Vampires, Transvestites, and the Non-Binary
In the last century, gender fluidity didn't come with so many demands.
I met Charles Busch once; actually I had dinner with him.
I had been making a lot of money in D.C. real estate and had taken on, as one of my major charities, supporting the gay and lesbian film festival, Reel Affirmations. I’d give them so much money I’d be listed as a major sponsor like a local bank and given many bennies. A parking space behind the Lincoln Theater and a skybox in it, extra tickets to all films and parties (which I’d give to clients), a full page ad in the festival program. I’d get to meet whatever celebrity might show up, like the gay actors in the American version of Queer As Folk. One year I was invited to a dinner for sponsors and seated beside Charles Busch, the gender illusionist, actor, and playwright.
Busch - who went on to write more “mainstream” successful plays like The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife (starring Linda Lavin, Tony Roberts, and Michelle Lee) and to write the book for Taboo (Rosie O’Donnell’s Broadway version of a play about Boy George), was just then doing indie films like Psycho Beach Party (starring Lauren Ambrose) that would appear in film festivals. For gay people who follow gay writers Busch was already known as the author and “heroine” of an uber-campy off-Broadway play, Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. Vampire Lesbians is delightfully naughty in every way. It showcased Busch’s ability to impersonate a huge range of famous actresses from films of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, since the plot involves an ancient Mediterranean monster who accidentally transmits her vampirism to the virgin sacrifice left by the villagers at the mouth of her cave. The two female vampires then go through the centuries as lesbian lovers and then enemies, including as rival stars in Hollywood (think Garbo and Dietrich).
One interesting thing about the play is that a subsequent major Hollywood film, Death Becomes Her, has a suspiciously similar plot, de-lesbianized for a mainstream audience. (This was back before plagiarism got you tenure track at Harvard University.) Goldie Hawn, the frumpy wife of plastic surgeon Bruce Willis, takes her husband backstage to meet her childhood friend Meryl Streep, now a Broadway and film star. Streep steals Willis and Hawn descends into depression, obesity and poverty. But at some point Hawn meets a witchy Isabella Rossellini, who sells a potion that provides eternal youth and beauty - though with a physical cost. Newly beautiful Hawn steals Willis back, and Streep tracks down Rossellini herself to get some eternal youth and resuscitate her career. The two immortal women then become bonded like an old feuding couple, outliving Willis and everyone else they know, keeping their secret, and helping each other glue and paint their damaged body parts, since the potion made them immortal, young and beautiful, but no longer able to heal or regenerate.
I asked Busch about this. He was very uncomfortable and said he was going to get something out of it. He ended up playing a small role a year later as a female character in Addams Family Values, though it isn’t clear to me who was involved in stealing from him for the first picture who was then involved in the second.
Last year Busch wrote his memoir (he is now on one side or another of 70), Leading Lady: A Memoir of a Most Unusual Boy. There is no mention of Death Becomes Her in the book. There’s also no mention of whether Busch has ever had a nose job (he has very large nostrils so separated from his nose by a crease and then flattened against his face that one imagines it is the result of some attempt at a reduction, with a result that might encourage his desire to use makeup). The memoir appears to be honest, as Busch serves up many details of his life - his stint as a prostitute, everyone around him dying of AIDS - that some might have minimized.
What one mainly gets is Busch’s slow climb to a level of success. From a childhood where his mother died early of a congenital heart defect (she was told not to have children and had three) and his feckless father paid him little attention (the family lived in a suburban home supplied by his wealthy aunt), his navigating being an extremely effeminate little boy, his graduation from Northwestern after being a very mediocre high school student, his work as a temp and a call boy while doing off-off-off-Broadway plays, to finally working with and writing for stars like Joan Rivers, Rosie O’Donnell, Linda Lavin and having love scenes in indie films with actors like Timothy Daly and Jason Priestly. A reader looking for much in the way of insight into the gender fluid or non-binary won’t find it here. Like Elliott (Ellen) Page’s recent biography Pageboy, or Mae Martin’s autobiographical series Feel Good, about the only commonality is that they all had divorced, absent, or weirdo parents. But many people have bad or missing parents, and I am friends with two couples who are lovely people and seem to be good parents who have daughters going or gone trans. (One seems to have gone trans and communist and then moved abroad just to fuck with her libertarian parents.)
Being girly is so “natural” to Busch after 70 years that the main preoccupations betrayed in his work are those of lots of old people, especially childless old people: real estate. In his 2021 indie film,The Sixth Reel, with a cast that includes a wrinkly Timothy Daly and a saggy Margaret Cho, and Busch’s own current troupe of aging and odd looking character actors, the Busch character is mainly concerned about being evicted when a multinational buys his apartment building and plans to demolish it. It’s an almost unwatchable movie - most of these theater actors, including Busch in his non-drag scenes - need a lot more makeup and better lighting to be visually palatable on film. Busch’s aging character, family-less and childless, is saved by the discovery of a lost copy of a Lon Chaney film, worth a small fortune, about, what else, vampires.
A slightly shorter version of this article was published at SpliceToday.