“Street Girls”

(An Historic Film Review)

[Filmed in Eugene, Winter of 1972. Released in 1975.]

. . . A surprisingly bold statement on feminism, black identity, lesbian love, queerness, and transgender on-screen expression in a time when these queer representations were forbidden to be anything but the butt of an on-screen joke, smear, or some such deeply shameful thing.

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Starring:

Art Burke as the father, “Sven Anderson”

Christine Souder as the go-go daughter, “Angel”

Famed & highly influential world-class Blue Note jazz musician Jimmy Smith as the good-hearted character “Jimmy”

Lily Sabina/Albert Michael Weber as, “Michael Albert” & “Sabina”

Directed by Michael Miller

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“I’m in an unconscious reality I can’t transcend.”

– Lily Sabina as Michael Albert

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Well, I sincerely had no anticipation I would cry during this film, but here I am, wiping my tears. As I have written previously in this Oregon intersectional history now, Lily Sabina, Albert Michael Weber, names they went by both & simultaneously, is the first recorded trans advocate in the Oregon gay liberation movement and in Oregon’s history. In this 1975 grind-house flick first filmed in Oregon’s winter of 1972, and then released in 1975, we see Lily credited as Albert Michael Weber in the role of “Michael Albert”. The film’s character “Michael Albert”, however, is not just a play on their first birth name, but is played within this film’s story as themselves, mostly as they were in real-life, as Lily Sabina, or just “Sabina” (pronounced, ‘Suh-bine-uh”).

I had anticipated their role to be minor, perhaps even just a fleeting glimpse in La Mar’s downstairs go-go club in Eugene that much of the movie was filmed at. Rather, what I received as a precious gift instead, was their role as Michael Albert and Sabina being integral to the entire plot, as well as getting a glimpse into the kind of person that Lily Sabina was in life as a Eugene radical intellectual. Besides playing themselves in the film, the character Sabina makes mentions of happenings in Eugene occuring in 1971 historically & culturally, such as the local popularity of Wilhelm Reich’s work at Blake College where Lily Sabina held frequent & historically vital lectures on subjects relating to sociology & civil rights with the students of University of Oregon.

What most took me back, however, was the raw poignancy of Lily’s words & presence on screen. We first see them on screen, digging with a stick in a pile of snow covered dirt and debris of a freshly demolished building. The main character, ‘Sven Anderson’ of the film, a father looking for his daughter ‘Angel’, who is lost in drugs and the city nightlife of Eugene, is looking for a hotel when he asks Michael Albert (Sabina) for directions. Michael Albert explains that they are looking for neat bottles in the building debris, and tries to show the neat things they look at on them, but Sven isn’t interested in neat bottles.

Regardless, Michael Albert offers to help in some way, as this father character is seeking his daughter. As the film progresses through each characters initial exposition, we begin to see an interwoven web of drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes, and sort of like an outlying innocent weaving their way through it all is Michael Albert (Sabina), whom lives with their sister, who is also a prostitute in the film and dancer at the go-go bar. While in 1975 when this film was released, public perceptions surrounding trans people were abysmal, we are beginning to see some change through the very artistic expressionary trans & queer advocacy of Lily (Albert) Weber we see on screen in “Street Girls”, as part of the greater gay liberation cultural movement.

In the first scene that we catch a glimpse of Lily Sabina as herself, rather than playing the male on-screen character of Michael Albert we were first introduced to; the go-go bar owner & villian of this film, as he watches her with disgust as she walks by in a dress and blonde wig, saying to himself; “Fucking perverts, I hate them.” . . . In an extensive two page journalistic & photographic exposé on Lily Sabina (Albert Michael Weber), in the Oregon Daily Emerald, 2.9.1973, “The idea for his drag name, Sabina, was provided to Weber by a character in Thornton Wilder’s play, “How We Got Through The Ice Age And Everything Else By The Skin Of Our Teeth.” Weber says his Sabina comes in two versions: blond and brown. He was wearing the brown-wigged version this day. Weber sat through the two-hour interview fidgeting with himself: putting on make-up, applying lipstick, smearing cream over his face. He constantly re-adjusted his “breasts” — every so often they would slip down his chest some and he would twist and yank them back up. Images and appearances are important to Weber. “If people were open,” he explains, “they wouldn’t care what image is presented. I go over to the Fishbowl and everyone there is in drag of some sort.”

