Whenever someone asks me why I’m not on testosterone, I tell them it’s because I’m terrified of turning into the Wolf Man.
This is in keeping with my way of gently deflecting complex questions I can’t answer by talking about movies. It’s the only way I have, sometimes, of getting at painful truths when it feels too raw to look them in the face.
It’s also just honest, though it might appear flippant: I’ve never been on hormones for a variety of reasons, most of them having to do with fear. There’s the fear that it will change my body—something I already hate—into something I’ll hate even more. There’s the fear of getting severe acne again, something I dealt with as a teen and young adult that deeply impacted (and still impacts) my self-confidence. There’s the fear of becoming dependent on something I might not always have access to, especially in today’s transphobic legal climate.
But most of all, there is the fear of being taken over by coarse, thick, unruly hair.
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In my family, there’s a lot of hair happening. On my father’s side, our bodies are dense forests of hair. Already on my body there are patches of hair where there “shouldn’t” be. I’ll wake up to find a black, curly hair sprouting on my shoulder, on my chest, on my stomach, under my chin. Every time a new one appears I wince, and think, “if this is how fucking hairy you are without testosterone, imagine what taking it will do.” I look in the mirror and longer see myself, but the melancholy-eyebrowed image of Lon Chaney, Jr., the man most famous for bringing the Wolf Man, in all his hirsute glory, to life.
The case of Chaney Jr. is an interesting one: in some ways, he was predestined to play this role, as the son of one of the greatest horror actors of the film industry’s early, silent days. His father Lon Chaney Sr. made his name, however, not by being hairy, but by using a diversity of costumes, prosthetics, camera tricks and filters to create the grotesques he played onscreen. In the space of only a few years, Chaney played the Jewish caricature Fagin in an adaptation of “Oliver Twist,” Quasimodo in the first Hunchback of Notre Dame film, a vampire, a ventriloquist, a carnival performer, an evil doctor, an old woman, and an amputee¹. He died in 1930, at 47, before the first great wave of Universal sound films, those iconic “creature features” we now think of as heralding the true arrival of modern horror.
But his son, Lon Chaney Jr., was there to pick up the slack, albeit in a different way. He would play a variety of creatures, but not with the devilish glee found in his father’s performances. When Chaney Sr. took on the role of a “monster”², it was with grim intentionality. He delighted in playing difficult, fucked up men, and even the characters he played who were sensitive and tortured—rather than evil—managed to still feel a little bit offputting. The agency and the power are always there. He was, after all, a man at the very top of his field. Horror didn’t have the same campy, B movie connotations it would come to have by the late 30s, when Chaney Jr. started acting.
The father looms large in every son’s life: there is both the fear and the desire to repeat his history in one’s own life.
During the silent era, horror was a main event. It was an exciting, technologically advanced genre, something that showed off the true power of film as an art form. Chaney Jr. got the scraps, and he took those scraps dutifully, always with the same pained expression on his face. When you’re watching him, you call to mind the opening monologue of the “Sopranos” pilot, where Tony laments about entering the mafia after its golden years are past. “I came in at the end,” he says. “The best is over.”
Because the thing that’s interesting about the Chaney Jr.—perhaps the thing that’s always interesting to me about sad sons begrudgingly following in their very famous fathers’ footsteps—is that he always seems so put upon, as if the decision to live in his father’s shadow—in the shadow of the horror genre’s past greatness—wasn’t a voluntary one. And maybe, in some cases, it wasn’t. What chance did Frank Sinatra Jr., for instance, have to be anything—anyone—but Frank Sinatra Jr.? Even Nancy couldn’t quite get out from under a shadow that large. There is the impulse, among sons, to emulate what they can’t quite achieve. The father looms large in every son’s life: there is both the fear and the desire to repeat his history in one’s own life. Or perhaps this repetition is the only way we have of feeling close to, of knowing, a figure as essentially unknowable as the father.
Sometimes, this impulse can yield fruit: right now I’m reading John Lahr’s—one of my favorite critics of all time—biography of his father, the great vaudevillian Bert Lahr. What it achieves is great specifically because of the prickly closeness between the two men. Lahr breaks the narrative at times to describe what his father’s face is doing as he’s interviewing him. He tells the story straight, until he hits on a gap, and there he fills the text in with his own hard-won knowledge of the man he grew up with. “I know what he’s thinking,” he says more than once after his father will not, or is simply unable to, answer a specific question. Sometimes he’ll just leave us with that blank space, to great effect, as when describing the death of his father’s first marriage and first vaudeville partner and wife, a dancer named Mercedes. Lahr writes simply that: “my father stayed up for three straight nights. He refused to talk.”³ The use of “Lahr” in combination with “my father” reminds us that we’re reading a straightforward biography, in some ways, and a living history in others.
