The first time I watched Grey Gardens I was very stoned. 

I was 20 years old. From a town in north Ontario newly moved to big city Toronto. Seeing my new life with beautiful stupidy and simplicity. It was also the same day I learned about the cultural touch stone known as - Criterion Collection. The five thousand dollars I had paid for my first-year film studies class seemed to show some value finally. 

Armed with such important information the video rental store called my soul. My stoned friends and I entered the video rental store and headed straight for the Criterion Collection. I remember having a jump in my step – a jump one only gets when they feel they have acquired valuable ‘cool people’ insider information. The other time I had that same feeling was being stuck in a backstage fashion show bathroom with Chloë Sevigny. Both were in the 2000’s and nothing was cooler. 

Stoned and facing a giant wall of Criterion Collection DVDs I was experiencing every art student's wet dream. After a happy and healthy debate on how we would treat our eyes for the next hours my friend Jasmine picked up a DVD case and declared she liked the fur coat on the women – I felt that was a strong argument and conceded - that DVD was Grey Gardens. 

The last time I watched Grey Gardens I was very stoned. 

-CHRISTOPHER SHERMAN

“You know, you don’t see me as I see myself… I see myself as a little girl.”

“Little Edie” Bouvier Beale’s enduring legacy with audiences goes beyond what she’s remembered for on the surface, like her iconic fashion sense and campy eccentricity. I think her cult status specifically among queer viewers could really be attributed to how relatable she is. For me, the way she spoke in Grey Gardens about her own passions, unfulfilled dreams, and personal beliefs resonates with some of my own queer-specific lived experiences, and I don’t think I’m alone. We can all see a bit of ourselves in Little Edie.

For instance, a common experience many of us share is feeling or being outcast at some point, which definitely can be said about Little Edie and her mother. Big and Little Edie lived in squalor for more than 20 years after Mr. Beale divorced Big Edith. The pair were no longer well-kept socialites and at one point, could only afford to eat cat food disguised as pâté. They could not keep up anymore with the world and society they once were apart of. As a result, they became increasingly recluse. Without Mr. Beale’s support, they didn’t fit into their former social scenes. But they were now free to live life as themselves. “Artists”, as Little Edie used to describe herself, an actress, model and performer, and her songstress mother. For me, it brings to mind my own experiences after coming out as a queer trans woman. We may not all go from riches to rags, but we know how it feels to be isolated as our queerness emerges and we don’t get to share in the cis or straight lifestyles that had surrounded us. After coming out, many of us transition socially and politically. We begin to move and read differently in the spaces we occupy.

The lifestyles of the Edies were also at odds with another relative, the famed Jackie O. Although she spent time with her aunt and cousin in her early life, the Kennedy widow distanced herself when the pair’s living circumstances deteriorated. She paid for a clean-up of Grey Gardens in the early seventies when the home’s hazardous conditions made it into the press. She had so much influence yet mostly just sent her assistant to deliver the Edies blankets and towels on a recurring basis. She allegedly encouraged Little Edie to leave New York City in the early eighties for the same reason. Bad press. Being the outcast of the family is an all too familiar experience for many queers. For a lot of us, interfamily dynamics change and some relationships strain after we come out to our families. They don’t see us as we see ourselves. Like how Mr. Beale and arguably Jackie O. disavowed Big and Little Edie for their artistic lifestyles, my father refuses to acknowledge me for the woman I am. However, I remain very close with my cousin Jamieleigh just like how Little Edie could count on her cousin Lee Radziwill (Jackie’s sister). Some people never come out at all and their queerness is hidden from public life, swept under the rug for fear of being outcast from family and society like these women were.

For some of us, fashion is an important outlet to express our queerness, before and after coming out. Much of Edie’s style was avant-garde for her time, setting trends of layering and juxtaposition in ways that would influence designs by Gucci, Dior, and John Galliano, to name a few. Bold style is something many queers take pride in, including myself. We were wearing skinny jeans while everyone else was wearing baggy pants. We were wearing mom jeans when everyone wore skinny jeans. It’s like how Edie worries about what her gardener Brooks thinks of her “revolutionary costume” and she says she never wears it publicly in East Hampton. And she was right, she was totally ahead of her time. Much of her personal style during the seventies makes its way into popular eighties fashion. In this case, Edie resonates with queer experiences of being outcast by dominant society for our personal aesthetics before our styles are popularized and digested into the mainstream.

Like both Beale women, many of us have love stories that don’t get happy endings or successful relationships or marriage. We miss out on opportunities in life and love because of who we are far more often than our cis or straight counterparts. And before we know it, we’re not young anymore and we aren’t married or in love or successful. We know how it feels to be ousted at some point in our lives and to live differently from the people around us. We know what it’s like for life to not go according to plan because of who we are or how we’re perceived in some spaces.

Little Edie never got married or became the successful, glamorous movie star she wanted to be. For a long time, she couldn’t even escape from underneath the thumb of her mother. I know that speaks to me as someone uncertain of whether or not I’ll ever make it writing and acting or create the right boundaries with my family. At some point, I think we all know what it’s like to have nothing to hold onto except for our dreams.

For Little Edie Beale to star in a movie about her life was her opportunity to finally be recognized as an artist and respected for being herself by the world around her, which she’d been denied for a very long time. She could sing and dance for the camera, express herself creatively and now be celebrated for it. I think to be acknowledged for being yourself on your own terms is something every person dreams of experiencing because so many of us hide parts of ourselves for fear of rejection. And the opposite of that, the ideal result, would be some respect.

Consciously or not, we all desire the chance to live in a way that is true to ourselves. Staunch performer Edie got that chance after the success of Grey Gardens. She was able to perform again, move back to New York City for a while, live by the beach, rejoin the Hamptons social scene, and, finally, she was famous. Her life didn’t go exactly as she hoped, she never found her libra husband. But she believed in herself long before anyone else did, and finally, after many years of dreaming, she got to live in a way that was true to herself. I think many queer people strive for that too. Some of us still only dream about it, for now.

“I'm finally beginning to live!”
- Little Edie, age 60, to The New York Times in January 1978