Ron Gregg. Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History in America. Editor: Marc Stein. Volume 1, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004.
In The Celluloid Closet, his groundbreaking 1981 history of LGBT representation in film, Vito Russo draws attention to a 1895 Thomas Edison pre-Hollywood silent short film, The Gay Brothers, in which two men dance closely together while another man plays a violin. While we cannot call these two men gay simply because they are dancing together or because the film’s title used the word, the Edison short depicts same-sex intimacy at the very beginning of filmmaking with apparent innocence and freedom. Hollywood’s representation of same-sex coupling would never be so innocent or free. Still, 1920s Hollywood films included a diverse range of images and moral judgments, and this helped provoke a new level of censorship from the 1930s through the 1960s that reduced and complicated—but never eliminated—queer representation. Filmic representations were always constructed in a complex relationship with the discourses of sexologists, moralists, LGBT activists, and queer cultural workers. The number and diversity of queer characters and themes in films throughout the twentieth century belie the myth that LGBT films—or “positive images”—only emerged after the Stonewall Riots of 1969.
The Early Twentieth Century
In the early part of the twentieth century, homosexuality and gender inversion (that is, effete men and mannish women) were linked in Hollywood films, vaudeville, and other popular forms of entertainment. This became the primary stereotype, paralleling the belief of many sexologists that homosexuality was only one part of a larger inversion of gender behavior, attitude, and appearance. Since a lesbian was understood as a man stuck in a woman’s body, and vice versa for gay men, they were often thought of as members of a third sex.
From the 1910s to the early 1930s, U.S. filmmakers and actors, including Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel, used various degrees of “gender inversion” in characters’ mannerisms, costume, work, and other attributes to signify homosexuality. In silent comedies such as Algie the Miner (1912), Chaplin’s The Masquerader (1914), and A Florida Enchantment (1914), the audience is led to laugh at the sissy male as this character interacts with conventional heterosexual, masculine men. After the comical interaction, the “abnormal” male (known popularly as “pansies,” “nances,” and “fairies” or by other words marking gender inversion) is either driven away from the social setting, beaten, or taught how to be manly and reclaim his male role in a traditional, two-sex society.
But while the “third sex” was seen commonly as an oddity and a butt of humor in this early period, some films provided moments of queer confidence and challenge to conventional gender and sexual roles. For instance, A Florida Enchantment shows the lead female character confidently assuming mannish characteristics and pursuing women. An equally subversive moment appears in Stan Laurel’s short comedy classic The Soilers (1923). While the hero played by Laurel and the villain duke it out, a “sissy” cowboy appears, effeminately mincing and primping around them. After the fight, the queer cowboy blows a kiss to our hero, which the hero rejects. The effete cowboy then drops a flowerpot on the hero’s head, leaving him woozy and confused and thus subverting the standard expectation that the queer will be punished.
In the last years of Prohibition, the number of queer images in Hollywood film increased dramatically. From musicals to gangster films to melodrama to exotic romances, queer was in. Numerous films featured “pansy” jokes or walk-ons where an effete gay man appeared for a brief comic moment. In Eddie Cantor’s Palmy Days (1931), The Sport Parade (1932), and even Betty Boop cartoons, pansies were as plentiful as racial and ethnic stereotypes, which were standard features at the time. The actor Franklin Pangborn even made a living out of playing pansies in films such as International House (1933) and Professional Sweetheart (1933).
Hollywood enjoyed not just a pansy craze, but a sapphic one, illustrated most infamously by Marlene Dietrich’s male drag performance and same-sex kiss in Morocco (1930) and Greta Garbo’s mannish dress and same-sex kiss in Queen Christina (1933). Both female stars appeared in similar mannish dress offscreen. As their erotic and subversive kisses suggest, the sexual implications of women’s assuming such poses were clear.
There were also many images of men in drag during this period. Some films teasingly placed heterosexual men in feminine disguise to escape danger or accomplish a goal. For instance, Eddie Cantor’s character in Palmy Days (1931) avoids two gangsters by dressing in female disguise. Often male comic actors played women, as when Laurel and Oliver Hardy played their own wives in the comedy short Twice Two (1933). But Hollywood also occasionally portrayed men who chose to cross-dress for different reasons. In The Circus Clown (1934), a professional female impersonator in the circus sexually teases Joe E. Brown’s small town character.
