"How Hollywood was Born Gay" Transcript

The love that dared not speak its name in English was surprisingly fluent in German throughout the silent era. While America was using its new toy to play cowboys and Indians, recreating the fading dreams of its own mythology, European cinema was shaping the older lessons of life into a more realistic look at the battle of the sexes. In America the battle of the sexes was Marie Dresser throwing dishes at Wallace Beery; in Europe homosexuality was often just another aspect of the panorama of human relationships. This has always been true. In 1956, theatrical producers had a lot of trouble producing Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy in France. A French producer told Anderson, "So the boy thinks he is a homosexual and the wife of the headmaster gives herself to him to prove he's not- but what is the problem, please?"

The age of sexual enlightenment that flourished in prewar Berlin spawned the first gay liberation movement, led by Doctor Magnus Hirschfeld, whose Institute for Sexual Science was the focal point of the battle against the anti gay Paragraph 175 which outlawed homosexual acts between men. It also produced the first film to discuss homosexuality openly and to contain many of the seedling issues of the gay liberation movement. Directed by Richard Oswald and starring Conrad Veidt, Anders als die Anderen (Different from the Others), released in 1919, openly pleaded tolerance for what it termed the Third Sex. The following are excerpts translated from the original program distributed at the showings and sent recently to a West Berlin gay liberation group by an anonymous gay man who was there.

False beliefs and unjustified prejudices concerning a sector of male and female sexual behavior known as homosexuality, or love of the same sex, have been predominant up to the present and still influence a large part of our population.

These homosexual men and women who are attracted to persons of their own sex, are often regarded as wicked criminals and libertines. But scientific research has determined that homosexuality is an inborn tendency for which the individual cannot be held responsible; that in Germany as well as in many other countries, every thirtieth person has homosexual tendencies; that there are homosexuals in every class, among the educated and among the uneducated, and in the highest and lowest sectors of our population, in the great cities and the small towns, among the strict moralists and among the most easygoing; that love for one's own sex can be just as pure and noble as love for the opposite sex, the only difference being the object of desire, not the nature of one's love.

Oswald's film, like others of that time dealing with abortion, incest, sex education and venereal disease, was propagandistic in treatment; Hirschfeld himself appeared as resident expert. Only one print of Anders als die Anderen, a fragmented copy, survives. It has never been seen in the United States. Other prints were destroyed by the Nazis in the early Thirties. Christopher Isherwood recalls that performances of the film were broken up by the Nazis. In Vienna one of them fired a revolver into the audience, wounding several patrons. In his memoir Christopher and His Kind, Isherwood gives a firsthand account of the film.

Three scenes remain in my memory. One is at a ball at which the dancers, all male, are standing fully clothed in what seems about to become a daisy chain. It is here that the character played by Conrad Veidt meets the blackmailer who seduces him and then ruins him. The next scene is a vision which Veidt has of a long procession of kings, poets, scientists, philosophers and other famous victims of homophobia, moving slowly and sadly with heads bowed. Dr. Hirschfeld himself appears. I think the corpse of Veidt, who has committed suicide, is lying in the background. Hirschfeld delivers a speech (that is to say a series of titles) pleading tolerance for the Third Sex.

And so the very first gay man to be presented on film ended in the obligatory suicide that would mark the fate of screen gays for years to come. The suicide of Veidt and the images of blackmail presaged the fates of American screen characters who would suffer for their sexuality in like manner when the U.S. cinema reached a similar starting point almost fifty years later.

The acknowledgment of the Third Sex in Europe was apparently not bound up in a definition of masculinity as it was in America. The emotional qualities of the passions aroused in human relationships rather than the sexual characteristics of such relations were the focus of the drama and intrigue. Carl Theodor Dreyer's Mikael (1924) is a homosexual love story in which a famous artist named Zoret (Benjamin Christiansen) falls in love with his young male model Mikael (Walter Slezak), whose nude portrait he has painted as Siegfried. Mikael, however, is an ungrateful opportunist who saps his benefactor's artistic spirit and uses his money, eventually spurning his affections for the more promising charms of a wealthy young princess. In spite of Mikael's indifference, Zoret leaves all his possessions to the youth and, on his deathbed, declares, "I can die in peace. I have known a great love."

