Film Archive of
Behind Every Good Man (1967)

The film discussed in this entry, Behind Every Good Man, can be found in the UCLA Film & Television Archive, specifically the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project collection, the largest publicly-accessible archive of LGBTQ moving media. It is a very rare yet powerful and important short docufiction that follows a black transwoman in the 1960s. It offers a very intimate glimpse into the life of the unnamed protagonist who meets a (presumably cisgender) man on the street and later prepares for her date with him in her apartment. While freshening up, she also provides a voiceover recalling an interaction she had with the police when she was using the men’s restroom. The film is regarded as so special and legendary within the (academic) LGBTQ community because such positive representations of black trans people, especially black trans women and transfem(me)s are so rare, that this documentary feels as though it shouldn’t truly exist. Still, I, like Laura Horak, am very grateful that it does. 

The film’s existence, coupled with the audience’s viewership and enjoyment of it, is itself a political act, fighting back against the transmisogynoir that permeates our society so deeply even into the halls of our “community’s” archives. We know that nonwhite, specifically African and nonblack indigenous, peoples were the first transgressors against the gender binary, and yet people like Georgia from Framing Agnes (2022) and, going further back into history, our ancestors on the plantations are constantly written out of account. This film is the reclamation of our history that Morgan Page argues for in her essay, One from the Vaults. The most potent excerpt from this writing that can capture the essence of Behind Every Good Man was Page’s description of what it felt like discovering real trans history: “For me, finding trans history—a process that involved years of digging through the Internet Archive to uncover half-deleted websites for now-forgotten events like Counting Past 2, the world’s first transsexual and intersex multidisciplinary arts festival—opened up a whole world of possibilities for dreaming myself into a future that was worth living.” (Page 2017 pg. 135). This film is meant to show all the black and nonblack trans, crossdressing, drag queen, nonbinary, gnc, etc. folx everywhere that living their lives both true to themselves and happily in public can and will coexist. 

Using both this film and Screaming Queens (2005), I’d argue that these “archival films” serve little purpose in databases and virtual hallways that the general public knows little nothing about. These films were created to show that trans survival may not be easy but it has been done in community with each other. From my perspective as a trans person, the greatest takeaway I have from these films is not just analyzing trans history and excavating archives for information I hadn’t previously obtained, but that all the current discussions in trans and LGBTQ circles surrounding community and learning to live with each other to change surviving into thriving have been proven right for many, many years, and that the trans people who have done it before would happily do it again for their trans siblings. Archive feels too stagnant of a name to describe all these different vessels for these records of life. It implies such finality in everything that it holds: old documents, dusty knick-knacks, black and white films. Everything we’ve read, watched, and seen feels alive because they’re full of the life that these trans artists, hustlers, workers, and people breathed into them. I’m not sure what I would call it instead, but something along the lines of a garden, something that reminds you that beautiful, natural, uncensored life is possible, which is the message that Behind Every Good Man conveys to its viewers.