As the film progresses into the seedy underworld of 1972’s semi-fictionally portrayed Eugene, we watch as the go-go dancers and the “lost daughter” characters are steadily pulled into the devious machinations of the pimps & drug dealing men who run the basement go-go strip club, in real life named “La Mar’s downstairs go-go club”. Via a combination of ruthless tactics of manipulation, violence, sex and addiction, these on-screen villians push the lost daughter, named Angel, deeper into prostitution & heroin addiction, while hiding her from the father, the character Sven Anderson, as played by Art Burke.

While I don’t wish to spoil this historic & vital intersectional piece of Oregon & national film history for you, dear reader, I will say that Lily’s character plays the most important role throughout the film to the end for the father, Sven, to eventually discover his daughter’s whereabouts. I would dare to say, that this is the first film in history that places a transgender person in such a keystone role, and all without turning her into a typically 1970’s vicious on-screen stereotype . . . Lily becomes deeply & tragically humanized by the end of this film, an historic achievement in film & queer history that has gone largely unsung to this present day.

I’m not sure if the makers & primary cast of this film were aware of the history that they were engaged in then in 1972 & ’75 within these foundational intersections of trans rights & queer civil rights. I suppose none us of are ever truly & fully aware of the consequential nature of our actions as we are fulfilling them in the present moment; however, that of anyone exhibiting a striking level of self-awareness and determination of their historic presence in Oregon’s civil rights foundings then and as expressed in this film, I would say it would be Lily Sabina, Albert Michael Weber. Exhibiting strong indications of genius intellect throughout their life & in Eugene in the 20th century civil rights era, as recorded in Lily’s many academic lectures, artistic & right’s advocacy, but most especially for this neurodivergent, trans & queer researcher writer; those recorded and on-screen indications of Lily Sabina being a person strongly affected by neurodivergency in real-life. In their opening scenes of this film, Sabina is digging around looking for neat collectibles, and as they speak to Sven, show clear echolalia in their speech, (“repetition of words just spoken by another person…” Wiki.). This is a trait of autism & people with adhd, as well as other neurodivergent conditions, but, in the context of the fullness of the historic life of Lily Sabina, yet another layer of depth of the genuine nature of this beautiful and brave human in a time when seemingly all the things that constituted who Lily was . . . was considered taboo, not to be spoken of, shameful, wrong, sinful, et al.

At the end of the film, as the credits begin to roll over the still image of jazz legend Jimmy Smith, we begin to hear Lily’s voice once more, they say; “I really don’t know what to say about our mother and father, we’ve been, I’ve been trying to leave home for a longer time, and I’ve been trying to understand my sister just as long, uh, you might say that uh, gee, it’s uh, I’ve tried to tell my mother, but my mother just, uh, my father doesn’t know, and my mother just doesn’t understand, and nobody has understood us since about 3 or 4 I guess.” In the context of this film, it plays out like the last words of Michael Albert speaking about the events of the movie. However, in reality, this is Lily Sabina speaking her beautiful trans truth, about herself, and about how their family recieved that truth. Although I don’t know for certain, I believe this final audio of Sabina’s voice over the credits is in fact recording from her interview exposé with the Oregon Daily Emerald on February 9th, 1973, just over a year after filming began on “Street Girls”, where in that article Lily is quoted, “. . . How do his parents take all this? His mother “doesn’t understand” and his father doesn’t know.”

“One might imagine quite a struggle exploding within a personality claiming two such polarized identities. Not so, Weber insists. “All the conflicts are external, from society.” These conflicts, he says, are a result of society refusing to accept him for what he is, rather than what it wants him to be . . . Or it just might be that the truth can be understood in these words of a favorite poet of (Lily) Weber, poet Bertolt Becht: “Therefore, I beg you, check your wrath and scorn, for all creatures need help, from every creature born.”

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