BRANDON GOES TO HOLLYWOOD.

Boys Don't Cry director KIMBERLY PEIRCE reflects on how her hero, Brandon Teena, has found a new home among the classic Hollywood stars--and opened up mainstream audiences to the classic gay game of identifying with someone who's not like you

There's a scene in Howard Hawks's To Have and Have Not where Humphrey Bogart leads a man up to his hotel room to loan the fellow his boat. When they get there, we hear a woman ask offscreen in a deep voice, "Anybody got a match?" The film cuts to the door, and standing there with a cigarette dangling from her mouth is a ravishing Lauren Bacall. Cut back to Bogart, stunned. He tosses her his matches.

I first watched that scene when I was 8 years old, and I've rewatched it many times since. That simple exchange, covered in two shots, remains one of the most intense I've ever experienced.

Part of the thrill of watching for me was identifying with Bogart--desiring Bacall--and then transforming what was going on between them into my own queer desire. I think most queer people learned to watch movies in this sort of transvestite way, making an erotic leap to find pleasure in characters and love affairs that only partially reflected our identities and desires.

Having gotten used to taking that leap, I found that when it came time to make my own movies, I was drawn to characters who were driven by their desire and continually in a process of self-reinvention. And so when I came upon the very fluid and inventive Brandon Teena, I felt a complete affinity.

As I came to understand his identity--how his passing as a guy, dating women, stealing, and lying were all tied together--I saw that his journey embodied a very common queer experience: having to leave home and reinvent himself to find love and acceptance. Then, as my writing partner and I started shaping his story into a screenplay, we found that in addition to representing a queer archetype, Brandon actually embodied many traits of the traditional Hollywood hero. He had the innocence and tenderness of Montgomery Clift in Red River or a young Henry Fonda, the naive determination of Jimmy Stewart. He was a rebellious outsider like James Dean, a shy, courtly gentleman around women like Gary Cooper.

But even though Brandon was in many ways a traditional hero who would do anything to get and keep the girl, we still had our doubts about whether he would be accessible to a mainstream audience. He was, after all, still a biological girl passing as a boy.

So I am still blown away whenever people, mostly "straight-identified," come out of the theater and tell me that they identified with Brandon, that they loved him, that they felt they were inside his character or inside his love affair with Lana. I've had older women tell me they see in Brandon's sweetness their husband as a younger man. My sound editor, a big married guy from Queens, swears that he identifies with Brandon knocking the guy out in the bar scene and that in the end he roots for Brandon to get Lana. Younger women have confessed that they love the sex scenes and that the scenes made them consider "crossing over"--and was that my intention? A guy friend said after seeing the movie that he so identified with Brandon that he stood naked, holding his testicles, staring at himself in the mirror, wondering if he was a man or a woman.

As we started getting these sorts of reactions, it occurred to us who made the film that we must have turned the tables on the straight audience, that by making this very queer character accessible in a familiar way, we'd enabled straight people to identify with him and therefore to participate in something that has long been central to the queer identity and experience.

I was thrilled that audiences were "getting" Brandon and that they were taking that erotic leap. I think it can open people up to all kinds of possibilities of playing with and accepting different genders and desires.

Probably the most satisfying thing, though, has been watching Brandon Teena, the Lincoln, Neb., trailer-park kid who reinvented himself in his bedroom back in 1991 and who was the least likely candidate for Hollywood success, emerge as a "Hollywood movie star."

We hit up against pretty much every obstacle trying to get him there, but he always pulled through in unexpected ways. After three years of unsuccessfully searching for a lead actor, we suddenly found the perfect Brandon in Hilary Swank. When we ran out of money for editing, my lawyer and producer made an unprecedented and very profitable sale of the movie off a 20-minute trailer. When financiers tried to discontinue the editing to keep more profit, our distributor, Fox Searchlight, stepped in and forced them to keep the editing room open. When the Motion Picture Association of America gave us the NC-17--a rating that would have prevented wide distribution of the film--we recut and got an R. There have been lawsuits and threats of injunctions, and yet the film keeps playing. It suddenly dawned on me that Brandon had seeped into the Hollywood arena and thereby the American mainstream when I saw him walk up on the stage--still embodied by the wonderful Hilary Swank--and accept the Golden Globe award on national television.

I have often wondered what Brandon's life would have been like if he could have seen a movie like this, if he'd had someone to identify with. But I guess since I can't give him that, I hope that having his story permeate the mainstream gives him a kind of love and acceptance he never got in life, wherever his spirit now resides.

I think the fact that we've gained a wonderful queer character whom most people are able to see as wonderful without having to add "queer," the fact that we got to tell his story in a medium as powerful and public as film, and the fact that we're getting to celebrate his success in such a public way--hey, we're going to the Oscars!--is a step in the right direction. I like to think that Brandon embodies something that we're moving toward and that we will continue learning to understand, enjoy, and represent our genders and our desires, individually and collectively, in our art and in our lives.

Coming to Hollywood brings me full circle. Old Hollywood was an inspiration for me, a place where vaudeville actors, immigrant directors, and studio moguls exchanged their old identities for new ones and created characters that reflected their own need to reinvent themselves. Bringing Brandon to Hollywood was like bringing him home and leaving him with a legacy of characters I grew up with.

When I got back to New York after the Golden Globes, I went to my usual East Village Sunday brunch with friends. One of them said, "So we were watching the Golden Globes, and it was a fantasy world; then all of a sudden they panned over, and there you were; in the fantasy world, and there was Kim. It was surreal."

Yes, it is surreal, but that's where the next movie begins.

RELATED ARTICLE: THE FILMS OF CHRISTINE VACHON

In just ten years Boys Don't Cry producer Christine Vachon's work has ignited the careers of many of today's leading gay and lesbian filmmakers --directors Tom Kalin (Swoon), Rose Troche (Go Fish), Todd Haynes (Poison, Velvet Goldmine); screenwriter and actress Guinevere Turner (Go Fish)--and several gay-friendly directors, such as Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol). A more impressive, challenging, and gay-inclusive resume than this you'd be hard-pressed to find. And there's more groundbreaking to come, such as Vachon's long-discussed Halston biopic, perhaps to star Rupert Everett. (Release year and director are noted in parentheses.)

* Poison (1991, Todd Haynes)

* Swoon (1992, Tom Kalin)

* Dottie Gets Spanked (1993, Haynes)

* Go Fish (1994, Rose Troche), executive producer

* Postcards From America (1994, Steve McLean)

* Safe (1995, Haynes)

* Kids (1995, Larry Clark), coproducer

* Stonewall (1995, Nigel Finch)

* Plain Pleasures (1996, Kalin)

* I Shot Andy Warhol (1996, Mary Harron)

* Kiss Me Guido (1997, Tony Vitale)

* Office Killer (1997, Cindy Sherman)

* Happiness (1998, Todd Solondz)

* Velvet Goldmine (1998, Haynes)

* I'm Losing You (1998, Bruce Wagner)

* Wild Flowers (1999, Melissa Painter), executive producer

* Boys Don't Cry (1999, Kimberly Peirce)

* Crime and Punishment in Suburbia (2000, Rob Schmidt)