George Coe and Anthony Lover | De Düva: The Dove / 1968

o, brave new world!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sidney Davis (screenplay), George Coe and Anthony Lover (directors) De Düva: The Dove / 1968

 

If you ever attended art house foreign film in the late 1960s, there is a good chance you will have seen this short parody based mostly on Ingmar Bergman films of a few years earlier, most notably Wild Strawberries (1957) and The Seventh Seal (1957). This short film, De Düva: The Dove played alongside some of the most notable world cinema of the day.

    It was what we called simply “a hoot” at the time, but looking back on it now, and realizing some of its then almost unthinkable subject matter and given its superb young actors it is now far more interesting, perhaps, than some of the classic films to which it served as comic break.

    Although, for inattentive viewers, it first may have appeared to be yet another film translated from the Swedish, the film was, in fact, almost completely in English with many of the nouns ending in “ska” along with a few words in Yiddish and German.

    Much as in Wild Strawberries, a 76-year-old physics professor is traveling by chauffeured car to give a university lecture, but suddenly determines to visit his boyhood home. More specifically, he has to take a dump, and knows that at the “old family home” there is still a friendly outhouse.

    Actually, the film begins with a dove dropping “dovakaken” (translated as “dove doody”) on the front windshield, which forces the poor chauffeur (David Zirlin) to stop the car and wipe off the bird slime. The incident is repeated in different variations throughout the film, and the dove becomes a kind of symbol without any particular referent attached, except perhaps for the vagaries of fate.

     In this first case, Victor Sundqvist (George Coe) demands from the back seat that the chauffeur should take the west road so that he might visit the “old house,” the chauffeur warning him that it’s the long route, and that he may be late for the lecture where the entire faculty is waiting.

    Victor explains that he has his reasons, as he now takes over the narrative, commenting on how brittle and worn the woods look, introducing himself, naming his age, and reporting that he, quite incredibly, has last year won the Peace Prize in Nuclear Physics. He adds, for no apparent reason that he has a hernia.

     They arrive at the old house, and it is here that he makes use of the outdoor john, and it is there he finds a ceramic dove that leads him to think back upon the past.

     He was young and handsome in those days, he notes, as he exits the outhouse and in the last days of summer runs to his beautiful sister Inga (Pamela Burrell) who he kisses long and intensely upon the lips, the siblings obviously involved in an incestuous relationship.

 

   But meanwhile, uncle Anders (Peter Turgeon) is giving the young Victor a farewell party before his nephew returns to the Institute. At the party is his cousin Sigfrid (Madeline Kahn, in her first movie role) and his best friends, Gustav (Tom Stone) and Olin (Stan Rubinstein).

     His friends sing a short drinking song to Victor, while the brother and sister stare into one another’s eyes, Sigfrid touching Inga’s hair as she offers her up a “phallican symbol” (a cigar), to which Inga somewhat dismissively responds in something close to actual Swedish, “Nej tacken.”

    Victor offers her a rosebud, which Inga gladly accepts, but immediately runs off, likely in sorrow for her lover’s near departure, Sigfrid commenting in the strange conglomerate of English with Swedish-sounding endings, “Someday Inga will love me when she sees what fools men are.”

     Uncle Anders wonders aloud to Sigfrid when she will stop trying to force herself on Inga; her answer is “When you stop trying to force yourself on Mooska.” A large cow is standing next to him.

     What are you implying, Anders enquires, Sigrid answering, while looking off in the opposite direction at her cracked mirror, “You forget, my dear Anders, my bedroom window overlooks the barn.” The cow aggressively moos.

      Meanwhile, Victor has caught up with Inga, who wonders what is wrong. She tells him of a horrible dream where, as she put his rose into a vase the night before, a shadow came across her, causing her to be cold and the room feel totally empty. And when she awoke the rosebud was shriveled up and had died.

      He attempts to comfort her, telling her it was just a bad dream, and points to a dove hovering nearby. The dove drops its “dovekakken” this time directly upon his eye.

      Inga once more runs off, with Victor unable to catch up, particularly after he trips and falls. But eventually they both encounter Death (Sid Davis), who admits that he has been stalking her recently. “The time is coming near” he mutters in a mix of Latin, German. and Swedish-sounding words, for her to follow him into darkness.

     But Victor, remembering that death like gambling, challenges him to play a game of badmintonska (badminton); if she wins, she is free to live.

      If she loses, however, Death insists he will take Victor as well.

