Film is one of the most widespread forms of entertainment in the world, and not surprisingly, it affects how people view the world very significantly. Although everybody knows that film is most commonly fictionalized, there are still aspects of it that affect people’s opinions on almost subconscious levels. For example, if no film ever showed women being in charge of men, people would start to believe that this is how the real world works as well and take this sexist viewpoint out of the cinemas and into their daily lives. Homosexuality is one such issue in film. It is still a hot debate topic today, and in the past it has been completely banned by censors. Has there been any homosexual influence on Hollywood in the past century of filmmaking? And conversely, how has Hollywood influenced the population’s perception of this issue?
Unlike what many people have come to believe, homosexual connotations and actual queer themes have been present in film since its very beginning. At the earliest stages in Film history in the beginning of the twentieth century, people’s views of homosexuality were completely different than what they are today. It was the general opinion of the public that homosexuality is linked to gender identity, and that the reason for the same sex attraction had its roots in a supposed desire to be of the other sex. Harry Benshoff summarizes in Queer Images that “homosexual men supposedly wanted to be women and homosexual women wanted to be men.” (21) For example, it was not considered strange or wrong for two men to dance with each other or even kiss, as long as they still looked masculine. The online article “Homosexuality in Hollywood” explains that “One of the earliest surviving motion picture images is a primitive test made at Thomas Edison’s studio, in which two men dance together while a third plays the fiddle.” (1) People believed that it only became “perverted” if there was gender-switching, such as a man wearing a dress.
This ignorance to see the connotations of the general public and the powers responsible for production of film created a kind of innocent era of filming where it was neither illegal nor condemnable to film homosexuality, since all film was still in a kind of experimental stage at that point. Benshoff notes that this innocence was then easily taken advantage of by directors such as “Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932) [which] make[s] homosexuality surprisingly overt. … Roman emperor Nero fits easily into the pansy stereotype … [while] Empress Poppaea demands that one of her female friends disrobes and shares her bath.” In fact, there were even positive responses. “Homosexuality in Hollywood” remarks that “a woman dressed like a man—like Marlene Dietrich in ‘Morocco’ (1930)—the audience loves and thinks that is sexy.” (1)
However, this innocence was not long-lived. The United States was still a deeply religious nation and its ethics and morals stated that homosexuality is an abomination and will not be tolerated. The article “Homosexuality in Film” explains that “powerful forces were already at work. Religious and women’s groups had been protesting the movies’ permissiveness throughout the twenties and thirties, lobbying for federal censorship of the movies.” (2) Although the federal government didn’t respond to these pleas, the film producers themselves tried to create censorship guidelines, such as the Hayes Code. Joseph Boggs connects the issue in The Art of Watching Films when he writes that “Hays and his staff first reacted to state and local censorship by codifying the most frequent objections to film content and advising member companies on what to avoid.” (514) The Hays code, along with suppressing many other aspects of film, tried to ultimately scour any reference to homosexuality, or as it said, “sexual perversion” from motion picture.
Even though the success of these measures was not absolute, it had very saddening long-standing consequences. It tried to purge all images of “sexual perversion”, especially positive ones, but at the same time it was impossible to exclude all references to gay subculture in film, because all types of culture naturally make their way into film. The film Celluloid Closet explains that “For all its efforts, the Production Code didn’t erase homosexuals from the screen—it just made them harder to find. And now they had a new identity: as cold-blooded villains.” (Scene 7) Film, one of the most influencial communications media in the public at the time, was telling America that homosexuals are heartless and insane, and this message was taken in by straight and gay folk alike. Homosexuals began to be more afraid than ever to accept themselves for who they were because they believed that would mean that they would become murderous maniacs that try to force others to be gay as well. This was actually one of many stereotypes Hollywood imposed on minorities during this period to try to belittle them and single them out. In fact, many of these villified homosexuals were women ending up behind bars or in cages like animals. The Celluloid Closet explains that “These women were a warning to ladies, to just watch it and get back to the kitchen, where God meant them to be.”
On the other hand, Benshoff reveals that
“Queer images did not completely disappear after 1934 … Often, because Code officials were lacking any understanding of the era’s queer subcultures, they missed more subtle instances. For example, while Code administrators were ever watchful to censor the word pansy from proposed film scripts, the newer use of the word gay seems to have slipped through on occasion.” (30)
This is a very crucial point, because it emphasizes the capability of the culture to persevere in the face of adverse suppression. “Homosexuality in Hollywood” states that “Hollywood had learned to write movies between the lines, and some members of the audience had learned to watch them that way.” (2) The fact that it was possible to sneak in gay references even when they were actively being “scoured” from cinema served as a model for future hope of gay rights movements, the first glint of hope amidst extreme hatred and prejudice.
In addition to this, foreign film industries had started letting down their own boundaries, creating competition for Production Code Hollywood. “Homosexuality in Film” recounts that “a film came out of Great Britain in which an explicitly gay (or at least bisexual) character actually stands up to fight the system that oppresses homosexuals.” (4) Because of this, Hollywood filmmakers tried to attract their own audiences with more adult themes, and eventually they had circumvented most of the code. Even though this was not a victory for gay rights in film directly, it was a step that began reverting all of the ignorance and hate that America had shrouded itself in during the Code era.
