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Gender is a prison from which there is no real hope of escape. Most inmates come to enjoy the advantages of maximum security, the predictability of routine, the conference of identity and the assurance of equality within certain immutable categories that the system entails. No institution on earth is more totalitarian. The system allows for infractions and exceptions because the little liberties demonstrate the larger limits, and because the exception is always necessary to prove that there is a rule. Richard Raskind was not happy in the sexual slammer. The behavior that was ordained for him as a man seemed entirely out of keeping with the sense he had of himself as a woman.

This article presents information about the motion pictures "After Hour" and "Mixed Blood." "After Hours" is probably the ultimate New York film school film. Every scene is clever beyond words, the characters are too picaresque by half and the whole work is infused with a bizarre bravado that seems to showcase the filmmaker's ego above the story on the screen. "Mixed Blood" is a film out of another school and time, Andy Warhol's Factory of twenty years ago, where a certain oddball realism was developed, taught and presented in such films as "Chelsea Girls" and "Nude Restaurant." Paul Morrissey, the star student, learned his lessons well and went on to make a series of remarkable movies of that era and its strange sensibility.