     The game is a long one, with Death speaking the entire time of how he controls the Moon and so much else; and it is soon apparent that he near his final volley, except at the that moment a Dove flies by, dropping its slime this time upon what Death describes as his “schmatta,” the Yiddish word for “rags,” or clothing that has seen better days; losing his focus the ball lands on his thorax. Death kills the dove with his badminton racket.

      But he has lost the game, as brother and sister run off the river to go skinny-dipping.

 

      The older Victor leaves the outhouse feeling much better now.

    So our little comic short, telling a tale of incest, lesbian desire, bestiality, and an encounter with death, is perhaps as shocking to some audiences of the day as the sexual content in the 1968 Bergman film, Hour of the Wolf.

      All said, however, the real delight of The Dove lies not in its story but in the made up language it employs, something that cannot be effectively expressed in an essay, but needs to be experienced by watching the work of art. The essence of this little gem exists in the very way we perceive reality, through words, even when they simply echo through our mind as cognates.

 

Los Angeles, October 25, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

Volker Schlöndorff | Baal / 1970

creating a work of art which no one can like

by Douglas Messerli

 

Volker Schlöndorff (screenwriter, based on the play by Bertolt Brecht, and director) Baal / 1970

 

It’s little wonder that Bertolt Brecht’s first full-length play of 1918 seldom is revived. As actor Ethan Hawke, reiterating the viewpoint of playwright Tom Stoppard wrote, “If you do Baal right, then no one can like it.”

     To do it wrong, to allow the wandering poet who utters inanities filled with romantic metaphors and similes that speak of the beauties of nature, the strength of trees, the tender drips of water off their leaves, etc. etc.—which the central figure spouts as lines of wise significance to, in this case, taxi cab drivers—is to make the drunken, misogynist, murderer, and social fiend, a kind of Nietzschean hero, a criminal who stands outside the law and apart of any decent human standards of behavior.

     Hawke definitely had a role in preserving the Television movie, directed by the great German filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff. After seeing the original at the Cannes Film Festival, Hawke inquired about it, with Schlöndorff responding that—once Brecht’s widow, Helene Weigel, angered upon seeing it on television, had immediately pulled the rights, allowing no more performances of it—he canned the banned film and no longer knew of its whereabouts.

     Eventually, the film was rediscovered in some rusty film cans labeled simply “S.” Restored, this film was eventually re-released on the august Criterion label, whose site I visited to the other day to watch it.

 

    At least to my way of perceiving—I have never seen a stage production of the play— Schlöndorff got it just about perfect, despite Weigel’s abhorrence of the work. Eric Rentschler, a scholar of film history describes the work as both “fascinating and difficult,” which is what I might argue is the telling this play deserves.

     Critic Michael Barrett speaks interestingly of Brecht’s pre-Marxist intentions in writing the drama in response to the expressionist writing The Loner (Der Einsame) by the soon-to-become-Nazi dramatist Hanns Johst, whose work lionized just such a disgusting figure.

     Film critic Michael Barrett further illuminates us with Brecht’s own youthful thinking:

 

“Writing just after WWI had eradicated a generation, and in direct response to…Johst's The Loner, Brecht's episodic drama illustrates a double-bind for the original artist. One can either submit to the pampered success of patrons and official approval, or one can be untameable. In the latter case, however, the result isn't a valiant hero but an antisocial, indulgent wastrel "beyond good and evil" (to coin a Nietzschean phrase), living outside the bounds of polite society until he chokes on his own vomit.

     … Brecht was about nothing if not alienating his audience, by which he meant a kind of emotional insulation against being swept into a satisfying escapist drama. He employed various devices to distance the audience from the drama, the better to analyze its messages critically and intellectually, not emotionally. In the case of this almost random collection of scenes, he provides heightened poetic language and songs amid the depiction of the squalor of his anti-hero, the least of whose qualities is that of the reckless womanizer. "Baal" happens to be the name of a demon or a god of storms and fertility, and the play is a famous case of the god spelled backwards as dog.”

 

    Since Schlöndorff’s film, true to Brecht’s original, presents itself as a series of episodes, each of the 26 numbered and stamped in white upon a blue background, I see no need to provide a complete narrative of the work. Let us just say that from beginning to end, Baal—acted stunningly by director Rainer Werner Fassbinder—grandly communicates, at least to his way of thinking, with nature, which mostly appears to be wallowing in the mud with his various lovers.