Then, after the Second World War, something strange began to happen. After this catastrophic war, people realized that not everything might be as it should be in America and many people started to voice their opinions. All kinds of minorities began to gain more rights, like African-Americans and women. But, at the same time, the subject of homosexuality seemed to go even further into the closet. Benshoff writes, “Male homosexuality was especially egregious to a nation obsessed with its own masculinity (or potential lack thereof). Homosexuals were branded ‘sex murderers’ in the press, a sort of human plague that was threatening to destroy the very foundations of society.” (87) This mindset stayed with Hollywood well past the World War into the sixties with producers and other officials choosing to ignore the gay liberation movement that was gaining prominence so quickly.
However, this period did not last forever, and finally began to subside after the Stonewall Riots of 1969, in which the members of a gay bar called Stonewall chose to resist yet another in a long series of raids by the New York Police Force on queer establishments. The riots reached national level of popularity and kicked off a cascade of events granting queers many rights they had not had previously. Fortunately, the film industry finally relized the cultural representation that Hollywood was trying to cling to was extremely outdated, and released two revolutionary films—The Killing of Sister Gorge and The Boys in the Band, both of which present homosexuality as a part of life for the characters along with the problems they must encounter because of it, rather than making the characters themselves and their queer identities problems of the plot. These two films were the prototype for the first gay feature fiction films that followed inevitably, but were not such themselves because in the end they did treat the subject of homosexuality as something negative and something that puts a dark stain on one’s life.
Queer Directors
The kind of homophobic attitude Hollywood had throughout the Production Code era and the Postwar era would make you think that every single movie director was a heterosexual homophobe. But this is a very transparent assumption, because in fact there were plenty of producers that tried to sneak in gay content into their movies. According to the article “Film Directors” on www.glbtq.com, “It has sometimes been said that the lesbianism of Dorothy Arzner (1897-1979) afforded her a certain license as ‘one of the boys’ in a fiercely male dominated profession,” and that she was “one of only two successful female directors in Hollywood's Golden Era.” Though she had many difficulties achieving this high rank, it cannot be debated that she was an extremely successful, and yet queer film director.
And even directors such as James Whale, who were unapologetically open about their sexuality, were still able to produce films under Hollywood’s name before their careers inevitably fell apart because of their notoriety. In fact, James Whale himself directed the highly regarded and yet overtly queer horror film Bride of Frankenstein (1935).
So a conclusion can be made from these facts: even while Hollywood thought they were scouring out all queer images from their exclusive industry, gay directors were almost proliferating in their backyard and infusing many of the most well-known movies with queer subtexts that undermined the entire philosophy. This counterbalancing of ideals provided a check on the power of Hollywood to influence the feelings of its audiences about homosexuality, and gave the queer movement more time to develop and settle into the picture.
Queer Actors
While directors control the film backstage, actors create what the audiences will see, and what else, if not this, influences an audience’s opinion? One of the most important queer actors of film is Rudolph Valentino. This man was the one and only male icon of his era of film (the silent era). According to the article “Valentino, Rudolph (1985-1926),” from the website www.glbtq.com, “His androgynous persona, at once assertively virile and gracefully sensitive, threatened traditional images of American masculinity in a crucial period of cultural change.”
Another important actor to mention is Clifton Webb whose career spanned the 40s and 50s. This actor, as the article “Webb, Clifton” from the same website states, “had the charisma and authority to single-handedly rescue the sissy from secondary roles; he is either the star or a major player in all of his films that followed.” This is crucial because the sissy—an effeminate male character—was one of the only representations of queers in Hollywood movies at the time, and certainly the most obvious. For gay audiences to see the sissy rise to leading roles was a very reassuring and hopeful change, albeit the fact that a sissy is still a sissy.
Conclusion
Throughoug the early and middle parts of the century, Hollywood, after realizing its undeniable presence, attempted to remove all queer references from its films. We have seen that the goal of these actions the hope that a lack of such ideas in film will have a direct consequences on the real world because film has such a big impact on viewers’ lives. We may be prone to believe that Hollywood succeeded in this heterosexist mission because of all the repression of queers that has been clearly present during this time period. However, upon more careful analysis, we find that this is not true, because where acknowledging the presence of homosexuality is concerned, the public has been and always will be ahead of the cinema. The fact that Hollywood’s officials chose to ignore the growing openness of the public for no less than twenty years did not affect this growth. What we must deduce from this goes back to the very fundamental concept of the entertainment industry—the purpose of which is to entertain the public. And the only way the public can be entertained is by displaying what the public wants to see or is used to seeing (and even that is stretching it). Therefore, it is impossible for Hollywood to be used as a tool for forcing the public to think a certain way unless the public itself chooses this path. It is not the producers that have tried to ban homosexuality from the screen, but rather the queer community that has succeeded in melting the strong stereotypes about it, one by one, to the point where soon Hollywood will portray people of all sexualities and gender identities in an unbiased, natural way.
Bibliography
Benshoff, Harry. Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America.Rowman &Littlefield Publishers, Inc. New York: 2006.
Boggs, Joseph. The Art of Watching Films. McGraw Hill. Boston: 2004.
Epstein, Rob. The Celluloid Closet (film). Brillstein-Grey Entertainment. 1996.
“Homosexuality in Film.” , 2007.
“Homosexuality in Hollywood.” 2004.
“Film Directors.” <>, glbtq, inc. 2002.
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