There's no denying that "Alien" is a landmark in sci-fi horror and the "monstrous feminine." Many consider it the first feminist blockbuster.
That being said, I'm not sure about the validity of some of these claims.
I'll have to check Lea Delaria's quote, but before I do:
- Lambert was indeed a trans woman. For anyone doubting this:
REMARKS:
Subject is Despin Convert at birth (male to female). So far no indication of suppressed trauma related to gender alteration. Subject's I.Q. at level 4.6 GMA personality at 4.2. Indicates that subject's social counts are too low for large crew, up mode status, and has been routinely assigned small crew cyrosleep mode duties which been performed adequately.
Slight hyperactivity and nervousness diagnosed and Loxy-Clav M (oral ingestion) has been successful as self-administered treatment.
Moderate intelligence and performance abilities did not substantially increase after security patrol navigation duties and subject was therefore re-assigned long range cyrosleep duties on cargo transports and tugs. Current assessment indicates subject should not be upgraded until after extensive full range DOQ testing and Frakes-Stephen orientation is applied
Above was never acted upon due to employment discontinuity
Also, here and here.
2. I haven't heard before that Ripley was originally written as a man. What I've heard is that the characters were written as gender neutral. That's why they refer to each other by their surnames. (Here's an interesting Scott interview where he talks about the characters.) But choosing to cast Ripley as a woman was indeed groundbreaking.
3. I'm trying to figure out which book Lea Delaria was talking about. Because if it's Alan Dean Foster's novelization, which was released on March 29, two months before the film came out (May 25, 1979), Ellen Ripley is a woman in it.
4. The OG rainbow flag made its debut on June 25, 1978. The OG film was filmed over 14 weeks from July 5 to October 21, 1978. So, hey, maybe the rainbow patches that all crew members--not just Lambert and Ripley--were wearing were a nod to the LGBT community.
5. Sigourney Weaver is a lesbian icon for portraying Ellen Ripley, no doubt about it.
Unlike many heroines of that era, Ripley didn't conform to romantic notions or motherhood (something that changed in the sequel) and embodied masculine action hero ideals.
But was she meant to be a lesbian?
In the early stages of script writing, there was a Dallas/Ripley sex scene that was scrapped and never filmed, because they felt it "seemed out of place."
In the theatrical cut commentary, Ridley Scott said that he considered same sex-relationships between the crew members.
“There was a line through the movie which had a … more by innuendo than anything else, that there was something going on between Dallas and she [Ripley]. And then later, I thought what was really curious was -could be interesting- there was something going on between her and Veronica, which I thought was far more probable. I mean a hundred years from now, you know, that’s certainly not gonna be remarkable in space. In fact, in space relationships are probably gonna be discouraged, and if you have the need for sex, it can be with either gender. Really doesn’t matter, right?”
“Should we have an inference of a lesbian or gay relationship or not? It would have been kind of interesting. Today I’d probably do that just to thicken up the layers in the characters.”
There was also Vasquez, who looked and acted like a butch.
“With Vasquez, I never said she was straight or gay, because to her it was nobody’s business.”
Last but not least, there's a whole discussion to be had about Xenomorphs as genderbending (phallic head and tail, vaginal shape during the facehugger stage) rapist parasites, impregnating their hosts against their will.
