Media Representation

I watched a Warhol docuseries a while ago that was executive produced by a certain known white cis gay man, who doesn’t have a great track record with my trans community. I have some thoughts.

Knowing this, I wasn’t at all surprised that the series left out a great many of the trans women who were colleagues and friends of Warhol.

What I was both surprised and offended by was in Season 1, Episode 6, at 23 minutes and 3 seconds, to view a vintage photograph of a trans woman of color marching in a Pride parade with a Warhol voiceover remarking:

“We went and watched the gay day parade. The gay cops and me got the biggest clap. And I took photos. All the beauties must have been shopping in SoHo or out in Fire Island because they sure weren’t in this parade.”

The documentary then cuts to the photo of a trans woman of color; the voiceover playing over the photos continues:

“It looked like Halloween,”

The documentary lingers on the happy transgender woman’s photo; the VoiceOver continues:

“But without the costumes.”

Now, a lot of us in the trans community are aware of what both personal and professional attacks and sabotage are and look like, and when people have a vendetta against our community.

The cis white gays who are not culturally queer can often get rather testy and reflect the pettiest behavior and continue to do so for a lifetime it appears as when it comes to a moment that they feel they are entitled to something they feel they were called out on and/or they feel like they are missing out on, whether it be fame, money, wealth, power, etc.

It’s highly unhealthy to see this type of continued petty behavior happening from companies connected to wealthy white cis gay men who have been publicly called out for how they treated their colleagues who are transgender women of color.

After witnessing this calculated display of mean-girl-esque “editing” and historical reframing positioned as “documentary storytelling,” it appears as if the person whose company produced this series may potentially have a huge chip on their entitled cis white gay shoulder after being called out for profiting off the backs of many a trans woman of color in Hollywood only to sabotage them privately that and let’s call out the near overall trans erasure entirely from supposedly telling the life story of a man who had many a transgender woman in his world at that time.

That’s the only reason I could surmise that any production company would approve such a pointed display of pettiness reflected towards the transgender community, because the person signing their checks made it so.

Let’s be crystal clear: this series comes across as a direct insult specifically to trans women of color.

So I’m calling bullshit; you can’t rewrite history and take transgender women of color out of it because you were held accountable for being a fake trans-ally and not a nice person.

So overall, I didn’t like the series because it was told through the lens of a transphobe who continues to collect residuals, profiting off of the stories of transgender women of color.

I didn’t like how Warhol spoke about the people in the parade’s appearance either.

It seems as if these two white cis gay men were actually made for each other. Both willing to profit off of transgender women and both ready to throw them under the bus at the first chance.

Nasty.

There’s nothing artistic about transphobia, whether it’s direct or passive-aggressive.

It’s just plain ugly.