October 21–28, 1999

movies

Searching for Brandon Teena

Kimberly Peirce tracks down shifting truths about Boys Don’t Cry’s real-life subject.

by Cindy Fuchs

Kimberly Peirce looks right at you when she talks. And she’s hard to look away from, what with her wide eyes and a blue streak in her near-black hair. She likes to talk, too, really talk. She laughs easily, thinks hard and wants to ask questions as much as answer them. She’s talking a lot these days, promoting her first feature, Boys Don’t Cry. The movie is based on the life and death of Brandon Teena, an 18-year-old girl passing as a boy in Falls City, NE, in 1993, raped and murdered by erstwhile friends when they discovered her secret.

Peirce says that she wanted to get past the spectacle that raged in the tabloids and other press, to "get inside" Brandon and show what most likely happened from his perspective. (Peirce uses "he" and "she" at different points to describe her subject, following what she discovered about his own changing understandings of himself.) Peirce began researching the case while she was a grad student at Columbia in 1994. Drawn by the bold "leaps of imagination" taken by Brandon and his girlfriend Lana Tisdel, Peirce attended the murder trial of John Lotter and Tom Nissen, worked at a rape and incest institute and interviewed butch lesbians, transgenders and many people who knew Brandon in Lincoln and Falls City.

Intrigued by the way that "stories changed" each time they were told, Peirce looked for motives and resistances, conscious or unconscious. Peirce remembers how, in her conversations with Lana, the girlfriend’s account of when she first knew Brandon was a girl constantly shifted: "She said, ‘I knew the day I met him.’ And then, progressively, it changed: She knew in the jail cell — no, she knew when they stripped her. What was so beautiful was that she wasn’t willing or able to locate Brandon as a girl or a boy at any given point, I think then and I think now. There is no absolute truth, [despite] society saying, this other person is gendered female, that’s bad or that’s good. That makes you a lesbian or makes him a lesbian."

Peirce wants her movie to refute such definitions, for instance by asking the audience to participate in and be thrilled by Brandon’s passing. "The sheer act of passing itself is erotic," she says, "regardless of the end result or where you come from. Androgynous people are so erotic because they’re in motion." But passing is also "totally incarcerating in a certain way. And Brandon was doing it under near-impossible terms. He specifically said, ‘I’m not a lesbian, I’m not going to New York or Los Angeles. I’m going to be a straight man here.’ The stakes for failure were tremendous."

Peirce feels the movie can appeal to everyone (she’s had straight men tell her they identify with Brandon). "I knew dykes coming to the film would probably love Brandon either way because of the act that he performed. I knew the gender passing would somehow be more important to a straight audience. Teena, as the trailer-park girl, could transform herself into the ideal boy because she could study the boys. She was an invention of her own imagination, fluid and thrilling, yet she was satisfying a cultural need" by conforming to gender norms. "She had the fluidity to do it, like a boy couldn’t."

Despite and because of her love for Brandon, Lana "sucked him into the family drama. Her imagination and her sense of poetry are so rich, and he enriched that too. But even after the trauma, she didn’t leave town." Their relationship is about shared joy and truth. To illustrate this in the last sex scene, Peirce says, "He had to be bare, exposed and visible. Some people have asked me, are they having sex as lesbians and I say, no not at all. Lana is gendered female and so is Brandon, but Brandon is now neither Teena nor Brandon, but some amalgamation of both. The emphasis is really on being seen and being loved. Genitals just don’t make the person."