Yes, but it’s also a story where kinky queer people are powerful and cool and sexy and fun, and ultimately the straight characters sing about how much freer they feel in a corset fishnets pool orgy. (And then the house, uh, is a spaceship and it takes off? Okay.) It’s also relevant that the movie was written by a nonbinary person; I think the intent was not to demonize kinky queer people, but to tell a story featuring them that also had elements of classic schlock horror and sci-fi movies.
And remember that this was the 70s, when sympathetic queer characters were thin on the ground, the distinction between “transvestite” and “transsexual” was not crisply defined, and the popular understanding of the difference between “seduction” and “rape” was even less nuanced than it is today. (Also, the “homosexual agenda” narrative of gay recruitment wouldn’t come around until the 90s.) This doesn’t make everything okay but it’s important context.
And I’d argue that some of the bad stuff in it is intentionally transgressive–isn’t saying “people who don’t conform to traditional gender and sexual roles are dangerous perverts,” but “you think we’re dangerous perverts? oh honey, you have no idea.”
Yeah, I’m defensive. This movie means something to me, on a level that’s not apparent on the screen, because I started going to midnight showings when I was fifteen. And it–counting the audience participation and shadow cast, because you really have to, there’s no point to watching this movie quietly at home–was probably my first experience with queerness being fun. I already knew it was possible to not be straight, but only as a tragic existence condemned to the shadows. Rocky Horror wasn’t the first time I learned two men could kiss, but it was the first time I saw two men kiss in front of a crowd that was cheering them on.
So, okay, not “therefore, Rocky Horror is flawless, QED,” but that’s why people like it. It’s an all-ages queer event you can attend without declaring yourself queer, it’s an introduction to queerness as silly and naughty instead of always being Very Serious Business, and you can throw stuff at the screen.
Tag: queer history
professor: so why do we think this first generation of college educated women mostly didn’t marry?
me: they were lesbians
everyone: [laughter]
professor: no like stop laughing…that’s the correct answer.
So apparently ‘female adventurer’ was early 1900s slang for lesbians/bi/pan women.
EXCELLENT.
Steuben legally adopted two handsome soldiers, William North (who later became a US senator) and Ben Walker. A third young man, John W. Mulligan Jr., also considered himself one of Steuben’s “sons.” His birth father, John “Hercules” Mulligan, had been Alexander Hamilton’s roommate many years before.
Prior to moving in with Steuben, young Mulligan had been living with Charles Adams, son of then-Vice President John Adams. The future president and his wife, concerned about the intense nature of the relationship, insisted that Adams and Mulligan split up. The anguished boys wrote to Steuben of their devastation at being separated. With compassion for the heartbroken couple, Steuben offered to take both young men into his home, writing to Mulligan on January 11, 1793:
“Your letter of the 7th was handed me yesterday by Mr. Hamilton. [Alexander?] In vain, my dear child, should I undertake to explain to you the sensation which the letter created in my heart. Neither have I the courage to attempt to arrest the tears you have so great reason to shed. For a heart so feeling as yours this was the severest of trials, and nothing but time can bring consolation under circumstances so afflicting….
Despite moral philosophy I weep with you, and glory in the human weakness of mingling my tears with those of a friend I so tenderly love.
My dear Charles ought, ere this, to have received my answer to the touching letter he wrote.
I repeat my entreaties, to hasten your journey to Philadelphia as soon as your strength permits. My heart and my arms are open to receive you. In the midst of the attention and fêtes which they have the goodness to give me, I enjoy not a moment’s tranquility until I hold you in my arms. Grant me this favor without delay, but divide your journey, that you may not be fatigued at the expense of your health.”
Keith Stern, Queers in History (via publius-esquire)
I’ve been trying to think of a good term for the “weepy movies about tragic queer people aimed at straight audiences” subgenre, and I think I’ve got it:
dead gays for the straight gaze
eh? eh??
queers die for the straight eye
SO YOOOO who wants to learn why this is a thing because the history is actually really fascinating and ties into some of my favorite shit ever?
Okay, so like, back in the mid-twentieth century, when being queer was still totally a crime everywhere in the United States, queer writers started working in pulp fiction–starting with Vin Packer (she is awesome)–and writing pulps to tell our stories.
So one day over lunch, her editor asks her, “Hey, Vin, what’s the story you most want to write?”
And she goes, “Well, I’d like to write a love story about lesbians because I’m, you know, gay.”
