The bizarre, gender-bending fiction of John Hughes

Before John Hughes became the guy who produced Home Alone, Beethoven and all of that early 1990s, mainstream family comedy crap, before he was the writer/director of beloved '80s teen comic-dramas like The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles, before he even broke into screenwriting with Vacation... He was a writer for National Lampoon magazine, back when that really meant something.

These days National Lampoon survives only as a promoter of cheap and sleazy fratboy comedies, but back in the 1970s it was a razor sharp satirical magazine that employed a lot of great talents before they became famous. (Saturday Night Live, for instance, was staffed by a lot of former Lampoon folks in its early days.) The magazine specialized in a kind of misanthropic, Ivy League shock humor, smart but sometimes frighteningly vicious. Its influence, for good and ill, is inescapable in the comedy of today, and Hughes was there to help set the magazine's acidic and unforgiving tone.

His best-known pieces from this era are the bizarre, gender-bending and very, very not safe for work stories My Penis and My Vagina. (The site hosting those stories seems to be a collection of transgender fiction from various media, so it's probably not too safe for work in general.) Published in 1978, My Penis tells the story of a teenage girl who awakens one day to find that she has mysteriously sprouted a male member. While funny at times, the story turns very dark indeed, with some unfortunate sexual stereotyping and an act of truly appalling sexual violence treated like a joke. (You have been warned.) My Vagina, published a year later, is a sequel where a high school jock is appalled to discover that he has developed lady parts during the night. Like the original story, it has some laughs but also features a rape played for laughs and leaves you feeling dirty and kind of depressed.

These stories feature the same good ear for teen talk that Hughes would later put to good use in his films, which makes it all too easy to picture Molly Ringwald as the mortified leading lady of My Penis and Emilio Estevez as the emasculated protagonist of My Vagina. Without trying to delve too deeply into Hughes' psychology, I think I can say that these stories were either written during a very unhappy time in his life, or he was a man with more demons than we knew. While the stories are fascinating historical curios for Hughes fans, you definitely need to prepare yourself psychologically before reading them. Some Kind of Wonderful they ain't.

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