     Rejecting the fawning bourgeois publishers who, having just “discovered” printed versions of his work, all of whom obsequiously seek to publish it, Baal makes it clear that he is only interested in stuffing his mouth with their food, excessively drinking their champagne and liqueurs, and stealing the heart of one of the publishers’ wives. Like all women he meets, he treats her abysmally, finally pawning her off to another acquaintance just to rid himself of her.

     Indeed, it is difficult to know what magical qualities all of the women and men who come into contact with him have discovered that we cannot imagine. One is simply tempted to suggest, perhaps, that it is the same kind of cult following that tracks many such monsters, including those attracted to Hitler, Stalin, or even today’s Trump—a following that is self-destructive in their imaginings of what this demon might provide them.

      After Baal impregnates a young virgin, Johanna (Irmgard Paulis), beloved for her purity by another of Baal’s acolytes, she is thrust away as a “millstone round his neck,” forced with no one  else to turn to, to throw herself into a local canal from which her body is never recovered.

      A third woman, a bartender named Sophie (Margarethe von Trotta—who soon after became a co-director with Schlöndorff, later married him, and ultimately went on to become one of the world’s major feminist directors) plays another of Baal’s spurned pregnant mistresses. He leaves her by a roadside to have her child without him.

     By this time, moreover, the monster has been seemingly involved with the death of a seasoned logger, who may or may not have been tied to a tree when it fell upon him.

      Just as importantly, he has met his male lover Ekart (Sigi Graue), a nearly mad man who attempts to create symphonies with a tuning fork. Yet, it is clear that Ekart is the only one who evokes any true love from Baal. Baal not only tells him that he loves him several times, but is seemingly jealous of his friend’s occasional sexual dibbling’s with the opposite sex. In a bar where the two have stopped to celebrate with champagne (and in which Sophie with her child now works) he finally encounters Ekart in the midst of copulation with a woman in another corner of the dark room, and stabs him to death. The only being he loved, it appears, is now dead, and Baal is once more on the run.

      Feverish and dying, Baal finally takes refuge in the logger’s hut, cared for and mocked equally by the lumbermen with whom he once briefly worked, and who still resent his possible involvement with their colleague’s death.

      When the loggers are called to work, Baal is left alone to die, and attempts in his fear and horror to return to his supposedly beloved nature. He dies only a few feet from the lumbermen’s hut, neither mothered by nature nor mankind.

      Beautifully filmed by cinematographer Dietrich Lohmann and with more than serviceable music by Klaus Doldinger, Schlöndorff’s film is both totally fascinating—if for no other reason than the endless trajectory downward of Baal and all those who meet him—and difficult, in this case simply to bear the absurd hero’s abuse of all those with whom he comes in contact.

      Although Fassbinder had only done one movie at the time of this film, he brought some of his soon-to-be continuing cast members, including Hanna Schygulla, to perform in his fellow New German Cinema director’s production. On set, he also met, performing in a bit part, Günther Kaufmann, who would later become his lover.

 

Los Angeles, July 11, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2020).

 

 

 

Andrew Herbert | Song of the Loon / 1970

the journey

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Amory and Scott Hanson [uncredited] (screenplay, based on Amory’s novel), Andrew Herbert (director) Song of the Loon / 1970

 

It’s 1877 and fur-trapping backwoodsman Cyrus Wheelwright (John Iverson) has just returned home from a voyage upstream to find his native American lover Singing Heron sunning nude with a cowboy, John (Lancer Ward), who just happened to be passing through. Cyrus doesn’t really mind, arguing that, like his American Indian friends, he is not a jealous lover and believes in free love, while pondering that the handsome John reminds him of his former blonde-haired, blue-eyed cowboy heartthrob, Ephraim MacIver (Morgan Royce). Urged by Singing Heron to tell John the story, Cyrus recounts the history of his former “partner” around which this now-cult Western is centered.

     Much like he has just encountered John, Cyrus came home one day from a fur-trapping trip to meet the beautiful Ephraim camping out nearby. Having just broken up with his closeted lover, Montgomery (Jon Evans)—who, in turn, has hooked up with the mean boy-loving villain of the piece Mr. Calvin (Brad Fredericks)—the city slicker Ephraim is confused and depressed. Like most white men he believes in monogamy and is still love with Montgomery, despite the fact that his former lover would only have sex when he was drunk and would not admit to it after. When Montgomery spreads the news that his new friend has a whole bevy of boys to service him, the mean-spirited Calvin, believing Ephraim to be the source of the rumor, tries to kill him, apparently with Montgomery’s help.

