Christine Jorgensen and the Cold War Closet

Christine Jorgensen and the Cold War Closet

David Harley Serlin

One of the most dramatic moments of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prizewinning Angels in America (1993) occurs during one of several confrontations between lawyer Roy Cohn and the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, the woman whose 1951 espionage trial helped catapult Cohn to professional infamy. In Kushner’s play, Cohn lives in New York City during the mid-1980s; in addition, he has been diagnosed with AIDS. In a moment of transhistorical hallucination, Rosenberg appears before Cohn in his hospital bed and proclaims to her former prosecutor that “the shit’s really hit the fan.” With both revenge and pity, Rosenberg watches as the dying Cohn confronts his own closeted homosexuality-the spectre of which, Kushner insinuates, was part of the reason that Cohn pursued and vilifed Rosenberg thirty years earlier. Cohn’s exposure of Rosenberg’s secret life as an alleged communist spy permitted him to displace his own secret homosexual life so that, in his manipulation of the trial, he could transfer his own sense of guilt away from himself to Ethel and her husband. The execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg not only tri- umphed the public humiliation and degradation of American communists, but also helped to eradicate any associations Cohn may have had with inappropriate personal conduct, whether in his Jewish immigrant heritage or in his private sexual proclivities. In Kushner’s revenge fantasy, the relationship between Ethel and Roy is cemented through this act of revealing-and testifying on behalf

An abbreviated version of this essay was presented at the 1994 American Studies Association meeting in Nashville, where it was warmly and graciously received. I want to express enormous gratitude, for generous comments and helpful suggestions on earlier drafts, to Jean-Christophe Agnew, Amanda Bailey, Steven Capsuto, Jeffrey Escoffier, Rebekah Kowal, Carol Magary, Andrew Ross, Joan Saab, Danny Walkowitz, and the RHR Editorial Collective.

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of-the other’s closeted alliances and subversive activities.’ Kushner’s decision to make these two historical characters-

household names during the 1950s-central players in a drama about the political economy of AIDS during the 1980s is more than simply a meditation upon the Reagan-Bush years (when the federal government unofficially abdicated its responsibility for the economic and social health of the American body politic). In fact, the loose, almost surreal framework of Angels in America provides an exem- plary opportunity to examine the ways in which the the domestic, heterosexual, nationalistic rhetoric that crystallized around discussions of family values and individual rights during the 1980s was rooted, both historically and culturally, in the immediate postwar period. Of course, many studies of postwar American culture have attempted to show similar historical continuities between the 1950s and 1980s, albeit with fewer creative liberties or dramatic flourishes than Kushner. Cultural historians such as Elaine Tyler May, Stephen Whitfield, and Stephanie Coontz have tried to demonstrate how mass media, government agencies, and religious propaganda manipulated ideas about family, nation, and ”American” character to maintain strict hegemonic control over both domestic and international political activity and social behavior.2

But, as Kushner’s play suggests, this postwar trope of ”Americanism” achieved success ultimately through a process that critics Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have called ”displaced abje~tion.”~ That is, to secure abstract concepts such as ”national pride” or ”American character,” individuals or institutions were responsible for revealing the ways in which certain ideas or people were inimical, or antithetical, to dominant conceptions of domestic health, public safety, or national security. Thus, the culture of the 1950s tended to transform complex political and ideological issues into allegories of damnation or redemption, through which people could exonerate themselves for their errant ways by either publicly exposing their own personal secrets or by exposing the secrets of their neighbors. Postwar culture framed and consumed these dis- avowals or confessions as narratives of conversion, ascendence, and political maturity. Some of these included highbrow tomes like The God That Failed (1949), which expressed the disillusionment of famous American and European intellectuals; popular confessional autobiographies such as Whittaker Chambers’s Witness (1952), Elizabeth Ekntley’s Out of Bondage (1950), Louis Budenz’s This is My Story (1951); and films such as I Was R Communist for the FBI (1952), and the more (in)famous On The Waterfront (1954L4

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Such cultural phenomena-confessionals, conversion narratives, and the multiple closets established by hidden political or sexual identities-seem particularly critical to our understanding of the Cold War period. Indeed, it is precisely under these circumstances, and within these cultural parameters, that Kushner’s play forces Roy Cohn to confess his true identity-not merely to the world or to Ethel Rosenberg, but to himself. Kushner’s portraits of Ethel Rosenberg and Roy Cohn not only give us a sense of the multiple closets into which people were routinely forced (or those from which men and women were routinely evicted) during the 1950s, but how the suppression of social and sexual identities remains a resilient and incontrovertible fact of political culture in the 1990s, well beyond the social and cultural demonization of people with AIDS. From the rise of anti-gay legislation in many American communities (though recently challenged and defeated, a s in the case of Colorado’s Amendment 2) to the current ”Don’t Ask, Don‘t Tell” status of gays in the military, Kushner‘s decision to foreground Roy Cohn within a much larger, and much uglier, picture of institution- alized homophobia and political repression resonates loudly and clearly for us some forty years later.

In light of these provocative issues, this essay will examine the early case history of Christine (nee George) Jorgensen, a Bronx-bred ex-GI who, in the winter of 1952, was the first American man to undergo a ”sex-change” opera tion, achieving international status as a woman. Admittedly, the dual effects of Jorgensen’s surgical transformation and her bizarre rise to stardom on the American cultural imagination hardly seems consonant with the historical moment that nourished McCarthyism and permitted the Rosenbergs’ execution. But Jorgensen’s biography-r the elements of her biography as they were revealed to popular audiences-forces us to reconsider the ways in which the political economy of the Cold War exploited ideas about sexual orientation and gender identity to promote and disseminate American nationalism and domestic security.

Although this essay will not presume to tell her entire life story, the earliest moments of Christine Jorgensen’s rise to stardom are worth recounting if only because there is a great deal of ambiguity and inaccuracy surrounding her intertwined surgical and sexual histories. For the purposes of this essay, it is exactly the nature of Jorgensen’s ”sex change” surgery that seems to have been forgotten-much, I will argue, to the collective chagrin of gender theorists everywhere. What current professionals in the field.of sex reassign- ment surgery consider to be the definitive (some would say defin-

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ing) operation for transsexuals-vaginoplas ty for male-to-females, and phalloplasty for female-to-males-was beyond the scope of even those medical experts in Denmark in whom Jorgensen had entrusted her faith. The best that contemporary physicians could offer Jorgensen in 1952, the year in which she experienced the bulk of her ”conversion,” was electrolysis, hormone injections, and removal of the penis and testicles. In the earliest media spectacles that accompanied her return from Copenhagen-the place where she had, ostensibly, “changed her sex”-Jorgensen merely assumed her new position as a full-fledged American woman. Jorgensen was able to maintain her charade of female authenticity for almost six months, during which time she was known internationally as ”the most talked-about girl in the world.” But when medical experts were called upon to define, in layperson’s terms, exactly what steps had been taken to transform Jorgensen from one gender to another, they instead announced the bitter truth about Jorgensen’s inauthen- tic anatomy. In April 1953, newspapers outed her as ”an altered male,” and Jorgensen supporters around the world were outraged to discover that Christine was not a “real” woman. Within a few months, Jorgensen’s social significance had shifted from that of ”glamour girl” and scientific miracle to medical oddity and psychological subject?

According to a 1968 radio interview that she gave to promote her newly published autobiography, Jorgensen did not become an anatomically correct transsexual-that is, did not have a surgically constructed vagina-until 1954, almost two years after her first appearance in the media.6 But by the time she underwent that last and final operation in her transformation from George to Christine, Jorgensen’s public identity and reputation had already dramatically shifted. The real case of Christine Jorgensen demonstrates how and why the various media and scientific communities welcomed and celebrated her, and why they ultimately lashed out against her within six months of her initial appearance. While it is true that medical and psychiatric discourses dominated the Jorgensen phenomenon (culminating with Ed Wood, Jr.‘s [19531 Glen or Glenda?, which was in turn lovingly re-created in Tim Burton’s [I9941 Ed Wood), the mainstream media of the early 1950s seized upon an alternative, and far more interesting, version of the Christine Jorgensen story than what has been recounted by cultural analyses of the p e r i ~ d . ~ Between December 1952 and April 1953, the American media diffused and refracted the image of Christine Jorgensen through a vari- ety of cultural conventions such as fashion photography, ”behind

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the scenes” reportage, and the reprinting of personal letters that Jorgensen had sent to her parents and a Marine stationed in Britain who was known shortly thereafter as Jorgensen‘s boyfriend. These discursive traits and provocative references had the unprecedented effect of normalizing Jorgensen rather than alienating her and thus secured her reputation as a sterling example of what constituted a ”real American woman.”

