C.B. Yi | 金錢男孩 (Hanyu Pinyin) (Moneyboys) / 2021

the fly enticing the spider to dance

by Douglas Messerli

 

C.B. Yi (screenwriter and director) 金錢男孩 (Hanyu Pinyin) (Moneyboys) / 2021

 

In terms of its visual beauty, one might characterize Taiwanese-Austrian director C.B. Yi’s freshman movie as taking its cue from the great Taiwanese master, Tsai Ming-liang without the long narrative sense of time of Tsai’s recent films.

 

     This work, about young male prostitutes in mainland China (although filmed in Taiwan to escape government repression) reveals not only the difficulties boy prostitutes discover throughout the world, but the particular complexities of living such a life in China, where at any moment gay hustlers might be arrested, beaten, and banned, often having to leave for other communities when word reaches their shamed families. Yet Moneyboys is also very much a love story, despite the focus of love for the young hero of this work Lian Fei (Kai Ko) altering over time.

    It begins when the far more conservative Fei is living with another prostitute Han Xiaolai (JC Lin), who is far more open and sexually experimental than his neophyte hustler lover, who we see in the very first scene thanking another experienced boy for including him in a threesome, perhaps his first job. Unlike the experienced Xiaolai, Fei cannot afford to offend his clients since almost all the money he makes he sends back to his family in a small village of Southern China, without revealing, obviously, his source of income.

 

    The couple seem near perfect however, particularly in their love scenes, and one could imagine an entire film centered around the vicissitudes of the two in their sweet domestic conflicts. But in fact, these early scenes where we get a sense that there may be enough money in prostitution to actually afford these young men a good life, but, as in any such a role, there are always obvious dangers. From one of his early outings with a john to whom the experienced Xiaolai has argued he should deny his services, Fei returns home having been beaten.

      No sooner has he begun to heal than Xialoai goes out looking for the well-known customer, finds him, and begins to beat him with a pipe. The battle spills over in several neighborhoods, as the abuser and his friends gang up on Xiaolai, running him down on the streets and taking retribution by breaking one of his knees while also thoroughly beating him.

      Xiaolai can hardly crawl back to the housing complex and, in the meantime, before he even reaches home the police arrive to their apartment. Having heard the cries of neighbors, Fei painfully has left his bed and gone into the walkways, suddenly observing the police making their way to his room. Unable to return for fear of arrest and even imprisonment, he is forced the leave the city and his beloved Xiaolai behind, who we later learn has been crippled for life.

      If one might have imagined that the beginner Fei would not have returned to hustling, we are very mistaken as he discover, five years later and more mature, he is now working with a high-class clientele regularly and has made enough money to live in spacious apartment in his new city, surrounded by close friends, with one of whom he apparently shares the place.

 

      We also see an entire encounter with a handsome client, with whom Fei plays roles, treating him almost as if he were his married husband, bringing his sandals and his robe when he enters the apartment, formally serving him tea, and after being fucked even refusing the suggestion that he himself ejaculate, saying that his friend “is the star of the show,” clearly a self-effacing Fei that we do not see in his most of his everyday activities, but which is evidently an aspect of his inner self. We do observe that side of Fei somewhat in his relations with his family to whom he is now sending substantial amounts of money and whom he regularly calls to check up on.        

     And in that sense, Fei continues to be a more conservative force than some of his friends, such as his roommate Chen Wei (Qiheng Sun). When Fei asks how much he plans to gift one of the gay friends, Xiangdong (Yan-Ze Lu) who is suddenly giving up hustling to marry a woman, Lulu (Chloe Maaayan), his best friend refuses to even think about since Xiangdong “already switched sides,” and it’s only a “fake” wedding, while Fei believes it’s only right to perform the traditional custom, even if for Lulu’s parent’s sake, they’re being used as covers.