The film, adapted from Hermann Bang's novel Mikael, played briefly in America in 1926 under confusing circumstances. The censors objected to its first American release title, The Inverts, so it ran for a short time at New York's Fifth Avenue Playhouse as Chained: The Story of the Third Sex, with a "scientific lecture" tacked on and without credit to Dreyer as the director. The title changes illustrate perfectly the American mentality with regard to homosexuality. The subtitle, The Story of the Third Sex, reveals how any story dealing, however seriously, with homosexual love is taken to be a story about homosexuality while stories dealing with heterosexual love are seen as stories about the individual people they portray. This is as much a problem today for American filmmakers who cannot conceive of the presence of gay characters in a film unless the specific subject of the film is homosexuality. Lesbians and gay men are thereby classified as purely sexual creatures, people defined solely by their sexual urges.

G. W. Pabst's Pandora's Box (Die Büchse der Pandora, 1929) featured what is probably the first explicitly drawn lesbian character on film. The adaptation of Frank Wedekind's two-part drama about Lulu, a woman "driven by insatiable lusts," starred Louise Brooks as Lulu and Belgian actress Alice Roberts as her passionate lesbian admirer, the Countess Geschwitz. Pabst explores the personality of Geschwitz with great range, manipulating the performance of Alice Roberts to achieve a believable woman with a lesbian nature. At first the countess is an angry, repressed woman whose nostrils flare in her jealousy of Lulu's affair with her ow stepson, Alwa. Later, when the pain and self. destruction of Lulu and Alwa's dissolute life threaten to destroy them, Geschwitz proves her love by engaging in a heterosexual blackmail ploy to raise money for Lulu. She submits to a crude yet powerful man who beats and humiliates her for her efforts. Although the love Geschwitz feels for Lulu is officially considered "sterile" in the context of both the Wedekind drama and the film, it is a motivating force in the action and it makes the debut of Sapphic passion onscreen an exciting cinematic event.

American audiences were spared such scintillating discussion, for the British censors deleted the character of Geschwitz from Pandora's Box, and she did not appear in the initial release version of the film in the United States (the character was later restored).

One of the earliest direct references to male homosexuality in an American film came, predictably, in a comedy spoof. Stan Laurel's one-reel comedy short The Soilers (1923) was a takeoff on Rex Beach's popular 1914 western The Spoilers. Set in Alaska during the gold rush, the film offers Stan Laurel as Bob Cannister, a patsy who strikes it rich only to be fleeced by an unscrupulous local sheriff. Most of the action consists of a drawn out fight scene between Laurel and the sheriff, who brawl the entire length of an old-time saloon During the fight, an ordinary-looking cowboy flounces gaily onto the set, hand on hip. He bats his eyes at both men, fluffs his hair before a mirror and primps a bit before sashaying out of the room as the two men continue to fight. Laurel beats the villain, but nobody seems to care, and he ends up sitting dejectedly outside the saloon, his face buried in his hands. The gay cowboy pokes his head out of a second floor window and extravagantly blows Laurel a kiss, mouthing the words "My Hero" (reinforced by a flowered title card). When Laurel spums him with a disgusted wave of his hand, the miffed cowboy drops a potted petunia on his head. In the final shot, the street cleaner sweeps Laurel away with the trash.

This is one of the first examples of the use of the "harmless sissy" image to present homosexuality. The sometimes silent connection between effeminate and homosexual was unmistakably evident here because the gay cowboy looked not like a woman but like any other cowboy in the film. The difference was that he preferred men- and therefore "behaved" like a woman. The primping and fussing mannerisms of the cowboy were certainly woman-identified, even though female impersonation was not a factor. Yet this was exactly [...]

[...] was not a factor. Yet this was exactly the sort of thing the censors were watching for. Ordinances already empowered censorship bodies to look at films in advance of their public showing, and although such groups had no real clout, their guidelines for morality in the movies specifically included "sex perversion" as a don't.

