Editor Ira is here today talking about the intersection of trash cinema and trans history. We wanted to note up top that history is long and language changes — while there are certainly throughlines from the 1940s to the present, some of the language used in primary documents here may not be comfortable to modern ears. If any trans readers have feedback on how we presented this story, please reach out! It’s our goal to celebrate the community this Pride Month.

"The Female Bunch" is not a very good movie, no matter how you slice it. Director Al Adamson was a trash cinema icon who specialized in cheap, chaotic genre movies punctuated by enough nudity and violence to keep the drive-in crowds more or less distracted, and this film fits that bill to a tee. It's a sloppy sort-of Western (the title is a clear knock-off of Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch," even though this movie bears very little resemblance to that one) about a band of outlaw women who hole up on a California ranch and smuggle drugs over the Mexican border. It's a pointless, gross, incoherent movie, but it is noteworthy for several reasons.

One, it's the final film of horror legend and early Hollywood nepo baby Lon Chaney Jr., one of my personal favorite actors and the main reason I watched the movie. He's a long way from his glory days as The Wolfman and visibly unhealthy, but he manages to give a strong, raspy-voiced performance as a broken-down former stuntman being manipulated by the women squatting on his ranch. Two, "The Female Bunch" was filmed at the infamous Spahn Ranch while it was occupied by Charles Manson and his cult of followers, a real-life horror scenario that echoed the movie's narrative in some eerie ways. Three, the Bunch's whip-wielding enforcer Sadie is played by underrecognized trans pioneer Aleshia Brevard in one of the biggest roles of her film career.

Aleshia Brevard was born on a Tennessee tobacco farm in 1937, but she harbored Hollywood ambitions from an early age. As she explained on her website, "I grew up balancing a Modern Screen Magazine on my bony knee and dreaming of becoming the silver screen’s next bombshell. I was on a Greyhound bus out of Appalachia almost before the ink had dried on my high school diploma."

Not long after arriving in San Francisco, Brevard began performing in a drag show at a club called Finnochio's. Although she was billed as a "female impersonator," Brevard said, "To me it didn’t feel like ‘impersonation.’ Being Lee Shaw, the club’s blond ingénue, was the closest I’d ever come to being myself." In 1962, she became one of the first people in the U.S. to undergo what was then known as "gender reassignment surgery," a procedure that Brevard said felt like the day her life truly began.

From there, nothing could keep her off the stage. She was working as a showgirl within the year, and soon became a familiar, if usually unbilled, face on mid '60s television. Brevard played small parts on variety shows hosted by the likes of Dean Martin, Red Skelton, Leslie Uggams, and Andy Williams. (I can't find many records of these appearances, but knowing the era and format, I presume these were mostly roles of the "Sexy Woman #3" variety.)

Throughout this period, Brevard kept her trans identity a closely guarded secret, as revealing it would have almost certainly ended her career as an actor in mainstream productions. Brevard, though, found a silver lining in that secrecy. "Was it fair to hide my gender past?" she wrote. "Yes. I was a working actress, working in my chosen profession. More importantly, I was a woman competing with other women for available roles. I was succeeding (or failing) based solely on my ability. Having a level playing field was important to me."

Soon she graduated to a handful of featured roles on the big screen, including romancing Don Knotts in "The Love God?," getting animated in Ralph Bakshi's cult classic "American Pop," and helping snake oil salesman John Carradine and a clean-cut biker gang bust up Sasquatch's backwoods human trafficking operation in "Bigfoot." (I have seen this film and swear to you that this is an accurate description of what happens in it.)

Brevard's most lasting pop cultural impact may have come in 1979, when she played the supervillain Giganta in the notorious "Legends of the Superheroes." This was a truly unfortunate pair of live-action TV specials hosted by Ed McMahon and based on DC comics characters. They featured low-level comedy, lower-level props and costumes, and mid-level stars ranging from "Batman" veterans Adam West, Burt Ward, and Frank Gorshin to affordable comedians like Ruth Buzzi, Jeff Altman, and the ever-excruciating Charlie Callas. (This makes consecutive Friday Know-It-All installments in which I diss a Charlie Callas TV special from the late '70s. It's a hard-knock life.)

The first special is some nonsense about Brevard and her villainous cohorts crashing a superhero retirement party and getting routed by Batman, Green Lantern, and their assorted super friends, but the second one gets genuinely weird. It's a celebrity roast with a bunch of heroes and villains trading hacky insults that wouldn't have passed muster on "Hollywood Squares." (Sample gag: "You're the Flash, right?" "That's right, the world's fastest man!" "Pass!") Still, it's nice to see Brevard get the spotlight in a stupid segment about the impending wedding of Giganta and The Atom, the joke there being that she's tall and he's small. It's heady stuff.

The roles began to dry up as Brevard moved toward her 50s, so she retired from Hollywood and headed back east to teach acting and direct theater productions at Middle Tennessee State University. She later returned to California and became a staple of the Santa Cruz theater community. Brevard also wrote prodigiously – as you might have sussed from some of the quotes I've included here, she had a fantastic way with words – penning plays, fiction, and a pair of well-received autobiographies, "The Woman I Was NOT Born to Be" and "The Woman I WAS Born To Be."

After decades of guarding her past, Brevard eventually embraced her role as a trans pioneer in Hollywood. By the time she died in 2015, she'd been featured in a number of documentaries and interviews about her unique journey to the silver screen. She took pride in helping to pave the way for a new generation of gender non-conforming people growing up in a different world than the one she came up in. In her own inimitable words, "Sometimes when I see young [trans people] going proudly about their daily lives, I think, 'Ohh… finally I’m a mother!'"