Don Roy King | New Beginnings Summer Camp / 2013 [TV (SNL) Episode)

the real outsiders

by Douglas Messerli

 

Seth Meyers and Colin Jost (head writers), Don Roy King (director) New Beginnings Summer Camp / 2013 [4 minutes] [TV (SNL) Episode]

 

The September 20, 2013 episode of Saturday Night Live starring Ben Affleck is basically a far less funny version of the skits of Jamie Babbit’s 1999 gay film, But I’m a Cheerleader, where star Natasha Lyonne, a high school cheerleader, is sent off to a gay conversion camp.

     In the discussion with his new group of gay young men and women, Marvin, their camp director attempts to convince these you people who believe that they were born gay, that they’re truly not and in three days will certainly convince them they are straight. “Hetero is better yo,” he insists.

     However, since they seem to be missing two counselors, we warns them not to wonder off towards the hot springs or the tall grass, or the smooth rocks behind the waterfall where you can’t be seen.

     After polling the boys and girls, all convince that they were born gay, he tries to make it clear that they’re simply wrong by trotting out his wife, Deirdre, who is mostly is church every day and he can hardly bare to kiss, and displaying the camp Music and Arts Director, Mike (Taram Killam), who used to be his gay roommate, that conversion is not only possible but preferable—despite the fact that he can hardly keep from kissing Mike. “But once you go straight, you know that it’s great."

      He announces, soon after, that tonight is “Movie Night,” the movie being The Outsiders, which even he perceives, with its highly homoerotic images, is hardly something that might help in their conversion. He’s now afraid that a lot of them are going leave the camp much gayer than when they entered, particularly when the cook, Rico, announces that for dinner the are having a hot dog eating contest. He decides to dim the lights and let the guys tear each other apart.

     I have to admit, that over the past several years, Saturday Night Live, in its total embracement of absurd stereotypes on all subjects imaginable, has been less and less successful as a humorous entertainment source.             There is also humor, one might remind the SNL writers, in exploring the standard notions of what used to be funny as opposed to what we not perceive. But SNL writers never go over their early juvenile attentions to what was outrageously outré. Today, it might demand a sophistication of thinking nobody on the show even quite knows once existed in Noel Coward or the thousands of other 1930s and 1940s coded films.

 

Los Angeles, June 21, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).

 

 

Tom Prezman and Tzor Edery | Maurice’s Bar / 2023 [animation]

the algerian

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tom Prezman and Tzor Edery (screenwriters and directors) Maurice’s Bar / 2023 [15 minutes] [animation]

 

On a train going nowhere, a former drag queen calls up her memories of one of Paris’ first gay bar, owned by Jewish-Algerian Moise (Maurice). Located on the Ru Duperré, this animated film takes us back to 1909 in Paris. An apparent woman knocks on the door and is permitted entry. It is the drag queen Bobette, who will soon be telling us this story.

 

  Her friends hope no one followed her there, “like so many follow you to the bed.” And they’re soon relating the numerous recent arrests. Maurice, known as The Algerian, was also in prison, one declares, for having kissed a man on the streets of Algiers. Rumor has that he once killed a man with a single punch.

    It also appears at Maurice is Jewish, since one of them comments “I thought Jews weren’t supposed to have tattoos.” Another reports that he sold furs in Algiers. And just as suddenly the handsome Maurice appears in a white sable coat. Everyone runs over the kiss him, particularly Bobette. The entire group, Maurice included, comments on the beautiful buns of one man who passes their table.

    Outside, however, police seem to be gathering, as within the drag queens begin to paint their eyes. The show begins with an obscene dance. Beardless and rough men, prostitutes of all genders, women in trousers, all are at Maurice’s. Two men passionately kiss onstage.

     They mention another bar of the past, Le Scarabée. But few seem to recall it, believing Maurice’s bar to be the first. But some recall it, a bar they visited in 1900 owned by two lesbians. It was closed down by a police raid just a few months after it opened.

