pilgrim’s progress
by Douglas Messerli
Martin Dannecker, Sigurd Wurl and Rosa von
Praunheim (writers), Rosa von Praunheim (director) Nicht der Homosexuelle
ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt (It Is Not the
Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives) / 1971
Early in his perceptive essay on Rosa von
Praunheim’s radical manifesto about the gay male experience, Călin Boto writes:
“It Is Not the Homosexual was
undoubtedly the cherry bomb of German Queer Cinema. Its rough looks and
extravaganza, with a nervous voiceover barely overlapping the campy sketchy
visuals of the narrative, made it a strange animal for film culture at that
time. If anything, it has certain similarities to a subgroup of the New
American Cinema, namely the avantgarde erotica of Jack Smith and Ron Rice, but
also to the histrionic suburban comedies of John Waters and the homoerotic
cheap flicks made by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey in the late ’60s and early
’70s. But these films had more to do with political existence than with
political engagement, and their directors rarely turned against their own
characters (up to some point they even seem to adore their characters and the
over-the-topness of everything that’s on-screen...)”
Von
Praunheim’s film certainly was a “cherry bomb” of sorts, and still startles a
bit today it its seeming attack on the very gay community it sets out to
explore; but that depends upon how you read his work which might be open to
question even after one individual’s multiple viewings.
It
Is Not the Homosexual begins, in fact, a bit like the American film of 17
years later, Roger Stigliano’s Fun Down There, in which a completely
innocent and clueless young man from upstate New York determines to move “down
there” to New York to find out what gay life is really all about. In von
Praunheim’s film the country cousin is Daniel (Bernd Feuerhelm), an attractive
young man dressed in a dark suit who somehow connects up with the handsome,
blond-haired, and more casually and fashionably-dressed Clemens (Berryt Bohlen)
who after a short walk down a German boulevard in which they share banal
information—via a voiceover which continues the narrative throughout—takes
Daniel home for “a cup of coffee.”
It
is no surprise that in the very next scene we observe them in Clemens rather’
kitchily decorated apartment kissing, and a moment later Clemens is telling
Daniel how lonely he is and how much he longs for a sincere friend. There is
from the very beginning of this scene almost a sense of camp, as when Clemens
almost immediately attempts to “court” his young street discovery by pulling
away from the kiss and turning to face Daniel directly to say in an almost Brechtian
manner:
I like you my boy. I’m
so glad we met. You seem so natural
and honest. That’s rare.
Most guys are callous and phony.
Speaking of love while
already thinking of the next guy....
I’ve never stopped
looking for a true friend. Guys don’t want
to be gay. They don’t
want to be different. They want to live
as kitchy and bourgeois
as the average citizen. They long for
a home where they can
live with an honest and faithful friend.
Already, the “assigned” dialogue—since the speeches come not through the
lips of the characters acting in a naturalistic manner, but from an identified
source in the form of the voiceover— is filled with the contradictions that the
film itself will play off of and contradict again with its secondary and
tertiary arguments. But for the moment, we certainly can well imagine that
Clemens is one of those gay men who don’t want to be gay or different and who
obviously desires to live in a sexual relationship more akin to those of
heterosexual society. And those in von Praunheim’s audience who have had any
experience with being gay already may begin to chafe at Clemens’ comments. Who
said we all don’t like being gay and different? And who presumes that we all
desire to live lives as “kitchy and bourgeois” as those with normative values?
Or, we might even ask, who presumes those are the truly normative values?
By
the end of this scene the statements that appeared to represent Clemens’ point
of view, subtly switch to become intrusive generalities of gay life spoken by
some presumable authority such as a government judge, a psychologist, or
possibly even a homosexual apologist.
Moving quickly away from Clemens’ personal beliefs, these
generalizations of gay life almost immediately irritate and anger anyone
invested in the queer experience. Indeed, one might almost imagine these statements,
at first, to be similar to those one might encounter in a didactic student film
on the dangers of homosexuals like the 1950s US shorts Beware!, Boys
Beware!, and Beware of Homosexuals—in Frank Ripploh’s Taxi zum
Klo (1981) we see an example of a German version—used here, one might
imagine, as a camp device to rouse the viewer into his own sense of caution
regarding von Praunheim’s narrative.
