THE CRITICS BOOKS CANDYLAND

A new biography assembles the story of the trans actress and gender revolutionary Candy Darling.

- HILTON ALS

If it wasn’t love at first sight, it was certainly fascination. I spotted him one afternoon in the East Village. Pale-skinned and thin, in an oversized trenchcoat tightly cinched at the waist, he looked like no beauty I’d seen before. His large eyes were lined with kohl, and his lips were painted a moist pink. His shoulder-length hair, straight and full, was dyed a kind of ash blond (he let the darker roots show). And as I watched him walk past Gem Spa, where newspapers and egg creams were sold—this was in the early nineteen-eighties—I didn’t think Bowie genderfuck so much as I thought Sue Lyon—not as Kubrick’s Lolita but as the wild, lovesick girl in the film version of Tennessee Williams’s “The Night of the Iguana,” staunch and a little spoiled. As I followed him down Second Avenue to Third Street, where, as it turned out, we both lived, he was even more alluring to me than Sue Lyon, in part because I couldn’t determine his sex right away, and I loved how that made me feel.