gay magic
by Douglas Messerli
Throughout most of history LGBTQ forms of love
and sexual activity seemed to the majority of the population exceptional and
abnormal to the degree that it became something almost incomprehensible and
accordingly dangerous and magical, an inexplicable form of love that one might
associate with witchery and the devil, becoming ultimately something evil and
illegal to be destroyed and wiped out, creating what today we describe as
homophobia and its most common manifestation of the threats of the gay bullies
and bashers.
This relationship with magic, in fact,
continues throughout gay and heterosexual literature and is retained in so many
numerous popular songs of inexplicable or unexplainable love that sometimes
love itself—both heterosexual and homosexual—comes to be aligned with magic and
witchcraft. What else do dozens songs such as “That Old Devil Moon,”
“Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” and “It’s Witchcraft” suggest?
LGBTQ cinema has had a great many films that involved witchcraft and
magic, as early as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray we see an
artist so spellbound by his obviously beautiful narcissist subject that he
argues the process of painting itself felt like magic, as if something had
possessed his brush. And, of course, the painting is magical, allowing the true
variations of Gray’s evil life to be hidden from his living human visage.
And as in Wilde’s work the mirror image of the young student of Prague
(in Paul Wegener and Stellan Rye’s film of that name) held his double, a trope
stolen from Edgar Allen Poe’s story “William Wilson.”
The
secret seed of Sidney Drew’s A Florida Enchantment (1914) could
change one’s sexuality to lesbian, bisexuality, or transgender. And the
Frankenstein family’s monstrous creations and the various Dracula myths were
represented as obvious examples of toying with magic and the occult that
provided evidence of a love that lay not only outside of normal human culture
but outside of life itself?
The
uninvited ghosts of lesbian love were conjured up in Lewis Allen’s The
Uninvited (1944) and a whole household of crazy queers were caught boiling
up poison potions, murdering, and torturing others in Arsenic and Old Lace of
the same year, enough to make the youngest born, sibling Mortimer wonder about
his ability to offer a normal sexual relationship to his new bride, marriage
itself having been previously constitutionally against his principles.
And
it is this affiliation with LGBTQ sexuality to magic or witchery that led me to
argue that the seeming heterosexual comedy Book, Bell, and Candle (1958)
is actually a highly coded LGBTQ story, about, once again, an entire family
of outsiders, secretly witches, meaning that they are involved in a queer world
with its own nightclubs, underground network of friends, magic talismans and
potions, forcing one to do all sorts of things you might never imagined,
including falling suddenly in love.
Is
it any wonder that even in the 21st century we still find LGBTQ films that
employ just such tropes?
The
five films below US director Adam Baran’s Jackpot (2012), Marc Marchillo’s
The Curse of the Un-Kissable Kid (2013), Brazilian director Octabo
Chamorro’s Floozy Suzy (2015), Columbian-born Juan Sebastián Valencia’s Magico
(2019), and Mexican director Axel Barranco’s Wish (2020) represent just
of few of queer films dealing with magic in various manifestations, some actually
with wands and potions, others simply with spells, but all ending in love.
Los Angeles, July 20, 2021
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2021).
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