The earliest of these, at first, seems benign enough: “Gays demand each
other to be aesthetes, to care about their appearances. It makes them proud and
distinguishes them from the rest. Condemned as sick and inferior by the
bourgeoisie they try to be even more like them in order to wear away their
feeling of guilt....They’re politically passive and conservative in gratitude
for not being beaten to death.” By the time it closes, beginning with the
statement, “A homosexual relationship, as much as both partners want it, is
doomed to fail,” almost anyone who has lived as a gay man, a lesbian, bisexual,
or transgender individual for more than a couple of months should be already
enraged with this movie. Fortunately, the narrative voice reappears celebrating
the love of the two men who have just had sex in front of us.
Given Clemens’ stated values it is not surprising that Daniel soon
leaves the relationship to explore other kinds of sexual relationships and
encounters. If these were presented simply as a series of narrative events we
might almost see Daniel’s Pilgrim’s Progress in reverse or what might better be
described as a Dantean voyage into Inferno as a fascinating study in male gay
sexual variations. Daniel first hooks up with a wealthy art-collector, a man
who surrounds himself with similar men who use their young boys as performing
objects who they show off for their own and other’s pleasure. Certainly, Daniel
learns immensely from his time with his “daddy,” now able to speak of art,
music, and literature, but he soon realizes that he is himself like the
subjects he has acquired, a “representation” of financial and social prestige
instead of a human being to be treasured. One day, he realizes, he too might be
sold off when the elder man grows tired of his accoutrement.
Becoming a barista in a gay establishment, Daniel suddenly finds a new
independence where he can become a regular in the gay culture he now inhabits.
His daily pick-ups introduce him to a world based on, as Boto summarizes: “good
looks, flirts, flings, dress codes” and geniality—a world defined, in short, by
surfaces.
By night he scours the gay bars and clubs where sex depends not only on
the daylight charms and signals but on patience, waiting, and chance (as we
have seen in films such as Ron Peck’s Nighthawks of 1978). Tired of
those determinants, Daniel also begins to explore cruising in public parks, at
leather men and their motorcycle hangouts, and in toilets (the favorite locale
of the character in the aforementioned Taxi zum Klo).
When all these fail to satisfy Daniel’s now seemingly insatiable sexual
desires, he gathers with others from the various gay cliques we have already
encountered—older gay men, motorcycle boys, drugged-out juveniles,
transvestites, and transgender women at an after-hours club to sing, dance, and
decompress. There he surprisingly runs into an old friend.
This seemingly endless struggle for sexual satiation, particularly given
Daniel’s radical transformation from a handsome young man to a dead-eyed,
hulking beast with outsized mutton-chopped sideburns might have been
entertaining if only for its exploration of the limits of gay sexual expression
if it were not for the increasingly rabid commentary of the voiceover
evaluation of gay life that by the penultimate scene of the film has utterly
infuriated any viewer who might have bothered to watch this work by Rosa von
Praunheim—who adopted the female name Rosa as a testament to the pink triangles
gay men were forced to wear in the Nazi Concentration Camps and took on the
name Praunheim from the neighborhood in which he grew up—that might be best
categorized as a moral manifesto.
To give you a sense of the near hysteria that the anti-narrative
accessors’ rant finally reaches, I’ve chosen a longish passage almost at
random:
Most gays resemble the type
of “nice guy” from a good family
who places great value on a
masculine appearance. They lead a
double life, afraid of
being outed as homosexuals. Their greatest
enemy is the flamboyant
“fairy.” Fairies are effeminate homo-
sexuals who attempt to act
like hysterical women. They wear
makeup and are the worst
nightmare of the bourgeoisie and of
closeted gays who could be
exposed by them. Fairies are not as
phony as bourgeois gays.
Gays are often conceited, moody, and
jealous. Fairies overdo
their gay attitudes and ridicule them. They
question society’s
standards and show what it means to be gay.
And later, when Daniel begins to frequent
pissoirs:
Public toilets are the most
popular meeting points for homosexuals.
Gays who have trouble
connecting are forced to have their first
homosexual experience in a
public toilet. Being punished for their
homosexuality by society and
left with a guilty conscience, many
have reduced their
homosexuality strictly to sex. They stand side
by side in constant fear of
discovery and finally if they pick some-
one up, they have to get off
within seconds. A relationship directed
only to a man’s penis is for
many gays the only kind of love-
making they know. They go
from toilet to toilet constantly seeking
satisfaction, which, if
they’re lucky, can only be found
compromised. Gays hold
public toilets in low esteem. They
claim to
despise “toilet-queers,” but secretly go there them-
selves if
they don’t score in one of their fancy bars. Here
they
appreciate the often “masculine laborer” kind of guys
who are not
interested in hiding their lust underneath
fashion and
good manners....
