Queer Cinema: Schoolgirls, Vampires, and Gay Cowboys

INTRODUCTION

Schoolgirls, vampires and gay cowboys are the heroes of this book. The former – schoolgirls and vampires – emerged in German films as ciphers of queer desire at the beginning of the twentieth century, while the latter – Ang Lee’s gay cowboys – queer the most manly of men and symbolise the presence of gays and lesbians in contemporary Hollywood. It is from the moment of omnipresence of gays and lesbians on television and in the movies – as main characters, their relatives, neighbours and best friends – that we return to a past when a character could be discredited as ‘queer’ by a calling card that smelled of lavender, as Joel Cairo famously was in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941). The tragic and monstrous queer forerunners of their contemporary well-adjusted gay and lesbian counterparts populate the history of queer cinema and allow us to trace its different incarnations. This book brings together important moments, periods and turning points that add up to a history of queer film.

Queer Cinema thus goes beyond describing gay and lesbian films to participate in a larger project of queer Film Studies: an archeology of an alternative cinematic aesthetics organised around non-normative desires. ‘Queer’ exceeds the notions of gay and lesbian identities that emerged in Paris, London, New York and Berlin at the beginning of the twentieth century. For some, ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ are descriptive terms that capture socially lived experience, while for others they constitute the political programme of declaring one’s gay or lesbian identity. Naming and publicly embodying a different desire transcends compulsory heterosexuality and demands rights to diverse sexual, erotic and affective relationships and gendered embodiments.

Sexuality and gender played a central role in the history of film, even before feature-length narrative films developed, because the medium engages the different pleasures of looking and being looked at: voyeurism and exhibitionism. Cinema is deeply ingrained with heterosexual and gendered assumptions, which also shape the vocabulary and methodologies of Film Studies. The important scholar of early cinema, Tom Gunning argues that before 1906, short films constituted an ‘exhibitionist cinema’, celebrating ‘its ability to show something’, which he contrasts to ‘the voyeuristic aspect of narrative cinema’, which developed later (1990: 57). To illustrate his case, Gunning points to The Bride Retires (1902): ‘A woman undresses for bed while her new husband peers at her from behind the screen. However, it is to the camera and the audience that the bride addresses her erotic striptease, winking at us as she faces us, smiling in erotic display’ (ibid.). The concepts of voyeurism and exhibitionism are shaped by gendered assumptions about heterosexual male voyeurs and female exhibitionists: the pairing of man and woman as husband and wife inscribes the structure of looking and being looked at, in which masculinity is associated with a desire to look and femininity with a desire to be looked at, bound together by the heterosexual contract (see Mulvey 1988a).

If movies show the stuff that dreams are made of, queer films can set the stage for fantasies that are structured by same-sex attraction: this time, when the princess kisses the frog, the repulsive animal might turn out to be a girl. Generally queer film promises to tell stories about gays and lesbians who negotiate events typical for their lived collective experiences: alienated youth and unrequited crushes; sexual awakening and coming out; the trials and tribulations of gay and lesbian communities. By representing defamed desires and allowing audiences an affective engagement with them, queer film is inherently political.

Yet, while this description captures the contemporary connotations of gay and lesbian films, it cannot provide a comprehensive approach to earlier queer culture – and its presence in film. According to historian George Chauncey’s work on New York City between 1890 and 1940, the taboos against non-normative sexualities and genders led gays and lesbians to develop a ‘highly sophisticated system of subcultural codes’ for recognising and communicating with each other (1994: 4). Because gays and lesbians brought these codes to the making and watching of movies, queer cinema also includes the traces of a hidden presence, readable in its imprints, inferences, codes, subtexts and styles.

This book, then, suggests that the term ‘queer’ enables a productive intervention into the visual representation of same-sex desire and the history of cinema. ‘Queer’ encapsulates ‘perverse’ sexualities without fixing them into specific identities and can therefore capture different configurations of cinematic representation and non-normative desire, even regarding films that do not include explicit representations of homosexuality. ‘Queer’ has come to function as a short-hand, an umbrella term signifying a range of non-normative sexual and gender identities, including gay, lesbian, bisexual, cross-dressing, transvestite, transgender, transsexual, intersex, effeminate men and butch women.