Even more astounding in films in this period, LGBT characters sometimes appeared in spaces marked as queer friendly. Call Her Savage (1932) includes a scene featuring a pansy duo dressed like chamber maids, singing about their desire for sailors before an audience evidently including both heterosexuals and homosexuals in a Greenwich Village basement café. Also, at this time, a number of directors and actors, including Dorothy Arzner, George Cukor, James Whale, and William Haines, were more open about their LGBT lives than would be possible later.
There were more horrible representations of homosexuality and transgenderism as well. By the late 1920s, many people were aware of the theoretical writings of Sigmund Freud and other psychoanalysts who challenged the model of “sexual inversion” by contending that homosexuality was not biologically inborn but was acquired through various deviations in “normal” psychosexual development toward heterosexual monogamy. This new theory shifted understanding from a biological model to a model of nurture, which suggested the possibility of correcting a person’s “abnormal” gender and sexual behavior through parental, educational, and other institutional surveillance of and intervention into the rearing of a child. In the Hollywood films Strange Interlude (1932) and the more insidious The Silver Cord (1933), both based upon successful stage plays, mothers were blamed for the emasculation of their sons and for fostering their homosexuality. Gender inversion, mother love, and neurosis mark homosexuality in these films.
The Hays Code Period
In the early 1930s, Catholic clergy and other moralists became outraged by the growing sexual license of Hollywood films and besieged the industry with threats of federal censorship and public boycotts. In response to this pressure, the Hollywood studios imposed their own censorship codes and empowered Will Hays and the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (known unofficially as the Hays Office), of which he was president, to censor all films. In 1933, in one of his first moves toward strengthened regulation, Hays began censoring pictures with overt “pansy” characters. In 1934 the major Hollywood studios committed themselves through the Hays Code to banning “sex perversion or any inference to it” and began to advocate conservative gender roles, monogamy, and heterosexuality.
However, the representation of homosexuality and cross-dressing did not disappear during the Hays Code period (roughly from 1934 to 1968), as film scholars such as Richard Dyer, Andrea Weiss, and Steven Cohen have pointed out. Instead, representations became more coded through denigrating stereotypes. Homosexuality appeared as unnatural, comic, deviant, monstrous—and above all, as covert—until the 1960s, while cross-dressing appeared merely comic.
The characteristics of the pansy, for instance, continued to influence the screen personae of Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis, as well as secondary characters, such as those played by Franklin Pangborn. However, these characters were always played for laughs and never allowed explicitly to express homosexual desire. Male and female drag also appeared periodically. In Sylvia Scarlett (1935), Katharine Hepburn disguises herself as a young boy to escape France with her father. While this leads to some suggestive queer sexual subtext, all is righted once her sex is known. Another unusual film is This Is the Army (1943), in which World War II soldiers put on a professional touring musical show to raise morale. Many of the musical numbers feature soldiers in female drag. However, their masculinity and heterosexuality are salvaged at the end of the film when they march out of the theater to fight for freedom.
The dangerous queer became more prevalent during the Hays Code years. For instance, in the 1936 film Dracula’s Daughter, the mannish vampire Countess Zaleska hypnotizes and feeds on young women. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film Rope features a witty, immaculately dressed, and psychopathically murderous male couple, modeled on the real world 1924 case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who strangle a friend just to see if they can get away with it. In both cases, the filmmakers use gender inversion and Freudian references to invoke homosexuality and then associate it with psychopathic tendencies.
Experimental Film Before and After World War II
Although Hollywood films generally became more conservative in their representations of gender and sexuality during the Hays Code years, experimental filmmakers offered an alternative and often more sympathetic set of images. Even so, few experimental filmmakers explored queer sexuality before World War II. One exception is Melville Webber and James Sibley Watson Jr.’s Lot in Sodom (1933). While the film draws upon the biblical story of God’s destruction of Sodom because of its sexual perversion, it depicts a captivatingly erotic and animated gay world and hints at the sexual pleasures experienced by the beautiful young male sodomites. The lives led by the dour Lot and his daughters seem uninteresting and uninviting in comparison.