Like Roy Cohn, Christine Jorgensen‘s early success rested almost entirely on her ability to remain inside the closet of sexual ambiguity and to constitute herself as a shining symbol of American nationalism. But immediately after her ”fall from grace,” the popular media expunged Jorgensen’s biography of any positive, romantic, or nationalistic attributes i t had acquired just months earlier. Jorgensen’s status as a sexually ambiguous eunuch was not only treated with homophobic disdain, but also was folded surreptitious- ly into the rhetoric of anti-Americanism, so that she was marked as someone who had forsaken her natural biological duty and had, in effect, converted to the other side. Within six months of her initial appearance, Jorgensen was transformed into a pariah of sexual deviance: a perfect symbol of the Cold War closet that someone like Roy Cohn, had he not had his hands tied with the Rosenberg case, might eagerly have sought out in order to distance himself from his own private sexuality and contain his reputation.

I Love a Girl in Uniform On 1 December 1952, the New York Daily News ran an exclusive headline across its masthead: ”EX-GI BECOMES BLONDE BEAU- TY.” Beneath the 72-point block capital letters, the type of which were normally reserved for the latest reports of MacArthur‘s peram- bulations around North Korea, was the shadowy profile shot of what seemed to be an attractive young woman who looked something like Marilyn Monroe. Facing the right side of the front page, with her nose crinkled and her eyes opened slightly, she seemed frozen, like a mannequin-or, perhaps more fittingly, like a intro- verted celebrity caught off-guard by an invasive paparazzi. Beneath the grainy photograph read the caption: ”George Jorgensen, Jr., son of a Bronx carpenter, served in the Army for two years and was given an honorable discharge in 1946. Now George is no more. After six operations, Jorgensen’s sex has been changed and today she is a striking woman, working as a photographer in Denmark. Parents were informed of the big change in a letter Christine (that’s her new name) sent to them recently.”s Inside the front page, the reader was

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treated to “before” and ”after” photographs of both George and Christine, including one narrow vertical shot of Jorgensen as a leggy bombshell, similar in style and pose to the type that George’s Army buddies (or George himself, prophetically perhaps) may have dis- played, in locker doors or on barracks walls, of Betty Grable or Rita Hayworth? The Daily News reprinted the complete text of the letter written by Christine to her parents, George, Sr., and Florence Jorgensen of 2849 Dudley Avenue in the Bronx. In it, Christine described the pain and secrecy involved in her decision to leave for Denmark and undergo two years’ worth of operations and hormone injections.

The Dairy News first presented Jorgensen’s story in a form that resembled familiar feature articles of local and national interest that were common to the media of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Dairy News prided itself on being the first newspaper to break the story-indeed, the ”story” of how Jorgensen’s story was captured became a corollary tale to the earliest accounts of her celebrated transformation. According to the legend, which was reproduced in syndicated versions of Christine’s story, News reporter Ben White heard about Jorgensen from a friend working at Rigs Hospital in Copenhagen, where Christine had been recuperating for several months following her surgery. Within a few days of White’s initial interview and cover story, the location of Jorgensen’s hospital room became public knowledge and the subsequent site of an international media circus. When major weeklies such as Time, Life, and Navsweek seized upon the Jorgensen story, they did not fail to reit- erate White’s professional account of how he “got” his news, as if to suggest that the resourceful journalist’s ability to obtain and disseminate the details of Jorgensen’s story was as triumphant, mythical, and extraordinary as surgery itself.I0

But Jorgensen was, of course, no mere feature article in a newspaper tabloid s t o r y e n d repeatedly the News announced and identified her as a former GI who had served honorably in World War 11. This may have been due to the fact that the Korean War was already in full swing, so that the residual effects of the ”soldier‘s story”- especially the feature story of the soldier returning home after many years abroad-had never really disappeared from the cultural imagination. But it may also have been because, in many ways, Jorgensen exuded all the insecurities of the conventional (and heterosexual) soldier’s story. From the very outset, the newspaper constructed Christine as a celebrity news ”itern” firmly ensconced in the tradi- tion of military reportage, of which newspaper precedents during

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”Before” and ”after” images of Jorgensen that, typically, were juxtaposed and reproduced together throughout the national media during December 1952. The grainy, candid shot of G.I. George-clearly enlarged from an Army photo-makes a stark constrast to the softly lit and expertly posed shot of Christine (looking not unlike

Grace Kelley), taken in a Copenhagen studio, summer 1952. Photo courtesy of UPI/kttmann.

the period were infinite. The New York Times followed the News’s lead with a dismissive, satiric presentation of Jorgensen that was echoed in i t s headline, ”Bronx ’Boy’ is Now a Girl: Danish Treatments Change Sex of Former Army Clerk.”’l When Newsweek turned away temporarily from the Jorgensen case to discuss the war effort in Korea, an article noted that it was ”not until the end of the week, when the travels of another soldier, Dwight D. Eisenhower, broke into the news did the public peek at Christine’s private ordeal start dropping from the front pages.”** When she returned from Copenhagen in February 1953, however, a New York Times headline announced “Miss Jorgensen Returns from Copenhagen: Ex-GI Back ’Happy to be Home,”’ which made explicit the connection between Jorgensen’s arrival back in the United States and the soldier’s return home from war.I3 Newsweek announced Christine’s arrival at New York International Airport in an article called ”Homecoming.” According to the article, Christine was busily writing her memoirs for William Randolph Hearst’s American WeekZy in a plush suite at the Carlyle Hotel; she intended her life story to provide spiritual and emotional guidance for those suffering in what she called “the no-


man’s land of sex,” which must rank as the ultimate civilian appropriation of military jargon.’*

Such military invocations were much more than updated versions of standard war stones like The Red Badge of Courage or All Quie t on the Western Front. Within the immediate context of American journalism during the early 1950s’ Jorgensen’s military identity not only exploited the success of World War I1 propaganda, but also evoked the social reform journalism and reportage of the 1930s, when advances in photographic technology were combined with the proletarianization of the social document. The constructed soldiefs story-his family background, his military exploits, his letters to families and friends-imitated self-consciously the icono- graphic images of the “ordinary” and “common” man that were used by WPA artists and writers a generation earlier to endorse New Deal programs and policies. Journalists during the early 1940s’ such as John Hersey, whose military portraits of Douglas MacArthur’s troops were made entirely from the safety of the Time Life building in midtown Manhattan, wrote tenderly about the young, brave, red-blooded American boys conscripted from farming pastures, dust bowls, urban landscapes, and college greens. Hersey’s portraiture was made to assuage American consumers eager to affix national, familiar, and sentimental qualities to the abstract war statistics with which they were daily ~0nfronted.I~ Whereas social realism-which reached its aesthetic maturity in the cultural work of the Popular Front movement-provoked a deliber- ate confrontation with the Depression’s widespread suffering and made an implicit mandate for change, the wartime appropriation of such ”common” images became a method to conceal and ultimately displace the more unsettling, and less altruistic, economic and political imperatives that motivated the war. By elevating the common man to heroic stature, the media was able to achieve ideological assent from its citizenry and could barter successfully the unpleas- ant images of death and violence for a wholesome, democratic, and ultimately mythologized American masculine identity.I6