     Fei’s friend, who has evidently been a lover of Xiangdong, gets drunk at their wedding party and demands that they drink to the bride several times, embarrassing not only the groom, the bride, and her family, but the other friends; but at the same time his intrusions make clear the hypocrisy demanded of many gay men in Chinese culture, forced to eventually pretend to abandon they gay lives in order to satisfy the demands of parents who even pay them to engage, if unknowingly, in the fraud of traditional heterosexual marriage.

      After the ceremony another friend summarizes the situation: “Xiangdong did it right. He quit after earning enough money. He finds a fake marriage to keep his family satisfied.” The same young man describes an incident of a couple of days earlier when he and Lulu encountered a street singer, who claimed that he was once the most successful money boy in Changsha. But fate was not on his side. He fought for someone and would up crippled. He spent two years in prison, reports Fei’s friend. “I heard it was for his lover. But when he was arrested, his lover disappeared.”

      Obviously, it is Fei’s Xiaolai of whom he is speaking or at least a case so similar that it puts Fei into a deep funk.

      In the very next frames, we see Fei in bed, eating an apple, while an older, portly man, obviously a john sits on the edge of the bed. When he finally moves in for sexual contact and Fei turns toward him, he calls in policeman as the “client,” identifying himself as a detective slips handcuffs on Fei.

       We don’t know how Fei escapes the consequences, but a short while later, perhaps to simply escape his current city for a while, the young hustler returns home to Southern China to visit his ailing grandfather. Once there, he is greeted lovingly by his sister, with home he celebrates his return by burning large sums of money he has brought along as a tribute to his dead mother. His father and even his grandfather, who at first doesn’t recognize him as his grandson, all seem delighted by his return. But at a dinner party later that evening, the uncles bring up, as surely they have in the past, the fact that he is still not married. As Fei attempts to ignore their instance that it’s time he found a woman, their comments become more insistent and louder and finally turn into anger and violence as they report the shame they and the rest of his family have hand to endure for the reports of his arrest for prostitution. A fight entails, as Fei escapes the family home the next morning to return to a spot where as a young man growing up in the isolated village he had often gone to swim.

      There he is enjoyed by an old schoolmate Liang Long (Bai Yufan), who he has met with by accident on his arrival home. Long, a somewhat handsome and awkward youth gradually, in a slow conversation of revelation and some resentment, reports that he had gone off after graduation for other jobs but had not been happy working and returned home where things were better. But as the vague conversation and flirtation continues, he admits that he has gone in search of Fei, first in Changsha, where he could not find him, and later in the city where Fei now lives. Going even further, he admits that he too would like to be a money boy, to live the kind of life his old friend now lives. Fei not only attempts to discourage him, but attempts to break off communications as he leaves his family behind, knowing now that there is no return. They were apparently very happy to accept the money he sent, as long as they didn’t know its source. It is another example of the kind of hypocrisy that exists not only in China but in all such cultures where the migrant sends home money without being questioned about its source, but cannot live the values of his old culture if he is to survive.

      Fei is now at a sort of standstill, a young man aging that doesn’t have the sums saved up as did Xiangdong, having done what he thought was the right thing, supporting his family, spending on friends when necessary, participating in traditional patterns of financial sacrifice. Things become even worse when Long suddenly shows up, demanding Fei help him get into “the business.”

       Fei refuses, finding a job working in a restaurant instead, where he is given a back bedroom that looks worse than sleazy motel room, while he has caught a glimpse of Fei’s luxurious apartment.

 

      In the midst of Fei’s suffering, Long rebels, doing damage to the restaurant and abusing a customer. Fei convinces the restaurateur to give Long his job back and himself pays for the damages, but Long refuses, despite Fei’s instance that he pay according to the rules of Chinese culture. As critic Philip Brasor has succinctly summarizes the Long’s argument: “as he [Long] so pointedly explains, every job he’s ever had involves ‘selling my body,’ so he might as well get paid as much as possible for it.”

