In her next film, Rub & Tug, Scarlett Johansson is playing Dante ‘Tex’ Gill, a brothel-running, mob-feuding, tough-talking trans man in Seventies Pittsburgh. Johansson is possibly the worst casting choice possible. Springtime for Hitler bad.
Why is this so problematic? Actors gonna act, right?
Dante ‘Tex’ Gill, the subject of Rub & Tug and Johansson’s #brave acting role, is a fascinating figure from the gritty milieu of Seventies and Eighties Pittsburgh. (I’ll use he/him pronouns with respect to Gill, in keeping with his strongly-indicated preference.) In his late twenties he worked as a blacksmith in the horse stables at Pittsburgh’s Schenley Park, followed by managerial stints running various businesses before easing into the massage parlor trade to pay for his mother’s care.
In 1977, George Lee, the reigning mob-connected massage parlor kingpin, was shot to death in a parking lot, which kicked off a violent scramble to divide his illicit empire. Gill ran or was a partner in at least eight massage parlors, understood to be fronts for Mafia-protected brothels, and managed to survive the bombings, arson and murders that killed some of his employees and associates. He married a woman nearly 25 years his junior, Cynthia Bruno, in Hawaii, who helped manage his parlors. “[He] was personally gentle and nonviolent, and [he] made a nice corrupt life for [himself] in a nice corrupt American society,” said Gill’s cousin. Like Capone, eventually the IRS got him for tax evasion and sent him to prison in 1984. “You’re talking about a person who was very complex,” noted his erstwhile attorney, Carl Janavitz. “[He] was very tough. A lot of fun. [He] drank a lot. [He] partied a lot. [He] could recite poetry endlessly. Irish poetry.”
Literally all of the history surrounding Gill is problematic in its understanding of Gill’s identity. Today we would clearly understand Gill as a trans man and Gill would have the social context to identify as such, given that he changed his name to ‘Dante,’ “insist[ed] [he] was a man,” “dressed like a man in suits and ties, wore short hair and sideburns and preferred to be called ‘Mr. Gill,’” and maybe even began medical transition. If Gill was understood by mainstream cis culture as a cross-dressing lesbian at the time, that’s a relic of ignorance. Trans women’s and trans men’s history and medicine has followed very different paths: in the Seventies, most trans activism and visibility was centered around trans women and feminism, and there wasn’t clear distinctions either within the queer community or without between crossdressers, drag artists and trans people. ‘Trans man’ as a label a person could claim was barely formed.
Like with Brandon Teena (the subject of another film with a cis woman playing the trans man lead), lesbians have their own motivations for claiming trans histories as lesbian histories: “I and a number of other lesbians saw ourselves in Brandon Teena, someone born with the same chromosomes as us who had determined to live as a boy, to woo women with a vengeance, to (as we saw it) walk in freedom upon the world,” writes journalist Donna Minkowitz in her recent mea culpa. While trans people have existed throughout history, without the social construction of a trans man identity separate from a masculine woman identity — without that label to identify themselves — it’s difficult to separate out trans men from masculine women in cis-centric and heterosexual histories. Gill’s own obituary from 2003(!) is gross, conflating sexual orientation with gender identity, and describing him as the “sexually ambivalent rub parlor owner,” “an unabashed lesbian in a less sexually liberated age.” ‘Sexually ambivalent’ seems to be a matter of perspective. Rub & Tug takes the ambivalence and erasure to the next level by giving Gill’s biography the Mulan treatment, making Gill a tempestuous woman “who flourished in a male-dominated business of massage parlors and prostitution by essentially taking on the physical identity of a man.”
Not coincedentally, the director of Rub & Tug, Rupert Sanders, also directed Ghost in the Shell (2017). Johansson was widely criticized for starring in it as a whitewashed Motoko Kusanagi, a cyborg generally depicted as and understood as East Asian. Johansson has a history of dismissing criticism, from her defense of sexual predators Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein to promoting Israeli corporation SodaStream’s illegal West Bank plant. In response to negative publicity regarding her casting as Dante Gill, Johansson told Bustle through a rep, “Tell them that they can be directed to Jeffrey Tambor, Jared Leto, and Felicity Huffman’s reps for comment.”