      Fortunately, a local Astonia-dwelling native American who follows “the song of Loon” (the Indian phrase for those of their tribe who enjoy sex with their own gender) sends the poor boy to the tribal Indian Guru, Bear-Who-Dreams (Lucky Manning), who prescribes that Ephraim take “the journey” by first eating hallucinatory mushrooms before spending several days in nature totally in the nude. Evidently, it does the trick, freeing Ephraim from wanting anything else to do with Montgomery and opening him up to free love, particularly—after the growing attachment he has already established with Cyrus—in the waiting arms of this backwoods charmer, the two joyfully building a cabin together just in time to spend the winter shacked up in bed.

     Sadly, Calvin has fallen in love, meanwhile, with the still closeted Montgomery. Getting drunk, Calvin finally publicly admits that he is in love with Montgomery, who, still terrorized by his deeply-hidden desires, denies the relationship, ending the film by trying to slug it out with Calvin in a kind of drunken showdown of a wrestling match in the middle of main street—which we’re almost certain will end up in sex if it doesn’t send one them off to the cemetery first.

      This feature film, Song of the Loon, with its truly queer mix of epic naturalism (both white and red-skinned nudes filmed in sepia-toned and negative-reversed images as the camera abstractly caresses their intertwining arms and legs, as well as their exposed buttocks) combined with a plot seemingly spun out of urban hippiedom philosophy might have been marvelously funny if it weren’t for the fact that director Andrew Herbert and screenwriter Richard Amory, on whose novel this work is based, weren’t so terribly serious. It’s almost as if the French cineaste François Reichenbach (see my essay on his Male Nudes of 1954) had inexplicably hooked up with Zane Grey to face off at high noon with Bernardo Bertolucci and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

     In most respects, amazingly, Herbert’s homespun innocents are more straight forward about their sexual desires than are the central tortured characters of the Bertolucci and Fassbinder films of that same year. And while the latter directors’ films are vastly superior in both cinematic and literary terms, there’s something almost giddy about the truth-telling “cowboys-and-indians” trope of this truly looney concoction. Serge Goncharoff’s musical score is even quite impressive. But I’ll bet anything that Herbert never even heard of Jean Genet! And the closest thing Amory has seen of leather is a pair of brown buckskin pants.

      Sex has never been so squeaky clean as it is in Song of the Loon, but it is utterly honest about its faith in “out-in-the-open field” gay desire. Denial leads to violence, this works shouts out; running naked in nature leads only to love. And who can argue against that?

 

Los Angeles, January 8, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (January 2021).

Bill Douglas | Come Dancing / 1970

etude for a clueless queer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bill Douglas (screenwriter and director) Come Dancing / 1970

 

There’s something incredibly sad about British filmmaker Bill Douglas’ 1970 work Come Dancing. First of all, the director of this seemingly gay film was not himself a homosexual—or at least was not able to admit it. Although he lived for years with fellow film enthusiast Richard Jewell, who he had met while serving in the Royal Air Force in Egypt, Douglas, as Jewell speaks of their relationship in his 2006 documentary Intent Upon Getting the Image, was not gay:

 

"We weren’t a gay couple. A lot of people assumed that were because [we lived] together….but Bill wasn’t homosexual…we were all sorts of other things to each other. Practically everything but sexual."

 

     Douglas’ well received trilogy of movies, My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973), and My Way Home (1978), although, as British Film Institute curator Alex Davidson observes, “returns repeatedly to the subject of relationships between male characters,” some of them—particularly Douglas’ last film, Comrades (1987)—verging on the homoerotic,” are not properly speaking LGBTQ films. “Come Dancing is his only work in which homosexuality is explicitly mentioned.”

     As Jewell continues to comment on the 1970 short, “His two characters [in this early film] bear no resemblance to Jaime and/or Robert [the two characters of Comrades]. But, with the benefit of 40 years’ hindsight, [his last film] is perhaps autobiographical, in that Bill may have been pondering what on earth he was doing shacked up with another guy for the past decade—as, indeed, I had waxed poetical over the same conundrum a few years earlier.”

