the birdcage

on passing, family, and broadening your scope

I am feeling sort of sick and sad this week for obvious reasons, so I am doing what you do when you are sick and turning to comfort food. Today, this means I am rewatching The Birdcage. In case you haven’t seen it, the short version: Armand Goldman and his partner Albert (aka Starina) are, respectively, the owner and star performer of a drag club. Hijinks ensue when their son, Val, invites his fiancee Barbara’s parents to dinner— her father is the conservative Senator Keeley, and she and Val go to great lengths to lie to both of the Keeley parents about Val’s gay dads and their gay club and their gay condo.

Albert, played by Nathan Lane, is so impossibly charming— glamorous and bombastic both in and out of drag, a delicate diva whose melodrama is part of what makes her so endearing. When the boys can’t convince her to make herself scarce for the dinner party, they try to train her to “act like a man.” It’s both hilarious and heartbreaking to watch Albert put her all into trying to play butch, only to repeatedly fail— everything from her outfits to her voice to her body language give her away.

The ultimate villain of this story isn’t the Keeleys— it’s Val, who begs Armand and Albert to strip their apartment of all its homoerotic tchotchkes, change their clothes and manners, and make themselves palatable to conservative sensibilities by whatever means necessary. Val’s last-minute insult to his father is to reveal (under a hastily-erected crucifix, no less!!!) that his wife-to-be has even whitewashed their Jewish surname to avoid consternation from her Christian family. Val’s biggest sin isn’t being straight— it’s failing to respect that these things matter to the people he loves, and that covering over them for the sake of propriety is a deeply painful kind of rejection.

“I look like my grandfather, in this suit,” Armand says, dressing for dinner. “Dressed like this in every picture. Killed himself when he was 30.”

“Don’t walk unless you have to,” says Val. “Try not to gesture. Don’t talk too much.”

The crux of the story is that Albert’s femininity was never a real problem— when she shows up to dinner in drag, she is better at maintaining kayfabe with florid half-lies than anyone else, and is so delightful in her role as hostess that the buttoned-up Mrs. Keeley bursts into tears out of sheer jealousy. At our emotional climax, when the charade falls apart and Albert is revealed to be “a man,” she is proudly reintroduced by her boys as Val’s mother and Armand’s wife. Applause, curtains, crying. Gets me every time.

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I saw The Birdcage for the first time very early in my transition, and I imprinted on it hard. It is easy to read Albert as a kind of trans woman— she refers to herself as a man only once, when explaining herself to the Keeleys, no less— and that is nice to have when there still just aren’t a lot of heartwarming comedies about trans people. That scene that always makes me cry reads to me as a spot-on depiction of gender dysphoria, and Albert describes the asymptotic feeling of early transition— the closer you get to the gender you’re aiming for, the louder your subtle incongruities scream to give you away. “You’re thinking that dressed this way, I’m even more obvious, aren’t you? You’re right.”

I adore Albert— Nathan Lane is so disgustingly charming, always— but Robin Williams’ portrayal of Armand feels like one of the few times I have ever seen a man on screen that speaks directly to my heart. To the queens and twinks around him, he is starkly masculine in the way only a hairy middle-aged man can be, but his patterned silks and gold jewelry make him out-of-place among straight men, and he knows it. He is a self-described fag who still slips into an effortless, erotic rapport with Val’s biological mother, Katharine, an old friend from the stage and presumably the only woman Armand has ever slept with. He thinks of himself as more-competent at playing a man’s-man than Albert, but he engages with “traditional” masculinity as camp-and-costume at least as much as anything that happens on The Birdcage’s stage.

Back then, I was trying to figure out if I wanted to start hormones, and I had an actual-real-life conservative family to deal with both coming and going. I feared that if I put on a suit, that ultimate symbol of masculine seriousness and maturity, I would look and feel more than ever like a child playing pretend, just as clocky and awkward as Albert. It meant a lot to me to read The Birdcage as a trans story, depicting someone who occupies the venn-diagram overlap between queer effeminacy and transfemininity, but also as story of cis men who shared roughly the same anxieties as I had about “passing.”

But Armand went further— he showed me an example of a man that was exuberant, fashionable and creative, sexy and queer while still being undeniably masculine. If there is a spectrum from Starina to John Wayne, then Armand (and even Val) sit somewhere in-between— to my baby-trans self, this was a delicious revelation of the potential variety that can be contained within masculinity rather than fleeing from it for reprieve. I saw in Armand that I did not have to choose between being a man and being beautiful (and also it’s legal to keep wearing your hats backwards until you are at least 50 years old). I could respect women without wanting to center them in my life, I could admire femininity as a language of regal glamour agnostic of the wearer’s body, and I could still work my own art without framing everything beautiful as fundamentally femme.

If you giggle at me describing this man as “beautiful,” you are part of the problem.