He says, “Hey, that’s awesome, I will publish it. One thing, though, the homosexuality has to end badly and the main character has to realize she was never gay in the first place. We can’t seem to support homosexuality. I don’t actually think that’s cool, but the government will literally seize our book shipments and destroy them on the basis of the books being ‘obscene’ if you don’t, so if we want this story actually out there, and not burning in a bonfire somewhere, it’s what you gotta do.”
So Vin goes home and writes Spring Fire, the book that launched the entire lesbian pulp genre. And while one character ends up in an insane asylum and the other ends up realizing she never loved her at all, it’s massively successful, and queer women everywhere snap it up and celebrate quietly in their closets across the nation because HOLY SHIT THERE’S A BOOK ABOUT ME? I’M NOT ALONE and it starts a huge new genre.
But: every publisher is subject to those same government censorship rules, so every story has to end unhappily for the queer characters, or else the book will never see the light of day. So, even though lesbian pulp helps solidify the queer civil rights movement, it’s having to do so subversively or else it’ll end up on the chopping block.
So blah blah blah, this goes on for about twenty years, until finally in the seventies the censorship laws get relaxed, and people can actually start queer publishing houses! Yay! But the lesbian pulps, in the form they’d been known previously, basically start dying out.
MEANWHILE, OVER IN JAPAN! Yuri, or the “girls love” genre in manga, starts to emerge in the 1970s, and even starts dealing with trans characters in the stories. But, because of the same social mores that helped limit American lesbian pulp, the stories in Japan similarly must end in tragedy or else bad shit will go down for the authors and their books. Once more: tragic ends are the only way to see these stories published rather than destroyed.
The very first really successful yuri story has a younger, naive girl falling into a relationship with an older, more sophisticated girl, but the older girl ends up dying in the end, and subsequent artists/writers repeated the formula until it started getting subverted in the 1990s–again, twenty years later.
And to begin with cinema followed basically the same path as both lesbian pulps and yuri: when homosexuality is completely unacceptable in society, characters die or their stories otherwise end in tragedy, just to get the movies made, and a few come along to subvert that as things evolve.
But unlike the books and manga before them, even though queer people have become sightly more openly accepted, movies are stuck in a loop. See, pulps and yuri are considered pretty disposable, so they were allowed to evolve basically unfettered by concerns of being artistic or important enough to justify their existence, but film is considered art, and especially in snooty film critic circles, tragedy=art.
Since we, in the Western world, put films given Oscar nods on a pedestal, and Oscar nods go to critical darlings rather than boisterous blockbusters (the film equivalent of pulps, basically), and critics loooove their tragedy porn, filmmakers create queer stories that are tragic and ~beautiful~ that win awards that then inspire more queer stories that are tragic and ~beautiful~ until the market is oversaturated with this bullshit.
The Crying Game? Critical darling, tragic trans character.
Philadelphia? Critical darling, tragic gay character.
Brokeback Mountain? Critical darling, tragic queer (? not totally sure if they’d consider themselves gay or bi, tbh?) characters.
And so on and so on VOILA, we now have a whole genre of tragedy porn for straight people, that started out as validation for us and sometimes even manages to slip some more through the cracks occasionally, but got co-opted by pretentious ~literary~ types. While tragic ends made these stories more acceptable to begin with, and in the mid-to-late nineties that started getting subverted a little bit (Chasing Amy, But I’m a Cheerleader), eventually that became the point, as more straight audiences started consuming these narratives and got all attached to the feels they got from the ~beauty of our pain~.
Queer history is crucial
Reblogging to mention Vito Russo’s important work, The Celluloid Closet, first published in 1981. You’ll never read a more comprehensive look at American cinema and the queers. Dated now (of course) but all the more stirring for the relentless stream of tragic stories, slightly flavored here and there with characters played for laughs, horrible depictions of broken, tormented or evil people, and a few fair, reasonable or positive roles. Russo died in 1990, after issuing an updated version of the book in 1987. Always concerned with how the LGBT community was depicted in the media, he was one of the co-founders of Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD).
Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman made a documentary from the book in 1995 and it’s lovely. Lots of clips, some interviews, it’s a real eye-opener. Amazon can stream it. (GLAAD) gives an award called the Vito Russo Award to openly gay or lesbian people within the Hollywood film industry who advance the cause of fighting homophobia.
Kimchi and Justice 