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The sissy

Talkies offered new opportunities for fun with effeminate men. An early film by gay director George Cukor, "Our Betters" includes Mr. Ernest -- an astonishingly swishy fop.
Character actors like Edward Everett Horton made careers out of characters of vague sexuality. Backstage stories like "Broadway Melody" and "Myrt and Marge" featured fey costume designers -- comic characters whose humor was based on male effeminacy.
Screenwriter Jay Presson Allen recalls these sissy characters from her youth: "There were sissies, and they were never addressed as homosexuals. It was a convention that was totally accepted. They were perceived as homosexuals just subliminally.
This was a subject that was not discussed, privately. Certainly not publicly." Gay screenwriter Arthur Laurents recalls being offended by them: "They were a cliché... like Steppin Fetchit for the blacks."
But gay actor/screenwriter Harvey Fierstein, from a later generation, disagrees: "I like the sissy. Is it used in negative ways? Yeah, but... I'd rather have negative than nothing. That's just my own particular view -- and also cause I am a sissy!
The movies were loose enough in those days that one Clara Bow movie ("Call Her Savage") could take us slumming in Hollywood's first big screen gay bar.

This freedom wouldn't last - it would also be the last big screen gay bar until Otto Preminger's "Advise and Consent" 30 years later
"Sissy characters in movies were always a joke," explains elder queen Quentin Crisp. "There's no sin like being a woman. When a man dresses as a woman, the audience laughs. When a woman dressed as a man, nobody laughed. They just thought she looked wonderful."
Even Greta Garbo raised eyebrows with her portrait of "Queen Christina" (1933), based on the life of a sixteenth century lesbian ruler of Sweden. While the movie invented a heterosexual romance with John Gilbert, hints of lesbianism remained, notably in her very affectionate relationship with her lady-in-waiting.
When Christina is admonished by her Chancellor, "But your Majesty, you cannot die an old maid," Garbo proudly retorts, "I have no intention to, Chancellor. I shall die a bachelor!"
Indeed, Marlene Dietrich caused a sensation when she finished a number in a nightclub in "Morocco" (1930) by kissing a young woman in the audience on the lips. Queer pop culture critic Susie Bright attests to the scene's enduring power to titillate, and Arthur Laurents agrees: "The thing worked for everybody of every sex.
And what's amazing, I don't think they've done anything as deliciously sexy as that since."

Table of contents

1 The Early Years 7 Finally it happened !

2 The Sissy 8 Gay Liberation

3 Censorship starts 9 The 80's

4 Subtlety reigns 10 Gay goes into hate

5 Accustomed 11 Hollywood's ambivalence

6 Cut, cut, cut ! 12 Aids