the sound of queers
by Douglas Messerli
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As
I note early in Volume 2 of My Queer Cinema, critic Richard Barrios
claims that the “panze craze” came to its full force in 1932. But certainly, as
I have already pointed out in several essays, the obvious gay figure who
generally served no other purpose than to express his disdain and disgust with
all things heterosexual was already appearing in the late 1920s in films such
as The Soilers, Battling Bruisers, Fig Leaves, Irene,
and others. And when the sound was turned on in 1929 out came the nances who
not only waved their arms, pursed their lips, and blinked and winked, but boys
and men who giggled, whined, and chattered their way through the six films
below, a clue to what I argue became, alas, the major transformation of gay
representation until Joseph Breen and Hays Code strictures did away with
absolutely any depiction of homosexuals, forcing directors still interested in
LGBTQ narratives to write in code.
Arguably, the rise of the talkies and the fall of the stock market wiped
out the nascent interest of US and European 1920s filmmakers in LGBTQ
characters, resulting in little but a history of absurd and often hateful
stereotypes for the next 30 years—many critics such as Vito Russo arguing even
longer.
It
is not accidental, I suggest, that the 1920s began and ended with the first
examples of what we might later define as gay porn in Le Ménage moderne du
Madame Butterfly (1920) and Surprise of a Knight (1929), which at
least got to the heart of things rather than simply whispering and tsking about
homosexuality from the corners and edges of the vast room.
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).
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