But to what degree, if at all, did these journalistic conventions change to accommodate a soldier who had been transformed into the opposite sex? Major periodicals tended to represent Jorgensen within the familiar discursive strategies of wartime reportagenot to mention the hyperbolic language of tabloid journalism-in order to legitimate Jorgensen’s putative ”realness” and “humanness.” Photographs and feature articles made certain that the distinctions between Jorgensen’s dual identities of ex-GI and aspiring starlet

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were highly negotiable, if not collapsed outright. According to a News article, ”The Girl Who Used to Be a Boy Isn’t Quite Ready for Dates,” Christine was ”a former GI who became a beautiful blonde with silken hair,” a tendentious statement that allowed the reporter to endow the present Christine with erotic qualities ( “silken hair”) that she never could have possessed (or that he never could have openly acknowledged) in her ”former” life as a soldier. Jorgensen’s wistful, campy response- “I’m womanly enough to be glad that it is such nice blonde hair”-suggested that she knew only too well what it was like to avoid an explicit statement about another man’s hair.17 None of these emphatic commentaries on her female authenticity seemed to conflict awkwardly with her military identity; indeed, even Christine’s parents framed the discussion of their (new) daughter’s transformation in terms of military service. In a Daily News piece, ”Folks Proud of GI Who Became Blonde Beauty,” father George declared that “(She] deserves an award higher than the Congressional Medal of Honor. She volunteered to undergo this guinea pig treatment for herself and to help others.” Florence Jorgensen expressed the delight and frustration similar to that of many army mothers when she explained that, ”YOU send a person over [to Europe] and you have a completely different person coming back.” When a reporter asked if Jorgensen had enjoyed his service in the Army, Florence replied, “Who likes the Army? She was very brave. And she is a beautiful girl, believe me.’’18

If Jorgensen’s public representation seemed to waver conspicu- ously between her former military identity and her new female one, it was not simply because she could be inserted easily within the established schema of wartime journalism. Building upon the already existing conventions of social realism within newspaper reportage, postwar military culture encouraged the news media to quantify and reproduce every intimate moment, every private heart- break, every recognizable human experience for mass consumption. In this way, all forms of cultural mythology-births, graduations, wedding celebrations, and deathbed scenes-were constructed to take on a self-consciously performative aspect that softened the more corrosive aspects of military life.19 Successful postwar films such as The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), The Men (1950), and The Man in the Grey FZannef Suit (1954) traced the journeys of male war veterans back to civilian life to examine the traumatic psychological, emotional, and economic effects of the war. The war had invested popular culture with a fertile and highly profitable commodity-the “human interest’’ story-which was distilled ultimately from the

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wounded masculine psyche.20 The media’s emphasis on Jorgensen’s prior military identity

seemed to commingle strangely with her new, postwar sexual identity and thus connected her not only to the genre of wartime reportage, but also to images of innocence and vulnerability that such journalism hoped to instill in its consumers. In a bizarre twist on the standard military hospital scene, Time’s initial Jorgensen story, ”The Great Transformation,’‘ described her ”11 lying in a hospital bed, her long yellow hair curling on a pillow ... Christine widened her grey-blue eyes and lifted her hands in a surprised frightened gesture,” which made her sound like a cross between a wounded fawn and a soldier recuperating after a bloody battle.*’ If soldiers were supposed to be stoic heroes impervious to pain on the battlefield, then they were supposed to succumb easily to human frailty while they were hospitalized-a rhetorical move that helped to make their formerly indestructible bodies more pathetic and the enemy more reprehensible. But unlike her fellow soldiers, Jorgensen’s body was wounded voluntarily and with complications for which there were neither shiny medals nor elevations in military rank. In fact, her surgical transformation aggravated the image of wounded soldiers’ bodies in the most provocative way by blurring the male-coded wounds of the military hospital with her self- induced wounds of female presentation. Given popular culture’s predilection for images of insecure war veterans who had to adjust to civilian life, Jorgensen’s surgical transformation may have seemed like the logical outcome of military service: it aligned her with the ways in which enfeebled soldiers were feminized, however temporarily, by their physical or mental inactivity. It was as if, by way of her conversion from agile manhood to fragile womanhood, Jorgensen stood symbolically for the vulnerable American male body besieged by a foreign power.22

Jorgensen’s reputation as a man who had become a woman was secured, not denied, because of these military embellishments on her identity. They ensured that she could be included within the bounds of the heterosexual imagination. Given the extent to which the news media embraced her as a ”real” woman, Jorgensen’s military associations co-existed peacefully with her so-called femininity. Several days after her initial appearance, the DuiZy Nezus featured an article “Christine’s GI Beau Pops Up: Boy, Wotta Gal!” which identified Jorgensen’s boyfriend as Air Force Staff Sergeant Bill Calhoun from the town of Everman, Texas (a town whose very name might have made Christine feel particularly restless). According to the arti-


cle, which was reprinted in countless, though often abbreviated, versions, Calhoun met Jorgensen while on a weekend pass from a US. Air Force base in Bentwater, England: “I was on leave in Copenhagen this Spring [of 19521 with nothing much to do. I saw this good looking blonde in a park. She looked like an American, and I decided to ask her.’’ After she took him on a brief guided tour through the city, Calhoun had to depart, but the two agreed to exchange letters throughout the summer. In September, Calhoun returned to Copenhagen on an extended six-day pass to spend time with Christine ”on the continent”; he remarked later that “I can hon- estly say that it was the best time of my life.” Interestingly, Calhoun claimed that it was not until that December, when Jorgensen’s surgical transformation was announced publicly, that he discovered his girlfriend’s special j e ne sais quoi. According to Calhoun, a friend brought the matter to his attention after noticing that a picture of “the sergeant’s blonde pinup girl” resembled a woman featured in an issue of Stars t3 Stripes, the U.S. military’s overseas newspaper. Although Calhoun admitted that finding out the truth about Christine was like ‘‘a trip to the moon,” he defended her honor as well as his own integrity: ”When I met her she was a girl and, as far as I’m concerned, she’s a girl now. She’s got a personality that’s hard to beat, the best looks, best clothes, best features, and best body of any girl I ever met ... I consider it a very intimate friendship.” The News explained that ”[Calhoun’s] feelings for Christine have not changed but ... he had ’taken a ribbing from boys on the base’- good na turedl~ . ’ ’~~

What did it mean that Calhoun recognized her immediately as an “American”? What, after all, did an American woman look like in 1952, and how would he know if he saw one? And what did Calhoun mean when he described his relationship with Christine as ”a very intimate friendship”? In recounting the mythical romance of Bill and Christine, several important and suggestive themes emerge, both in terms of how the news media framed and packaged their relationship, and in terms of what information was displaced or repressed by such framing and packaging. For immediate consumption, the story was framed as a military romance, in the purest sense of the phrase. A tale of the handsome young soldier who, on leave, discovered the girl of his dreams-the American girl, one might argue, in whose honor Calhoun had vowed to defend and protect his country in the first place. Their story became so entrenched in both the romantic rituals of courtship and the generic conventions of military journalism that there was nothing that could be coded as

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”different” or ”illicit” about their relationship. Indeed, quite to the contrary, the news of their relationship was so utterly banal that Bill’s friends’ mockery was presented as nothing more than the gen- tle derision that any heterosexual male might receive (and expect) from his peers.

