like Steppin Fetchit for the blacks." But gayĪctor/screenwriter Harvey Fierstein, from a later generation, disagrees: "I like the sissy. Certainly not publicly." Gay screenwriter Arthur Laurents recalls being offended by them: "They were a cliché. This was a subject that was not discussed, privately. They were perceived as homosexuals just subliminally. It was a convention that was totally accepted. Screenwriter Jay Presson Allen recalls these sissy characters from her youth: "There were sissies, and they were never addressed as homosexuals. Backstage stories like "Broadway Melody" and "Myrt and Marge" featured fey costume designers - comic characters whose humor was based on male effeminacy. Character actors like Edward Everett Horton made careers out of characters of vague sexuality. An early film by gay director George Cukor, "Our Betters," includes Mr. Talkies offered new opportunities for fun with effeminate men. He didn't seemed to have a sexuality, so Hollywood allowed him to thrive. The Sissy made everyone feel more manly or more womanly by occupying the space in between. As film historian Richard Dyer demonstrates, describing a scene in which a burly stagehand taunts Charlie Chaplin for supposedly kissing a boy in "Behind the Screen," the equation of male homosexuality with effeminacy was already "so firmly in place that a popular mainstream film could assume that the audience would know what that swishy was all about."Įnter the Sissy - Hollywood's first gay stock character. A popular gag in parodies of the western was to insert a flamboyantly effeminate pansy into the world of the macho cowboy ("Wanderer of the West," "The Soilers"). In "The Florida Enchantment," two women dance off together, leaving their bewildered menfolk to shrug, and dance off together themselves. In early comedies of the teens and twenties, the possibility of homo behavior was a common joke. One of the earliest surviving motion picture images is a primitive test made at Thomas Edison's studio, in which two men dance together while a third plays the fiddle.įrom the very beginning movies could rely on homosexuality as a surefire source of humor. In fact, homosexuality, or the suggestion of it, has been with us since the movies were born. (Passages in italics are excerpts of narration from "The Celluloid Closet" ) and gay people what to think about themselves. Hollywood, that great maker of myths, taught straight people what to think about gay people. These were fleeting images, but they were unforgettable, and they left a lasting legacy.
When it did appear, it was there as something to laugh at - or something to pity - or even something to fear. In a hundred years of movies, homosexuality has only rarely been depicted on the screen.