CANDY DARLING

The biography of a transgender performer whose brief life illuminated 1960s and ’70s New York.

“She began life as a tortured effeminate boy because she wasn’t really a boy,” writes Carr, author of Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz. Candy Darling’s 1950s Long Island childhood was miserable, with a mother who was ashamed of her and a volatile father who drank to excess; at school, she was bullied. “Nobody gets who I am,” she told a classmate. Her escapes were TV, movie magazines, and, eventually, cosmetology school. New York City beckoned, with its gay scene—but also its 19th-century laws that still criminalized cross-dressing. Candy developed an image as a glamorous fantasy woman inspired by Hollywood starlets like Lana Turner and Kim Novak; friends recall her as a “natural star” emanating an “ethereal light.” Candy was taken up by Andy Warhol, photographed by Richard Avedon and Peter Hujar, and cast in off-off Broadway shows and underground films such as Flesh. Yet wider success eluded her, as Hollywood wanted nothing to do with a trans actor (the casting of Raquel Welch in Myra Breckinridge was a particular blow). She rarely had a stable address, often slipping back to her mother’s suburban house under cover of darkness. She was plagued by bad teeth, longed for love yet shied away from intimacy, and died of cancer at the age of 29. Carr devotedly pieces together this incandescent portrait from irregular diary entries, hilariously unreliable narrators, and taped interviews conducted by Candy’s friend Jeremiah Newton after her death. “You must always be yourself no matter what the price,” Candy once wrote. “It is the highest form of morality….Don’t dare destroy your passion for the sake of others.”

Carr resurrects a trans icon whose life, artistry, and struggle speak directly to our moment.