Yet this is precisely what remains so intriguing about this episode: the fact that this conflation of Jorgensen’s multiple identities seems to have provoked little or no discomfort in the military itself. Perhaps this was because the news media’s focus on her new ”female” status-that is, that she truly had become a “woman”-began to sub- sume all other aspects of her biography. In an article entitled ”’I Could Have Gone for the He-She Girl,’ Says Reporter,” Dairy News writer Paul Ifverson admitted to his readers that ”Chris is now a girl I could have fallen in love with had I met her under different circumstances.” Despite the fact that doctors were still trying to “help Christine adjust her still masculine mentality and to become truly feminine,” Ifverson had no qualms about commenting on the ”beautiful, emotional, feminine hands” of “the chic, obviously American

The emphatic attention to Jorgensen’s ”American” characteris- tics in both Calhoun’s and Ifverson’s accounts must be regarded as more than simply nationalistic pride. With historical hindsight, we know Jorgensen was not at the time an anatomically correct woman with a surgically constructed vagina. But it was this attention to Jorgensen‘s explicitly feminine appearance and her externally project- ed gender identity that simultaneously elevated the overt heterosexual conventions of her public behavior and diminished the covert homosexual implications of her private sexuality. For Ifverson, there was nothing potentially incompatible in his description of Jorgensen’s ’‘blue eyes sparkling and her blonde hair in pretty curls around her broad shoulders.” And, for that matter, it comes as no surprise when Ifverson’s article closes dramatically with the statement, ”Today, Chris looked up, her mouth as luscious as Joan Crawford’s, and said, ’I’m happy.‘” In both cases, it was the attention Ifverson paid to Jorgensen’s putative femininity that legitimated his infatuation and diffused the homoerotic tensions of his description. And it was the exact same attention Bill Calhoun paid to “the best looks, best personality, best features, and best body” of Jorgensen that sanctioned their publicly celebrated romance. A romance that, under ”different circumstances” (i.e., that of an open, same-sex couple), would have sure- ly branded Calhoun a homosexual and forced him to leave the Air Force via courtmartial or dishonorable discharge.

Bill and Christine’s status as a couple, then, was made safe not


only through the familiar conventions of military reportage and heterosexual romance, but also through photographs, hyperbolic narratives, and personal testimonies that revealed the terms by which men during the early 1950s understood and consumed the attributes of American femininity. Just as the media’s emphasis on her ex-GI status normalized her new life, her romance with Bill Calhoun normalized her new identity in the face of systemic homophobia fomented by military, journalistic, and familial institution^.^^ In this way, Jorgensen’s constant reiteration of her “natural’’ femininity and the qualities of her ”obvious” American persona helped to mitigate any associations she, or even Bill, might have had with subversive behavior or with dangerous sexuality. These ideological frameworks served to reinforce each other, thereby making it entirely possible for both reporters and readers to displace the social or sexual anxieties that normally would have attended such revelations. This is also the reason why, during these early moments of Jorgensen’s life as Christine, the rhetoric of female authenticity (“I’m womanly enough to be glad that it is such nice blonde hair”) could diminish effectively what contemporary psychiatrists might have otherwise identified as deviant or pathological sexual behavior.26

While Jorgensen was not, anatomically speaking, a woman-this was not known publicly-her identity could be affirmed culturally as the material apotheosis of postwar popular culture. She embodied essentially the story of the soldier who, in the end, defies con- vention, follows his own heart and remains happily-ever-after not with, but as, the beautiful blonde. In this case, the Daily Nezusk descriptive appellation first used to announce Christine Jorgensen to the world-”Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty”-satisfied the binary terms on which American postwar culture understood gender and helped to explain what those terms actually meant to begin with. The ubiquitous, recurring trope of ”Americanism” throughout her early case history not only served to temper Jorgensen’s sexual ambiguity, but also became part of the inviolable bulwark of domestic, nationalistic propaganda that could be used to justify why wars were waged and why men’s lives were lost in the first place.

The Place of Skulls, or the No Man’s Land of Sex The national media attempted to capture the contours of Christine Jorgensen’s thoroughly American female identity not simply because her military reputation and domesticated personality car- ried such potent rhetorical strength. Clearly, the media’s attention upon her “naturally” female character traits gave a conceptual

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framework for the physical and even, perhaps, the philosophical dilemmas posed by her new identity. Such attention also served to assuage the confusion voiced by some of the more disconcerted members of the press, who were unable to imagine Jorgensen’s transformation within the terms established by socially proscribed gender roles. During her first interview from her Copenhagen hospital room, Time reported that Christine was forced to field questions, such as ”Do you sleep in a nightgown or pajamas?” ”Do you still have to shave?” ”Are your interests male or female? I mean, are you interested in, say, needlework, rather than a ball game?”27 As one reporter observed, albeit in a slightly more hostile tone, Jorgensen ”lit a cigarette like a girl, husked ’Hello’ and tossed off a Bloody Mary like a guy, then opened her fur coat. Jane Russell has nothing to worry about.”28 In this sense, Jorgensen’s external features were the most vigorously contested aspect of her personality. Because her success as a female icon rested upon the conventions of military and celebrity journalism, her clothes and mannerisms-her personal habits or effects that could be enumerated, through which she could gesticulate her femininity-were as important, if not more so, than what she said or which boyfriend she was currently dating.

But far from being manufactured passively by news agencies or journalistic conventions, Jorgensen herself played an extremely important part in the production and dissemination of her own identity. Like a good politician, Jorgensen knew how to mobilize and manipulate the discourses of personal integrity and public virtue in order to manage her image. And as a media star, Jorgensen herself was amazingly good at how she dressed and what she said in public. After her return from Copenhagen, the New York Times noted that, “wearing a loose fitting nutria coat and carrying a mink cape over one arm, the blonde woman declared: ’I’m happy to be home. What American woman wouldn’t be?’”29 In this passage, Jorgensen’s poised gesture, expensive and tasteful ensemble, and quick wit-all of which seem endowed with a self-consciously, campy gay flourish-were structured to be exactly like the rhetorical conventions of military journalism or fashion photography. That is, they served as a kind of physical rhetoric that allowed her to sit comfortably within the parameters of the heterosexual imagination. We cannot reasonably dispute Jorgensen’s authority as a ”woman” in these passages because she knew exactly how to present herself, both verbally and somatically, to “pass” according to the presumed cultural terms of American womanhood.30 For these reasons, most accounts of Jorgensen’s public appearances during this period did


Jorgensen as saucy vamp, showing off her new wardrobe to media pundits and gos- sip columnists in Hollywood, 7 May 1953. Although Jorgensen is centered, the real subject of the photograph is the bemused reporters in rapt fascination. During the press conference, Christine balked at inquiries into her personal life and asserted

enigmatically that "There are boundaries to a human being's rights and good taste." Photo courtesy of UPI/Bethnan.

not fail to mention, and consequently reify, Jorgensen's innumerable female accoutrements, which were couched repeatedly in the familiar, glamorous language of fashion journalism. The Daily Nms reported that Jorgensen was "[dlressd in a sophisticated tailored black suit ... Christine used pearls as the only jewelry to relieve the severe black of her costume. A pearl cluster adorned the side of her black hat and another cluster her high-collared blouse. Pearl earclips added the final, brightening touch ... [She was] manifestly pleased at the attention bestowed on her feminine charm."31

If the dominant culture seemed to scrutinize Jorgensen unceas- ingly, it was because her behavior self-consciously confused or collapsed those social gestures and mannerisms that, in the 1950s, were thought to reveal the outward signs or movements of masculinity and femininity. Comments such a s "I am very happy to be a woman" and "I'm just a natural girl" were strategies of self-promotion through which Christine intended to challenge and parody the

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assumptions that people brought, often cynically, to her new life.32 And as I have already suggested, such comments not only legitimated her claim to an American female identity, but also displaced the homosexual innuendoes involved in such a claim. In these ways, Jorgensen’s self-promotion was predicated almost entirely on exploiting the performative or theatrical aspects of what constituted American gender identities.33 Her clothes, gestures, and physical presence became, in a way, openly dramatized ”events” that were buttressed ultimately by the media’s perpetual retelling or re-enact- ment of the myths and secrets that surrounded her life story. Jorgensen’s newly constructed persona also functioned as a public disavowal of her former male identity, of her former life as a soldier, and of whatever physical or psychological male attributes with which she still felt burdened. Whether intended or not, Jorgensen’s self-generated female virtues and her self-styled conception of vampish, womanly wiles distanced her not only from the dangerous and subversive sexual implications of her surgery, but also from her unglamorous, unsexy former life as the son of a Bronx carpenter.