After World War II, the number and diversity of depictions of male homosexuality and transgenderism grew dramatically in experimental film. Unlike Lot in Sodom ‘s use of literary motifs and Hollywood’s use of stereotypical gender and psychoanalytic codes, Kenneth Anger’s groundbreaking Fireworks (1947) used the film-maker’s own homosexual desires and experiences in 1940s queer Los Angeles for its inspiration and subject matter. While Fireworks was the most explicit gay experimental film made in the United States at that time, other filmmakers—including Gregory Markopoulos, Willard Maas, and Curtis Harrington—produced films that evoked homosexuality in more veiled ways—using, for instance, imagery, mythological characters such as Narcissus, and the tropes of Freudian psychoanalysis. Overt lesbian representation in experimental film was not seen at this time, as far as can be ascertained.
The number of experimental films with daring queer content proliferated in the 1960s, most of them adopting a playful and liberated attitude. Such films drew upon a wide range of influences, including personal experience, Hollywood and popular culture, Beat culture, and the all-male physique films of the 1950s. Two of the more influential films were Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) and Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964). Smith’s film celebrates a Hollywood “B” movie aesthetic with its playful, uninhibited transgender performances and exaggerated costumes and acting styles. By contrast, Anger’s film voyeuristically submerges the viewer in homoerotic images of bike-boy culture and male adolescent drunkenness and play, making innovative, pre-MTV use of popular music and collage. The male nudity and lack of moral condemnation in both films shocked conservative society, and their screenings were often shut down by local legal authorities who confiscated the film prints.
Andy Warhol also made a number of influential experimental films during this period, including Blow Job (1963), Tarzan and Jane Regained …Sort of (1963), Mario Banana (1964), Taylor Mead’s Ass (1965), and Chelsea Girls (1966). Warhol’s films featured a cross-section of the queer underworld in New York City, including male hustlers, fairies, and drag queens and depicted both queer and straight sexual play. Warhol also featured eroticized male bodies in such films as My Hustle (1965), Bike Boy (1967), and the later Warhol-produced, Paul Morrissey-directed films starring Joe Dallesandro, including Flesh (1968) and Trash (1970). The latter films paralleled the rise of gay erotica in magazines and films such as Pat Rocco’s gay male nudie shorts. Other influential avantgarde filmmakers from this period included Ken Jacobs (Blonde Cobra, 1962), Ron Rice (The Flower Thief, 1960, and Chumlum, 1964), and the Kuchar brothers (I Was a Teenage Rumpot, 1960, and Sins of the Fleshapoids, 1965).
Hollywood in the 1950s and 1960s
In the 1950s and 1960s, Hollywood’s representations of homosexuality and transgenderism were—compared to experimental film—limited and timid. But during the 1950s the industry did make a shift to more serious subject matter, including sexual and gender diversity. A variety of factors pushed Hollywood in this direction: economic competition from television and more sexually daring foreign films; the Kinsey reports and other medical literature detailing heterosexual and homosexual behavior in American society; the serious literary fiction and theatrical plays that were exploring more daring sexual material; and the declining power of the Hays Code.
In particular, Hollywood raised the issue of homosexuality in psychological and social problem films. Caged (1950) and Tea and Sympathy (1956), for instance, dramatized social concerns over homosexuality in U.S. society without quite naming them. But such explorations remained limited in the 1950s, as witnessed by the censorship of homosexuality in the film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958).
As the power of the censorship code waned in the 1960s, Hollywood films moved from subtextual to overt depictions and discussions of homosexuality. The Children’s Hour (1961), for instance, explored the power of gossip when two young female schoolteachers, Martha Dobie (played by Shirley MacLaine) and Karen Wright (played by Audrey Hepburn), are accused of being lesbians. Near the end of the film, after the women have lost their school, Martha admits that she has desired Karen and feels “dirty” for having such feelings. Unable to handle her self-loathing, Martha commits suicide. Having MacLaine’s character openly admit her desire was a remarkable step, since under the Hays Code, films were never allowed to overtly name or represent same-sex desire. Equally groundbreaking was the 1962 film Advise and Consent, which also overtly tackled the issue and even included the first openly gay bar scene since the 1932 movie Call Her Savage (1932), although Advise and Consent too portrayed homosexuals as self-loathing.
