On October 1, 1987, the newspaper Los Angeles Times published an obituary that read: “Elizabeth Eden, Starting Point of “Dog afternoon”. Although Eden was much more than the real event on which one of the most popular films of the seventies is based, the title represents a posthumous victory for those who fought for decades for the world to see a woman in her. Eden died at the age of 41 in a hospital in the American city of Rochester, where she fled to start a new life away from John Wojtowicz, her partner for years and the charismatic robber that Al Pacino immortalized on the big screen. It was precisely Wojtowicz who revealed to the press that Eden had not died due to cancer and pneumonia, as she wanted to spread, but as a result of the AIDS that she suffered from. More than 25 years after her death, there are several voices that try to claim that she is, with her lights and shadows, one of the most relevant figures of the trans movement in the United States and that the footage of dog afternoon he failed to portray it in its maximum splendor. “Its pioneering political impact goes far beyond a failed bank robbery,” the magazine maintains. Tribune.
There is hardly any information about Elizabeth Debbie Eden's childhood beyond the fact that she was born in Queens (New York), into a Jewish family and under the name Ernest Aron. She became one of the best-known young women on the New York scene of the early seventies because of her height, her beauty, her talent for dancing and her scandalous character. She used to play records at parties with a portable record player that she carried with her and became a prostitute to survive, at a time when any non-normative sexual orientation was still persecuted and criminalized and homophobic beatings by groups of straight people or police were a possibility. the order of the day. But something had begun to change in the Greenwich Village neighborhood following the Stonewall riots in 1969, which multiplied the collective's demonstrations until giving rise to the birth of the gay movement. One of the members of the Gay Activist Alliance, a nonviolent militant political organization, went by the name of John Wojtowicz.
This Vietnam War veteran was quite a character. A few years earlier he had abandoned his wife, Carmen Bifulco, and his two children, and had decided to embrace what he himself defines as “sexual perversion.” “I don't smoke or drink, I don't take drugs or gamble. I'm a little angel, but I have horns. And when you have horns you can only do one thing: fuck,” he says in the TCM documentary the dog. It was in the army when he had his first homosexual experience and stopped defining himself as a “republican, conservative and warmonger” to join LGTBI activism as an excuse to satisfy his chronic promiscuity. He met Liz in the summer of 1971. “When I first saw him, I knew. It had to be mine,” said Wojtowicz, who died in 2006 from cancer and always addressed her in the masculine. Such was the passion of their romance that they ended up celebrating one of the first – unofficial – gay weddings in New York and even the general press echoed the union between the soldier, adorned with his numerous war decorations, and Eden, who She was wearing a very expensive white dress.
The joy did not last long. The woman longed to undergo a sex change operation, but she did not have the money or the support of John to do it. She delved into drugs and tried to end her life on several occasions. “A lot of people had already had surgery by then, and Liz couldn't stop talking about it and how wonderful it would be to be a woman herself. She was not happy. “She once showed me her wrists and she had scars,” says a close friend of Eden in the dog. In August 1972, she attempted suicide again by taking an overdose of medication and ended up admitted to a psychiatric center. The episode was the trigger that made Wojtowicz, given to ravings and a textbook egomaniac, plan a bank robbery to pay for the long-awaited surgery.
On the 22nd of that same month, the ex-military man, accompanied by his accomplices Bobby Westenberg – who fled before the police even arrived – and Sal Naturale, entered the Chase Manhattan bank in Brooklyn. The robbery became a circus with thousands of curious onlookers who encouraged the acts of this modern Robin Hood story and millions of spectators nationwide who were empathetic with the robbers for the altruistic and passionate cause they defended. “It was a shock. Did you want gay liberation? Well, there you have it,” said journalist Randy Wicker. Both Liz Eden and Carmen Bifulco became media stars during the 14 hours that the robbery lasted and which ended with the death of Naturale by a shot by an FBI agent, the release of all the hostages and the arrest – and subsequent sentencing of prison – by Wojtowicz.
The criminal did not receive any type of support from his Alliance colleagues since the consensus among the members of the group is that Wojtowicz was mentally ill. But thanks to the premiere of Sidney Lumet's celebrated film, his popularity skyrocketed to the point of living from then on on the profits from that failed robbery. He received hundreds of letters from fans, he signed autographs, he posed in front of the bank branch in front of the tabloid press… whatever it took to squeeze every last dollar out of his 'feat'.
Liz's life changed too. With the money they received from Warner Bros for the rights to the story, Eden underwent the desired sex change operation. The film was a critical and public success. His alter ego In fiction, the cis actor Chris Sarandon was nominated for the Oscar for best supporting actor, although the fact that they rejected the trans actress Elizabeth Coffey Williams to play Eden “for being too attractive to give life to a trans.”
As if it were the American sister of Cristina Ortiz 'La Veneno', Liz was also paraded like an exotic-festive ar
ticle on television sets and the covers of erotic magazines showing off her new attributes. After the operation she wanted to leave any relationship with John behind and start a new life. They ended up having bitter confrontations in front of the cameras, as she defended that the altruistic and already mythological endeavor thanks to Wojtowicz's cinema was not such. Eden claimed that her robbery was not intended to pay for her reassignment surgery, but rather to settle the debts he had with the mafia, and that, obsessed with her years later, John had threatened to kill her.
Liz Eden did not want to participate with John in what could have been a seminal story of the LGTBI community in New York. These days, trans historians like Julian Gill-Peterson, they try to do it justice: “Liz may not have been a redeeming heroine in the story, but she wasn't just a passive bystander either.” Her close friends defend that she was never happy, not even after her operation, and the press made her a broken toy after her short-lived fame. She moved to Rochester, on the Canadian border, and disappeared from the media spotlight for ten years while John tried to defend the romanticism behind her crime. They say that she returned to prostitution and that it was an HIV-infected blood transfusion after she was run over that caused her to contract the virus. She died in 1987 and Los Angeles Times published an obituary about her using female pronouns.
#tragic #untold #story #trans #icon #39Dog #Day #Afternoon39