But clothing and mannerisms were only part of Jorgensen’s strat- egy to authenticate herself as a legitimate woman. To be exonerated from possible associations with deviant or anti-social behavior during the early 1950s-the type to which Christine was, of course, in perpetual danger of exposure--required ceremony and ritual, and in this regard Jorgensen was no different than any of her Cold War contemporaries. Although she may have performed a convincing and coherent gender identity through her external appearance, it was on the question of Christine’s soul that, for all intents and purposes, the jury was still hung. The letter that Jorgensen wrote to her parents in the summer of 1952 serves in this regard as a highly accessible in-road to the Jorgensen phenomenon. It also speaks, as a cultural artifact in its own right, to many of the questions of authenticity and performativity raised by Jorgensen’s public displays and announcements.%

At first glance, the letter bears an unfaltering resemblance to what is now called, in popular parlance, a ”coming out” letter: that is, it is a claim, defense, or partial explanation for her struggle with, and triumph over, her sexual identity. “Right from the beginning,” Jorgensen announced, ”I realized that I was working toward the release of myself from a life I knew would always be foreign to me. Just how does a child tell its parents such a story as this?” But given the delicacy, poignancy, and emotional investment that one would normally expect from a such a life-altering document, the narrative


content of Jorgensen’s letter is anything but private or domestic. Nothing in the letter strikes one as terribly colloquial or inaccessible in the way intimate family correspondence often is; that is, no editorial annotations are necessary to preserve Christine’s original meaning. “Sometimes a child is born and to all outward appearances seems to be of a certain sex. During childhood, nothing is noticed; but at the time of puberty, where the sex hormones come into action, the chemistry of the body seems to take an opposite turn and chemi- cally the child is not of the supposed sex, but rather of the opposite sex.. .. I was one of those people.. . . It was not an easy fact to face but only for the happiness i t brought m e I should not have had the strength to go through these two years .... I am still the same old Brud, but, my dears, nature made a mistake which I have had cor- rected and now I am your daughter.”

The public quality of Jorgensen’s prosc+honest, familiar, linear, reassuring-was more than simply calculated to mitigate the confusion and anxieties produced presumably by her physical appearance. The letter‘s goal was to locate and seize the voice of reason and the language of confession: its stylistic conventions, readerly expec- tations, and utterly predictable language would be familiar to any audience, including Jorgensen‘s parents. And like Christine herself, the body of the text seems carefully and self-consciously constructed from the interior outward with a public audience, and their bewil- dered reception, firmly in mind. Jorgensen’s letter invoked this generic language and tone precisely because she herself expected- and rightly so-that this was what her readers, parents and tabloids alike, would want to hear in a description of a postoperative ”sex change” recipient. One anticipates, and even waits with patience and hope, for the build-up to the revelation, the protracted explana- tions of circumstance ( “ I was one of those people”) mixed with wispy camp flourishes (”my dears”). Anything more unfamiliar or cryptic might have placed Christine’s case beyond the reach, both intellectual and moral, of her parents’ affection, not to mention the discriminating palette of mass cultural consumption.

In these and other passages, Christine demonstrated her obvious compulsion to explain herself and choose a singular life from the enigmatic haze of her formerly ambiguous gender identity. Jorgensen’s words combined the implicit desire for immediate control with the explicit desire to generalize about, and therefore avoid, external pressures and problems, so that her sexuality, or gender, became an active, and presumably positive, choice that brought with it “happiness.” She wrote, ”Life is a strange affair and seems to be

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stranger as we experience more of it ... [we] strive through science to answer the great question of ’Why’-Why did it happen, where did something go wrong and, last but not least, what can we do to prevent it and cure it if it has already happened.” By assuming the rhetorical ”we,” Christine pleaded for compassion and universality (”We strive through science to answer the great question ’Why?’”), which envisioned personal anxiety as a symptom of a larger, shared, consensual cultural anxiety (”Why did it happen? Where did it go wrong? What can we do to prevent it and cure it if it has already happened?”). Jorgensen’s prose in these passages took on an almost spiritual dimension: representing her surgery as a type of religious conversion, Christine could describe her struggle as a triumph of spirit over flesh, wherein she chose to alter, through the miracle of modern science, the poor hand she had been dealt in life. One might even say that Jorgensen’s decision to rename herself ”Christine,” and not “Georget te,” “Georgia,” or ”Georgina,” functioned, like self- conscious performances of her femininity, as a kind of resurrection. As the new and improved version of George Jorgensen, Jr., the son of a Bronx carpenter, the glamorous Christine was also a beatific vision of virtue.

Whatever other qualities it possessed, transparent or otherwise, Jorgensen’s writing here was without doubt a work of confession, of explanation, revelation, and personal transformation. But we must remember that Jorgensen was only one of many public personalities whose celebrity status and popularity were calcified by the success of such personal expositions about life and career. Certainly, the rhetoric that Jorgensen used in her letter allowed her to translate her anxieties about gender or sexual orientation into terms that were more generically familiar, or that were more accessible or more highly prized, to the culture at large. But the letter’s disavowal of dangerous difference-her ”confession” of innocence and her pre- sumption of authenticity-also seemed to replicate the rhetoric of other confessional tracts popularized during the immediate postwar period, especially during the rise of the House Committee on Un- American Activities (HUAC) and the onset of domestic anti- communist ~ r o p a g a n d a . ~ ~ Perhaps the most famous confessional of this type was Whittaker Chambers‘s epic work Wifness (1952), which became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection not long after Chambers read sections of it over national radio broadcast in July 1952-the very month, in fact, that Jorgensen’s parents received the first news of their new

Chambers, and his embrace of anti-communist hysteria, is an


important departure point for a discussion of Jorgensen. In certain ways, Witness enacts publicly the cultural contradictions of the early 1950s, especially as embodied by closet-dwellers like Jorgensen and Roy Cohn. Chambers’s act of exposing and vilifying Alger Hiss was an attempt to disguise any guilty associations he himself may have had with the Communist Party. Writing Witness, which helped to endear him to the American public, provided Chambers with an ideal (though, as we have seen, a relatively common) opportunity: like Cohn’s manipulation of the Rosenberg trial, Chambers could bring Alger Hiss to public obloquy and, at the same time, manipulate the facts of his own personal history. Chambers‘s book functioned to humanize his own identity as an otherwise inaccessible and intimidating public figure who, like many HUAC participants and informers, required a public image sweetened by virtuous recantings and Christian allegories to naturalize and protect his acts of domestic terrorism. In these ways Witness, and especially its over- the-top prologue ”Foreword in the Form of a Letter to My Children,” used and abused a host of different rhetorical and sentimental devices that were as accessible and effective for Chambers as they undoubtedly were for someone like Christine Jorgensen.

In the ”Foreword” to Witness, Chambers explained to his children his decision to rescue himself from his deluded former life as an ex- communist. Chambers insisted that ”One day [American communists] have to face the facts. They are appalled at what they have abetted. They spend the rest of their days trying to explain, usually without great success, the dark clue to their complicity.” For Chambers, this moment of political doubt or uncertainty was a moment of freedom from the soul’s inner torment and freedom from the brain’s inner sickness: “The Communist who suffers this singular experience then says to himself: ’What is happening to me? I must be sick’ ... it is recognized frankly as a sickness. There are ways of treating it-if it is con- fessed.” In one deft motion, Chambers‘s narrative conflated the t e rn of popular psychology and religious conversion, so that his desire for confession, for change, and for correction became the ultimate expres- sion of his Americanism.

It is not simply the case that Chambers saw communism as an ill- ness that could be cured. To be more precise, it is that communism could be cured only by enacting or articulating certain patriotic forms that would express the ideological soul of the nation. For Chambers, a true American soul expressed the uniform, religious desire for what he called political freedom: “Freedom is the need of the soul, and nothing else. It is in striving toward God that the soul


strives after a condition of freedom .... External freedom is only an aspect of interior freedom." True, "freedom" was (and still is) a hopelessly ill-defined rhetorical abstraction, malleable enough in its time to appeal to religious zealots, civil rights activists, political ide- ologues, and aspiring transsexual people alike. But if this was the case, then Jorgensen's desire to become a woman was also nothing more than an "aspect of [her] interior freedom." As Jorgensen herself claimed, "I realized that I was working toward the release of myself from a life I always knew would be foreign to me." The emphasis on "foreign" in Jorgensen's narrative performed the same function as ''sickness'' did in Chambers's: the reiteration of such terms not only permitted both writers to expose the dangerous, even insidious, forces from which they saved themselves, but also allowed the two writers to evade and displace other questions about identity, history, or self-motivation.

