleens. The crux of their indignation was the audacity of liberal compatriots like myself who have been advocating for equality regardless of sexual orientation and promoting the constitutional protections we believe the LGBTQ+ community has the right to enjoy. The presence of the Vultures signaled that they would not be settling only for “smoking out Beelzebub” or gorging on just any dirty rotten heretic.

This time around, I was to be eaten alive. This manner of exsanguination, once a certainty by the Vultures, however, was hastily commuted down to a mock execution. It wasn’t because I’d been granted a reprieve. They just couldn’t tolerate my strongest defense yet of the growing admiration for Candy Darling. Taking a page from Carr’s book, I argued that the importance of its protagonist and sheroine to a still “evolving trans movement” cannot be understated — because all “during Candy’s lifetime,” up until her death from lymphoma, on March 21, 1974, at the age of 29, “Homosexuality was illegal. So was cross-dressing.”

“Carr is saying out loud what the transphobic right would prefer to keep quiet about the irrepressible Candy Darling and our Transgender family as a whole.”

Ten years in the making, Candy Darling really is an ode to a transgender equality movement that is navigating an America it cannot live without, yet one that often refuses to coexist with it. “As I worked on this biography … I saw that community increasingly demonized in ways both cruel and traumatizing,” Carr writes in her intro about her raison d’être for Candy Darling. The author describes what it’s like living inside the head of Candy (born James Slattery, in 1944), who would bathe late at night after everyone was asleep because if anyone saw Candy’s genitalia, it would deeply upset her. (“Candy knew that she was beautiful — but was it the right kind of beautiful? Her obsession with appearance was not rooted in narcissism. It was how she affirmed her female identity in a world where there was very little support for even the idea of gender fluidity.”)

Carr unties Candy’s tongue, allowing the fille audacieuse with “a quick wit” to portray herself as the loosed lips in a pissed-off vagina monologue. (Candy once went to a hotel roof party for Liberace, the famous pianist and entertainer known for his flamboyant performances and extravagant lifestyle — who wasn’t openly gay —  and kept trying to talk to him, but he avoided her. When she finally cornered him and said, “We have much in common,” a “horrified” Liberace outed her to hotel management). Candy’s tongue becomes as mighty as the sword, slicing through the veils of restraint to reveal the raw, unfiltered truth, fueled by the trans’ pent-up rage. Candy, who had complained of a lancing pain (“I have a baby in my stomach”) that would turn out to be lymphoma, lashed out after she checked herself into the now defunct Cabrini Medical Center, on 19th Street in Manhattan. “As she left her room in a wheelchair, a nun approached and asked if she was Catholic. ‘She saw the beads around my neck. I said no I just wear them to keep the vampires away. She said, ‘Well God bless you.’ I said remember ‘god’ spelled backwards is ‘dog.’ Ha ha.” Carr captures not just a story but the very essence of Candy’s tortured soul (her indecision about undergoing a sex change), laying bare her deepest desires, fears, and regrets. Candy Darling becomes the poster trans for sexual liberation. Considered to be way ahead of her time, Candy’s swaggering insouciance may have ushered in the modern version of the radical trans feminista sashaying down international catwalks. She “predates many of the conversations about gender going on now,” though, as Carr also puts it, “Candy would prove to be no feminist. She had no interest in politics and saw herself as a traditional woman.”

That day in Brooklyn, the West Indian Culture Vultures cawed in unison. Their hectoring escalated to vituperative attacks on my alleged “history of gay sexuality” (presumably I’ve been a screaming “Batti Boi!,” a “She She Man!,” and have been “Poom Poom Afraid!” all this time). They bemoaned “the American lifestyle” that had corrupted my strict West Indian upbringing (some knew I’d tried out to become an acolyte at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Trinidad). But a gay man I am not. There was nothing I was trying to keep secret from the fake electors of who’s going to make it into heaven or not for embracing the legacy of Candy Darling.

Photos courtesy of Jeremiah Newton

In lieu of biting off my head in public, the Vultures denounced the Facebook post, for which they said I should eat crow for predicting that Carr’s book would “appeal to diverse audiences, wider than you may think.” For them, my post is a blasphemous screed, antithetical to their Christian values, Shango faith, and Bobo Shanti Rasta beliefs. By praising Carr’s book (“Carr is saying out loud what the transphobic right would prefer to keep quiet about the irrepressible Candy Darling and our Transgender family as a whole”), they pontificated that I’d facilitated the zombie resurrection of Frankentrans: an impostor of feminine eroticism, embodying the outlandish couture of the devil’s handmaiden.

