Week 4 - vito-russo-the-celluloid-closet-homosexuality-in-the-movies PDF

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For Jeffrey Sevcik Who Will Always Live in My Heart

Many people helped me to identify and locate films, still photographs and reference materials for this edition. Others granted me interviews in spite of busy schedules. My friends supported me in emotional ways during what has been a very difficult time for all of us. I would like to express my love and gratitude to Arnie Kantrowitz, Larry Mass, Jim Owles, Arthur J. Bressan, Jr., John Bovee, Lily Tomlin, Joel Levitt, Judy Peabody, Charles Silver, Stephen Harvey, Larry Kardish, Jan Oxenberg, Jed Mattes, Clovis Ruffin, Betty Bourne, Eric Meyer, Maxine Feldman, Barbara Kerr, Dorothy Allison, Robb Epstein, John Wright, Armistead Maupin, Mark Pinney, Dean Pitchford, Marcia Pally, Nancy Shaw, Alan Sawyer and Craig Zadan. For their help in making this book possible I would like to thank Bruce Yves, Liz Smith, Mark Thompson, Jerry Wheeler, Steve Badeau, Gary Steele, Stuart Byron, Ron Magliozzi, Stephen Frears, Bill Sherwood, Barry Sandler, Catherine Olim, Lois Smith, Marci Bloom, Nora Ephron, Brandon Judell, Penelope Spheeris, Tom Steele, Howard Mandelbaum, Carlos Clarens, Christopher Reeve, Helen Shaver, Bingham Ray at Samuel Goldwyn Studios, Linda Duchin at Cinecom, Paul Mowry at Orion Classics, Larry Mark at Twentieth-Century Fox, Donna Deitch, Robert Plunket, Kevin Cortland, Granger Hines, Eliott Stein, Michael Bronski, Jimmy Coco, James Kirkwood, George Hadley Garcia, Marie Kuda, Peter Lowy, Michael Lumpkin, Barbara Noda and Joe Brewer.

It became one of the chief problems in discussing this book. Everywhere I went for more than three years, the same misconception arose with a disturbing regularity. At dinner parties, at family gatherings, at lunches in Manhattan and on picket lines in Berkeley, on the beach at Fire Island and on lecture tours in the Midwest, everyone had the same question when the subject of this book was raised in conversation. People would always ask what The Celluloid Closet was about, and I would always say that it was an exploration of gay characters in American film. The response seldom varied. "Oh, really?" they would ask with a leer. "Are you using people's real names?" This is not a book about who in Hollywood is lesbian or homosexual. Nor is it a book about how gays have expressed themselves in Hollywood. Yet both approaches to the subject are valid and important. The public should in fact be aware of the sexuality of gay actors just as it is aware of the heterosexuality of the majority. I do not believe that such a discussion is nobody's business, nor do I believe that it is one of a sexual and therefore private nature. Discussing such things in a book without the knowledge or consent of the people in question is, alas, immoral and libelous. It is immoral because unless people by their own choice come out of the closet, the announcement is valueless; it is libelous because such information has been known to destroy people's lives. Some of us will change that in time. As to the second approach, that of studying the various ways in which gays, as a group almost exclusively closeted, have expressed themselves on film, this will also be pursued, but much sooner. Openly gay writers and critics have already begun to examine the works of Jean Vigo, Dorothy Arzner, F. W. Murnau, James Whale, Edmund Goulding, Mitchell Leisen, Sergei Eisenstein and Pier Paolo Pasolini, taking into account the dynamic of their sexual personalities. Openly gay directors such as Rosa von Praunheim, Wolfgang Petersen, Richard Benner and Rainer Werner Fassbinder can and will speak for themselves. What especially depressed me, though, listening to the initial reactions to The Celluloid Closet, was that they reflected the oppressive assumptions that form the basis for most screen images of lesbians and gay men. They reflected the closeted mentalities of gay people themselves. Almost all the people I spoke with reacted as though they had never considered a discussion of homosexuality as anything but potential gossip; the idea of examining some images of gay people onscreen was a barely legitimate concept to most. To see homosexuality as a dirty secret is something we all learned as children, both gays and straights. In Hollywood closeted gay people are among the most uptight and uncooperative stumbling blocks in the path of positive gay projects. The screen work of gays as well as straights has reflected the closet mentality almost exclusively until very recently. I sought to interview almost two hundred people for this book. Screenwriters and directors were almost always willing to talk. Actors were terrified and remained silent. Only two or three, all heterosexual, were willing to discuss their work. Any type of openly gay enterprise is still highly suspect in the culture in general. Before 1970, most gays in America mistrusted or avoided gay-owned businesses and services. Books on gay subjects and even books on non-gay subjects by openly gay writers have rarely been taken seriously in the straight press—when they are noticed at all. Such oversights are occasionally of an obviously homophobic nature. The Reverend Malcolm Boyd has written twenty books. His last, Take off the Masks, was the only one in which he openly discussed his homosexuality; it is also the only one of the twenty not reviewed by the NewYork Times. There is enormous pressure to keep gay people defined solely by our sexuality, which prevents us from presenting our existence in political terms. Gay research is often discounted or ignored. Jonathan Katz's extraordinary volume Gay American History has been sadly overlooked by scholars and critics because it places the struggle for gay

