The Immortal Christopher Lee

Editor’s note: This story is part of ‘Trans Bay: A History of San Francisco’s Gender-Diverse Community.’ From June 9–19, we’re publishing stories about transgender artists and activists who shaped culture from the 1890s to today.

In 2002, when Christopher Lee and Shawna Virago were the first trans grand marshals of San Francisco Pride, they were asked how old they were. Virago’s answer, she remembers, was “between 35 and death.” Lee’s was “immortal.”

He was right. In a very real sense, even though Lee died in 2012 at the age of 48, he is immortal. His influence lives on in the art he created as a filmmaker, in the annual film festival he co-founded and in the landmark California bill that his death inspired, passed in 2014.

Alongside all this, Lee was an activist and an organizer, simultaneously a participant in and a documentarian of the queer communities that surrounded him.

Lee made history at seemingly every turn (he and Virago cruised down the parade route in a cherry red convertible, Mötley Cruë blasting) by transcending gender binaries in his own life and work, and by welcoming any and all into spaces where more complicated and authentic narratives could be told.

‘Let’s all be in the same room’

“Back in the ’90s when we first met, the transgender community was invisible,” wrote Chino Scott-Chung in 2015. “Christopher came into the Asian Pacific Islander lesbian community sporting LOVE-HATE tattoos on his hands, one letter for each finger, and insisted we call him ‘he.’”

Scott-Chung, a member of Lee’s chosen family, described Lee as a role model. “Christopher helped me embrace who I am because he was fully himself.”

That self wasn’t shy about putting on a bit of a show. Born in San Diego in 1964 to Polish and Chinese parents, Lee moved to San Francisco in the early ’90s. In 1993, he was photographed in military garb, hat under arm and sabre in hand, by then-emerging photographer Catherine Opie, who was traveling back and forth between San Francisco and Los Angeles documenting friends and artists in her queer and leather communities. (Works from the series would later be included in the 1995 Whitney Biennial.)

The next year, Lee was captured in another artistic rendering of a specific time and place: dancing atop a New York City bus stop during the Stonewall 25 celebrations in cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For.

Lee’s presence in Opie and Bechdel’s work is a testament to his own stature within artistic and activist circles. Shawna Virago remembers their first real meeting as a two-hour conversation on the back stairs of a party in 1998. “I think we had both gotten a certain amount of community attention in our small world,” she remembers. Virago had been playing music as an out trans person since the early ’90s, and was doing prominent police accountability work. Compared to the rest of the partygoers, she says, “We were just on a different path already.”

While Lee was showing up in other artist’s work, he was also doing his own documenting. For the ambitious project Asian Lesbian & Bisexual Movement 1994–1995, Lee videotaped meetings, parades, interviews, talks and performances with members of the movement. He’s visible in small snatches across the collection: a reflection in a dressing-room mirror; a voice behind the camera, asking activist Urvashi Vaid to recount her first kiss.

Lee recorded his own transition in the 30-minute short Christopher’s Chronicles, co-directed with Elise Hurwitz. It was among the very first films made by or about a transgender man of color. The film premiered at the 1997 Frameline Festival, screened at other LGBTQ+ festivals nationally, and was recently digitized by the San Francisco Public Library.

It was Christopher’s Chronicles that introduced Alex Austin to Lee. Austin had pivoted to law after President Ronald Reagan attempted to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts. (“I wanted to fight censorship and protect artists of all stripes,” Austin says. “I wanted to keep the arts in the hands of the artist.”) In August of 1997, Austin was programming Alternative Vision: Diverse Images in Lesbian and Gay Cinema at Oakland’s Parkway Theater. Looking to include trans content, they screened Christopher’s Chronicles.

“I fell in love with that little film,” Austin says. “He and I got to talking and we just sort of fell in friend love immediately.”

After the Parkway screening, Austin says, Lee reached out again. “He’s like, ‘Do you think there’s enough content to do an entire film festival just about trans issues?’ I looked at him and I think all I said was, ‘Let’s find out.’”

Within an astonishing three months, with the help of a small team of volunteers, Austin and Lee organized a full-fledged one-day film festival at the Roxie, with a week of programming leading up to it.

Tranny Fest, now the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival, advertised itself as a “finger-snapping, groin-bumping, tear-jerking, heartwarming, gut-busting mix of experimental, documentary, drama and pornographic films!” The city of San Francisco declared Nov. 22, 1997 “Transgender & Transgenre Cinema Day.”

Across six eclectic programs (and a video lounge), that first festival screened a diverse range of narrative, documentary and experimental offerings. They included Two-Spirited People, a 1991 documentary on Native American culture; Tina Valentín Aguirre’s homage to San Francisco activist and ranchera singer Teresita La Campesina; and Kings of New York, a 1996 documentary about “the secret world of breast-binding, pants-stuffing drag kings.”

Lee and Hurwitz’s second collaboration, the 1997 film Trappings of Transhood, also played at the inaugural festival. In it, Lee interviews a multiracial group of transgender people about their experiences, presenting their own stories in their own words.