In 1915 the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that "the exhibition of motion pictures is a business, pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit, like other spectacles, not to be regarded or intended to be regarded . . . as a part of the press of the nation or as organs of public opinion." This meant that the movies were not covered by the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech. Within a few years of the ruling, censorship laws were passed in New York, Florida, Massachusetts, Maryland and Virginia. The New York law, enacted in 1921, was typical; it provided that "a film should be licensed by the State unless such a film or part thereof is of such a character that its exhibition would tend to corrupt morals or incite crime." Indecency, immorality and obscenity were nowhere described or defined in the statute, and thus there was considerable latitude for interpretation.

Early efforts of the film colony to regulate itself proved clearly inadequate to moral and religious leaders. To complicate matters, there were inconsistencies as a result of local interpretations of the laws. Scores of films dealing with supposedly forbidden subject matter, including homosexuality, slipped through the censors' fingers. Comedies such as The Soilers were passed as harmless. Other films were clearly passed or rejected as concessions to certain attitudes and prejudices. One of the first instances of lesbians kissing onscreen was in a brief orgy scene in Cecil B. De Mille's Manslaughter (1922). The vision of two passionate women locked in a forbidden embrace was used by De Mille to condemn the excesses he was busy portraying so graphically. In return for his judgment on the "crime," he was consistently allowed to paint a more explicit picture of evil, especially sexual sins, than was ordinarily permitted. This was particularly true when the evil transpired in a biblical city. Quoting scripture on their title cards, De Mille's films became moral lessons rather than exploitation. They also became box office.

By 1922 there were censorship bills before the legislatures of thirty-two states, and throughout the nation the distinct odor of moral indignation was rising at an industry that at times seemed to embody wicked behavior of all sorts. The censors were horrified by Salome and ordered the elimination of several sequences, including one that made clear a homosexual relationship between two Syrian soldiers. The handwritten report of the examining censor in New York, filled out at a screening in 1923, concluded: "This picture is in no way religious in theme or interpretation. In my judgment, it is a story of depravity and immorality made worse because of its biblical background. Sacrilegious."

The censors in the late Twenties and early Thirties were not interested in what was or was not fabulous. They were under pressure from all quarters. In 1926 a Photoplay magazine film critic decried the use of "disgusting perverts" in Rex Ingram's Mare Nostrum, which featured a vaguely lesbian spy. The arrival of sound brought a new element of realism to the screen, and the watchdogs of the public morality began to bear down on the industry. But while censorship laws were becoming more specific and explicit homosexuality remained a forbidden subject in every statute, it was clear that cross dressing, weakness in men and over­intellect­ualism were sometimes direct statements about deviant sexuality. And whether expressed directly or not, the classic definition of homosexual men as frivolous, asexual sissies was firmly established during the last of the pre-Code years.

In the late 1920s Will Hays, a former postmaster general of the United States and a Hoosier Presbyterian elder, had been drafted to head the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, an organization formed mainly to provide favorable public relations for the studios and to protect the industry from the threat of outside censorship. The latter goal was achieved in 1930 with the creation of the Motion Picture Production Code, by which the industry regulated itself. The Code survived under different names until the late Sixties, often taking the name of its current administrator. Thus, at various times it was called the Johnston Office, the Hays Office and the Breen Office. When, under tremendous pressure from the Catholic Church and other civic and religious groups, the Code was strengthened in 1934, borderline gay characters fell into well-worn innuendo and reliable sissy credentials, but said the same things.

The rough, no nonsense masculine image of the film business was constantly at odds with its reputation for feyness, just as was journalism. The sissy was used onscreen and off, as both scapegoat and weapon, to expose a mistrust of brightness or wit in men who were not also pushy or aggressive. In his book See No Evil, censor Jack Vizzard recalls an informal chat with Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn at which several other Hays Office representatives were present. Cohn was describing how he had planned to have his current big star, Grace Moore, sing "La Marseillaise" at the fall of the Bastille in her new film, and censor Geoffrey Shurlock interrupted with, "You can't do it, Harry. The Marseillaise wasn't written until three years after the fall of the Bastille."

"Who cares?" Cohn shouted. "Who would know a thing like that but a queer like you, anyway?"