I think the mushiness of Albert’s gender and Armand’s inconsistent erotic compass are part of the point in a film that both begins and ends with Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” blasting in the club. Whatever your gender is, Albert is like you in one way or another, and it is impossible not to love her. The film draws an obvious parallel in that the Keeleys and the Goldmans are both driven to panic while trying maintain a respectable appearance for a capricious conservative audience— the main difference is that the Keeleys do it for power, while the Goldmans do it for love.

Albert doesn’t dress up as a man because the Keeleys’ opinion matters at all to her self-concept, but to demonstrate her love to her family by not embarrassing them with the parts of herself that everyone else finds freakish and confusing. Her problem isn’t that she doesn’t love herself, but that other people won’t reciprocate enough to defend her. They consider their own reputations more precious than she is. This is a pain which some portion of every category of person— every gender, every race and class, every tick on the political compass— has experienced at some point or another: the fear that if you follow your own bliss, no one will respect you, let alone love you.

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Maybe this film is a good example of why so much of contemporary writing about gender and gender-relations makes me feel insane. When people talk about the problems of “men,” they are invariably talking about straight guys. Occasionally, a writer might do a little lampshading and admit to the specificity of their subject, but still this remains the prevailing cultural narrative about gender relations: men are angsty because they want women to have sex with them, and when they can’t have sex with women, they throw horrible tantrums about it.

It would be easy for me to say that I do not relate to this because I am an outlier, I am not part of the target audience, I have a different sort of sexual identity that neatly sets me apart from those problematic straight men that everyone loves to hate. The strife I feel about gender is just not the same because I do not share their heterosexual affliction (lol, lmao). In the third person, queer and trans men are often seen as ~enlightened~ by comparison, relating to gender with more depth and intention than straight men, and we are granted relevance in conversations about masculinity only when we do not disturb this narrative. Comparisons between the feelings and struggles of straight and queer men are rarely made to the end of humanizing the straight man. And we are overall pretty happy to accept that position, since it always feels good to have someone to look down on, especially when you think they deserve it.

But I am not interested in playing this game, because when I look at the complaining done by straight men, I find myself relating to their fretful posts about feeling disposable and undesirable and always-in-trouble-for-something. Fancy little fag though I may be, I do not much enjoy the way that cultural anxieties about men’s potential for violence and narcissism has poisoned the well of how we perceive masculine identity and the aesthetics that signal it— being gay certainly hasn’t saved me from instances of people who had a bone to pick with how they perceive my relative level of clout/esteem/“power”. I do not blame the boys who do not have an LA/NY body or stellar social skills and fear that femininity and queerness are the easy-mode options for portraying oneself as not only attractive, but safe, worthy of anyone’s tolerance for their faults or lack of normative/hetero sex-appeal. And I do not appreciate it much when even the manosphere’s critics talk about masculinity and male identity in a way that still implies-by-omission that men who do not posessively thirst after women are not really men at all, measuring maleness entirely on how & how-much you think about women. I guess the metaphor of “a room of one’s own” remains relevant, and gender discourse makes narcissists of us all.

The Birdcage is partially responsible for my feeling that masc and femme are effectively narrative devices— that identities and aesthetics are the means by which we make sense of and communicate who we are and how we want to relate to one another, but these things can be creative and varied rather than restrictive and painful. This is very shmaltzy of me, but I think much of our bad behavior is driven not by base identitarian hatred, but by the very human need for love and security and participation-in-life with the people we hold dear. At this point, hateful men and people who describe men as incessantly hateful seem to be doing the same thing— avoiding the vulnerability that would let us move on from this narrative into something better, freer, or at least more interesting.

We cannot tell boys to “be themselves” or “branch out” or whatever when everything they could become sooner-or-later curdles in the culture and becomes repellent, deceptive, and/or a cruel joke. Maybe at this point, the urge to see men and their feelings as perpetually cringe is part of the problem. Maybe we have to notice what it is that men care about and treat those feelings seriously, not because men’s feelings are ~soooo important~ compared to anyone else’s, but because that is how you demonstrate care for your fellow humans. Maybe if we want boys to risk embarrassing themselves, we have to demonstrate that we will stand up for them when they embarrass us, too.

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Two disclaimers:

1. As he is wont to do, Hank Azaria plays a probably-racist-caricature character in The Birdcage, and while Agador Spartacus is adorable because Hank Azaria is adorable, you will have to sit through that if you watch it. My personal hwite apologies on behalf of 90s Hollywood etc etc whatever, you know how it goes— I just thought it would be weird not to mention it.

2. Hello new people! I have got a bunch of new subscribers lately, that is very nice of you all, thank you for caring. I am a compulsive post-editor after I hit the “send to all” button, so if you get my stuff in your email inbox, I would much prefer you click through and read it on-site rather than the version that shows up in your email. Many thanks!