Boy trouble

Or, homophobia in the heartland

by Alicia Potter

THE BRANDON TEENA STORY, Directed by Susan Muska and Gréta Olafsdottir. A Zeitgeist Films release. At the Coolidge Corner for a two-week engagement.

Brandon Teena was a great guy. That's what girl after girl says in the opening minutes of Susan Muska & Gréta Olafsdottir's devastating yet thoroughly engrossing documentary about the tragic last weeks of the 21-year-old's life. The ex-lovers describe Teena as funny, romantic, and sensual, the kind of boyfriend who composed love notes, sent flowers, kissed like a dream. So magnetic was Teena -- and, evidently, so dismal their previous dealings with men -- that a couple of young women even profess their love for him in the face of his shocking secret: Brandon Teena was a woman.

It was the discovery of Teena's status as a transgendered person (he had undergone hormone treatments in anticipation of a sex change) coupled with his maddening success with the ladies that sent the town of Falls City, Nebraska, into a spiral of hatred in late 1993. Such injustice rings all the more urgently in the wake of the murders of Matthew Shepard and, closer to home, Rita Hester, yet the documentary is more than an exposé of Middle American views on homosexuality. Indeed, this fearless film uproots the very origins of violence to become a plea for sweeping human rights.

The notion that a cool guy like Teena could really be a woman enraged two men in particular: Tom Nissen and John Lotter. In a tape of a police deposition, its appalling contents heightened by the interviewing sheriff's bullying prurience, Teena tells how the pair of former convicts pulled down his pants at a Christmas Eve party to prove to his girlfriend, Lana Tisdel, that her beau was not the man he claimed to be (Tisdel, in a demonstration of touching loyalty and rampant denial, later admits she tried not to look). Then Teena explains to the sheriff how the two men kidnapped, raped, and beat him. One week later, on New Year's Eve, Lotter and Nissen would gun down Teena and two of his friends execution-style.

Without stooping to sensationalism, the film retraces Teena's struggles with his sexual identity and the horror of his final weeks through his own letters and alternately tender and raw commentary from his family, his friends, law officials, and even his killers (Nissen is serving three life sentences; Lotter is on death row). Scattered throughout are snapshots of Teena from happier days: chocolate-eyed with feathered hair and perfect skin, a wide, red mouth reminiscent of Macaulay Culkin's. The effect is a poignant portrait of a tormented spirit, a gentle soul who discovered his true self in the transposition of his real name: Teena Brandon.

Although the film is clearly an elegy to the young Nebraskan, it casts a complicating light on his victim status in revealing he was no saint. Teena paid for most of those flowers with kited checks and pilfered credit cards, and though his manipulative actions are sympathetically shown as the consequence of confusion, several women -- all of whom claim to have had sexual relations with him and none of whom is bisexual or lesbian -- still seem to be reeling from the titanic scale of his ruse.

Most surprising, however, is the way the film portrays Teena's killers as victims too: casualties of a gun-toting world where intolerance is as much a part of life as John Deere and demolition derbies. In one of several compelling moments that push the film beyond Midwestern insularity, one of Lotter's fellow inmates takes on the judicious voice of a Greek chorus in explaining the brutal legacy of prison rape.

The film shudders with such sad ironies. Never too far from Muska & Olafsdottir's lens is the character of Nebraska itself, which one highway sign heralds as home of "the good life." In a series of grainy tableaux, the film tills a metaphor for Teena's solitariness in the desolation of the frost-hardened land; meanwhile, its twangy country soundtrack drops such prescient lines as "It's a wishy-washy world . . . I want out and I want in it."

Ultimately, the documentary offers little consolation: there are no candlelight vigils, no signs that a new understanding of diversity has dawned on the citizens of Falls City. Perhaps most haunting is the smiling face of nine-month-old Tanner Lambert, who witnessed the murder of not only Teena but also his own mother. In a film that lays bare the insidious cycle of human destruction, one is left with the frightening thought that tiny Tanner just may grow up bottling the same surge of hatred that killed Brandon Teena.