Onscreen this kind of hostility was stated hardly more delicately, but since homosexuality did not officially exist, the thrust of such basically homophobic sentiment was directed elsewhere. Symbols of masculinity were defended by the use of sumbols for homosexuality. The fact that most early movie sissies were homosexual only if one chose to see them as being homosexual was simply a reflection of the fact that the existence of homosexuals in society was acknowledged only when society chose to do so. Although the presence of sissies in the Thirties and Forties did not imply that homosexuality in fact existed, it implied that homosexuals could exist if things were topsy-turvy, and it provided a subtextual reminder that the basic illusion of America was pretty shabby. Sissies were an outlet for unspeakable ideas.

Because they were only symbols for failed masculinity and therefore did not represent the threat of actual homosexuals, most sissies during the reign of the Code were not demeaned, nor were they used in cruel or offensive ways. It was not the sissy but what he stood for that was offensive. Some actors created memorable galleries of gossipy snoops, harried professors and snippy shopkeepers who were always a little on the innocent side, even in malice. To say that Franklin Pangbor played a sissy in the Thirties would be like saying that Michael Dunn played a dwarf in Ship of Fools. An inventive satirist with expert timing, Pangborn seized on his brief screen moments and made them shine. An indication of his coming glory can be seen in D. W.

The ghetto was one otherworld in which gays could regularly be found onscreen both before and after the reign of the Code. The underworld life as a haven for homosexuals is a staple of music and literature, and of course this reflects the reality of most gay experience, which has been limited to expression in ghettos of one sort or another since the beginning of time. The gay ghetto has often been connected with the underworld to the extent that wherever illicit activity flourishes, organized crime moves in to control it and turn a profit. Also, unlike other minority groups, homosexuals hold criminal status in most places. A black ghetto may be crime ridden but the people who live there are not criminals for being black. In Bessie, his book on blues singer Bessie Smith, Chris Albertson discusses the singer's lesbian experiences, which are detailed further by historian Jonathan Katz in Gay American History. In an interview with Smith's niece (available on record in a blues and jazz collection of homosexually oriented songs from the Twenties and Thirties), Albertson sees homosexuality as a part of the jazz subculture. Describing a "buffet flat" of the early 1930s, Smith's niece says, "A buffet flat [was] nothing but a bunch of faggots and bull dykers everything. Everything went on in that place. Everything that was in the life." In the life.

In 1933, Rowland Brown's gritty and atmospheric Blood Money created a great deal of ambiguous sexual tension in a wider underworld than that of Call Her Savage. In Blood Money the existence of homosexuality is openly acknowledged in the subculture that shelters it on the fringes of acceptable society. Sandra Shaw is featured in several sequences as a fun-loving blonde who likes men's clothes. Wearing a full-dress tuxedo and sporting a monocle as she awaits the arrival of her boyfriend at a nightclub bar, she provides a sounding board for a few in-jokes and some innuendo. Offered a cigar by the star of the film, George Bancroft. Shaw throws back her head and roars with laughter at his blase attitude.

"Why, you big sissy!" she snorts, slapping him on the shoulder. Although it is not apparent in society in general, such feigned recognition is classic in gay surroundings, where it signals that the dress or demeanor of a person has communicated the unspeakable.

Shaw's boyfriend, meanwhile, the younger brother of the glamorous nightclub owner (Judith Anderson), is upstairs preparing for their date. Anderson wars him about the kind of women he has been running around with she calls them "french pastry"-but he waves her fears aside. "Oh, don't worry, Sis, this one's different. Wears a tuxedo."

Anderson arches an eyebrow and shrugs in relief. "Oh. Then you're safe." Getting her meaning, he tells her it's not what she thinks, that the girl is just full of fun. But later in the film Shaw turns up again in double-breasted tweeds, this time not with Anderson's brother but with another woman in tow.

In addition to strengthening the Code in 1934, Will Hays reacted to criticism by inserting morals clauses in the contracts of performers and compiling a "doom book" of 117 names of those deemed "unsafe" because of their personal lives. Homosexuality was denied as assiduously offscreen as it was on, a literally unspeakable part of the culture. By 1940 even harmless sex-role farces such as Hal Roach's Turnabout were considered perilous in some quarters. The film, about a married couple (Carole Landis and John Hubbard) who switch roles by wishing on an Oriental statue, was described by the Catholic Legion of Decency as dealing with "subject matter which may provide references dangerous to morality, wholesome concepts of human relationships and the dignity of man."