As the 1960s progressed, however, Hollywood moved toward more openness and complexity in its representation of homosexuality in films such as Lilith (1964), Inside Daisy Clover (1965), and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967). By the end of the decade, Hollywood had released The Killing of Sister George (1968) and was ready to release The Boys in the Band (1970), both based on successful stage plays and still two of the most searing and controversial dramatizations of homosexual themes ever released by Hollywood. The Killing of Sister George perpetuates the association of self-loathing and alcoholism with gay culture that was presented in earlier films, but it also provides a powerful portrait of a bold and unapologetic dyke called “George.” The Boys in the Band, adapted by Mart Crowley from his stage play, likewise depicts a gay world saturated with self-loathing, psychoanalytic jargon, and alcoholism, but also portrays the rich social ties and camp humor of gay men and includes a range of gay social types, including the hustler, the fairy, the gay sportsman, the neurotic. These two films are views from inside the LGBT world, which is oppressed by mainstream conservative gender and sexual beliefs, but is also strong in its queer relationships and friendships.
The 1970s
While The Boys in the Band was the best that Hollywood had to offer in 1970, queer experimental, independent, and documentary filmmakers brought their personal experiences of LGBT life, coming out stories, and LGBT politics into a post-Stonewall Riots queer film explosion. Lesbian filmmaker Jan Oxenberg ruminated on her childhood and her lesbian life in Home Movie (1972) and took on lesbian stereotypes in A Comedy in Six Unnatural Acts (1975). Lesbian feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer challenged lesbians to celebrate their sexuality unapologetically and to create new visions of gender and sexuality in short films such as Dyketactics (1974) and Women I Love (1976).
The early 1970s was also a time when explicit gay male erotic experimental films and pornography began to be taken seriously in art film circles. For instance, gay male sexuality and the male erotic object were celebrated in Curt McDowell’s Confessions (1971), Ronnie (1972), and Loads (1980). Wakefield Poole’s lyrical, pornographic Boys in the Sand (1971), starring Casey Donovan, received mainstream reviews. The Gage brothers’ trilogy (Kansas City Trucking Company, 1976; El Paso Wrecking Corporation, 1977; and L.A. Tool and Die, 1979) combined expressions of an assertive gay pride with explicit depictions of men’s sex with men (and occasionally with women), often using an experimental film approach.
LGBT filmmakers also made important documentaries during the 1970s that affirmed LGBT identity and community and challenged closeted LGBT people to come out and become politically active. Arthur Bressan’s Gay USA (1977), for example, documented lesbian and gay pride marches in 1977 as a response to the anti-LGBT activism of Anita Bryant and other conservatives, while the Mariposa Film Group’s Word Is Out (1977) depicted the diversity of lesbian and gay life by interviewing twenty-six lesbians and gay men.
In the 1970s, midnight features began to screen the queer films of John Waters, including Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974), both of which starred Waters’s drag diva Divine, and the cross-dressing, multi-sexual Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), which eventually had phenomenal success. All three films attracted large LGBT and straight audiences. In addition, the rise of LGBT newspapers and magazines offered new publicity outlets for queer films. Furthermore, independent, documentary, and experimental LGBT filmmakers found a receptive and growing audience for their work on college campuses and especially through the establishment of gay and lesbian film festivals in major cities, including San Francisco, Chicago, and New York.
While this expansion of queer work was taking place in the 1970s, Hollywood often seemed to regress to the stereotypes of the Hays Code period. Hollywood made films, for instance, featuring murderous queers, such as the deadly transvestite in Freebie and the Bean (1974) and the psychopathic lesbian played by Elizabeth Ashley in Windows (1980). The pansy stereotype continued in films such as The Choirboys (1977), which features a cruising, mincing man with his pink poodle.
