Tribute To Christine Jorgensen

by Susan Stryker

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Christine Jorgensen was arguably the most famous person in the world for a few short years nearly half a century ago, although her name is not widely remembered today. The journalism trade publication Editor and Publisher announced in the spring of 1954 that more newsprint had been generated about Jorgensen during the previous year than about any other individual -- over a million and a half words, the rough equivalent of fifteen full-length books. That Jorgensen now requires any introduction at all underscores the truth of that old adage about how fleeting fame can be. At the beginning of the 21st Century it seems almost quaint that Jorgensen should have provoked such widespread attention simply by having the shape of her genitals surgically altered one late-November morning in Copenhagen in 1952. But she did, and as a consequence of doing so she helped introduce the word "transsexual" into the American vocabulary.

As Jorgensen herself recounts, her celebrity began December 1, 1952 when a banner headline screaming "EX-GI BECOMES BLONDE BEAUTY: OPERATIONS TRANSFORM BRONX YOUTH" greeted readers of the New York Daily News. Hearst Publications' popular Sunday newspaper supplement, American Weekly, subsequently paid twenty thousand dollars for an exclusive interview with Jorgensen that brought her story into millions of American homes, and whetted the appetite of the world press. When she returned to the United States in 1953, an unprecedented three hundred reporters were on hand to meet her plane at New York Inter-national Airport. She was inundated with offers to appear in nightclubs, strip joints, wrestling arenas, and other sensationalistic settings. Such mundane activities as walking her dog were reported in obsessive detail to an avid worldwide reader-ship. If reporters couldn't find a legitimate story, however trivial, they simply made one up. Jorgensen received letters by the thousands, many reaching her addressed only "Christine Jorgensen, USA". Some were from other transsexuals who wanted to do what she had done; most of her correspondents sought nothing other than an autograph or photo; only a few sent hate mail, and the vast majority simply wished her well. Still others, however, spoke of Jorgensen's physical transformation as an event of profound religious significance. Her "sex-change" was viewed by many as a miracle of God in which not Christ, but Christine - Man reborn as Woman - heralded a new dispensation of human history.

In spite of beginning life as the son of a carpenter, Christine Jorgensen hardly seemed destined to become anyone's messiah. Born in 1926 to Danish-American parents and raised in unremarkable working-class circumstances, she had been a delicate, painfully shy child who always felt more feminine than masculine. By adolescence she was attracted to boys and terrified at the thought she might be "homosexual", a word she'd learned by furtively reading books in the locked "medical" case at the public library where she worked after school. Upon graduation from high school she studied commercial photography, held a low-level job in the film-stock archives at RKO Studios, and reported for military service when drafted in 1945, months after World War II had ended. Jorgensen served a brief enlistment as a file clerk at Fort Dix, New Jersey, processing demobilisation paperwork for the combat troops streaming home from overseas. Later, after failing miserably to find work in the Hollywood film industry, she returned to school in New York and resumed her studies. Jorgensen was desperately unhappy with her lot in life as the 1940s drew to a close. She found hope, however , in the stray accounts she'd read in the popular press of hormone experiments carried out on animals, which had reportedly changed their secondary sex characteristics. After a handful of humiliating visits to clinical endocrinologists to see if such treatments were available for humans, followed by a few research trips to a medical library, Jorgensen decided to take matters into her own hands. She prevailed upon an unsuspecting pharmacy clerk to sell her a bottle of estradiol, a recently synthesised version of estrogen. She began to self-administer the drug, which promoted breast development and a general softening of her appearance. A few months later, Jorgensen set sail for Europe - and the history books - in search of doctors who would provide the sex-change procedures she sought. She found them in her ancestral Denmark, and soon became for all the world the woman she had long considered herself to be.