liberation in a firm historical context and, importantly, ties our existence to the American dream. In her book on women in film, From Reverence to Rape, Molly Haskell says that "the big lie" is that women are inferior. The big lie about lesbians and gay men is that we do not exist. The story of the ways in which gayness has been defined in American film is the story of the ways in which we have been defined in America. In Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, Beverly Axelrod says, "Our tragedy does not derive from our fantasy of what homosexuals are but from our fantasy of what America is. We have made each other up." As expressed on screen, America was a dream that had no room for the existence of homosexuals. Laws were made against depicting such things onscreen. And when the fact of our existence became unavoidable, we were reflected, onscreen and off, as dirty secrets. We have cooperated for a very long time in the maintenance of our own invisibility. And now the party is over.

There's two things got me puzzled There's two things I just can't understand That's a mannish actin' woman And a skipping, twisting woman actin' man. —Bessie Smith, "Foolish Man Blues," 1927 Most of our pictures have little, if any, real substance. Our fear of what the censors will do keeps us from portraying life the way it really is. We wind up with a lot of empty fairy tales that do not have much relation to anyone. —Samuel Goldwyn, 1938 The movies didn't always get history straight. But they told the dream. —Charlton Heston, narrating America on Film, 1976 Nobody likes a sissy. That includes dykes, faggots and feminists of both sexes. Even in a time of sexual revolution, when traditional roles are being examined and challenged every day, there is something about a man who acts like a woman that people find fundamentally distasteful. A 1979 New York Times feature on how some noted feminists were raising their male children revealed that most wanted their sons to grow up to be feminists—but real men, not sissies. This chapter is concerned primarily with the genesis of the sissy and not the tomboy because homosexual behavior onscreen, as almost every other defined "type" of behavior, has been cast in male terms. Homosexuality in the movies, whether overtly sexual or not, has always been seen in terms of what is or is not masculine. The defensive phrase "Who's a sissy?" has been as much a part of the American lexicon as "So's your old lady." After all, it is supposed to be an insult to call a man effeminate, for it means he is like a woman and therefore not as valuable as a "real" man. The popular definition of gayness is rooted in sexism. Weakness in men rather than strength in women has consistently been seen as the connection between sex role behavior and deviant sexuality. And while sissy men have always signaled a rank betrayal of the myth of male superiority, tomboy women have seemed to reinforce that myth and have often been indulged in acting it out. In celebrating maleness, the rendering invisible of all else has caused lesbianism to disappear behind a male vision of sex in general. The stigma of tomboy has been less than that of sissy because lesbianism is never allowed to become a threatening reality any more than female sexuality of other kinds. Queen Victoria, informed that a certain woman was a lesbian, asked what a lesbian might be. When the term had been explained, she flatly refused to believe that such creatures existed. Early laws against homosexuality referred only to acts between men. In England the penalty for male homosexual acts was reduced from death to imprisonment in 1861, but the new law made no mention of lesbianism. Nor did the target of the pioneering German gay liberation movement, Paragraph 175, which outlawed homosexual acts between men but omitted any mention of lesbians. The German movement, begun in 1897, was eliminated by the Nazis in the early 1930s. The trial and jailing of Oscar Wilde in England had already silenced leading literary figures who had vocally supported homosexual rights, and such movements as existed had little effect in the United States. The first American gay liberation group, the Society for Human Rights, chartered in 1924 by the State of Illinois, was disbanded after less than a year when its members were arrested by Chicago police. An organized gay visibility did not re-emerge in America until after World War II. In many ways, Queen Victoria spoke for everyone. In the popular mind, no such creatures existed except in a