     They mention that the police also regularly visit Maurice’s, to “out ‘little theater of insults to morality.” One adds “In the evening they seek are company and at night, they arrest us.” “Either way, we’re fucked,” adds a third.

     But this night the wolves are waiting outside the door.

     We’re now told another story, how after a few days after opening the bar a client shot Maurice in the chest, someone who wanted the bar closed. Or perhaps someone with a deep jealousy, a lover from his past?

     As Bobette sings, we note that the police have gathered in full force just outside the door. But the three who enter, simply wish him a bonsoir, and join the singer upon the stage. Three artists are arrested for dancing and singing, so the newspapers report the next morning, “in a small sinful bar.” They are accused of public indecency, feminine impersonation, and the corruption of the youth. Does this sound familiar, even today as many Southern states in the US are attempting to once more ban drag performances?

 

     Its owner, so we are told, will have no choice but to close the bar.

     In the next frame chaos has taken over; the bar is gone. It is now 1942 in the French Occupied Zone. Now, 33 years later, the narrator reveals that they (this time the Nazis) have also taken Maurice away, this time as part of the holocaust (a Jewish homosexual). They provide him with a new tattoo.

     “We should have known what the future reserved for us, the perverts, the foreigners, the degenerates. Everyone looks the other way thinking only we shall be hurt. But war, it’s like a drunken drag queen doing a show who pitilessly mocks everyone in the crowd and leaves nobody unscathed. You’ll die in those damned camps. I’ll never see you again. All that remains are my memories of the bar and of you.

      The final credits read: “Moise ‘Maurice’ Zekri 1879-1942. Born in Algeria, lived in Paris, died in Auschwitz. Owner of the second queer bar in Paris.”

      One suspects, given the wonderful animation of this Israeli-French production, and the increasingly loss of gay and lesbian bars in LGBTQ history, that eventually we might find many more documentaries, histories, and fictional works based on the substantial institutions that these gathering places have offered to LGBTQ+ individuals over the years. Several books on the subject have become available over the last few years.

 

Los Angeles, June 21, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).

Douglas Messerli | The Man That Got Her Way: Marion Davies in the 1920s [essay]

the man that got her way: marion davies in the 1920s

by Douglas Messerli

 

Between 1922 and 1929, in both silent and talking pictures, actor Marion Davies performed cross-dressing roles as a man in four films. In each of these works, particularly in Little Old New York and Beverly of Graustark, by pretending to be a male the character attained something that the male compatriots could not achieve. In all of these works, she returned before the end of the film, to her sheltered world as a woman, reaping the benefits of marriage and other feminine awards. But in her time as a male, she achieved degrees of independence and new perceptions that she could not have otherwise been available to her as what still considered to be the inferior sex.

 

      In fact, Davies’ cross-dressing figures were an important new phenomenon in the 1920s regarding LGBTQ depictions. The most common LGBTQ expression in cinema before this period were the numerous representations of males dressing up as women, almost entirely for comic effects. Indeed, these imitators learned little about the female sex and were not truly interested in the sexual possibilities made available to them in drag, except in a few instances in Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s and Harold Lloyd’s films. For the most part their characters simply brought about laughter because of the costume and the pretense, without the filmmakers caring at all to explore the other implications of gender changes.

      If second decade of the 20th century represented a more serious exploration of gender and the advantages (and disadvantages) that it provided to women in the ground-breaking films such as Urban Gad’s Zapatas Bande (Zapata’s Gang) (1914), D. W. Griffith’s Judith of Bethulia (1914), Mario Roncoroni’s (Filibus (Filibus: The Mysterious Air Pirate) (1915), and Joseph Kaufman The Amazons (1917), in the 1920s these early outliers served as influences for a far common exploration of women’s sexuality and power in numerous works such as Sven Gade and Heinz Schall’s Hamlet (1921), and in the films of  Swanström, Sloane, Czinner, Wellman, and Pabst.

