the sissy
by Douglas Messerli
Although the least important
behavioral pattern attached in LGBTQ individuals, dressing in drag, dominated
the early cinema of the 20th Century, earlier than we might have suspected
filmmaking writers and directors began to explore some of the outward signals
that they perceived as identifying gay male behavior, effeminate behavior and
what were generally perceived as female as opposed to male interests that
together were often summarized by the word “sissy” or “pansy,” without having
the definite inference of full homosexual behavior implied in faggot or fag.
The Wikipedia entry quite effectively
summarizes what is generalized within the epithets sissy or pansy:
“Sissy (derived from sister), also
sissy baby, sissy boy, sissy man, sissy pants, etc., is a pejorative term for a
boy or man who does not demonstrate masculine traits, and shows possible signs
of fragility. Generally, sissy implies a lack of courage, strength,
athleticism, coordination, testosterone, male libido, and stoic calm, all of
which have typically been associated with masculinity and considered important
to the male role in Western society. A man might also be considered a sissy for
being interested in typically feminine hobbies or employment (e.g., being fond
of fashion), displaying effeminate behavior (e.g., using hair products,
hydrating products, or displaying limp wrists), being unathletic, or being
homosexual.”
The word pansy probably was derived for the ancient Japanese word bishōnen
(literally "beautiful youth") and the Korean word kkonminam
(literally "flower boy") which were also polite terms for a man or
boy with gentle or feminine attributes.
But the word sissy, derived from “sister,” is thought to have entered
the American English around 1840-1850. The female version, “tomboy” is far
older, dating to 1545-55. And both terms sissy and tomboy (the latter of which
I discuss elsewhere) quickly were brought in as character types on both the
stage and in literature, which is not say such figures did not exist previously
without specific epithets. Surely, we might see some of those qualities in
Charles Dickens Oliver Twist, for instance, the book published in 1838.
In film, however, we can almost precisely date the sudden appearance of
“the sissy,” although since so many early films have been destroyed or lost we
might justifiably equivocate. However, we can argue with some certainty that
such figures were first witnessed in the important female director Alice Guy
Blaché’s, co-directed with Harry Scheck and Edward Warren, 1912 film Algie
the Miner. Until recently that film, indeed, stood out as almost a singular
first example, that wouldn’t be repeated until the 1920s.
But in 2016, Shane Brown, in his study Queer Sexualities in Early
Film: Cinema and Male-Male Intimacy, exploring the term in various lost and
forgotten short films of the same period was able to demonstrate that at least
six other films of the same period, 1912-1918, presented the same kind of
identifiable “sissy,” in most cases being a young man who displayed such
tendencies at home that dismayed his father enough to attempt to do something
about it.
Many of the films discussed in this section, with the exception of Algie
the Miner and the later Roscoe Arbuckle comedies—A Cave Man Wooing, Hilda
Wakes, Sissybelle, The ‘Pay-as-You-Enter’ Man, Keep Moving,
and He Became a Regular Fellow (all except Cave Man and Keep
Moving being presumably lost films)—are all discussed here only because of
Brown’s important research.
Brown attempts to argue that, given the confusion
of the word “sissy” which allows it to straddle the homosexual and simple
gender behavior divide, that—in that the four defining films of this sort, Algie
the Miner, A Cave Man Wooing, Sissybelle, and He Became a
Regular Fellow contain effeminate men who desire women or seemingly come to
desire them in the last instance—we should not automatically associate these
sissy figures with homosexuality per se, but with an issue of gender or what I
believe he means as “gender definition.”
Along with LGBTQ film critics Vito Russo and Richard Barrios, however, I
disagree, being convinced that the desires for the female gender that these
characters exhibit were simply the standard ruses that any filmmaker attempting
to discuss gay sexuality before 1990 needed to use in order for the work not to
be outrightly rejected their audiences or censored. Particularly in US cinema
it was rare—except for the few examples I catalogue—that any director would even
imagine presenting a tale wherein a male was outwardly attracted to men, even
if he behaved like a queer. With regard to sexuality, the central male
figure was presumed to be interested in the other sex, even if is apparent he
is not attracted to women or, for that matter, females to him. These
explorations of gay sexuality, accordingly, had little choice but to become
conversion narratives, an explanation in how such a person might be able to
“right” the sexual situation before the film’s end.
