Joseph Mawra | Chained Girls / 1965

trash talk

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph Mawra (screenplay and director) Chained Girls / 1965

 

Melissa Sky, writing in Bright Lights Film Journal captures the tone of Joseph Mawra’s unenlightened lesbian pulp from of 1965, Chained Girls: “Lesbians have their variations from one group to another. There are those women who are cultured and refined who sneak away to some dirty bar in order to find a trampish-looking woman to make love to. Some women break up homes, forsake children for the love of another woman. Then there are the teenage lesbian or baby butch. They roam the big city streets in large gangs assaulting everyone who falls within their path. Some of the weapons they use run the gamut of fists, lead pipes, chains. Many of these girls eventually end up as drug addicts, alcoholics, and prostitutes . . . Regardless of what the lesbian does or where she goes, her life is a very difficult one. She, like her male counterpart, leads a very lonely and despairing life.”

 

      Sky finds much of this amusing, but the misogynist babble about how the queer world, in this case lesbianism, is a terribly sick one in which dykes run wild and brutal over their meeker femme lovers, its statements, which increase as time passes, about their need for a cure, and their general misinformed mockery of lesbian and gay sexuality strikes too close to home for someone like me, born in 1947.

     Sky makes clear how Mawra got away with this mumble-jumble at a fairly innovative juncture in the presentation of queer sexuality: “One of the ways authors and filmmakers of this conservative era avoided obscenity charges when dealing with homosexual subject matter was to couch their exploration of sexual deviance in scientific terms. Chained Girls writer-director Joseph Mawra uses this tactic, creating a film that is part pseudo-documentary and part pure pornography. Hence quotes from Freud and serious statistics compiled from medical journals are liberally interspersed with gratuitous shots of topless women rolling around on top of each other. The film’s stated purpose is to define the lesbian for the general public, for both “preventative education” (“Only through understanding the facts can we keep lesbianism from becoming a serious social problem”), and, more to the point, sheer titillation. Chained Girls begins by asking in an authoritative male voiceover, ‘Who and what is a lesbian? Is lesbianism a disease or a natural occurrence? Is lesbianism reserved for only a few people, or is it a common happening? How do lesbians live? Are they happy with their lives?’”

      At one point quoting the high suicide rate of lesbians—likely caused by such attitudes that he espouses—one wants to cry out for the outrageous lies he is telling us.

 

Los Angeles, May 30, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Film (May 2025).