       The majority of these were not US productions it should be noted, which makes Davies’ far more pop culture-based historical romances so very important and interesting. Except for The Clinging Vine, which studied the cross-dressing transition in reverse, Davies’ four films bravely took up the issue not as a comic trope, although there were certainly a number of comic results, but as a serious study of what life might be like for a woman given the opportunity of the man’s world, and how she would adapt both spiritually and sexually to those possibilities. In nearly every case, Davies’ women, just as the central character in Ernst Lubitsch’s Ich möchte kein Mann sein (I  Don’t Want to Be a Man) (1918), were only too happy to return to their feminine selves along with the limitations and benefits that brought with it. But her characters, nonetheless, discovered that even as a man they often remained attractive to the opposite sex—the first open hints that men might also be erotically attracted to their own sex—and, more importantly, that they were given the opportunity to bring about changes never previously possible to them as women, early feminist lessons that had already begun to be explored by Alice Guy (Blaché), Gad’s Zapata’s Gang and Hamlet, and Rancoroni’s Filibus.

     It might be argued that this female cross-dressing pattern was the most notable shift in the 1920s in the treatment of homosexual and transgender figures, despite the rise of other serious explorations of queer behavior.

 

Los Angeles, May 18, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022). 

Cecil B. DeMille | Manslaughter / 1922

flaming creatures on a match stick

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jeanie MacPherson (screenplay, based on the novel by Alice Duer Miller), Cecil B. DeMille (director) Manslaughter / 1922

 

Almost no character from Cecil B. DeMille’s 1922 film Manslaughter is in any manner likeable. Heiress Lydia Thorne (Leatrice Joy) is a spoiled, selfish, and self-destructive rich girl who speeds around the neighborhood and attends wild parties like one early in the film at the local roadhouse, filled with the same kind of people who she represents, the drunken children of the rich and famous which 1920s cinema loved to portray as symbols of American decadence. The kind of “careless people” like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tom and Daisy, who smash up things and then retreat “back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

 

    Rather inexplicably, the county District Attorney, Daniel J. O’Bannon loves Lydia, more, an intertitle tells us, for who she might become than for whom she currently is. Why he would attend such a wretched event, particularly given his puritanical values and his tendency to sermonize like someone of the girl’s father’s generation, is beyond me. Besides, Lydia seems to be making out just fine with the corrupt State Governor Stephan Albee (John Miltern) who even is willing to gamble with a drunken girl (Lydia) in order to marry her. She loses, but O’Bannon intercedes.

      Indeed, O’Bannon is a true spoil-sport even if the party is rather disgusting, including as it does a boxing match for women, an obvious T&A treat for the males in which the girls compete in an old-fashioned peg-stick race (these are not the little sticks with which youngsters play nor the computer game, but real life-size peg sticks upon which you place your feet and move by jumping up and down in balance).

  

     The only reason that this film is included in these pages is because, observing the mass of youthful moving flesh at the party, O’Bannon conjures up his vision of a Roman orgy in which masses writhe on the floor not terribly unlike what Jack Smith shows us in his 1963 experimental flick Flaming Creatures, although DeMille casts hundreds rather than a mere couple of dozen. And in the midst of this heaving mass of flesh imagined by good boy O’Bannon are two women, perhaps with bared breasts—it’s hard to see, but certainly, suggested to the imagination—who keep kissing one another, described by many film commentators to this day as “the first lesbian kiss” on screen.

       Accordingly, it’s not really in the film itself, but simply presented as a figment of the District Attorney’s prurient vision—which, incidentally, allows the barbarian conquer her to order up rape, plunder, and murder, the camera showing several nubile women be carried off. Clearly the decadents were created to be raped and slaughtered in the good old traditions of the USA.

        Nothing else in Manslaughter has anything to do with LGBTQ behavior except perhaps when Lydia, by this time imprisoned for having attempted to outrace a motorcycle cop, whose death she has caused, kisses her former maid, Evans (Lois Wilson), who has been earlier imprisoned for having attempted to steal some of Lydia’s jewels in order to pay for her young son to travel to California since he is certain to die, probably of consumption, if he remains in New York.