national fear of effeminacy, a word listed in Roget's Thesaurus as a synonym for weakness. A nation of immigrants recently mesmerized by the flicker of the nickelodeon seized the largerthan-life images of the silent screen to play out its own dream of itself, and there was little room for weakness in the telling. Suspicions of inadequacy, however, were rife. The predominantly masculine character of the earliest cinema reflected an America that saw itself as a recently conquered wilderness. Actually there was not much wilderness left in the early twentieth century, but the movies endlessly recreated the struggles, the heroism and the romance of our pioneer spirit. There were western movies but no easterns; our European origins were considered tame and unworthy of the growing American legend. Men of action and strength were the embodiment of our culture, and a vast mythology was created to keep the dream in constant repair. Real men were strong, silent and ostentatiously unemotional. They acted quickly and never intellectualized. In short, they did not behave like women. Unspeakable in the culture, the true nature of homosexuality haunted only the dim recesses of our celluloid consciousness. The idea that there was such a thing as a real man made the creation of the sissy inevitable. Men who were perceived to be "like women" were simply mama's boys, reflections of an overabundance of female influence. It became the theme of scores of silent films to save the weakling youth and restore his manhood. Although at first there was no equation between sissyhood and actual homosexuality, the danger of gayness as the consequence of such behavior lurked always in the background. Tomboys (and the very idea of lesbianism) emerged as an exotic and often fascinating extension of the male myth, serving as a proving ground for its maintenance. A look at heterosexual pornography shows that lesbian eroticism in the service of male sexuality has been a consistent theme in heterosexual fantasy, appearing often as the preliminary to the "real" event, sex between men and women. True lesbianism, relationships defined by and in terms of women's needs and desires, was not contemplated. In the popular arts especially, such women were simply perceived to be "like men," and they conjured up a far more appealing androgyny than did male sissies. The tomboy image was amusingly daring and aspired to strength and authority, while the sissy image discredited those values. The idea of homosexuality first emerged onscreen, then, as an unseen danger, a reflection of our fears about the perils of tampering with male and female roles. Characters who were less than men or more than women had their first expression in the zany farce of mistaken identity and transvestite humor inherited from our oldest theatrical traditions. Rougher and broader than their classic predecessors, male and female impersonations, informed by a breezy vaudeville legacy, were a fascination of the movies from the beginning. As early as 1903 the innovative American director Edwin S. Porter used as one of his subjects a transvestite posing before a mirror. An experimental film directed by William Dickson at the Thomas Edison Studio in 1895 shows two men dancing a waltz. It was titled The Gay Brothers. Men in silent comedies often took women's roles, but total character impersonation disappeared early. The use of female garb by male comics became just another device for a one-scene joke. In Miss Fatty's Seaside Lovers, directed by Fatty Arbuckle in 1915, he plays the daughter of a rich man on a beach outing with the family. In Bumping into Broadway (1919), Gus Leonard played Ma Simpson, the vigilant landlady of a theatrical boardinghouse. When, in 1915, Harold Lloyd played a female pitcher on an all-woman baseball team in Spit-Ball Sadie, Motion Picture News called the scenes "repellent." The

critics said the same thing about Jack Lemmon's performance in Some Like It Hot in 1959 because Lemmon seemed to be enjoying his role too much. It was virtually the only female impersonation sustained throughout an entire film since the teens. Albin, the professional female impersonator in La Cage aux Folles (1978), was French and therefore suspect (unlike Lemmon, who was an all-American actor). The remarkable success in the United States of a film like La Cage aux Folles is a testament to the durability of the old-fashioned expansive femininity used to type male homosexuality. John Bunny's hilarious pomposity as a Marie Dressier-type gorgon in The Leading Lady (1911) has a lot in common with Michel Serrault's delightful Albin. Bunny's forays into drag and Wallace Beery's coy Swedish maid in the successful "Sweedie" series (1914-1916) were among the funniest if not the most subtle of the early impersonations. Fatty Arbuckle, who left the Keystone Studio for Paramount in 1917, made his sausage-curled bathing beauty a familiar comic characterization in film after film. Miss Fatty's Seaside Lovers and Fatty in Coney Island (1917) had him at his eye-rolling, umbrella-twirling best, forever in a heap of trouble with the local gents.

