Just as gay people have always been around, so have queer characters in movies. We’ve been here from the very earliest days of the flickers (an experimental film from 1895 shows two men dancing while a third plays a violin) to the dawn of the gay liberation movement when characterizations of LGBT people began to become more complex and multi-dimensional with bold films such as 1968’s The Killing of Sister George. All of these cinematic pioneers will get their due as the focus of An Early Clue to the New Direction: Queer Cinema Before Stonewall, the most comprehensive LGBT film series yet assembled, that will be screened at Lincoln Center In New York City today through May 1.
Many of the medium’s finest directors, including John Huston, Vincente Minnelli and Ingmar Bergman are represented with screenings during the series. From well-known titles such Minnelli’s adaptation of the now-quaint play Tea and Sympathy, Huston’s melodrama Reflections in a Golden Eye starring Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando, Andy Warhol’s erotic My Hustler (pictured above) and Bergman’s influential Persona to less-available works like Jose Rodriguez-Soltero’s avant-garde Lupe Vélez biopic Lupe and Andrew Meyer’s moving An Early Clue to the New Direction. Drag fans will relish the 1968 doc The Queen, which now stands as a compelling time capsule as it was filmed during 1967’s Miss All-America Camp Beauty Pageant and the same year’s fascinating Queens at Heart, which features interviews with a quartet of transwomen and provides an early look at ball culture.
The opening night selection is 1931’s Mädchen in Uniform, a lesbian-themed drama from Germany that found a somewhat unlikely champion in First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
Related: If Stonewall Whetted Your Appetite For Bad Movies, Try These
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Watch a trailer for the entire film series below. For more info on screenings and tickets, go here.
IDoNotHaveToAgreeWithYou
They are gay films. Stop pushing this millennial queer garbage.
AtticusBennett
ROPE is supremely entertaining , it’s one of my all-time favourite films. Hitchcock’s genius was getting around the anti-gay censorship of the time, and casting two actaully-queer actors in the lead roles whom he directed to utterly play up the subtext.
the result? you get all the unspoken stuff, and it’s still clear what’s really going on.
and let’s not forget The Boys in the Band , the groundbreaking play that premiered a few short month before the Stonewall riots occurred. the film, made and released one year later, remains as potent as ever.
many say it’s ‘dated’ – i say it’s nowhere near as dated as it should be all these decades later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxGTr7aVO0E
Billy Budd
I own the DVDs of ROPE and Reflections in a Golden Eye. Both movies are fabulous.
Billy Budd
There is also another movie by Hitchcoc that has lots and lots of gay subtext. It is named STRANGERS IN A TRAIN. Also, if you look carefully, the mega thriller PSYCHO has lots of heavy handed gay subtext. Norman Bates is stereotipically portrayed as a candidate to become gay, at least according to the theories that were dominant at the time. He was obsessed about his mother, hated his father, was jealous of his mother, and the actor who played Norman was gay.
musclemutt
The Impressive Celluloid Closet by MOMA curator and AIDS activist Vito Russo is the definitive history of ourselves in film as far back as Thomas Edison. For a taste, stream the movie of the same name on Netflix. The amount of sex in movies from the 1920’s and our presence caused the government to clamp down with censorship until pioneers of the 1970’s broke free with feature film Deep Throat.