With Pride month in full swing, it’s an ideal moment to look at historical queer representation, particularly in the early days of Hollywood cinema. The first few decades of the twentieth century were not only an active time for a growing medium, but also one in which crises of confidence, economy, masculinity, and culture changed how filmmakers presented queer characters and how (or if) audiences received them. Film professor David Lugowski summed up queer representation in early film neatly, writing that “[a]s cinema learned to talk, so did it also ‘speak’ about the gender roles so crucial to Hollywood film.”
Cinema moved from silent film into “talkies” in the late 1920s, with Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer typically credited as the first feature to integrate sound and dialogue (it may, however, be a more complicated exercise to locate a true “first”). The late twenties also saw the onset in America of the Great Depression, and, at least as far as entertainment is concerned, many scholars link displays of sexuality and queerness in films in the late 1920s and early 1930s to a larger crisis in masculinity. Economic collapse, the story goes, leads to a broader crisis of identity and gender role. “In short,” Lugowski writes, “men found their gender status, linked to notions of ‘work’ and ‘value’ promulgated by capitalist structures and ideologies, in jeopardy.”
As film became more pervasive and culturally integrated under these circumstances, stereotypes started to be read as evidence that gender performance was equivalent to sexual orientation. Basic types in Hollywood films were clear. For men, queer types were usually either the “dithering, asexual ‘sissy,’” writes Lugowski, or “the more outrageous ‘pansy,’ an extremely effeminate boulevardier type sporting lipstick, rouge, a trim mustache and hairstyle, and an equally trim suit, incomplete without a boutonniere.” Lesbian representation favored masculine drag—tailored suits, hair cut short or slicked back, and sometimes male-coded accessories like a monocle or a cigar. “Objections arose,” Lugowski explains, “because she seemed to usurp male privilege; perhaps the pansy seemed to give it up.”
Prior to the 1930s, these stereotypes appear to have been commonly understood and deployed, for glamour, humor, and drama alike. Audiences may have responded variably—with titillation, acceptance, or shock, depending on the individual—but no one could say the film industry wasn’t inclusive of different relationship story arcs.
In Pandora’s Box (1929) Louise Brooks wooed a father and son as well as a countess in a tuxedo. Greta Garbo portrayed the title character Queen Christina in a 1933 film about the seventeenth-century Swedish monarch, widely assumed to have been queer. Garbo, along with Marlene Dietrich and other leading ladies such as Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy, and Barbara Stanwyck, were members of a private professional group of Hollywood women—all of them quietly bisexual or lesbian—known as the “Sewing Circle.” Palmy Days (1931) features not only a proud flower-wearing “pansy” character, but drag, donuts, and a sexy Busby Berkeley dance number.
These portrayals took on new weight and context with the passage of the Hollywood Production Code. The Code, a set of self-regulatory guidelines applied to film production, was begrudgingly accepted by film execs, writes Steven Vaughn. That industry figures would accept content restrictions seems strange, until you consider that it was a hold-your-nose solution preferable to either intrusive government regulation or control by investment banks or funders, who preferred their investments be as stable as possible. The Production Code of 1930 therefore came into being, heavily influenced by religious collaborators and proclaiming two linked truths: “Motion pictures are very important as Art,” and “The motion picture has special Moral obligations.” In a Code world, no film should risk lowering an audience’s moral standards nor should evil or immorality be presented except as a cautionary tale.
The Production Code embraced a list of “don’ts” and “be carefuls.” On the “don’ts” list, films were to eliminate blasphemy and profanity, depictions of drug use, miscegenation, and “any inference of sex perversion,” which implied homosexuality. “Be carefuls” enumerated in the 1956 version of the Code urged “the careful limits of good taste” around bedroom scenes, hangings, liquor, childbirth, and “third degree methods.”
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The well-known English critic Anthony Slide explains that the Code particularly targeted queer representation in film.
“Words such as ‘fairy,’ ‘nance,’ ‘pansy,’ and ‘sissy’ were banned from the screen vocabulary,” Slide writes. “Homosexuality, identified by the Production Code as ‘sex perversion,’ was outlawed: ‘No hint of sex perversion may be introduced into a screen story.’”
At first, to be honest, not much changed. Hollywood cinema remained as queer as ever, and during the harshest years of the Depression, the industry engaged in some of its most boundary-pushing and queer storytelling efforts.
“Not only does the number of incidents increase,” writes Lugowski,
but we also see more explicit references, longer scenes, and sometimes surprisingly substantial characters. Perhaps most important, the pansy and lesbian characters of the period remain, respectively, effeminate and mannish but become increasingly sexualized in 1933–34.
To wit: in 1934, Jack Warner (of Warner Brothers Studio) felt perfectly comfortable ignoring enforcer Joseph Breen’s firm letter and repeated phone calls about that year’s Wonder Bar. Starring Al Jolson and based on a Broadway musical of the same name, the film included a scene in which a tuxedo-clad man glides onto a busy dance floor and taps the shoulder of another man dancing with a blonde in finger waves and a white gown. He asks, “May I cut in?” The woman answers, “Why, certainly!” and reaches out her arms expectantly, at which point the two men embrace each other and whirl off down the dance floor. Jolson, from the bandstand, observes the exchange and quips, “Boys will be boys. Woo!”
By the end of 1934, though, the Code was more than just a feel-good document for moralists. It was enabled with specific enforcement machinery in response to religious lobbying and the threat of significant industry opposition from the Catholic church.
“[R]ather than risk possible state and federal censorship,” notes Chon Noriega, “as well as anticipated boycotts by the ten-million-member Catholic Legion of Decency, Hollywood studios proferred [sic] strict self-regulation, empowering the Hays Office—now under Joseph Breen—to enforce its four-year-old Production Code.”
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Once the Production Code had teeth, filmmakers were restricted in what they could include in their work. If they violated Code standards, the Production Code Administration (PCA) could withhold its seal of approval, making distribution difficult. The possibility of appeal was slim to none, with a board of PCA directors making the call, not fellow filmmakers. In 1947, with the Code not even fifteen years in effect, writer and censor Geoffrey Shurlock noted with some pleasure that
Queer characters and storylines were less common, or circumscribed, until the Code weakened and ultimately fell in the 1960s (the success of boundary-pushing films like Some Like It Hot only helped in this regard). It remained true in film that villains, especially, were more likely to be accepted with queer coding. But a large number of films—more than perhaps one might expect—remain a testament to Hollywood’s longtime engagement with queer characters and themes.
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