In Blood Money and Call Her Savage, homosexuality is just another pocket of an underworld that exists outside the law. The gay presence in such subcul tures was sometimes reflected in the language, especially in the use of slang, in films dealing with lawless people. In Blood Money, the word fag is used without reference to homosexuality. When George Bancroft wars a timid taxi driver not to betray his destination to the police, he threatens, "Lissen, fag"-and is rebuked by Judith Anderson for "scaring the little fellow half to death." Sexual connotations often surrounded the attitude of powerful men toward hired boys or servile companions. This remark in Blood Money was perhaps the first time fag was used onscreen in this context. Taken from its use in British boarding schools as a term for underclassmen "fagging" for upperclassmen, the word in underworld jargon denoted a subservient person or lackey, especially young men "used" for favors. Edward G. Robinson's side kick Johnny in Little Caesar (1931) was such a character, when he decides to give up the rackets to be a tap dancer, Robinson cracks, "Dancin' just ain't my idea of a man's game."

Although the character of Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) in The Maltese Falcon (1941) is identified by Sam Spade's secretary in Dashiell Hammett's novel as a homosexual, the film version just turns him into a perfumed fop with lace hankies. A brief, sarcastic reference by a venomous Mary Astor to "that young boy in Istanbul," the character with whom Cairo had a little trouble, is murky and unexplored. Elisha Cook, Jr., as Sidney Greenstreet's bodyguard Wilmer, however, is implicitly homosexual. He is referred to as "sonny." "boy" and "kid," and Bogart derisively calls him a "gunsel." Since about 1915, bums and prisoners had used the German word gansel or gosling, corrupted to gunsel, for a passive sodomite, especially a young, inexperienced boy compan­ion. From the mid 1920s it gradually came to mean a sneaky or disreputable person of any kind. By the 1930s it meant petty gangster or hoodlum. That film characters like Wilmer and the taxi driver in Blood Money shared a feminine status is obvious. The only variation was the degree to which that equation was carried to its common underworld conclusion.

Gays as predatory, twilight creatures were a matter of style and personal interpretation in the horror films of the 1930s. The equation of horror with the sins of the flesh is easily seen in monster movies of the period. Creatures like the Frankenstein monster and Dracula were almost always linked with the baser instincts of human beings; Frankenstein especially is a film character created outside every boundary the film calls normal.

The essence of homosexuality as a predatory weakness permeates the depic tion of gay characters in horror films. In Dracula's Daughter (1936), Countess Alesca (Gloria Holden) has a special attraction to women, a preference that was even highlighted in some of the original ads for the film. ("Save the women of London from Dracula's Daughter!") Roger Vadim's Blood and Roses (1960) and Joseph Larraz' Vampyres (1974) both deal with lesbian vampires. Homosexual parallels in Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) arose from a vision both films had of the monster as an antisocial figure in the same way that gay people were "things" that should not have happened.

In both films the homosexuality of director James Whale may have been a force in the vision. Director Robert Aldrich recalls that "Jimmy Whale was the first guy who was blackballed because he refused to stay in the closet. Mitchell Leisen and all those other guys played it straight, and they were onboard, but Whale said, fuck it, I'm a great director and I don't have to put up with this bullshit' and he was a great director, not just a company director. And he was just unemployed after that never worked again." Accord­ing to Aldrich, an obviously [...]

[...] never worked again." Accord­ing to Aldrich, an obviously lesbian director like Dorothy Arzner got away with her lifestyle because she was officially closeted and because "it made her one of the boys." But a man who, like Whale, openly admitted his love relationship with another man, in this case producer David Lewis, did not stand a chance. Although James Whale worked again briefly in 1943, he fell into obscurity soon after. In 1961 he was found dead at the bottom of his swimming pool, and there has never been a full investigation of the circum­stances surrounding the event.