While we’ve brutally tangled in the past (there were instances involving near fisticuffs and them brandishing their lyrical guns over my 1993 cover story in the Village Voice, “Batty Boys in Babylon: West Indian Gay Culture Grows in Brooklyn. And So Does Violence”), I was sickened by the intense emotional outrage with which the Vultures regurgitated my own words back to me.

What also infuriated the Vultures was my “commiserating out and loud” with Candy’s whiteness, that I was playing the race card to engender empathy for Candy. I responded that as immigrant Blacks in America who have been systematically discriminated against because of the color of our skin, we had more in common with Candy than they cared to admit.

For one, had they read Carr’s book, they would have been surprised by Candy’s equating the struggles of mixed-race ancestry with transgender identity in describing the rejection she faced. Writer Julie Baumgold tells Carr that Candy “identified with the lead character in I Passed for White, a film that falls into the ‘tragic mulatto’ category but for Candy it was about having a core identity that she often had to keep secret.” Even when she relied on the tragic mulatto reference to explain the Black and white duality present in society, Candy, who was quite comfortable in her “ghostly, lily-white skin,” didn’t want to offend anyone by taking sides. 

One day while Candy was standing on a kitchen table as her friend Holly drew a seam down the back of Candy’s leg with an eyebrow pencil (to create the illusion that her nylon stockings were two-toned), Holly joked with Candy: “Just don’t cross your legs or you’ll look like you’re half black and half white. They won’t know what you are.” Candy shot back, “They don’t know what I am now….”

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Based on what Carr has unearthed about Candy, she didn’t seem to have a racist bone in her body. And in fact, a racist thing was done to Candy, who “began her life as a tortured effeminate boy because she wasn’t really a boy” growing up in a “very conservative, very Republican, very Catholic, very white” neighborhood in Massapequa Park, Long Island. Carr recalls the story of Ed Yazijian, a nerdy elder boy who lived across the street from Candy’s family, who “was warned against having anything to do with Candy. Warned, that is, by the other boys on the block in declarations like ‘If we catch you with that faggot, we’ll beat the shit out of you.’” Yazijian’s mother told him that one day while she was washing dishes, she’d looked out the kitchen window and noticed that two teenage white boys had tied a noose to the cherry tree in the family’s backyard. She saw Candy standing on a box with the noose around her neck. “They were about to push the box away when my mother ran out and stopped them,” he tells Carr.

In my quarrel with the Vultures, I compared the staged execution of Candy to the backwood Southern lynchings of Black men and boys, as both acts stem from deep-seated bigotry: marginalizing or stigmatizing to enforce conformity to oppressive codes. In both instances, Candy and those Southern Blacks (whom no one intervened to save) were targeted not for any wrongdoing but for their inherent identity.

There is ample evidence in Carr’s book that while growing up, Candy Darling might not ever have seen a Black person in real life before she was taken to a hospital at age 14, in 1958, for an emergency appendectomy, and remained there for a week. “While hospitalized,” Carr writes, “she made note in the diary of two ‘colored’ people — the first she’d ever met, judging by the notice she took of them: ‘There’s a cleaning lady here. Colored. Her name is Sunshine. Ha ha. She is one of the most wonderful persons I have ever known. Also there’s a colored nurse here. Her name is Lee. I like her a lot.’ By the end of her stay, Candy did not want to go home. ‘I was almost in tears! I hated to leave everyone! Lee and Sunshine.…’”

In my parting message to the West Indian Culture Vultures, I emphasized that regardless of your own identity (hidden or openly expressed), you might find inspiration in reading Candy Darling’s story, which is about an American being unapologetically herself in a world that demands conformity.  ❖

Peter Noel writes mostly about social, racial, and criminal justice, focusing on police violence, culture, poverty, and politics. He lectures as an A’Lelia Bundles Community Scholar at Columbia University. Noel is the author of Why Blacks Fear ‘America’s Mayor’: Reporting Race, Crime and Black Activist Politics Under Rudy Giuliani.