It’s intriguing that she’d lump herself in with Tambor, who played a trans woman in both Dallas Buyers Club and Transparent, but is lately notorious for sexual and verbal harassment; Leto, whose character in Dallas Buyers Club has been described as an “exaggerated, trivialized” caricature of every negative trans woman stereotype; and Huffman, who played a trans woman in heavy makeup in the uneven and transition-centric Transamerica. It exposes the ruse. Tambor got an Emmy. Leto got an Oscar. Huffman got a Oscar nomination. Cis people playing trans roles is awards bait.
Critics love cis actors who are #brave enough to play trans characters. They fawn over how sensitive but tough they are to portray the struggle of trans people, as though trans people are magical martyrs-slash-sages who exist solely to highlight the tragedy of corporeal existence while also teaching the cis characters a valuable lesson — and not, for example, actual working actors. “You pat yourselves on the back with trophies and accolades for mimicking what we have lived,” actor Trace Lysette tweeted. “I wouldn’t be as upset if I was getting in the same rooms as Jennifer Lawrence and Scarlett for cis roles, but we know that’s not the case.”
“To you people out there, you producers and you network owners and you agents and you creative sparks: please give transgender talent a chance. Give them auditions. Give them their stories,” Tambor pled, while accepting an Emmy for Transparent.
Lysette and Jamie Clayton have both pointed out that trans actors aren’t considered for cis roles, while cis actors are celebrated for playing what trans roles there are. This has been historically true for many oppressed groups, usually based on race — we’re no longer okay with Mickey Rooney doing yellowface in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but we’re still whitewashing characters that could go or have gone to people of color — but in ‘cis-washing’ trans roles, actors are simultaneously being praised for their progressive values while reinforcing negative stereotypes and misconceptions of trans people. A key part of the awards-bait trans role is The Look. Tumblr user cruciphix nailed it:
Hollywoods idea of a trans man is a pouty woman with short hair wearing ace bandages and hollywoods idea of a trans woman is a lanky birdlike man in bad lipstick with a wig and a limp floral dress
“We don’t want them to be seen as transgender, we want to make it very clear these are cis people playing dress up” like yeah, we get it
It’s not awards-worthy unless the actor makes it very clear they’re acting. Cis people are obsessed with how the trans sausage gets made. They want to know birth names, they want to see yearbook photos, they want to speculate about ‘The Surgery.’ The problem — for Hollywood, for awards committees, for casting directors — is that you can’t reliably tell who’s trans at a glance. For example, which of these people are trans?
Surprise: literally all of them. Trans people have entire lives outside of their coming out story, but cis actors, cis directors, cis audiences don’t seem interested — if the story isn’t about transition or dying, is the character really trans? To paraphrase Deadpool’s Colossus, ‘Everyone thinks it’s a full-time job. Wake up trans. Brush your teeth trans. Go to work trans. Not true.’ The bravest trans role that Hollywood could cook up would be one in which the character’s allowed to be a fully-fledged human being instead of a token cardboard cut-out.
I hinted at it at in the first paragraph, and this is to some degree an aesthetic and not political take, but casting Scarlett Johansson — a 35-year-old Manhattanite deemed Esquire’s Sexiest Woman Alive in 2006 and 2013 — as a “short and dumpy” trans man in his late forties is astonishing. Besides the fact that there are trans actors who would be a much closer fit (49-year-old Chaz Bono, for example), even reimagining Gill as a relucantly crossdressing lesbian, as Rub & Tug does, means butting up against the entire different issue of what straight men want to fantasize lesbians look like. Rub & Tug’s narrative emphasis on Gill’s relationship with wife Cynthia Bruno means we’re going to get sex scenes, but portraying Gill realistically as a butch lesbian still isn’t going to make the sort of steamy woman-on-woman action that sells tickets to straight men. Actual lesbians are, by definition, not concerned with sexually appealing to men.
What’s the solution? In the short term: don’t pay for this garbage. Putting money in the studio’s pocket will only incentivize them to make more appropriative work. Instead, make some noise and demand better trans stories and more trans actors (and while you’re at it, also demand that they get paid properly for it). Put your money in the hands of trans creators, whether that’s actors or filmmakers or writers or porn stars. And for the love of God, don’t congratulate a cis actor for spending a few weeks pretending at what trans people live daily.