While there were definite divides between different queer communities at the time (Austin points out they never would have met Lee on a barstool at the Lexington), the Transgender Film Festival sought to create a rare meeting space for all-comers. “Tranny Fest was, I think, a huge proponent of let’s all be in the same room. Let’s all talk about it,” Austin says. “We can enjoy movies. We can enjoy music. We can enjoy dance, poetry, art. Art fucking saves lives. That is the mantra.”

Virago, who took over from Austin and Lee as director after the 2002 festival, remembers a welcoming scene. “It was — I don’t know if the word’s thrilling — but it felt safe,” she says. “Any time we could gather together, I think, it was a feeling of being able to relax and not have to be afraid all the time.”

‘Big sinners and proud of it’

In handwritten notes on the back of planning documents from the first festival, someone, maybe Lee, wrote, “Straight people get to talk about their sex and it’s time we can talk about our sex.”

From its very first incarnation, the Transgender Film Festival committed itself to showing adult films. In a preview of the 1997 festival written for the San Francisco Bay Times, Susan Stryker wrote that “explicit visual pornography” is where most cis people first encounter images of transgender people. “The twist,” she wrote, “is that the work included here is by gender queers themselves, rather than by those whose chief aim is to exploit our differences for a fast buck.”

Lee’s next two films were decidedly pornographic. Alley of the Trannyboys (1998) is described by Frameline as “a deeply subversive landmark of erotica” and by the International Transgender Film & Video Festival program as “a hardcore hand-job of a movie that puts a few extra X’s in ‘explicit.’” The 50-minute film retains its subversive power; it was shown as recently as the 2024 Frameline festival, in an “Erotic City Shorts” program.

The feature-length Sex Flesh in Blood (1999) has a more gothic bent, with dark spirits speaking Mandarin, vampires, cadavers, an industrial darkwave and punk soundtrack, and, according to Frameline’s write-up, a sexual smorgasbord drenched in plenty of “blood, blood, blood.”

(Both Alley of the Trannyboys and Sex Flesh in Blood are now available to rent from the indie adult film site PinkLabel.tv.)

Meanwhile, queer identities were shifting and expanding. And Lee refused to be pinned down to any fixed definition. In a 2001 interview with Asianweek, Lee described himself as “a gender hybrid.”

“I see myself as really futuristic and not wanting to put myself in too much of a gender or species category,” he said. “I’ve been able to evolve through science and technology … I believe the possibilities will be endless to evolve into something else in the future.”

Lee’s trickster energy and gothy self-presentation were vastly removed from mainstream queer culture at the time. Which is what made his nomination for SF Pride’s grand marshal in 2002 all the more exciting — for some.

“We were really outliers,” Virago explains. “I remember the Bay Area Reporter had a little article about the people who were nominated … And they said something like ‘this will be a wild ride,’ because of us and our reputation.”

Lee and Virago ran as “America’s Little Darlings,” hosting a “Kissing Hands and Shaking Babies” meetup at the Lexington at the start of their campaign. When the ballots were tallied, they had gathered the most votes in the recent history of grand marshal elections. “We are both forces to be reckoned with,” Lee told the Bay Area Reporter. “We are both big sinners and proud of it.”

“Christopher was really gung-ho to be a grand marshal,” Virago says. “It was endearing.”

An incredible legacy

Traces of Lee’s participation in public events fall away in the years following his grand marshal appearance. Virago says she was part of a film Lee was working on in 2004, but she’s never seen the footage.

Lee struggled with his mental health. Austin remembers trying to help Lee try to fill a prescription one day near the Castro Theater. “[The medical field] really failed him,” they say. “And that is just heartbreaking.”

On Dec. 22, 2012, Lee died by suicide. When the Alameda County Coroner’s office misgendered Lee on his death certificate, friends and chosen family, led by Maya and Chino Scott-Chung, rallied to right the wrong. Two years later, the Respect After Death Act, authored by Assemblymember Toni Atkins and sponsored by the Transgender Law Center and Equality California, passed the state legislature.

The bill requires coroners and funeral directors to record a person’s gender identity rather than anatomical sex on their death certificate. And if there’s a dispute with the next-of-kin, who the deceased might be estranged from, a driver’s license or passport can trump family opinion. (Lee’s driver’s license identified him as male.)

The law took effect in 2015.

It’s an incredible legacy, atop an already impressive list of things Lee achieved in his lifetime. Four films, hours of documentary footage. A celebratory, welcoming event for filmmakers and audiences alike. Over its 28 years, the festival Lee co-founded, like him, has inspired countless people to be fully themselves.

The San Francisco Transgender Film Festival is North America’s longest-running trans film festival. It’s not the place for high-profile premieres or even high-polish productions, but it remains a place where authentic stories get told with style and panache. “We’re not beholden to the best production values,” Virago says. “We’re looking for ideas more than anything.”

Trying to describe the festival’s ethos, as passed down by Austin and Lee, she reaches for a metaphor: “Netflix is the auto-tune experience, right? We are — you can hear our voices and our real concerns in the movies we screen.”