Douglas Messerli | Masked Men [essay]

masked men

by Douglas Messerli

                       “Can you trust me, a man who wears a mask?”

                                                      —Diego Vega, Zorro: The Gay Blade                                             

 

All masked men—and women—are automatically suspect of being LGBTQ. The very fact that an individual chooses to replace one identity with a hidden other can only remind us for of the recent past when gay men and lesbians needed to hide their identities, a necessity even today in many countries and a phenomenon which may possibly be repeating itself in the US as hatred for LGBTQ+ people grows in conversative communities and states where even school librarians are being accused of grooming their students for sex through LGBTQ novels and other books. 

 

     That does not mean that all male and female superheroes who are masked are necessarily gay or lesbian or even hiding any aspect of their sexuality; it simply calls that individual into question. And from the earliest of the Zorro films, The Mark of Zorro (1920) directed by the character Fred Niblo, the film’s central character, in his alternation between what is basically an effete and effeminate male totally disinterested in women and his darker half—in what is rather an inversion of the standard metaphor—a mysterious and dangerous lover and Robin Hood-like champion of the people did everything to encourage the gay speculations.

     By 1940, however, given the Film Production Codes’s strict limitations on pansy portrayals and the timidity of director Rouben Mamoulian, Zorro’s mask hid only his face while dismissing the idea that it need cover up any of his personal aberrations and sexual identities. And, accordingly, the clumsy and quite meandering Tyrone Power—whose rumored bisexuality—might have promised a portrayal of a near perfect Zorro, whose mask allowed him to perform on both sides of society, did little to excite us as the first version had. As I note in the essay below, this Zorro could hardly wait to reveal his identity. And, although there are some minor indications that he might have a deeper sensibility than the virile ladies’ man he outwardly portrays, they are never fully explored. This Zorro’s mask so entirely covered over any other possible identity that we never doubted the heteronormativity behind the blackened face as if Power was in fact performing in black face, a stereotypical role of the virile hero.  

 

   The 1974 TV version delimited the mask and returned the hint of Zorro’s bisexuality, or at least his alternating between fop and heterosexual lover. And in the 1981 feature directed by Peter Medak, Zorro: The Gay Blade, bifurcated them into full-out-gay and heterosexual twins. The dangers of this, however, might have been to simply stereotype the gay Zorro while turning the straight one into the film hero. Fortunately, Medak forced the athletic “masculine” twin to remain basically in bed with a sprained leg, while allowing his gay brother to run around the country to engage in heroics, mostly off stage. He focused instead of how the straight characters in this film might be seen to harbor gay tendencies, forcing them to enact various gay stereotypes while freeing up the actual gay figure to go about his heroics and, finally, to appear in drag, attracting straight men in a manner that made one question their sexual predilections or, if nothing else, their definition of the female sex. If by film’s end Medak had again split the two into identifiable individual beings again, befitting the restrictions of Hollywood, he at least asked certain questions about homosexuality and heterosexuality that challenged the values purported in Mamoulian’s version, and even extended those permitted in Niblo’s 1920 version.

      Zorro, in short, has remained a puzzle, a mix of the effete gay Spanish “old” world and the new American masculinity of the West, a figure that did quite find its match again until later superheroes such as Superman and Batman, both also costumed and masked individuals, each with their form of a loyal friend like the first Zorro’s Bernardo.

 

Los Angeles, April 25, 2024