       Furious for the fact that he is now responsible, in his sense of intense guilt, for bringing such an innocent into his world, Fei attempts to once more dismiss and also violently get rid of the innocent, sending him back to his Southern village. But Long also clearly has fallen in love with Fei as well, and what has become clear is that his odd sense of humor is the perfect balance for Fei’s guilt-ridden intensity.

     When the stubborn Long insists that he will not only remain in the city but find his own way to become a prostitute, Fei has no choice but to bring him into his own home, where his polite john quickly seduces him into sex. Fei takes him to a gay bar where in one of the most charming scenes of this now overtly serious film, the slightly clumsy, corny, but cute small town boy literally plays out his own form of seduction, coaxing Fei onto the dance floor where for one of the first times in the film we see the successful money boy let down his guard and momentarily truly enjoy his body without having to surrender to someone he doesn’t truly love.

 

      The relationship between the two follows, but at almost the same moment, Fei also comes upon the street singer in a café, realizing that it is in fact his former lover Xiaolai.

        The two re-establish their love, but things have radically changed since Xiaolai, no longer able to support himself as a prostitute, has married and has a child, his life like so many young gay men in this film, almost paralleling Fei’s earlier mockery of such relationships, have become a kind of sham, if nothing else a denial of their dominant sexuality and a settling for a life basically of deceit.

       Xiaolai’s wife, like Lulu, is entire aware of her husband’s past life, having accepted it as fully as Xiaolai has devoted himself seeming to her and his child. Xiaolai, perhaps feeling vestiges of their love, even as a cripple, insists he has come to terms with his life and his happy with it.

       Even though the relationship between Long and Fei has progressed through a moving and mysterious, almost mystical evening between the two in memory of Fei’s grandfather who has just died, Fei is not yet ready to give up on his deeper lover of the man who lost his own life to protect his lover. Trapped in the past, Fei meets secretly with Xiaolai’s wife, providing her with a washing machine and the child with other gifts. In his imagination he hopes, in fact, to bring the entire family into his and Long’s own life as what appears to be a sort of polyamorous relationship, unthinkable in Chinese culture, but something upon which he has become fixated.

        Hearing of his plans, the previously seeming innocent quickly becomes very smart, threatening to, and finally leaving his lover if he cannot come to terms with the past, to accept what has happened fully without further regrets and guilt just as Xiaolai apparently has.

        Long lays out the situation quite fully: “Don’t deceive yourself anymore. You’re always living for others. Do you think that makes you a great person? The way you sacrifice yourself, you constantly hurt yourself, and sometimes others too. Xiaolai has left the pain behind. I know that you love me. We can have a good life together. We can also live the life we want. Isn’t that good enough?”

        Fei: “You are family. He is my beloved. You can’t change that.”

        And finally, the comic figure takes off his mask: “Do you think you can really hurt me like that? …You devoured me. That’s not love.”

 

       Xiaolai has tried to warn Fei away, even telling him to never again visit their home again; but Fei continues, finally even stalking the slower moving prey in an earie late-night encounter, when

finally catching up to Xiaolai, who stands near to him and in what seems like many long minutes comes close to completing but finally refuses the kiss. Their relationship, it is apparent, is finished, a thing of the past.

 

       Now Fei has no one, no lovers, no family, despite all his sacrifices, all of his self-demeaning actions in which he himself never seemed to be truly there. Who is he? This beautiful young man come to be so successful for attracting others to him? In a long, slow frame Fei sits pondering just such questions.

        Fortunately, the lover rings not only twice, three times, four, but keeps buzzing toward the spider as Fei has described himself—just like at the bar, finally enticing Fei once more into the dance of life.

       I found this film beautiful and mesmerizing. In Taiwan, however, it was perceived quite differently. In the Taipei Times critic Han Cheung took the film to task for a great many serious problems and even grievances, particularly for C. B. Yi’s use of the obvious Taiwan landscape as a pretend China. “Given the tensions between Taipei and Beijing, it might raise a few eyebrows for Taiwanese to see their homeland portrayed as part of China.  Politics aside, however, CB Yi, the Chinese-Austrian director who is using a pseudonym for fear of reprisals against relatives still living in China, has made some other questionable decisions.”