While any LGBTQ person would find these
passages to be filled with stereotypical nonsense, we also cannot help but
sense there is some element of truth behind these vociferous attacks. Why, we
have to ask is the highly concerned gay activist von Praunheim saying all these
things without putting them into any context?
As
one anonymous commentator writing on the Mubi site expressed it: “I don't get
this. Is it supposed to be funny or is it just awkward incompetence. If you are
not gay, this is bound to bore you to death, but if you are gay, do you really
want Rosa von Praunheim to prattle on for over an hour about how fucked up gays
are. I guess, if you see this at a public screening it's good laughs all
around, whereas my main reaction was a deep gratefulness that the Seventies
have long gone past.”
At
the after-hours club, the man whom our anti-hero Daniel met invites him home to
the gay commune in which he lives. There five naked men, laying on the floor,
patiently listen while Daniel describes his Berlin adventures. Boto nicely sums
up the questions and answers they put to him:
“Who are these men? They seem some kind of
radical collective, free love and hard politics (“erotically free and socially
responsible”), who deliver an uncompromising diagnosis: Daniel has been living
the sugar cotton dream of a faux sexually emancipated queer. Instead of
becoming politically aware of his status and making use of it, he offered
himself to frivolous hedonistic fantasies, deeply rooted in meaningless
concepts—sex without responsibilities, fashion, bourgeois art and education,
self-destructive vices etc. They preach a new way of being queer, consisting of
responsible free love, political activism, togetherness with other oppressed
minorities, an en masse coming out etc. Is this von Praunheim’s ideal of
queers? It surely seems so. “Closeted gays must have the guts to come out.
Fairies and leather men should end their feud and fight for their freedom side
by side,” they tell Daniel. “Get out of the toilets, take to the streets,” von
Praunheim concludes with full-screen cardboard signs.”
If
this is von Praunheim’s suggestion of how to erase all the slurs that he has
previously posited against gays in the rest of film, I would argue the film is
a total failure. What these men argue for is in many respects what had already
begun to happen after Stonewall and by 1971 was being argued for in gay
liberation meetings throughout the world. My husband Howard and I met at one in
Madison, Wisconsin while presumably von Praunheim was shooting this work. Yet
many of the major elements of his idealistic manifesto were simply impossible,
given, first of all, that gay men and the entire LGBTQ community (the latter of
which von Praunheim inexplicably ignores in his manifesto) are made up of a
wildly diverse group of individuals not only in their sexual preferences—as the
film has certainly revealed—but socially, financially, and intellectually as
well, and given that fact such a purposeful paradise was simply impossible,
even if many of this communes’ wishes were already granted.
Gays with lesbians, bisexuals, transgender people, and those who just
don’t yet know or may never know where they stand with regard to sexual
orientation, along with their parents and friends took to the streets. The vast
majority of closeted gays came out over the next few decades. Fairies and
leather men joined together in annual Gay Pride marches.
But
at the heart of it, sex, given the AIDS epidemic, even as “responsible” free
love seemed a dangerous thing, although it is still practiced (sometimes not so
responsibly). Contrarily, a large portion of the LGBTQ community fought for and
entered into marriages which these five naked men might also have perceived as
utterly bourgeois. Parks are still cruised, bathrooms still frequented when
they exist. Blacks, Hispanics, and other people of color joined with gays when
it was useful, but often found their needs and the ways to achieve them
radically different from the LGBTQ agendas. If this concluding scene is why
this film is still so very important today then I’d have to agree with the
confused Mubi correspondent: “I’m glad the 1970s are over.”
What von Praunheim really achieved was to create a narrative and
attending commentary that functioned something like the sound of a drag queen’s
fingernails scratching across the clapperboard of this film’s content. It drove
us crazy; it made us mad; it helped us to sit up and ask questions we had long
been afraid to ask. Those lazy nude men could say whatever they might, but we
had already pricked up our ears and begun to fight.
I’d like to see It Is Not the Homosexual all over again, but run
backwards so that we might see Daniel dance through the urinals back into
Clemens’ arms, but with the knowledge of all he had learned to tell his lover
that a relationship is not at all what he had imagined it to be. For god’s sake,
pull down that wallpaper, Clemens, and stroll with Daniel once again down the
Ku'damm. Today it’s a different place. Now that would be a true pilgrim’s
progress.
Los Angeles, January 26, 2021
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and
World Cinema Review (January 2021).
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