Jorgensen's subsequent celebrity is especially remarkable given that she was not the first person to undergo surgical and hormonal sex-reassignment - that had been going on for more than twenty years before her story hit the headlines. The procedures employed on her behalf, as well as the rationale for using them, had been championed by the eminent German sexologist Magnus Hirschefeld, at his Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, in the years between the World Wars. Jorgensen herself notes that her doctors were familiar with dozens of cases similar to her own, some of which had even been widely reported in popular media in Europe and the United States. None of that seemed to matter - Jorgensen was christened the atomic age sex marvel the second her story leaked out. Historical context helps to explain why Jorgensen became an emblem of her era, an icon representing some fundamental shift in human affairs to an audience of millions. First and foremost, it is crucial to recognise the extent to which massive population mobilisation of World War II refigured conventional notions of men's and women's proper social spheres, and helped unsettle familiar concepts of sexuality. Women left the home and entered the paid workforce in unprecedented numbers to meet the demands of the burgeoning wartime economy, while members of the armed services could scarcely help but notice the homosexual activity that flourished as never before in sex-segregated military settings. American society hasn't been quite the same ever since. Jorgensen's story became a lightning rod for many post-World War II anxieties about gender and sexuality, and called dramatic attention to issues that would drive the feminist and gay-rights movements in the decades ahead. Years later, in the twilight of her career, Jorgensen herself commented that while she couldn't personally take credit for launching gay liberation, the women's movement, or the sexual revolution, her notoriety had given each a "kick in the pants" by drawing unprecedented scrutiny in the mainstream media to questions of personal identity; sexual orientation, and gender roles. Many formerly taboo topics were publicly discussed in the post-war era with specific reference to Christine Jorgensen.

Jorgensen's fame was undoubtedly structured to a certain degree by the paranoid logic of Cold War cultural fantasy. At the height of the United States global military dominance, "traditional" American masculinity seemed from some reactionary perspectives to be paradoxically on the defensive: subverted from within by an increasingly visible homosexuality, challenged from without by an economically empowered womanhood, and menaced from abroad by the spectre of communist totalitarianism bent on subjecting it to unmanly servitude. In an era when atomic bombs could now rip open the fabric of the physical universe, the sudden spectacle of male-to-female transsexual re-embodiment offered further giddy proof that science had indeed triumphed over nature. Jorgensen's notoriety in the 1950s was undoubtedly fueled by the pervasive unease felt in some quarters that American manhood, already under siege, could quite literally be undone and refashioned into its seeming opposite through the power of modern science.

All this cultural baggage - everything from the mind-numbing implications of the atom bomb to tectonic shifts in gender roles - added up to a rather heavy cross for a twenty-six-year-old American to bear as she lay convalescing in a Copenhagen hospital in December, 1952. At first, Jorgensen seemed utterly bewildered by the storm of publicity that surrounded the revelation of her intensely private quest for personal happiness, though rumours persist that she herself leaked the story to the press. Whether she intended it or not, the sheer magnitude of her celebrity quickly precluded any prospect of returning to a low-profile career in photography. From the moment she hit the headlines, Christine Jorgensen was a star - destined to stand before, rather than behind, the camera.

If a perceived crisis of American masculinity fed some of the hysterical attention to Christine Jorgensen, her stardom definitely played itself out in terms of American womanhood. She was presented in the media as a blonde bombshell - fashionable, desirable, slightly aloof, blending Doris Day's wholesome propriety with Marlene Dietrich's sly wisdom in the ways of the world. Jorgensen rose admirably to the occasion. Fate placed her in the limelight, but her own talent and charisma kept her there. Other transsexuals made news in the immediate aftermath of Jorgensen's story, but they all sank quickly into obscurity.

Fortunately, the formerly introverted Jorgensen blossomed into her new role. Following the advice of seasoned theatrical agent Charlie Yates, who later became her manager, Jorgensen pulled together a surprisingly polished nightclub act in the summer of 1953. She sang a little, danced a little, told some jokes, and made quick costume changes, but mostly she simply performed her own identity on stage for paying customers. Though her audiences initially seemed interested in gawking at a freak show - harbouring the same expectations they might bring to a female impersonator act or a burlesque show - Jorgensen generally left them feeling enlightened as well as entertained. She managed to keep her name in marquee lights well into the 1960s, often earning more than five thousand dollars a week in top venues around the world.

Christine Jorgensen's long-awaited autobiography first appeared in hard-cover in 1967, just as her life on stage was coming to a close, and it helped launch the next phase of her career. The Bantam paperback edition issued the next year sold over four hundred thousand copies, yet it remains hard to find in second-hand book shops due to its continued popularity with the many transgendered people who consider Jorgensen a pioneering role model. An exploitative film version of Jorgensen's life story based on the autobiography appeared in 1970, starring cross-dressed Olympic swimmer John Hanson in his acting debut. The film quickly disappeared into well-deserved oblivion. Jorgensen, however, rode the new wave of attention created by her book and movie to establish herself as a highly sought-after speaker on the college lecture circuit, where she regularly drew audiences of thousands into the mid-70s.