Whale's Frankenstein monster was the creation that would eventually destroy its creator, just as Whale's own "aberration" would eventually destroy his career. The monster in Frankenstein bears the brunt of society's reaction to his existence, and in the sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein, the monster himself is painfully aware of his own unnaturalness. In a graveyard scene, character actor Emest Thesiger, a friend of Whale and a man who played the effete sissy with as much verve and wit as Franklin Pangborn or Grady Sutton, listens as the monster confesses his knowledge of his own creation. In Frankenstein, it is the monster who limits Henry Frankenstein's contact with the normal world. The old baron, Frankenstein's father, continually beseeches his son to "leave this madness," to come home and marry the young Elizabeth. Finally, the father, Elizabeth and Henry's best friend go to the castle and force him, for his health and sanity, to leave his creation, to be free from his "obsession." Later the monster fulfills Mary Shelley's prophecy by joining his creator on his wedding night, carrying off Elizabeth and thereby preventing the consummation of the impending marriage. The monster is then hunted by the townspeople in the same way that groups of men in silent comedies had once run effeminate men off piers and out of town. Their outrage echoes again and again in film. "What is this creature? I abhor it!"

In The Bride of Frankenstein, it is the odd, sissified Dr. Praetorius (Ernest Thesiger) who comes to entice Henry Frankenstein from his bridal bed in the middle of the night. Praetorius too has created life, and Henry's curiosity again overcomes his "good" instincts and proves his downfall. Praetorius pro­claims himself to be in love with evil and professes to detest goodness. No accident, then, that the monster, seeing the unnaturalness and folly of his own existence, takes the evil Praetorius with him when he pulls the lever to destroy himself and his bride, crying out to Henry and Elizabeth, "Go! You live. We belong dead."

Probably the "gayest" film yet made by a major studio and an excellent spoof of gay/horror conventions is The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a cult rock musical that Twentieth Century Fox has never given a proper release in the United States. Since 1976 the film has been playing midnight shows in cities throughout the country. A truly subversive and anarchistic film on the subjects of sexuality, movies, sex roles and the homosexual as monster, Rocky Horror features two innocents (Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick) whose car runs out of gas not far from a haunted mansion that appears to be a parody of the creepy mansion in James Whale's The Old Dark House. In it they discover Dr. Frank N Furter (Tim Curry), the apotheosis of deviant sexual­ity, who introduces himself by singing a sizzling "I'm a Sweet Transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania." Frank N Furter is an androgyne who comes from outer space, from a galaxy called Transsexual and a planet called Transul­vania. When the timid couple arrive, he is in the process of showing off his latest creation, a hunky blond named Rocky, who is straight off the slab and wears nothing but tight gold lame trunks. Pointing to Rocky, Frank N Furter sings a lusty "In Just Seven Days, I Can Make You a Man," then proceeds to introduce Brad and Janet to the joys of the unmentionable.

As both catalogue and spoof of old monster movies and science fiction films, Rocky Horror becomes almost dizzying in its references, but its most expert satire is of the age-old fear with which straight society encounters deviant sexuality. This is established at the beginning of the film (Janet says, "Brad, there's something unhealthy about this place") and is followed through to the very end, when Frank N Furter is destroyed "for the good of society." having been carried by Rocky, in the manner of King Kong, to the top of the RKO-Radio Pictures tower. Nevertheless he returns to life to perform, with the entire cast, an underwater ballet version of the film's message, "Don't Just Dream It, Be It," and the song becomes an anthem of hope for an androgy­nous world. Tim Curry's performance, especially in his rendition of "Sweet Transvestite," is the essence of what every parent in America fears will happen if our sexual standards are relaxed. It becomes the living horror of making deviant sexuality visible and tangible in the only kind of setting in which it could possibly work, an old dark house populated by lesbians, transvestites, acid freaks and goons who sing rock and roll as they seduce the innocent youth of America. Hollywood didn't know what to do with The Rocky Horror Picture Show when it had been completed, but despite its shabby treatment, it has grossed a fortune as a popular cult film, and it continues to play through out the country to audiences made up largely of young people who dress for the showings like the characters in the film.