This list, however, does not capture queer’s deconstructive dimension. Queer theorist Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble (1990), argues that making identity the basis of political analysis and movement, as in ‘women’s movement’ or ‘lesbian activism’, presupposes of a coherence that limits the possibilities of expressing subject positions. ‘Queer’ implies the subversion of gender and sexual identities assumed to be cohesive, while ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ claims the political productivity of circulating such identities in the public sphere in order to demand equal rights. Since the medium of film lends itself to a realist representation of identity as well as to its artistic deconstruction, both approaches exist in filmic production and reception.

Queer Cinema negotiates possible theoretical conflicts marked by the terms ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ vis-à-vis ‘queer’ by framing its discussion in the historical contexts from which those terms emerged in the first place. Descriptors reflect the discursive context of the period that gave birth to them. ‘Invert’, ‘third sex’ and ‘uranian’ emerged in turn-of-the-century sexology only to make their way into the subcultural codes of the Weimar Republic, for example in the phrase ‘saucy daddy’ [KV, short for Kesse Vater] as code for a butch (masculine looking and acting) lesbian (see Zur Nieden 2003). The American mid-century phrase ‘a friend of Dorothy’, a code of recognition for gay men, presumably was based on a camp reading of Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) staring gay icon Judy Garland as Dorothy and as such indicates the importance of film in gay and lesbian subcultures. The terms ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ are rooted in the homosexual rights movement that emerged from the late 1960s throughout the 1970s. The shorthand ‘Stonewall’ – referring to bloody riots of drag queens resisting police raids of gay bars in 1969 in New York City – came to stand for a turning point from a subcultural existence that relied on codes of recognition to an ‘out’ life style that demanded visibility and claimed normalcy. The term ‘queer’ was appropriated in the political activism around AIDS of the late 1980s and early 1990s. These terms are therefore not mutually exclusive, but instead relate to each other across a historical continuum. Socio-political contexts and intentionality of speakers inflect their meaning.

Thus, this book’s methodology and terms reflect a moment in which queer film theory has been consolidated and the gay and lesbian rights movement has achieved some of its goals. ‘Gay’ and ‘lesbian’ refers to men-loving-men and women-loving-women. It applies to characters, their sexual desires and political identities, whether explicit or implicit, to films that address them and to self-identified directors, actors and producers. An approach committed to homosexual rights suggests that conventional representation of gays and lesbians in film constitutes societal acceptance and indicates political and social progress. Queer Film Studies, however, proposes that non-normative desire undermines cinematic conventions because the subversion of coherent identity also questions the possibility of its mimetic representation in film. Queer film aesthetics challenges the cinematic conventions based on gender-normative heterosexuality.

Film Studies has witnessed a development from gay and lesbian history to queer theory. Foundational books by Richard Dyer, Vito Russo and Andrea Weiss established gay and lesbian film history, while a contemporary proliferation of theorists and publications constitute Queer Film Studies (discussed in depth in chapter four). A brief example organised around the theoretical approach to cinematic visibility and invisibility illustrates this shift. Film scholar Andrea Weiss (1992) argues that the study of cinema as visual medium is crucial for the representation of lesbians because their oppression has taken the form of enforced invisibility.

Seven years later, Patricia White, a scholar trained in Queer Studies, modifies this argument by suggesting that even though, for example, the Production Code Administration in mid-twentieth-century Hollywood attempted to make lesbianism invisible, individual films nevertheless register effects (1999: xvii). The production code forbad the representation of ‘sex perversion’ as well as its inference, without naming lesbianism. Yet, as White points out, even the ‘motion picture industry practitioners recognised censorship as a set of codes for producing meaning, and particularly sexual meaning, and indeed for producing readings’ (1999: 8). She reads Hollywood films made under the production code to excavate the traces of lesbian desire paradoxically produced by its prohibition.

To capture the changing configurations of politics and aesthetics on the one hand and visibility and invisibility on the other, Queer Cinema is organised around five key historical moments. Chapter one discusses films associated with a period of liberation movements for homosexuals and lesbians, the Weimar Republic (1918–33) in Germany. Chapter two is organised around camp as a gay aesthetics, which connected films produced in the Hollywood studio system, B movies, experimental and art film during the 1940s to the early 1970s in the US.