Chambers fashioned Witness to be a highbrow political Jeremiad that would win over those who doubted the sincerity or integrity of his intentions. This explains why and how Jorgensen's letters could, and did, follow the same rhetorical trajectory as Chambers's book. Both authors knew how to manipulate publicly sanctioned notions of oppression and freedom so that their personal experiences, however dissimilar, made complete sense within the political milieu of the Cold War. When Jorgensen announced, in a February 1953 press conference, that she intended to help save those individuals who suffered in "the no man's land of sex," it was because she felt, as did Chambers, that she had the authority to offer spiritual and psychological guidance to those in need. The covert and subtle triumph of Jorgensen's conversion narrative out of the "no man's land" was achieved in much the same way that the overt, exaggerated emphasis on her ex-military identity, or her "real" feminine appearance, established her as a reputable American woman. By the same token, Chambers concluded his "Foreword" with a similar authority that, although written for his children, was intended to persuade and sus- tain those who had chosen to follow in his footsteps. "I am leading you, not through cool pine woods, but up and u p a narrow defile between bare and steep rocks from which in shadow things uncoil and slither away. It will be dark ... I will have brought you to Golgatha-the place of skulls. This is the meaning of the journey." A vast, dangerous wasteland was the perfect Christian allegory to describe the place through which deluded communists who seek conversion to democratic purity must travel. And, in terms of autho- rial intent, "the place of skulls" as a physical and spiritual terrain


served exactly the same purpose for Chambers as the “no man’s land of sex’’ did for Jorgensen. Immutably familiar and yet highly conceptual, both analogies were powerful symbolic spaces through which individuals who desired conversion and change would have to pass on the way to their final destination.

As an affirmation of change, conviction, and moral and spiritual ascendence, Witness paralleled the way that Jorgensen, trapped by her biologically male body, fashioned a new identity consonant with what she contended were her many female virtues. And just as Jorgensen used the confessional to defend herself from her detrac- tors, Whittaker Chambers also took advantage of the same cultural disposition towards public proclamations of innocence and experience to produce an easily digestible (though intellectually spurious) anti-communist tract. The physical and intellectual act of confession for both parties not only made visible the essentialized tenets upon which both Jorgensen’s avowed femininity and Chambers’s avowed political maturity rested, but made visible the role that the confession played in the cultural construction of Americanism during the Cold War. But whereas Chambers’s hyperbolized journey resulted in a published work, Jorgensen’s resulted in a new gender identity. Her physical conversion to a new body did not simply emulate the act of confession, but was the very act of confession: the creation of the authentic private body and authentic public identity that she had so eagerly sought from the very beginning. The surgery-like the letters she sent home, or like the perpetual exhibition of her femininity-was the material proof of Jorgensen’s redemption for her former life as a man.

Goodbye New York, Hello Las Vegas On 20 April 1953, Time ran a lengthy article entitled ”The Case of Christine”:

For a while, having achieved notoriety, she was Manhattan’s No. 1 glamour girl. A blonde with a fair leg and a fetching smile, she seemed to be everywhere that was anywhere, with everybody who was anybody. Columnist Leonard Lyons introduced her to a gaggle of celebrities. Broadway star Yul Brynner and she grinned at each other over a couple of highballs at El Morocco. She appeared in Madison Square Garden at a charity rally sponsored by Walter Winchell, on half a dozen television programs, and was photographed in a soft tailleur for the Easter Parade. .. .

Last week came the revelation that Christine Jorgensen was no girl at all, only an altered male.37

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Within several days of Time’s announcement, the media descended upon the Jorgensen case and exposed her secret to an extremely dis- enchanted and visibly offended American popular audience. Her “secretN-the fact that she had not undergone “real” surgical conversion from one sex to the other-made her physical and rhetorical performances more than patently unreal: they betrayed her as nothing more than an unmitigated sham. But had Jorgensen really betrayed the public’s trust and confidence? Had she blatantly lied to them or misled them? Or was she merely caught within the ideological nets of the Cold War, which both framed and consumed her according to its own political and cultural impulses?

After April, references to her former military life and professions of her female authenticity began to vanish and were replaced by the sober opprobrium of rational science. A May 1953 Newsweek con- firmed that ”[llatest medical testimony seems to indicate that the now celebrated Christine Jorgensen is not a hermaphrodite, not a pseudohermaphrodite, and not a female. The former George Jorgensen is a castrated male.”38 The interesting continuum of biologically coded gender identities provided by the article (and the pragmatic reiteration of her given male name) not only suggested the degree to which Jorgensen had previously avoided scientific scrutiny, but also demonstrated how control over the word ”testimony” had shifted ultimately from Jorgensen to that of the medical profession. As a legitimate woman, even as a legitimate hermaphrodite who had found ways to valorize her new identity and gain public acceptance, Jorgensen’s personal narrative had inspired the cultural imagination with the kind of warm, familial comfort that seemed anathema to the cold vernacular of surgery or psychiatry. But as an exposed, illegitimate woman-and perhaps, more impor- tantly, an illegitimate manrhrist ine’s secret had betrayed more than just the trust and goodwill of the American public. Later references to Jorgensen labeled her a “fugitive” who had been ”emasculated” to ”suit his inclinations,’’ and descriptions of Jorgensen were based, as Time related, on ”more pity than facts.”39

Although Jorgensen’s spectacular status as ”the most talked about girl in the world’’ disappeared, what did not disappear, as a consequence of her public exposure, was her status as a medical exhibit. During the spring of 1953, she was offered a contract with a prominent Las Vegas casino to perform in a supper club-cabaret at a weekly salary of $12,000. Her act consisted of singing show tunes, narrating a photographic slide show of her two years spent in Copenhagen, and doing what Quentin Crisp remembers as ”jaunty


little dance numbers, although she couldn’t sing or dance to save her life.”40 The cabaret show culminated with Jorgensen parading around on stage dressed in a Wonder Woman costume and knee high boots while holding ignited sparklers. Although one is tempted to read her performance as Wonder Woman, the all-American comic book heroine who assisted the Allied Forces during World War 11, as a reference to her former military identity, the performance also demonstrates that Jorgensen could only earn her salary after 1953 by playing exaggerated cartoon roles that highlighted her as a cultural and medical oddity. Considering the profound relationship between popular entertainment and scientific education in American cul- t u r d e t a i l e d extensively in the overlapping performance histories of medicine shows, dime museums, and carnival side shows- Jorgensen’s career move to Las Vegas seems, in retrospect, the only possible option suited to her new public persona as a performing freak. For better or worse, she became a refugee trapped forever in the cultural “no-man’s land” between risque entertainment and high kitsch.

By June, Jorgensen jokes had become positively de rigueur: come- dy routines, among other forms, were the most visible public mani- festations of animosities directed at Christine. A summer 1953 broadcast of the Jack Benny Show included a sketch in which Benny and Bob Hope, dressed as jungle explorers, capture a tiger that when reversed is revealed to be a leopard. Certainly, the HopeBenny routine invoked a long history of standard vaudeville sketches: the myth of the Great White Hunter out to capture wild beasts and subdue untamed natives.41 But far from being merely nostalgic for vaudevillean simplicity, the Benny satire reflected, to a large degree, the way in which the familiar mythology surrounding Jorgensen’s early reputation had been replaced by a cultural mythology even more familiar (if not more insidious) to American audiences. Hope, taking full advantage of the immediacy provided by early live television, remarked to an especially anxious Benny that the tiger ”must have gone to a veterinarian in Denmark .... He had his paw on his hip when I shot him.... Look, his claws have been manicured.” The simple reference to ”Denmark” as the vignette’s slapstick punchline could have easily sustained the scene. Yet, what is interesting is Hope’s reiteration of ”he” and ”him” throughout the sketch, which served as a public register of Jorgensen’s failure to persuade audiences that he was both a surgically and socially constructed woman. Moreover, Hope’s improvised line about ”manicured claws” demonstrated the logical progression of intolerance

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Jorgensen poses for her first swimsuit photo session under the watchful eye of the Sahara Hotel, 4 November 1953. Taken six months after Jorgensen was outed as an ”emasculated male,” the photograph attempts to recuperate her residual glamor.