In the same way, it feels like watching Lon Chaney Sr. when you’re watching Lon Chaney Jr., even though the two performers couldn’t be further apart in style. It’s more that the son’s work feels like a helpless continuation of the father’s. And this works, this feeling of being unable to control one’s actions, in the case of The Wolf Man most of all. Because it’s so much a movie about masculinity, our fears around it, which of course are in dialogue with father-son anxiety. It’s a movie about the fear of not being able to become your father, as well as a fear around becoming only the worst parts of him. In the film, Lon Chaney Jr. is to the manner born: his brother recently died in a mysterious hunting accident, and his father, played by Claude Rains, clearly thinks his living son is insane. How could he not? He keeps talking about werewolves, and how he might one. More than that, Chaney is rather feminine about it. He always looks on the verge of tears, terrified of what he doesn’t know about himself, desperate to be able to control his worst unconscious impulses. And the performance works, because the Wolf Man is not a fearful figure, but a tragic one.
“There’s something deeply tragic about that man,” someone says about Chaney’s character at one point, and it’s true even before he gets the telltale wolf bite that transforms him into the creature. There is something deeply sad about him, something desperate and hopeless in his face that even a smile can’t hide. Even in the moments when he’s trying to be normal, he seems like someone whose sadness will always irrepressibly rise to the surface. His eyes seem incapable of communicating anything apart from “help me.” And his transformation into the Wolf Man is something he very much doesn’t want to happen. When he dies in this film, it’s a happy ending. Not just because the creature who’s been terrorizing everyone is dead, but because the life of the person in the most pain in this universe is finally, mercifully over. It was his father who killed him with the silver-handled cane, and that same father is the only one left to mourn him.
I’ve feared that testosterone will turn me, physically, into the Wolf Man, and my father, and Max on “The L Word.” That my body will become a Pigpen-like cloud of hair and emotions the instant the first T shot hits my bloodstream. This is in keeping with my general fear of becoming too visibly “male.” Because even if there’s a way for me to be perceived as male by others, that’s not exactly what I want. It’s still hard to know what I want from T, if anything. Maybe I still have a fantasy that T will make me beautiful, even though I know that’s not at all how it works.
When you’re a gay man, you don’t always want to look especially masculine. You just want to be beautiful. Hair is the enemy of male beauty, the culture tells you. Even though there are plenty of men who love bodies that are not what the culture celebrates, it’s hard to shake the feeling that nobody wants you when you’re Lon Chaney Jr. A little flabby, sad-looking in your undershirt, a little too emotional, and hairy against your will.
But maybe that’s who you are anyway.♦
¹ Many of these as dual roles in the same film.
² Sadly and stupidly, often Chaney’s “monster” roles are just characters with disabilities.
³ Interestingly similar to Frank Sinatra’s family accounts of how he acted after Ava Gardner’s death.
In my family, there’s a lot of hair happening. On my father’s side, our bodies are dense forests of hair. Already on my body there are patches of hair where there “shouldn’t” be. I’ll wake up to find a black, curly hair sprouting on my shoulder, on my chest, on my stomach, under my chin. Every time a new one appears I wince, and think, “if 
The case of Chaney Jr. is an interesting one: in some ways, he was predestined to play this role, as the son of one of the greatest horror actors of the film industry’s early, silent days. His father Lon Chaney Sr. made his name, however, not by being hairy, but by using a diversity of costumes, prosthetics, camera tricks and filters to create the grotesques he played onscreen. In the space of only a few years, Chaney played the Jewish caricature Fagin in an adaptation of “Oliver Twist,” Quasimodo in the first 
But his son, Lon Chaney Jr., was there to pick up the slack, albeit in a different way. He would play a variety of creatures, but not with the devilish glee found in his father’s performances. When Chaney Sr. took on the role of a “monster”², it was with grim intentionality. He delighted in playing difficult, fucked up men, and even the characters he played who were sensitive and tortured—rather than evil—managed to still feel a little bit offputting. The agency and the power are always there. He was, after all, a man at the very top of his field. Horror didn’t have the same campy, B movie connotations it would come to have by the late 30s, when Chaney Jr. started acting. 
