Roy Clements | He Became a Regular Fellow / 1916 [Lost film]

how to make a sissy into a man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bennett Cohen (scenario), Roy Clements (director) He Became a Regular Fellow / 1916 || lost film

Surely one of the most obnoxious of the early “sissy” films is Roy Clements’ He Became a Regular Fellow, whose central character, J. Percival Bean (Pat Rooney), a sissy extraordinaire, disgusts his father for his effeminate ways. Mr. Bean (Edward Sedgwick) determines to send him off to college to make a man of him.

     Living in a college dormitory seems to be what high school is to most young gay men of today, a miserable place for the young Bean, tortured by the other boys. He writes home about his grievances to his mother, but Bean Sr. intercepts the letter, writing him back that he must “stick it out.”

      At one point he meets a girl named Trixie (Jessie Arnold). Taking a liking to him, she asks him for a picture of his mother, and soon after makes herself up to dress and look like her, taking Percy out of a date.

    Percy comes back very late, ever-so-slightly intoxicated, the Principal feeling, of course, that it is his duty to notify the father. When Bean discovers what really happened, he immediately arranges for the two to be married, proud that his son has finally become a man.

    In short, the plot presumes that the real problem with a gay boy is his relationship with his mother, and imagines that his “female” mannerisms are related to his identification with her. The only way around this is for a girlfriend to replace the mother so that he might marry her and become happy ever after. And in in doing so, of course, he is defined as a man.

     It’s hard to know even where to begin in explaining the absurdity of the film’s comic assertions. Perhaps by pointing out that homosexuality is again laid at the doorstep of the mother, as if it were her influence that had made him into a “sissy” in the first place, yet another thing the patriarchy blames women for.  And, of course, the very idea that being a “sissy” is merely a state of mind that a good girl might easily be able to change has been the wrong-headed logic among thousands of such devouring women, obviously hoping to sweep up a husband from the dregs of his ineffectual masculinity. Do young college girls still believe that?

      And, of course, the idea that marriage is necessary to define oneself as a “regular fellow” is one of the longest shared illusions among humans since they began to walk the earth. Must one presume, moreover, that once he marries Trixie, his effeminate manners will automatically disappear?

      Finally, we might question whether what we call “effeminacy” in males is necessarily a bad thing, or even has anything whatsoever to do with sex. I know several heterosexual married men who might also be described as slightly lisping, softspoken individuals, some of whom also use a great many hand gestures.

      Accordingly, in one short film, it is absurd for a writer and director to imagine that homosexuality might be identified through effeminate behavior, is an abnormal condition created by a young man’s relationship with his mother, and that the way to resolve this is find a woman willing to convert herself into the mother, which will not only attract the boy—who evidently has been desperate all along to commit incest—but will utterly change the way he walks, speaks, and perhaps even thinks. Good luck with that philosophy! I’m taking bets on how long Percy’s and Trixie’s marriage lasts—even if he can waddle over to the altar.

      This film is all a slightly misconceived Freudian myth that has nothing whatsoever to do with reality, although I doubt whether its creator even meant it to.  It is after all a comedy, a movie intended to make one laugh. Thank heaven by the time of Ralph Cedar’s surprising film, The Soilers (1923) we finally realize a sissy may certainly be someone to be reckoned with, but definitely not someone to be cured.

 

Los Angeles, October 1, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2021).