       It is, of course, O’Bannon, who despite his love for her—or as the movie would have it, because of his love for Lydia—serves as the prosecuting attorney, winning his case as always with bombast and remonstration.

       Actually, the on-screen trial is not half bad, with all of the figures, including a court artist, the testifying witness, the bereaved wife, and a constantly objecting defense attorney who we have come to expect from watching years of courtroom drama in films like 12 Angry Men, and TV series like Perry Mason. The jury finds her guilty and the judge delivers his usual 3–5-year sentence, the same he previously handed down to Evans, who was forced the leave her beloved, dying son in the hands of his elderly and penniless mother.

     As one might expect, Lydia is unable to do anything in prison, from washing clothes to scrubbing floors, or even carrying the prison slop, and almost immediately falls into a swoon where she dreams of killing the District Attorney and the Judge. Evans, at first, is perfectly ready to gloat over her former employer’s impossible position, but gradually comes to see that hate will destroy her, and attempts to help Lydia come back to active life in her imprisonment.

       By the time she and Evans are freed, Lydia has learned her “lesson” and is ready to spend her wealth in helping others with Evans at her side. Perhaps it is, after all, a kind of lesbian relationship.

      But meanwhile, if you care, O’Bannon—realizing the old adage “You always kill the one you love”—has become an alcoholic, having quit his position as a lawyer long ago. He now stumbles through the New York City streets as a drunkard, happening upon a coffee and donut hand-out trailer set up and manned by Lydia and Evans on New Year’s Eve. 

      Encountering his old flame once again, he attempts to hide, she determined now to help save him. But he rejects her help, insistent on his own punishment for a three-year isolation in which he hopes overcome his alcoholism and return to society.

      He succeeds, of course, despite a series of severe temptations. And is now running against the corrupt Albee for governor. On the very night before the election which he is slated by all the polls to win, Lydia returns to him and he is ready finally to join forces with the woman he has loved all along. Albee, however, slithers in to remind him that it would be impossible for an ex-convict to become the mistress of the governor’s mansion.

       Lydia is ready to give him up for his own good, but O’Bannon, suddenly speaking over the radio announces he is pulling out of the race: nothing is worth losing Lydia all over again.

       If you like that plot, welcome to hetero-heaven, where men and women get together simply because they deserve to and are blessed with normal loves and desires. Hollywood would certainly never have permitted a queer man or woman to arrive at such a felicitous end, had they even been interested in presenting their story. Both have fought their demons, represented in DeMille’s phantasmagoria as an orgy where everybody loves everybody else. Damn hippies! Damn Commies! Damn Democrats! Damn liberals! Damn whatever you to damn.

       Now that I’ve told you the story you needn’t bother with the numerous bad prints that are readily available of this film on the internet. Interestingly, I suspect DeMille paid more for the Roman Orgy scene than he did for the filming of the rest of this melodrama.

 

Los Angeles, June 27, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).

Andreas Köstler | 2 Jungs (2 Boys) / 2018

spilt milk

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andreas Köstler (screenwriter and director) 2 Jungs (2 Boys) / 2018 [4 minutes]

 

German director Andreas Köstler’s 2 Boys doesn’t have a very complex story going for it. Two young mean (Tom Olcay and Tim Schaub) glimpse each other coming and going to their apartments which are on the same floor of a dreary high rise black house. And clearly both like what they see.

     Upon their second encounter one of the boys checks out Grindr, only to discover his neighbor’s picture. He sends a message, which is finally returned before they share a quick phone call. By the

end of 4-minute movie, we see them returning to the same apartment with groceries, apparently now a happy couple as they proceed to hug one another, dropping a bottle of milk, winkingly suggesting they now also an even more treasured white liquid.

 

    There’s really nothing here. Love at first sight? The wonders of Grindr? The dreary life of “anonymous block houses?” Even the possible topics of this little film seem rather lame and empty. These happy consumers don’t have any reason, evidently, to cry over spilt milk.

 

Los Angeles, June 21, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).