       Most of his complaints involved the strange mix of languages, the use of traditional Mandarin spoken by some quite flawlessly, but by other figures in manner which in the US we might equate with something like Brooklynese. In the Southern China scenes, in particular, Cheung was appalled that while some of Fei’s family spoke properly in Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese), while his father and Long speak with strong Beijing accents, obviously unable to speak the local tongue. I should imagine this would be akin to encountering a family speaking in the dialect of the US southern Mississippi, with two of the local figures entering into the conversation with a waspy Bostonian accent.

      One can be quite empathetic for his viewpoints, but it hints slightly at a self-censoring attitude that criticizes the director for locating a work with gay sexual content that would have not been allowed in another, by locating it supposedly in more open-minded country and, moreover, critiques Yi’s inability to find actors who might properly speak the proper Chinese dialects instead of employing local Taiwanese actors. Apparently Cheung because of the political situation, sees such subject matter verboten in a free country, and would have preferred that all of its actors had been born and raised in China, having learned proper Mandarin. He seems to be nodding more to Chinese attitudes than to those of his own country. Moreover, whatever happened to the “suspension of disbelief,” one might ask.

      To the outsider, of course, these are mute points, and the film as a whole, while certainly not perfect in his pacing or in its resolution of the dilemmas it presents, is a moving work of art, particularly for a first-time director.

 

Los Angeles, December 28, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).

Akira Kamiki | Top 10 Lugares em São Paulo (Top 10 Places to Visit in São Paulo) / 2018

the bridge

by Douglas Messerli

 

Akira Kamiki (screenwriter director) Top 10 Lugares em São Paulo (Top 10 Places to Visit in São Paulo) / 2018 [14 minutes]

 

In Brazilian director Akirka Kamiki’s short 2018 film two very different kind of photographers, Plinio (Cleyton Nascimento) and Argentinian Fran (Esteban H. Esquivel), the latter visiting the city of São Paulo for a single Sunday, meet up.

Somewhat as in Richard Linklater’s 1995 film Before Sunrise, the two, despite their vast differences, find one another irresistible and spend the day together as Plinio, a social activist who photographs people shows his special vision of São Paulo to the visitor, who primarily focuses his attention on buildings, rarely incorporating individuals into his landscapes.     

     The relationship develops even though Fran has only a few words of Portuguese and Plinio cannot speak Spanish nor English, the latter language Fran uses to communicate in Brazil and other countries.      At first Plinio even suspects that Fran may be playing a role as a way to pick up young men, but quickly realizes his open naiveté when it comes to interactions with people. And before Fran even quite knows what’s going on, Plinio has grabbed him by his camera strap and pulled him into the busy world of one the largest of South American cities.

 

     But it’s clear that Plinio is not quite sure of Fran’s behavior, asking him if people “xavecam” in Argentina, which he describes as “flirting, wooing, dating.” For Fran it is simple. It’s usually starts with liking how someone looks and they something you like about the person. For instance—as he touches Plinio’s frizzy hair do—“I like your hair,” Plinio pulling away even though he has previously complemented Fran about his long hair.      

     Fran describes himself as taking “travel pictures,” the most important thing being the understanding of space. Soon after, he describes himself: “I am the bridge between the beauty of architecture and people’s wanderlust,” none of which Plinio comprehends—that is until Fran shows him some of his pictures on his cellphone of France. Plinio enjoys the pictures, but seems to be laughing at them as Fran sees it, demanding his phone back. But actually, Plinio is just commenting on the fact that in only one photo is a garden with people. They are, after all, the pictures of a well-traveled photographer, not at all like the ones Plinio shoots with his cruder equipment.

