Jonathan Tiersten died May 5 at his home in New Jersey. He was 60. He played Ricky Thomas in Sleepaway Camp, and I want to explain why a very specific group of people is taking this one harder than a 1983 summer camp slasher would usually warrant.
What The Film Means To Me
I am trans. That goes on the table first because nothing else I am about to say makes any sense without it.
I have been showing Sleepaway Camp to people since I was eleven years old. Everyone who mattered to me has sat through it. Friends who thought slashers were beneath them, partners who loved me enough to watch things they would never have chosen, my teenagers.
I give the same speech before every single viewing. Something is going to happen in the last few minutes, I tell them, and whatever your first reaction is, please sit with it for a moment before you say it out loud. Not because the reaction is wrong. Because there is almost always a second reaction underneath it and that is the one I am actually interested in.
What The Film Actually Is
Robert Hiltzik made a low-budget slasher set at a summer camp. Angela Baker is strange and barely verbal and is tormented by basically everyone around her while her cousin Ricky tries to run interference. The ending reveals that Angela was born Peter, that her father died when she was small, and that the aunt who took her in had always wanted a girl and simply decided Peter would become one.
Angela did not choose any of this. Not her name, not her clothes, not the gender she was made to perform in front of every single person she encountered every single day. And after years of living inside something she never chose, the pressure found somewhere to go.
That Ending
The transness is framed as the horror, as the explanation for the violence, and there is nothing there any trans person would hold up as a victory for representation. I understand all of that.
But I was eleven when I first watched it, and what I heard underneath everything it was trying to do was something nobody was trying to say. If you force someone to live as the wrong thing long enough, they will eventually stop being able to contain what that costs them. The film turned that into a monster story. I recognized it as a thing I had been trying to explain to myself without having the words for it yet.
Trans Representation In Pop Culture
For context, consider what came the year after. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective came out in 1994 and its treatment of a trans character is a two-minute sequence of Jim Carrey vomiting, using a plunger on his own face, burning his clothes, and sobbing under running water upon learning he had kissed her. The joke is that she is contamination.
My classmates quoted this film back at me for years. That was what mainstream culture had decided trans people were good for, and it went more or less unchallenged for a long time. Angela Baker, for all of Sleepaway Camp’s genuine limitations, is the protagonist of her entire film. Her history is the engine of the whole story. She is not a punchline. She is why the movie exists.
Trans representation in horror has never been particularly good, and I am not about to argue Sleepaway Camp is the exception. What I will say is that it accidentally told the truth in the middle of trying to do something else entirely, and horror films that stumble into the truth are still telling the truth. I have built twenty-five years of love for this movie on that.
Ricky
Ricky is most of the reason I keep coming back, which brings us to Jonathan Tiersten. He played Ricky as someone who never needed to understand Angela in order to be fully in her corner. He does not study her. He does not puzzle her out, he just shows up every time with the kind of furious loyalty that does not require an explanation because the explanation is right there. He loves his cousin, and he is not going to stand there while the world is unkind to her. That is not a complicated thing to put on screen. It is also rarer on screen than it should be.
Tiersten reprised the role in Return to Sleepaway Camp in 2008 and kept working in independent horror until the end. His most famous performance is forty-five minutes of a teenager planting himself between his cousin and everything the world wanted to do to her, and for some of us who grew up watching this film, that was the first time we saw someone treat that as simply the obvious right thing to do.
It was an answer to a question I had not yet figured out how to ask.
