40 years ago...a trans actress in the lesbian vampire film genre.
Macumba Sexual
The film is on IMDB, but I learned about it from this book:
"...its Black Seductress is a trans woman, the pioneering Ajita Wilson. An American actress who gained fame working in European skin flicks and soft-core pornography, the statuesque Wilson wasn't open about having had sexual reassignment surgery, but there are reports that some within the industry were aware of it before her death from a car accident in 1987. Still, she was featured in Jet magazine as a Beauty of the Week in 1981 — a stunning accomplishment at this time for a trans woman but one that made it clear that she was not generally acknowledged to be trans.
In Macumba Sexual, Wilson headlines as the mystical Princess Obongo, who haunts the dreams of White lead Alice (Lina Romay, Franco's wife) while she's vacationing in the Canary Islands, seducing the tourist with the voodoo-esque religion Macumba. The film exploits the taboo nature of both race and sexuality in no uncertain terms, with the princess at one point telling Alice, 'I'm everything that's forbidden, that's shameful: a Black woman with an undefined sexuality, shameless and irresistible.' It's not clear if Wilson's trans status was known by the filmmakers (Franco claimed ignorance), but the film could be interpreted as inferring that she's less than 100% woman when, during the climax (so to speak), she holds a small ivory statue between her legs and uses it as a phallus to penetrate Alice, transferring her magical powers to her before dying."
— Robin R. Means Coleman and Mark H. Harris. The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema From Fodder to Oscar. New York: Saga Press, 2023.
Douglas E. Cowan writes:
"Whatever else vampires in general — or Dracula in particular — represent, their narrative presence signals a contested vision of the unseen order. They too are a product of the religious imagination, insofar as they propose a different answer to the question that very likely started it all: What happens when we die? ... [The undead] represent a religious threat — or at least an implied risk to the storyworld’s established religious order. Which means that any notion we had about consensus reality, whether informed by the rationalism of nineteenth- century Western medicine or the supernaturalism of the dominant religious worldview, has flown out the window."
Douglas E. Cowan. The Forbidden Body: Sex, Horror, and the Religious Imagination. New York: New York University Press, 2022. The reference to the "unseen order" comes from James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Cowan adds that "not only does the existence of such a creature [like Dracula] challenge consensus reality; his (or her) effects reshape social decorum." Indeed: "They eroticize evil."
See also: "A philosopher discusses gender". It's a 6-minute read on Medium.
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