     He photographers only current events: “Workers, students, housewives, everyone [taking] to the streets.” If Plinio could not understand what Fran was saying about his out, neither can Fran “get it,” when Plinio explains what he does. Plinio takes him into a bookstore and shows a book of his photographs, all closeups of people’s faces, the faces of just those whom he has described.

      “I photograph people, refugees who come to São Paulo.”

      Fran asks what he wants him to say, Plinio laughing, “You can praise me, but it has to be in Spanish.”

      It is getting dark, and Plinio has to catch his bus home. “You could come with me,” he adds.

     But Fran must go back too. The two men are doomed in their short time together to lose the pleasure of one another’s company as the sun sets.

      Plinio takes Fran to one final site, a large fallen tree with huge leaves that have continued to grow despite the trees collapse. And there they finally kiss, the tourist visit and the current events between people occurring like a bridge between their two cultures.

 

Los Angeles, December 28, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).

Alice Guy Blaché, Harry Schenck, and Edward Warren | Algie the Miner / 1912

conversion therapy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alice Guy Blaché, Harry Schenck, and Edward Warren (directors) Algie the Miner / 1912

 

     Since I wrote this review in 2020, I have certainly come to see the comic elements about this film as well, and don't necessarily associate the viewpoint of conversion as being that of the directors or writers, since this is primarily a satire. Yet, I couldn't at the help but express my dismay in forcing such a figure into what is a conversion therapy even as a comic maneuver. And I have now revised by older commentary below.

 

Finally in the 1912 film directed by Alice Guy, Harry Schenck, and Edward Warren (I’ve purposely inverted the usual male-first listings, since Guy was also the producer) we get a truly early gay film, staring the effeminate Billy Quirk, desperate to marry his wealthy girlfriend, Clarice Jackson—for god knows what reason—who is told by his future father-in-law that if he can tough it up as a man in a certain period of time that he can marry his daughter (Mary Foy).

 

    That means “going west,” to learn from rough-neck cowboys how to become a masculine man. The results are quite hilarious as he begins by attempting to kiss the cowboys before they try to take control of him, particularly under the control of a hirsute, heavy-drinking man to whom Algie takes a liking, attempting to help him overcome his alcoholism. Gradually—and so, unfortunately American—Algie is taught how to use a gun, and, more importantly, how to become a miner of gold—the major source of wealth in those gold rush days.

      Quirk gradually turns the gay Algie into a figure suitable to Clarice’s father, who is able to return home, now forcing open the door to his future family’s home in the “cowboy” way, pushing down the frame and entering the house as a kind of boisterous hero. He has now clearly become a straight man—in the very worst sense.

      It’s a tragedy, celebrated by the family and the film, as after the earliest version of “Conversion Therapy,” cured evidently from his homosexuality and rich from his discovery of the gold mine, now a quite brutal masculine, gun-toting, individual who no woman should truly desire.

      Algie has, before our very eyes, been transformed from a pansy into the kind of being that represents some of the major failures of American straight men. Why he desires the socially aspiring Clarice is never explained, except perhaps to rid himself of his natural sexual desires or his dismissal of the world in which he previously lived.

      And in that sense we might suggest that he has now lost the being with whom evidently Clarice had fallen in love. Algie, in short, has lost his soul, unable to remain the loving being he truly is. The engagingly gay figure has been emasculated by the writers’ script.

      This is one of the saddest stories I have ever heard, as writer Ford Maddox Ford began his novel The Good Soldier. I’d love to have seen him kiss the cowboys continuously, and we can suspect that despite his marriage to Clarice, he might one day want to return to that activity. 

      Algie the Miner transplants an interesting gay male into a world into which he should never have entered. The gold he was seeking was not in the glittering rocks, but in the hearts of the people with whom he lived.

      In the end, this is a film I cannot quite forgive.

 

Los Angeles, January 13, 2020

Douglas Messerli | The Sissy [essay]

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).