The two decades following the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 in New York take centre stage in chapter three as a symbolic turning point cast as a collective coming out in films that unapologetically showed gays and lesbians often as positive identification figure in realist settings. The New Queer Cinema of the early 1990s is the topic of chapter four, which describes the radical and highly aestheticised films that often portrayed queers in the margin of past and contemporary societies. New Queer Cinema belonged to a larger political, social and cultural force; while juxtaposed to mainstream cinema, it nevertheless paved the way for the presence of gays and lesbians in conventional films, which is discussed in chapter five. This last chapter examines the wave of gay- and lesbian-themed films targeting general mainstream audiences as well as specifically gay and lesbian moviegoers and addresses the proliferation of international queer cinema. The conclusion suggests that the current hypertext and multi-media environment goes hand in glove with a deconstruction of gender and sexuality, expanding the term queer to include cross-dressing, transgender, transsexual and intersex characters in films and web-based art projects. Taken together, the chapters assembled here retrace the complex interconnections between politics and aesthetics that fueled the filmic developments of what we now call ‘queer cinema’.

1   THE ORIGINS OF QUEER CINEMA: SCHOOLGIRLS, VAMPIRES AND CROSS-DRESSERS

Queer figures, from schoolgirls to vampires, populate the films of Germany’s Weimar Republic, a period inaugurated by the end of World War One in 1918 and brought to an abrupt and violent end with Hitler’s ascendance to power in 1933. During those fifteen turbulent years of Germany’s first democracy, gay and lesbian political and social movements thrived, and so did the movie industry. The first explicitly homosexual rights film was made as early as 1919. Richard Oswald’s feature-length silent classic Anders als die Anderen (Different from the Others) narrates a tragic story about homosexual lives ruined by extortion. Toward the end of the period, the box office hit and early sound film, Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform) (1931) tells a tale now considered the Urtext of the schoolgirl genre, a staple of lesbian film. Homosexuals were everywhere: not just in bars, dance houses and cabarets but also in literature, painting and film. Yet this presence was neither an isolated cultural phenomenon nor an uncontested existence.

The homosexual and women’s rights movements and the exploration of the new medium of film were part of larger processes of modernisation in the early twentieth century. Arts movements, such as dada, expressionism and new objectivity, revolutionised literature and painting. The Bauhaus philosophy redefined architecture and interior design with an eye to efficiency and rationalism. Technological innovations led to increased speed in communication, transportation and industrial production. Women received the vote and entered the university and the workforce in record numbers. Bodies were liberated from stifling traditions with knee-length skirts, nudism and wild dance styles imported from America. The New Woman was flat-chested, cropped her hair and smoked in coffee houses and bars. The modern woman and the modern man were androgynous creatures. The roaring twenties witnessed an explosive sexual and social life for gay men, lesbians, transvestites and those who enjoyed their company.

The politicisation and social visibility of gays and lesbians in the Weimar Republic had its roots in the late nineteenth century. In turn-of-the-century Vienna and London, writers such as Frank Wedekind, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Schnitzler and painters such as Gustav Klimt produced works that were explicitly sexual. During the nineteenth century male homosexuality became both ‘extremely public’ and, at the same time, linked to secrets (see Sedgwick 1990: 164). Lord Alfred Douglas’ famous line in his poem ‘Two Loves’ (1894), ‘I am the love that dare not speak its name’, encapsulates the secrecy that was constitutive of homosexuality (see Murray 2000). Nineteenth-century sexology developed a new, scientific language to define and catalogue normative and perverse sexual behaviours and identities. Homosexuality at the turn-of-the-century was a closeted affair and turned into a scandal when made public as when in 1907 journalist Maximilian Harden suggested that General Count Kuno von Moltke, Prince Philipp of Eulenburg and others in the Emperor Wilhelm II’s inner circle were homosexuals. They, in turn, charged him with libel, and the trial evolved into a public scandal that lasted two years and ruined the lives of the accused (see Schneider 1997).

But the increasing urbanisation permitted public expression of gay and lesbian identities in the anonymity of cities, turning Berlin of the 1920s into the hotspot of queer culture where the presence of members of the so-called third sex, also called inverts, including gays, lesbians, transsexuals and transvestites, could not be overlooked. Famous bars, such as the ‘Mikado’ and the ‘Eldorado’ catered to homosexuals and transvestites, while others, such as the ‘Golden Ball’, ‘Violetta’, ‘Monbijou’ or ‘Sappho’ served lesbians (see Dobler 2003). Magazines aided lesbians in networking to meet like-minded women, find romance or reflect on politics (see Schoppmann 1996; Dobler 2003). At grand masquerade balls, women dressed as men and men as women.

Social activities overlapped with political ones, split along the lines of gender and the different understanding of homosexuality. By the 1920s, gays and lesbians could look back on decades of homosexual rights movements