Douglas Messerli | Early Wizards

early wizards

by Douglas Messerli

 

I love The Wizard of Oz and every gay-boy-born-before-1960’s favorite musical diva Judy Garland who sings all about the LGBQ+ Rainbow long before it was ever imagined, as well as that “sissy” of a lion (Bert Lahr), so you might certainly describe me as “A Friend of Dorothy’s.”

      I also recognize that all those who join Dorothy Gale along her Yellow Brick Road trip to the Land of Oz are fully outsiders, in danger from all sorts of authority figures—although in this film, except for the Munchkin town council, authority is primarily matriarchal (including Auntie Em and the homegrown broomstick rider Elvira Gulch) coming from outsiders of another sort, witches good and bad. And even the great Wizard of OZ, a presumably patriarchal figure of heterosexual normality, is finally recognized to be fraud who goes floating off into the greatly inflated nowhere, while Dorothy gets a ride home just by clicking her lovely ruby slippers, which I’ve worshiped at the shrine in which they are now held many a time since they happen to be located in the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Museum in Los Angeles across the street from where I live.

      Yet for all that, I—who have blithely argued for many a work of cinema that no one previously imagined as being queer—have some great difficulty in perceiving the 1939 masterpiece and all of its previous manifestations—which include The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910); Dorothy and the Scarecrow in Oz (1910) now lost; Land of Oz (1910) also lost; The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914); His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz (1914, also titled The New Wizard of Oz); The Magic Cloak of Oz (1917), The Wizard of Oz (1925), and The Wizard of Oz, an animated version from 1933—as  true queer works of cinema, in the sense of sharing the sexual interests of the LGBTQ community. I’ll certainly go with the queer, which is why I have permitted this discussion in these pages, but I have qualms about arguing these remarkable fantasies’ place in the homosexual / transexual / transgender spectrum. I’ll save my discussion of the most significant of these films, the Norman Taurog, Richard Thorpe, George Cukor, and Victor Fleming-directed The Wizard of Oz for my 1930s volume. 

       But in these pages I will discuss the “actual” rather paltry LGBTQ-like figures in two versions of this work, the first of which appears regularly on gay lists, His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz, while the other far more queer-involved work, Larry Semon’s 1925 version, The Wizard of Oz has never been mentioned, to my knowledge, as being of LGBTQ interest

 

Los Angeles, June 18, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).