The 1980s
However, two “event” films illustrate the growing attention given the subject of homosexuality in Hollywood films, though not always to the liking of LGBT viewers. William Friedkin’s 1980 film Cruising, a film noir-like slasher film set in New York City’s gay sadomasochism and leather subculture, led to LGBT protests, both when filming was taking place and at the premiere, by activists who worried that the film would only feed the growing anti-LGBT sentiment represented by Anita Bryant’s crusade of 1977. Two years later Hollywood offered Making Love (1982), a melodramatic love triangle in which a wife finds out that her husband is having an affair with another man.
In the 1980s, however, a number of independent and mainstream films featuring more complex LGBT characters and themes broke out of the lesbian and gay festival circuit and into mainstream cinemas. In independent film, the most successful were director Donna Dietch’s Desert Hearts (1985), a lesbian love story based upon a novel by Jane Rule, and writer-director Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances (1986), which features a young Steve Buscemi as a gay rock singer living with AIDS.
Parting Glances was only one of several gay films in this era to tackle the subject of AIDS, some in a confrontational voice and others using a more conventional, melodramatic narrative. Two important activist-based AIDS films were Arthur Bressan’s 1985 feature Buddies and Marlon Riggs’s 1989 experimental documentary Tongues Untied. In Bressan’s two-person drama, one character becomes a “buddy” to an older man dying of AIDS. The experience of visiting and listening to the bedridden man turns the more naïve character into an activist. Riggs’s Tongues Untied is a complex discourse on AIDS, homophobia, and racism from a gay African American man’s perspective. Queer film lost important voices when the directors Sherwood, Bressan, and Riggs died of AIDS in the 1990s.
The 1990s and Beyond
The AIDS melodrama proved to be the most successful vehicle for moving more complex and less stereotyped representations of LGBT people into the mainstream. Longtime Companion (1990) melodramatically shows a group of friends dealing with the effect of AIDS on both their close social circle and the larger gay world. With successful actors such as Campbell Scott, Bruce Davison (who was nominated for an Academy Award for his role), and Dermot Mulroney appearing in it, as Buscemi had in Parting Glances, the film showed other actors that they could play LGBT characters on screen without any setback to their careers. Better-known straight actors began to feel more comfortable taking on LGBT roles, most famously Tom Hanks in the courtroom AIDS melodrama Philadelphia (1993), directed by Jonathan Demme. Philadelphia is credited with taking gay characters and experiences into the multiplexes of mainstream America. For a grim story about a man who is fired from his law firm for being HIV positive and who then successfully sues the firm before dying of AIDS-related diseases, Philadelphia was a phenomenal success at the box office and the Academy Awards, where Hanks won for best actor. With Philadelphia, Mike Nichols’s The Birdcage (1996), and Kimberly Pierce’s Boys Don’t Cry (1999), Hollywood seemed to signal that the door was now open to LGBT representation in big-budget films.
Following in the successful footsteps of Dietch, Sherwood, Bressan, and Riggs, independent filmmakers in the 1990s continued to depict a much more diverse queer world than did Hollywood. Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris Is Burning (1990) portrayed the black and Latino drag ballroom scene in New York City, whose competitive ritual forms included voguing. Also in the 1990s, a group of well-made, provocative films by LGBT filmmakers signaled the birth of what became known as the new “queer cinema.” Todd Haynes’s Poison (1991), Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992), Gregg Araki’s The Living End (1992), and Rose Troche’s Go Fish (1994) marked a new level of visibility and success for LGBT filmmakers.
Outside of feature filmmaking, experimental and documentary film and video makers continued to break new ground in technique and subject matter. The important work of Su Friedrich, Cheryl Dunye, Sadie Benning, Greg Bordowitz, Tom Kalin, George Kuchar, Ellen Spiro, Yvonne Welbon, and others too numerous to list expanded and diversified the representation of queer identity, desire, and politics.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a number of successful films, both independent and mainstream, suggest that LGBT representation has expanded into a variety of genres, characters, and themes. Building on the art house and mainstream interest in queer characters and subject matter, films such as Big Eden (2000), Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), Far from Heaven (2002), and The Hours (2002) placed those characters and issues in dialogue with larger familial, social, political, economic, and cultural themes.