      Just as importantly, however, is how Douglas represents the short-lived meeting between the two figures of Come Dancing. “The visiting man” (Clive Merrison), with whom the picture begins, is seen sitting on a chair with a dart in hand which he hurls at a map of Britain. It hits Southend, which, we realize is to be his destination. Behind him, meanwhile, sits a woman, intentionally exposing her breast as if attempting to woo the man to remain with her, obviously in order to share her now rejected love.

     In Southend, meanwhile, the “local man” seems quite joyful, dancing alone upon a pier before delightedly pissing into the ocean below.

     The visitor already sits in a nearby coffee shop, disgusted by the taste of the liquid he’s half swallowed and amused by the older waitress (Nicole Anderson), utterly consumed by her telly, broadcasting what appears to be a national competition of ballroom dancing of the kind that Baz Luhrmann satirized in his movie Strictly Ballroom (1992).

       So inattentive is the woman and so empty is the café that the stranger is clearly bored and begins to construct paper airplanes which he sails as close as he can to the woman transfixed by her TV set.

       The local man enters, an almost immediate bond of recognition passing between the two, if for no other reason that they seem to be the only men in Southend at the moment. Indeed, after the Southender orders up the same vile liquid that the stranger is drinking, they eye one another, the newcomer yelling out, “Were is the action around here.” “It depends what you’re looking for,” his would-be friend responds.

       Just few seconds later, the local man has joined the outsider at his table where they share lighters, the dancer offering his new acquaintance a cigarette. The newcomer refuses, obviously preferring his own brand, but offers the other a light. Before long the two are whispering to each other, apparently about the café waitress’ inability to focus on anything but the ballroom competition to which she has tuned. They briefly giggle and in mockery of her fascination gradually dance out the door together.

        As they reach the pier where, one supposes, the local man has hinted there may be a space for “action,” they briefly tussle with one another, mock-wrestling almost as teenage boys might, seemingly just for the delight of touching one another.

       Yet suddenly, as the two seem about to share an erotic moment, the stranger, pretending to urinate, turns on his partner, knife in hand, calling him a fag and letting loose what Davidson describes as a “tirade of homophobic abuse.”

        It is difficult to make sense of this sudden shift. Did the local approach him too quickly? Has the outsider randomly chosen Southend so that he might accidentally encounter a hated homosexual? And for a second or two we fear that the suddenly pent up hostility which the visitor has displayed might in fact turn into physical abuse.

      Yet the Southender seems unfazed, almost fearless, as he stands his ground with a broad smile pasted upon his face, almost as if he expected the other to finally come round and admit his transparent desires.

      Defeated by his own inexplicable game, the stranger moves away toward to end of the long pier, while the happy local begins to spin off in his own version of a ballroom dance, just as we have seen him performing, we now realize, in the earlier scene.

      Where the homophobe might be going we never discover, although we fear it will not end well, maybe even with his own death. Whatever might occur to him we recognize as representing a great sadness, a great emptiness, certainly a refusal to join openly in the dance the other offered to share with him.

      If the waitress watches her dance passively, her charming fellow citizen has offered up his own sexuality in his dance, in which the repressed visitor has sadly been unable to participate.

        In the end, we might describe this lovely short work as an étude to a clueless queer.

      This lovely film was one of Douglas’ first films made while he was enrolled at the London Film School. He died of cancer only 4 years later after completing what might be described his “bookend” creation, Comrades. It appears that he was never able to live out the joyful sexual possibilities he had so lovingly captured on film.

 

Los Angeles, September 19, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My Queer Cinema blog (September 2020).  

     

 

Pat Rocco | Sign of Protest / 1970

much ado about something

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pat Rocco (director) Sign of Protest / 1970

Well known for his short gay erotica films of the 1960s, over the next decade Pat Rocco also became involved with various gay liberation groups and from the beginning of those movements shot numerous related activities—protests, parades, interviews, meetings, lectures, and various other events related to the gay community. When he left his archive to the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) many of his tapes were restored and re-issued through the UCLA Film and TV Archive.

     One of the earliest of these, from 1970, covered a rather small protest starting with about 40-50 individuals that grew in size perhaps to 100 or 150 against the sign in the West Hollywood legendary eatery, Barney’s Beanery: “Fagots Stay Out!”

      Through his conversation with the original owner’s daughter, Joan Elowitz, we learn that originally there were 8-10 such signs throughout the establishment put up in 1959 to “discourage the faggots from coming in” after a raid on the place by the Los Angeles Police Vice Squad:

 

                   The vice squad had a raid in here. It took us two years to clear

                   the name. The name wasn’t—if Barney’s Beanery’s name

                   wasn’t cleared, then the liquor license would have been suspended.