Instead, it underlines the ways in which her personal life and career were most deftly expressed by her status as a Las Vegas spectacle. Photo courtesy of UPI/Bettmann.

subsequent to Jorgensen’s eviction from the closet of female authenticity-”he” was nothing more than a limp-wristed sissy who indulged in female activities of vanity and external decora t i ~ n . ~ *

That the longevity and popularity of both Benny’s and Hope‘s careers rested on their eagerness to perform in drag seems, in this context, nothing more than an ironic insight. Given the cultural parameters of the period, this c o d a tion of Jorgensen’s reputation with the imagined attributes of early 1950s homosexual identity- vain, effeminate, overly dramatic-was the only possible conclusion for the Jorgensen case. Not only did such sketches transform her into the butt of jokes about gay behavior (she was certainly not the first, nor would she be the last), but they implicitly demoted her to the level of transvestite/homosexual/deviant, a suspect and crimi- nal category that denied her any of the privileges of womanhood- however socially circumscribed in 1 9 5 S t o which she so conspicu- ously aspired. After her exposure, Christine Jorgensen did not cease to be a novelty; on the contrary, the media shaped her social identity


to conform to the demonized status of other homosexuals, who were ceaselessly identified throughout the 1950s as a scourge against American family values, national security, and the moral hygiene of the body p ~ l i t i c . ~

Which brings us into the 1990s, when Christine Jorgensen and the prickly machinations of her life story have been all but forgotten. In this regard, she shared the same cultural position as Roy Cohn, at least prior to Tony Kushner's excavation of the Cold War closet inhabited by that former legal counsel to Joe McCarthy. In Angek in America, Roy Cohn materializes as the self-hating Jewish f igere for whom redemption comes at the hands of his manufactured mortal enemy, Ethel Rosenberg. In that one moment, the duplicity and ideological terror of an entire age is made manifest in Rosenberg's act of "outing" Cohn, his life, and his physical deterioration. The very act of outing Jorgensen, as it were, served the same impulses for Cold War culture as had the act of praising her female authority and feminine wiles six months earlier. When Jorgensen had been identified as a "real" woman, it would have been unthinkable for media pundits to put her under any kind of scrutiny. Considering the decorum of 1950s public culture, which dictated what was proper or improper to discuss in the public sphere, to question Jorgensen's female authenticity openly would have been an inappropriate social transgression far too "indelicate" for a lady of Jorgensen's glamorous stature to endure. But when medical experts intervened to dem ystify the tenets of Jorgensen's putative "womanhood for popular audiences, they exposed her as an "altered male"-and, later, a "morbid" transvestite. With the force of rational science tempering her popularity, Jorgensen was discovered to be nothing more than a female impersonator, whose distorted mind and body contained a reassuring subject for the Manichean microscope of postwar sexual perversion. In this way, Jorgensen's rise and fall helped to metaphorize access to, or expulsion from, the powerful cultural narratives of heterosexual legitimacy: from desire and veneration, to disappointment and revulsion.

But the collective outing of Christine Jorgensen and Roy Cohn betrays more than the shifting ontological status of femininity and masculinity, or heterosexuality and homosexuality, within Cold War culture. They also tell us something about the ways in which we can recuperate the historical undergirding of sexism and homophobia to make them visible and struggle against them. What, after all, had been discovered and consequently exposed by the Jorgensen case? The dangerous duplicity of a homosexual transvestite who wanted to be

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known only as a woman? Or the embarrassed homoerotic imagination of American postwar culture that invested Jorgensen with utopian dreams and domestic fantasies that she could never fulfill?

Notes 1. All references to Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Part One: Millenium

Approaches (New York Theatre Communications Group, 19921, esp. 111. 2. See Elaine Tyler May, H o m m r d Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era

(New York: Basic Books, 1988); Stephen Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); and Stephanie Coonk, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York Basic Books, 1992). For other recent historical studies of the period, see Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 2945-1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York Villard, 1993); Dan Wakefield, N m York in the Fifties (Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1992); and Wini Breines, Young, White and Miserable: Growing up Female in the Fifties (Boston: Beacon Books, 1992).

3. This concept, which owes its ideological undergirding to Mikhail Bakhtin, is developed by in Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 19/53.

4. See Richard Crossman, ed., The God That FaiIed (New York Regnery Press, 1987 (1949); for popularity of confessional literature, also see Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York Penguin, 1980), 16-19,199-222.

5. Audio recording of 1968 radio interview with Jorgensen by well-known psy- chologist and radio personality Dr. Lee Steiner, published as Mole and Female (New York Jeffrey Norton Publishers, 1969). The word "transsexual" itself, which was coined by D. 0. Cauldwell in 1949, was made popular in 1967 by Harry Benjamin, who also provided the preface for Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography (New York: Bantam Books, 1968). To a large extent, the controversies surrounding Jorgensen kept the surgical/medical binaries of "male" and "female" securely in place until the late 1%Os, when gender dysphoria clinics such as the one at Johns Hopkins helped to create a more welcoming climate-not to mention a working vocabulary-for those who wanted to undergo transsexual surgery. In tlus respect, both Jan Morris and RenCe Richards had the surgical and cultural precedent estab lished by Jorgensen against which they could maintain their new identities. See, for points of comparison, Moms's Conundrum (New York Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 19741, and Richards's Second Serve: The Reme Richards Story (New York: Stein & Day, 1983). For historical details about male-to-female operations as they occurred in Jorgensen's time, see Deborah Heller Feinbloom, Transvestites & Transsexuals: Mired V i m (New York: Delacorte Press, 1976), 25,227; or even Janice G. Raymond's vulgar radical feminist diatribe, The Transsexual Empire (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979).

6. See "The Case of Christine," Time (20 April 1953). After identifying Jorgensen as not a "real woman," but actually a male transvestite, the article offers us a 1950s "medical definition" of transvestism: "a morbid desire to dress in the clothing of the opposite sex."

7. See note 2; see also Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992); Annie Woodhouse, Fantastic Women: Sex, Gender, and Transvestism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Catherine Millot, fforsexe: Essays on Transsexuality, bans. Kenneth Hylton, (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1990); and Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (New York Routledge, 1994).

8. All references to "Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty: Operations Transform Bronx Youth," New York Daily News (1 December 1952), Al, 3/10.

9. For a fascinating discussion of the use of female pin-ups as domestic propaganda during the war, see Robert B. Westbrook, "'I Want a Girl, Just Like the Girl That

CHRISTINE JORGENSEN /I 63

Mamed Harry James’: American Women and the ProbIem of Political Obligation in World War Two,” American Quarterly 42, (December 1990): 587-614.

10. Ben White‘s travails were reprinted in “The Great Transformation,” Time (15 December 1952): 87-88; “Talk of the Town,” New Yorker (24 January 1953): 12; and ”Christine and the News,” Newsweek (15 December 1952),64-66.

11. “Bronx ’Boy‘ is Now a Girl: Danish Treatments Change Sex of Former Army Clerk,” Nao York Times (2 December 1952), A18.