The very idea of calling Fatty "Miss Fatty" was funny. In La Cage aux Folles Albin tries to imitate John Wayne with what comes out as a hilarious Mae West swagger. It is the best he can do. His lover Renato (Ugo Tognazzi) throws up his hands and cries, "That's Miss John Wayne!" and the scene is funny because of the sound of John Wayne's name with "miss" in front of it. Yet such characters were always irritating to masculine men in silent comedy. In Miss Fatty's Seaside Lovers, the penetration of Fatty's disguise leads to the conclusion that "it's the women who cause all the trouble in the world after all," which reaffirms the superiority of the male point of view while using feminine manners to draw the weaker side of human nature as comedy. Many of the male and female impersonations of the American silent screen are stunning and of the finest comic creativity. The strident but vivacious foolishness of Fatty Arbuckle, John Bunny and Wallace Beery was the genesis of the Milton Berle school of drag humor, in which the joke lies in the very appearance of a man dressed up as a woman. But the subtlety and grace of others—like Charlie Chaplin in his Essanay film A Woman (1915) or the drag of Stan Laurel, whose levels of relating to Oliver Hardy were in some ways typically "feminine" in every nuance—hinted at the deeper levels of a visual language that could at times capture the possibility of pure androgyny.

From the Broadway stage of 1896, where as a play it created a modest sensation, emerged the first and one of the very few films to deal with the sexual characteristics of men and women entirely through the use of farcical Impersonation. Sidney Drew's adaptation of A Florida Enchantment (1914) was a sex reversal comedy with first class male impersonations and wry comment on the privileges of the male sex. Interviewed in the New York Dramatic Mirror after the opening of his play, author Archibald Gunter announced that his primary reason for "perpetrating" the farce was to show that "in a measure, men have a better time than women amid the social environment of our present civilization." In the film version, Lillian Travers, a young northern heiress who is visiting her aunt in Florida, comes upon a hundred-year-old chest containing seeds that, if swallowed, will turn a man into a woman and vice versa. In a fit of pique over a suitor, she takes one and awakens the following morning sporting a thick black mustache, which she promptly shaves off. Pretending to be female still, but possessed of male instincts, she persistently woos other women, causing a general stir in her aunt's staid southern home. The male impersonation of Vitagraph star Edith Storey is impeccable. Visually uncanny, especially in her scenes of dapper male attire on a visit to New York, her performance throughout

is laced with an insouciance that tempers male arrogance with a secret, barely withheld sensitivity. Desiring a valet instead of a maid, she gives one of the magic seeds to her mulatto servant and together they go out on the town, to be seen as notorious womanizers. The shock with which their actions are met, however, is tempered with fascination for their boldness. Lillian's aunt and her guests are titillated by her behavior as they would be by that of a male roué among them. Yet not until Lillian's doctor friend (played by director Sidney Drew) hears her story and takes one of the seeds himself does anyone become genuinely upset. Drew first begins to eye the men in town strangely, then decides to pursue a few of them in earnest. Unlike the restrained impersonation of Edith Storey, Drew's eye rolling is pure travesty. He also plays an aggressive woman who actively pursues men. In both cases, then, it's a male view of the sexes that dominates the impersonation. Drew's activities in town arouse the hostilities of a group of men who hastily form a posse and call out the police to deal with the "unnatural" man in their midst. Finally they form a mob and chase him through the town and off a pier into the river.

The conclusions would be interesting, but they are not drawn in A Florida Enchantment. Lillian awakens suddenly to discover that it was all only a horrible dream, and the sexes resume their natural order as she departs Florida with her newfound love, the suitor responsible for the mixup in the first place. Perceptible in the dream sequence, however, is a higher tolerance for women who relate emotionally, or even sexually, to other women than for men who behave similarly toward other men. Women did not merit the serious attention afforded male "unnaturalness" because they did not betray the male myth by aspiring to male behavior; they simply mimicked it and lent it credibility. In a review of the film in the New York Dramatic Mirror, it was pointed out that "while Edith Storey made quite an attractive man, Sidney Drew is far from a handsome woman." The playwright's original contention that men have ...