                   But the name was cleared up and everything was straightened out

                   and as a result, Dad put the signs up. There was a total, I think,

                   of eight or ten signs throughout the place, but they just stayed in

                   the bar.”

 

“And now you’re down to one sign,” adds Rocco, to which Irwin Held, the new owner waiting for escrow to clear, adds: “We should have a sign at the back door.”

       When Rocco asks how she feels about the protests going on at the moment, Elowitz answers:

 

                     That’s their privilege. If they don’t like it they don’t have to like it.

                     But I’m not going to pull it down for that reason”

       Rocco: “What reason would you find that would be important enough

                   for you to take the sign down?”

       Elowitz: “A legal reason.”

 

     The owners seem startingly dense about the whole thing, seemingly unable to comprehend why it offends gays and, perhaps even more importantly, why anyone might find it problematic, as if it were some historical monument that should be kept simply out of sentiment’s sake.

      No one, including Rocco, considers asking why would the 1959 Vice Squad have raided a restaurant for simply serving gay men or lesbians, or what those “faggot” diners might possibly have done to deserve such attention. Of course, it might have even been the law that homosexuals could not gather at such a public location. But how, one might wonder, were these men or women identified as being homosexual in the first place. Were they laughing too loudly, camping it up, kissing one another? It doesn’t seem to matter much to the owners current and future. They were faggots and that seems to say everything.

     The current manager of the restaurant and bar, Ruth Pappas, responds, when Rocco asks her if something should be done in response to the protests about taking the sign down:

 

                     No, I don’t think we should do anything about it. After all,

                     it’s on our own premises...It’s part of the place.

 

     After his original outburst, Held pretends objectivity, noting that, at least in his mind, times have changed meaning that the relevance of the sign is meaningless:

 

                     Anybody who comes in here is welcome to be served.

                     ..And as long as they behave themselves and not interfere

                     with anybody else that’s their privilege and the sign

                     will continue and anybody that may not like it or enjoy it,

                     or be at ease as a result of it, it’s a two-way swinging door.

                     Just the same as they can walk in, they can walk out. No hard

                     feelings on anybody’s part.

 

     But obviously there are precisely “hard feelings” which is why the protestors are now chanting just outside their doors. These people see unable to connect.

      Rocco chooses to actually show us the sign, an important thing to do, particularly today when in the midst of one of the US’s most gay-friendly cities it might now be unimaginable that such a brutal sign might really have existed. But there it is: FAGOTS STAY OUT!.

      At the bar facing it is a man and his wife who insist that Rocco talk to them as well. When asked how he feels about the protests, the man replies: “They’re on the street. I’m in here. That’s my wife.”

        In response, Rocco makes the same comparisons as some of the protestors do soon after:

 

                       Would you like a sign that says perhaps “Niggers stay out?

                       Or Mexicans stay out? Or people with children stay out?

 

(He misses another obvious such sign, which appeared—and perhaps still existed at the time of this film—in restaurants, hotels, and other establishments throughout the USA: “Jews not allowed.”) The man answers with what almost might sound like an irrelevant statement if you didn’t perceive that he was expressing his sense of heterosexual prerogative: “I just like my wife.”

      The wife, in turn, begins a sentence that moves a bit further in revealing their homophobia: “It’s always been Barney’s Beanery’s...law. “

      As Troy Perry, Pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church in Los Angeles, a church that invited homosexuals to worship, points out, when Rocco moves outdoors, that the gentleman who put this sign up—Perry holding up a copy of Life magazine from June 26, 1964* showing the original Barney (John “Barney” Anthony)—says “he thinks homosexuals should be shot.” Here finally we have the direct evidence of the violent bigotry that lay behind that “antique sign,” the “law” of Barney’s Beanery the woman at the bar began to talk about.

       Accordingly, when Rocco chats with Morris Kight, the founder of the Gay Liberation Front in Los Angeles whose group are the ones shouting slogans such as “Hey, hey, hey, hey, we are proud and we are gay” and “ Two, four, six, eight, gay is just as good as straight,” I found his answers to what he was doing there surprisingly empty and even somewhat odd:

 

                         I thought it was time for a protest. And my position here tonight

                         is to complain about this particular injustice.

                             The issue here is that this restaurant has been here a long

                         time. And they have a sign that says “Fagot stay out.” Now,

                         it doesn’t offend me awfully, but it offends everybody else.”