By the time she slid more or less gracefully into a modest retirement in the 1980s, she had been in the public eye for more than a quarter-century. Even in her final years she remained a feisty presence in the social circles in which she moved. With her health and fortune failing fast by the late 1980s, she would still pry herself out of her favourite armchair where she spent so much of the day reading newspapers and working crossword puzzles, put on a carefully chosen outfit, fix her face in a flattering style, and announce "It's show time!" to whomever was listening as she dashed headlong from her apartment and into the night. Bravado notwithstanding, bladder cancer eventually brought down the curtain on Jorgensen's life in 1989, at age sixty-two.

In her autobiography, Christine Jorgensen does an admirable job recounting the inner turmoil of her youth, as well as the triumphs and tribulations of her glory years. She does so with a steadfast determination to present her story in a dignified and understated manner - so understated, in fact, that the book sometimes makes for admittedly dull reading. So intent is she on proving her respectability and countering the many untrue and unkind things said of her in the press, that parts of her story seem little more than lists of which famous and important people she lunched with during any given week, which fabulous and exclusive clubs she performed in, and which tasteful ensembles she wore while doing so. This is a pity, for Jorgensen's life was anything but dull. It's a shame the prejudices of others persuaded her to tone down a vibrant, often bawdy personality for the sake of posterity's opinion.

The photographs included in the edition published in 2000 offer tantalizing glimpses of the woman behind the veil of propriety she draped around herself: Christine surrounded by hungry eyes at a Havana resort, Christine belting out tunes in a Philippine nightclub. To see Jorgensen in her prime in old newsreel footage is to be struck by the ironic distance between the staid persona presented in the pages of her auto-biography and the vivacious starlet who exudes sexuality for the camera like a young Marilyn Monroe. To read her own descriptions of her nightclub act one would think she recited Shakespeare in a high-necked gown; to read her actual stage material is to appreciate her keen assessment of the roots of her popular appeal. "It's a Change," one of Jorgensen's trademark numbers, was full of double entendres that played on the public's titillation with her shift in gender presentation, and with the ambiguous desires that eddied in its wake.

Understandably, Jorgensen's autobiography also skimps on the details of her many behind-the-scenes struggles and personal shortcomings. She smoked and drank excessively, and had a tongue sharp enough to drive away the most dedicated and long-suffering supporters. She was more than a little star-struck, perpetually impressed with herself for having hobnobbed with show business glitterati. She was litigious, constantly embroiled in petty lawsuits and legal actions. She peddled an endless steam of improbable projects that never went anywhere: Danish cookbooks, wretched screenplays for movies in which she played the female lead, a guide to the graves of movie greats. Towards the end of her life she even contemplated a new no-hold-barred, tell-all autobiography, complete with nude photos of herself. It. like all the other projects, ultimately failed to pan out.

But what of it? Christine Jorgensen's human failings do little to tarnish the zest with which she tackled the role that history handed her. She threw herself heart and soul into playing the part of the world's first famous transsexual: educating and entertaining, being gracious and glamorous, striving for the respect that every individual should be given as a birthright, but which is all too often denied those, like Jorgensen, who express their gender identity in an atypical fashion. Even now, straying too far from rigidly enforced gender norms makes one vulnerable to employment discrimination, familial abandonment, emotional violence, vicious hate crimes, and other potentially life-threatening difficulties. Jorgensen faced those challenges in far less tolerant times, and transcended them. Given a very narrow path to walk through life, she found a way to walk it with style. This act of simple dignity is her enduring achievement and greatest legacy.

For the personal courage she showed in her public life, Christine Jorgensen remains a heroine for many transgendered people today, though she has largely faded from our general culture's collective consciousness. It is a pleasure to celebrate her life once more with those for whom her memory is still very much alive.

Copyright Susan Stryker. This essay on the life and career of Christine Jorgensen was written as the Introduction to the 2000 re-issue of Christine Jorgensen; a personal autobiography, Cleis Press, San Francisco, 2000 (there is a copy in the Gender Centre library). Susan Stryker will be visiting Australia in April 2003, in conjunction with the Body Modification Conference to be held in Sydney by the Department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University.

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