It is the same strategy used by nearly
all the US directors after 1934 when the Hays Code through Joseph Breen’s
Production Code Administration hung the sword over their productions,
threatening to rip them apart if they even dared to explore male gay
sexuality—or lesbianism or bisexuality for that matter. Accordingly, no matter
what the story told us subliminally about the character’s true sexuality, the
hero simply had to be married or about to be married by film’s end. Actors such
as Cary Grant and Rock Hudson spent their entire careers allowing very clever
writers to expose their true sexuality in codes while superficially courting
and conquering the central female figure.
Throughout much of the century it was
also what film actors, in particular, had to do in their real lives: marry
attractive women while seeking sex elsewhere. Those that chose not to, early on
Grant and Hudson, were the endless subject of tabloid gossip and were
threatened always with the destruction of their image and career. The studios
protected them fiercely.
My point is simply that we must never
read in too much with regard to the marital status or spoken desires of male
figures when the film is outwardly exploring other elements of their sexuality.
These films are not about their ultimate capture of the female, but about their
comic struggle. And these works were comic precisely because their male figures
didn’t look like or behave like cinematic heterosexual figures generally did.
Their failings were obvious, call them homosexuals or aspiring heterosexuals
with gender behavioral issues; it was their differences that made them
interesting, queer, and outright funny to their audiences.
Nobody came away from A Cave Man Wooing believing that “sissy
boy” George really developed enough muscles to pick up and carry off the woman
of his desires. It was his attempts to do so that made people laugh. If one
believes, as does his father at the end of He Became a Regular Fellow
that J. Percival Bean simply needed a girl to dress up and look like his mother
to convince him to become a man, I’d suggest he see a therapist about both his
misogynistic and homophobic misconceptions. For what mattered far more in that
film was the fact that a boy like Percy would be bullied in college; or, that a
boy attempting to buy some knitting yarn in a grocery store as in the film Keep
Moving would automatically be tortured and bullied by the clerk. If their
creators could count on their presence to make people laugh, by presenting even
brief moments of their lives, audiences learned about their existence and the
feelings they must have felt. A few audience members might even have gone home
and wondered why their difficulties had even made them laugh.
More importantly perhaps, and maybe unintentionally, what Brown has
shown through his careful research is that in the exceptions to the films
concentrating of the issues between the sissies and their father such as Hilda
Wakes, The ‘Pay-as-You-Enter’ Man,” and “Keep Moving,” the
fact that the writers and directors almost inexplicably still chose to include
“sissy boys” in narratives of otherwise generally heterosexual concerns
indicates that they found such types not only produced a laugh or two but made
their films more interesting. Brown has even produced quotes of the critics of
the day who were deeply offended by their inclusion, which only makes it clear
that their existence had had an effect, they were being noticed and even being
written about by a still very conservative audience. And given the fact that
perhaps as many as 75% of the thousands of silent films made, and that perhaps
as high as 90% of the films made before 1929 have been lost, we can be assured
that other such “sissy films” were released during these same years.
What Brown didn’t realize is that the figures of the sissy also made it
into some of the more notable comic efforts of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, films
that have since become more readily available to us because of the interest in
his famous co-actor Buster Keaton. Although Arbuckle appeared in numerous films
in drag, and Keaton does so in Arbuckle’s 1917 film His Wedding Night,
the far more interesting phenomenon in that film and his The Bell Boy of
a year later was the appearance of a sissy figure primarily for comic intent,
but which nonetheless takes up a significant part of the story of The Bell
Boy wherein that figure is rather bizarrely linked to major
historical figures. Because of the more extended appearance of the “sissy” of The
Bell Boy, I have discussed that film separately within the context of the
year it was released (1918) rather than group it with the others below.
Algie and the six films Brown uncovered, along with the two
Arbuckle comedies link up through the otherwise quite desolate period of LGBTQ
cinema in the US with the earliest of the pansy films of the 1920s such as Ralph Ceder The Soilers (1923),
Roland West’s The Monster (1925), Alfred E. Green’s Irene (1926), R. E.
Williamson and Joseph E. Zivelli’s A Wanderer of the West (1927),
Charles Reisner and Buster Keaton Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), Clarence
Brown’s A Woman of Affairs (1928), Frank Capra’s The Matinee Idol
(1928), and Roy Del Ruth’s The Desert Song (1929), and others.
And most importantly, these sissy films can be seen as precursors to the
serious “Panze Craze” of dozens of such films in the early 1930s which would
truly change the way US film goers would see, for good and bad, gay men.
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(December 2023).
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