Exploring the Private Moments and Identities of Transgender Teens in the 90s: A Review of I Saw the Light of TV

As a transgender teenager in the 1990s, I vividly remember the flickering light on the TV screen. Late at night, once everyone else in the house was asleep, I was able to have a degree of privacy, and it was the main time when I could access things that were somewhat similar to my real self.

Watching transgender filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun's new film I Saw the TV Glow took me back to this time in my life. As the title suggests, the American Springs Palace film is about the small screen and what it meant to the lives of two cool teens growing up in the '90s.

Long before the advent of the internet as we now know it, long before the explosion of information about the existence and normalcy of transgender people. It was only a few years before I visited a website linking members of the transgender community, and more than a decade before I even imagined that I could transform and become my true self.

What sustained me during those years were the few female objects I managed to acquire - which, for some reason I couldn't understand at the time, felt absolutely right to me - and the late-night TV programs that seemed to make sense to me. I remember that the shows that felt the most authentic often involved horror, extremes, and the bizarre-such as Tales from the Crypt, The Outer Limits, and the strange movies that aired in the wee hours of the morning on PBS. These entertainments would flicker in the background of my darkened room as I took the time to feel feminized, opposed to my family's abuse, and the ever-present risk of humiliation and punishment.

I Saw the Light of Television centers on Irving, a black boy just entering puberty, and the slightly older Maddie, who seems to be changing towards femininity and becomes a sort of mentor to Irving. Maddie mainly helps Irving smuggle in tapes of a strange television program called The Pink Opaque, which hypnotizes young people, though it doesn't seem to be a very good program and ostensibly has little to do with their reality.

The movie at the American Springs Palace is largely about what it's like to be the cool kid before you come out of the closet. It's when you know you're different in some way, but haven't yet realized that you may have a different gender or sexual orientation than most people. It's a strange part of the journey, being drawn to an identity without fully realizing it. It was a much longer and more common period before the advent of the internet, when increased acceptance made cooler identities clearer. The nineties may have been the last time that so many young people sleepwalked their way to cool kid status, mysteriously drawn to whatever pop culture seemed to express this strange sense of difference.

The impressive ability of Mizumiya to create movie-length metaphors allows the viewer to experience this feeling. The average metaphorizer creates ideas that might work at the 1:1 or 1:2 level; the very, very good metaphorizer might operate at the 1:10 or 1:20 level. Storytellers like Mizumiya completely break this ratio. They create metaphors of such complexity and dynamism that we can't map them from one conceptual realm to another. It's easy to say that Jane Scheinbren has created a movie about gender dysphoria, but trying to tell the story of how or why they work is beyond our ability to express in so many words.

Watching the flickering screen of I Saw the TV Glow at the American Springs Palace, trying to figure out how what I was watching was speaking to me, I believe I felt similar to how Irving and Maddie felt watching Pink Opaque, experiencing the show's hypnotic appeal to others. For the same reason, this movie allowed me to re-experience what it was like for me as a teenager to watch these shows in front of a glowing TV screen so many late nights, connecting with a femininity that was beyond my ability to comprehend.

I Saw the Light of Television is a heartfelt interpretation of the nostalgia genre that shows great compassion for the children who lived through it. It preserves their incomprehensible innocence and trauma with genuine care, as if attempting to give these children and so many others the empathy they should have been able to receive in those times. Its kindness is something I learned to give to a younger version of myself, who for years struggled with inner hatred and judgment that I had been taught to keep for myself and children like me. Watching it, I felt how small and confused Owen and Maddie were, and I wished they had something better than the TV show to guide them. I wish I had too.