12. ”Christine & the News,” Newsweek (15 December 1952),64-66 [italics mine]. 13. “Miss Jorgensen Returns from Copenhagen: Ex-GI Back ’Happy to Be Home’,”

New York Times (13 February 1953), A38. 14. ”Homecoming,” Time (23 February 19531, 28. Though deliciously appropriate

as a traditional military term, Christine’s use of the ”no-man’s land” seems to me slightly inaccurate, especially for someone who had, at least to all outward appearances, transgressed the ”boundaries” and arrived safely at a conclusive identity, however falsely realized or imprecisely defined. It is also interesting that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have seized upon this term for their recently published volume of literary criticism, No Man‘s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the 20th Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). Finally, the intriguing term also makes me think of the Red Baron, the imaginary villain who regularly shoots Snoopy down over a “no-man’s land” on the French/German border, in cartoonist Charles Schultz’s bizarre romanticization of World War I-era Europe.

15. See John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 19761, 53-64. For more about generic conventions during the war years, see William S. Graebner, The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in fhe 29405 (Boston: Twayne, 1!391), 1-18, 138-40, and Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century ( New York: Pantheon, 1984), esp. the chapter on American culture during the 1930s. For WPA art, see Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). For WPA photography, see Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Noonday Press, 1989); and, as a good introduction, see Vicki Goldberg, The Power of Photography (New York Abbeville Press, 1993).

16. For an interesting treatment of political assent, see Simon Shepherd, ”Gramsci- the-goalie: Reflections in the bath on gays, the Labour Party, and Socialism,” in Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis, eds., Coming on Strong: Gay Politics and Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 287-300. For a recent interpretations of photographic images in relation to American propaganda during World War 11, see George H. Roeder, Jr-, The Censored War: American Visual Experience During WWII (New Haven: Yale University Press, 19931, and Wendy Kozol, Life‘s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Iournalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994).

17. “The Girl Who Used to Be a Boy Isn’t Quite Ready for Dates,” New York Daily News (2 December 19521, C4.

18. The0 Wilson, ”Folks Proud of GI Who Became Blonde Beauty,” Nrw York Daily News (2 December 1952), C4.

19. For a near contemporary analysis of these phenomena, see Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor, 1959).

20. For analyses of these films within the historical context of the period, see Graebner, The Age of Doubt, 14,4042. For issues of masculinity (and homoeroticism) in films of late 1940s and early 1950s, see Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 100-15.

21. ”The Great Transformation,” Time, 58. 22. Postwar masculine anxieties are discussed in Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of

Men (New York: Doubleday, 1983). The effeminacy of soldiers, and its implications for gay war veterans returning to American communities, are treated in Allan Berube, Coming Out Under Fire: the History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Free Press, 1991). See also Peter Lehman, Running.Scared: Masculinity and the Representation af the Male Body (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993).

1 64 /RADICAL HISTORY REV1 E W

23. All references in this paragraph to ”Christine’s GI Beau Pops Up: Boy, Wotta Gal!,” New York Daily News (5 December 1952), A l . The story of the Jorgensen- Calhoun relationship was recounted throughout the media, but was emphasized (and strangely edited) in Time‘s ”The Great Transformation.”

24. Paul Ifverson, “’I Could Have Gone for the He-She Girl,’ Says Reporter,” New York Daily News (3 December 1952), A l .

25. While this study does not proport to explore homophobia per se during the early 1 9 5 0 ~ ~ it is important to note that the ”fall” of Jorgensen followed, to a great extent, this same rhetorical and political trajectory. The most crucial document of the period is the notorious, and often quoted, Senate Report on the Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverfs in Government (Washington, D.C: Office of Government Printing, 1950). See also William B. White, “Inquiry by Senate on Perverts Asked,” New York Times (20 May 1950). For background reading that exam- ines the persecution of gay men and lesbians (and, frequently, resistance to such persecution) during the McCarthy period, see David Savran, Cowboys, Communists, and Queers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Richard Corber, In the Name of National Security (Duke University Press, 1993); John IYEmilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1983); Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History (New York Meridian, 1992); Eric Gordon, Mark the Music: The Life of Marc Blihstein (New York: St. Martin‘s Press, 1987); and Stuart Timmons, The Trouble with Harry Hay (Boston: Alyson Press, 1990).

26. There is an enormous amount of primary and secondary studies of the med- icaCzation of homosexuality, and the concomitant use of it to justify discrimination based on sexual orientation, during the postwar period. For a typical exampte of a contemporary article, see Karl Bowman and Bernice Engel, “The Problem of Homosexuality,” Iournal of Social Hygiene 39 (March 1953): 2-16. For good, general background reading, see John-Manuel Andriote, “Shrinking Opposition,” 10 Percent (Fall 1993): 60-64. See also Berub6, Coming Out Under Fire ; Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lavers: A History of Lesbian Life in 20th Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); and Richard C. Friedman, Male Homosexuality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988),79-126.

27. ”The Great Transformation,” Time, 58. 28. Cited in an New York Daily News article (date not given), but reprinted in

”Homecoming,” T i m , 28. 29. “Miss Jorgensen Returns from Copenhagen,” N a o York Times (13 February

1953): A38. 30. Presentation of gender identity is a key concept in Woodhouse, Fantastic

Women, esp. 5-21; and in Garber, Vested Interests, esp. 35-42. 31. “Chris in Public Bow; Aims to Grind Camera, Not Mug It,” New York Daily

News (12 December 1952), C2. 32. Both quotations taken from “The Girl Who Used to Be a Boy Isn’t Quite Ready

for Dates, New York Daily News (2 December 1952): C4. 33. For a greater discussion of the performative aspects of gender, see Judith

Butler, Gender Trouble (New York Routledge, 1989). 34. All references to Jorgensen’s letter throughout the paper are from ”Ex-GI

Becomes Blonde Beauty,” New York Daily News (1 December 1952): Al. Almost every periodical that followed the story during the first two months of Jorgensen‘s initial appearance quoted from the letters, often emphasizing the “personal” rather than the descriptive medical passages. This study did not allow me to include Jorgensen’s letter to Calhoun, reprinted in the Daily News’s ”Christine’s GI Beau Pops Up: Boy, Wotta Gal!” article, in which Jorgensen asks Calhoun if, on his weekend passes around England, he had “found a little cuckney”(ita1ics mine).

35. Navasky, Naming Names, 199-222. 36. All references to Chambers from Whittaker Chambers, Witness (New York

37. ”The Case of Christine,” Time (20 April 1953), 82-84. 38. “Boy or Girl,” Newsweek (4 May 1953),91-92.

Random House, 19521, esp. 3-22.


39. Jorgensen’s reputation and medical history were partially recanted the following year when a twenty-eight-year old American, Charlotte (nee Charles) McLeod, also travelled to Denmark to undergo the equivalent of a back-alley castration. See “In Christine’s Footsteps,” Time (8 March 1954), 6344. Two years later, she was still a culturally determined touchstone for discussions of transvestism and homosexuality in ”Altered Ego,” Time (18 April 1955), 91.

40. Author‘s telephone interview with Quentin Crisp, 11 April 1993. Mr. Crisp remembers seeing Jorgensen perform the Wonder Woman routine in London in the late 1950s. Although we do know about the slide show, as she aspired to be a fashion photographer upon her return to the States, little documentation exists to elaborate on Jorgensen’s stage act; see, for example, ”Homecoming,” Time (23 February 19531, 28.

41. The vaudevillean scene of hunt in this context seems to reverberate, I think, with the imperialist policies of early 1950s overseas military activity in Korea, and political anxieties driven by Western fear of the newly established People’s Republic of China.

42. This controversial material from the broadcast version of the (June?) 1953 Benny program is wholly improvised, and bears no resemblance to the original script version of the program. I am indebted to Steven Capsuto for sharing this information with me, which is featured in his work-in-progress, Alternate Channels: Queer Images on Prime-Time 7V and Radio, 1930s-1990s.

43. For a good examination of the maintenance of the closet during the Cold War, see Lee Edelman, ”Tearoom and Sympathy; or the Epistemology of the Water Closet” in Henry Abelove, Michele Barale, and David Halperin, eds., The Lesbian and Guy Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1993), 553-75. See also the interview with Harry Hay about his experiences before HUAC as a founder of the Mattachine Society and as a “former” Marxist teacher in Katz, Guy American History, 406-20.

Christine Jorgensen and the Cold War Closet

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