                         They think that this sign comes out of an antique American idea

                         which should have gone out of style along with “Niggers stay

                         out” and “No Mexicans or dogs allowed.” And these kinds of

                         things have to go.

     I can’t explain to myself why Kight doesn’t see this as a signifier of homophobic hate, or why he might, as he put it, find the sight of it “a little funny.” Why use the pronoun “they” as opposed to “us” or “I?” Apparently he doesn’t even know that the sign does not refer to the “idea” of “faggotry” (a faggot) but to all the real individuals who are homosexuals. These are minor issues, but they reveal a way of thinking that is a bit troubling in that it diminishes what his group is attempting to accomplish.  Kight wishes that they might simply put an X through the word “out,” welcoming homosexuals and homosexuality without realizing that at heart all this time they have truly been threatening gays, even if a queer is now allowed to stay for dinner. Being “in” or “out” is not the issue; it is the misspelled word “fagots,” like the word “nigger” or “jew” or “Mexican dog” that speaks of John “Barney” Anthony, the owner’s hate.

      (When I use the word “queer” as I do endlessly in these volumes, it is because I am claiming and redeeming my difference from a person who uses that same word as an expression of degradation and hatred. And that “différence,” as Jacques Derrida might point out, is everything that matters. If I use the word “faggot” it is to start a fire not to accept someone else’s expression of my inferiority.)

      Rocco interviews a female marcher who speaks quite succinctly about why she marching, equating the “Fagots stay out” sign with the “No niggers in the South” when blacks began their first protest marches for civil rights. The earliest protests, she reminds us, “were about the signs in cafeterias and other public establishments.... And I feel this is a good starting point for us.”** Her comments help to explain why such a seemingly small issue became one of the first battles of post-Stonewall Los Angeles gay liberation community in the 1970s.

      Rocco even talks to the single police officer and his partner assigned to watch over the event.

Well-spoken and thoughtful, the young officer, although by police policy refusing to give his personal opinions, does recognize it as an issue of “discrimination toward homosexuals,” having no fear that things might get out of hand: “They’re going to cooperate with us fully. We’re going to cooperate with them.”

      Unfortunately, Rocco doesn’t do as well when he perceives that the man’s partner is a woman, as he suddenly gushes over Deputy Swing, “This looks like a lady officer. I don’t think we’ve had a lady officer on camera before. She’s a lovely lady.” We have to chalk his unintentional condescension to the fact that feminists had not yet reached this former purveyor of male erotica.

      But you do have to praise Rocco simply for being there, in these early days, and putting it all on film for his Bizarre Productions.

      That sign did not come down until 1985 when West Hollywood became an independent city, and the gay-dominated City Council took as its first test of power of their determination to ban discrimination against homosexuals to demand the removal of the Barney’s Beanery sign and the match books which repeated that phrase on their covers. Not wanting a court fight, Barney’s sign was put away, we hope, forever.                          

 

*I recall that issue of Life very well from my childhood, and have mentioned it before since it represented a terrifying moment in my young life. Having read that article about homosexuality in the US, I has startled that the reporters seemed so ignorant and naive that—at least as I remember it (I have not been able to find what led me to this conclusion)—they were startled to see homosexual men kiss in public. I did not yet perceive myself as being gay, but even I who had grown up isolated from gay life in Iowa imagined that if you loved other men you might perfectly well want to kiss them, even in public. When I asked my father about the article, the normally mild tempered man grew red in the face and shouted back at me: “If ever I found out that one of my sons was homosexual I’d immediately disown him.” I was so taken aback that from that day forward I begin to wonder about what being homosexual meant and whether or not I too didn’t sexually prefer men to women. In short, that article and my father’s response forever changed my life.                                  

 

**That very same year my new companion, Howard, whom I’d just met, as I’ve often noted, at the first gay liberation meeting in Madison, Wisconsin protested with others the motion version of The Boys in the Band disturbed as we all were by its various stereotypes of gay life. Of course, we recognized its significance in American filmmaking as being one of the first films to actually focus on a gay group, but its negative connotations simply outnumbered its positive encouragement of gay representation. I had even served as an usher for the play’s New York premiere a year earlier; but a great deal had happened between early 1969 and 1970. It was our foray into battle, which, I’m sorry to say, until recently went no further.

 

Los Angeles, May 1, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (May 2021).