The expression gender-bending has stuck with me since I first read it—or, really, a variation of it—back when I used to read Time Magazine back in the 80s. The term was in a movie review of "Raising Arizona," and guess what? I found the review online—by Richard Corliss in March of 1987, the year I graduated from high school. This was one of the expression's earliest uses. I remember seeing "Raising Arizona" in the theater back then; I thought it was gut-bustingly funny; these days, I think the movie is a great introduction to the works of the Coen Brothers,* who rarely misfire. Corliss writes:
Every character, great or small (and truth to tell, they’re all small), has the juice of comic originality in him. In jail with Hi, one convict strums Beethoven’s Ode to Joy on the old banjo. The bounty hunter — he’s real, not just a Hi dream — is a demon road warrior, a warthog from hell who grenades rabbits and torches roadside flowers, can catch flies between his filthy fingers, and has a secret tattoo of Woody Woodpecker on his left pectoral. Gale and Evelle (lots of gender-bent names in this picture) lecture Ed on the importance of breast-feeding as a retardant to criminal behavior. Having kidnaped Nathan Jr. from the original kidnapers, Evelle wanders into a store and, just prior to robbing the place, buys balloons for the child. “These blow up into funny shapes?” he asks. “Not unless round is funny,” the clerk replies. [Emphasis added.]
The name "Ed" is as gender-bent as "Gale" (John Goodman) and "Evelle" (William Forsythe). Ed is short for Edwina, played by a fetching Holly Hunter. You have to wonder, though, whether saying gender-bent or gender-bending these days is a form of bigotry since we're all supposedly part of a gender-fluid spectrum.
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*And it goes without saying that this was one of Randall "Tex" Cobb's two greatest movie roles, the other being his role as the grenade-wearing Sailor in "Uncommon Valor," which also came out in the 80s when Vietnam War prisoner-extraction fantasies were all the rage (cf. Stallone's "Rambo II," and Chuck Norris's "Missing in Action").
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