Doris Wishman week (July 21 – 27) Doris made the loopiest of movies. A self-proclaimed prude who made nudist camp movies, her filmography is filled with contradictions. When she tried to be mean spirited with something like Bad Girls Go To Hell there was always an undercurrent of silliness and fun, but when she tried to be silly and fun in things like Keyholes Are For Peeping there was an underlying seediness and grime that couldn’t be wiped off. It’s hard not to love her!  

I’ll go anywhere Doris Wishman wants to take me.

Doris is able to be so many directors in her approach and yet remain herself. Here, she’s in the worlds of Ed Wood and Kroger Babb, making a movie that says that it wants to educate you, but really wants to show you graphic surgery of a man’s penis being sliced into a vagina in full detail. In fact, this same footage was used for the South Park episode “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina.”

It features Dr. Leo Wollman, founder of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, now the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which wrote its first Standards of Care for transgender health care. He was also the science and medicine advisor for this movie. You also get interviews and moments with other transgender individuals, include Deborah Hartin, who transitioned in 1970 and became one of the first divorces due to transitioning. She also sued the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene for refusing to update her sex designation on her birth certificate.

Wishman started filming this in 1971 and debated titles like Adam or Eve and Strange/Her. Then she found Leslie, an attractive trans person who would provide the main interview in this film, yet seems to hate nearly every other trans person she’s ever met, even comparing herself at one point to Anita Bryant. This movie has a total Yin/Yang-ness to it; for every positive thing, there’s something truly deranged or negative. You get Dr. Wollman leading a support group in the same movie where there’s a re-enactment where a trans woman can’t wait for her new vagina to heal, so she sleeps with a cab driver and sprays blood between her thighs in graphic detail. And oh yeah, the cab driver? That’s Harry Reems sleeping with Arlana Blue, who was also one of the caged victims in Bloodsucking Freaks, the second murder victim in Massage Parlor Murders! and an adult actress who was in Invasion of the Love Drones, The Vixens of Kung Fu and Joe Sarno’s Confessions of a Young American Housewife.

There’s also a moment where a man uses a sharp blade and a hammer to attempt to remove his member, while you watch. And yes, that is Vanessa Del Rio and if you picked that up without IMDB, I’d shake your hand, but neither of us wants to know where our hands have been for so many years. And that john who gets picked up in the park? That’s Richard Towers, who used the name Greg Reynolds in Deadly Weapons, Tony Armada in Keyholes Are for Peeping, Joe Powers in Fleshpot on 42nd Street and Gaylord St. James when he played Dr. John Collingwood in Last House On the Left.

This ends with a long chroma key sex scene at the end that feels like the kind of images that Black Sabbath would perform in front of on a European variety show and then we’d watch it ten years later on Headbanger’s Ball.

I have no idea how to rate this movie. As a documentary, it’s not good. As trash, it’s amazing. I also understand that this is — at best — an embarrassing film for the trans community to watch. Yet without movies like this and Glen or Glenda, some audiences would have no experience with this community. Part of me would like to think this film’s heart is in the right place, but then again, this is also a movie padded out with softcore inserts. It really is almost a singular film, in the same way — oxymoron, anyone? — that Goodbye Uncle Tom is also trash yet is a fascinating document of how far you can push it.

I mean — when the weirdest part of your movie isn’t a penis gun that shoots fluid and that’s said to be an actual medical device — you know that this is the kind of thing you have to experience.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.