Opengender

In the period following World War II, an expansion in publishing diversified popular literature considerably and even produced a specifically lesbian form (Uszkurat, 1993: 26-7). Although often rejected by more literary and academic lesbians, who focused rather on 'high' literature, lesbian 'pulp' novels such as Anne Bannon's Beebo Brinker series remained popular with lesbians in the new urban communities and were regularly reviewed in The Ladder (27). Lesbians identified with Anne Bannon's butch protagonist and accepted such novels as part of lesbian reality (44). Indeed, many looked to them for information about lesbianism (44).

By contrast with popular literature, the cinema of the 1950s has often been characterised in film-studies criticism as reflecting a period of rather seamless moral consensus in US society. This is partly an effect of a critical focus on direct censorship (in the form of the Production Code Administration or formed in 1934) as the primary mode of controlling cinematic representation:

Once the Code's provisions had entered cinematic currency, in fact, they informed both the style and the content of the genres themselves ... Indeed, as long as the industry remained vertically integrated, the power of the PCA remained virtually unchallenged. (Cook, 1985: 8)

Biskind (1983), however, saw the representational field of 1950s Hollywood as far more complex:

Indeed, perhaps the most striking thing about the films of the fifties is that they reflected not one but several warring ideologies, so that it is possible to speak of radical (left- and right-wing) as well as mainstream films. Moreover, they waged this combat ... without explicit political allusions. Films of the fifties, in short, pitted different ways of being and acting against each other. While, say, sensitive men like Montgomery Clift, Tony Perkins, and James Dean were quivering and quaking their way through films like A Place in the Sun, Fear Strikes Out, and East of Eden, John Wayne was still gunning down bad guys in films like Rio Bravo. (Biskind, 1984: 4 -- my emphasis)

In other words, films of the 1950s may frequently be regarded as highly polemical — despite offering a preferred reading of happy conformity and consensus. Homosexual anxieties were among those most often subtextually rehearsed in popular film:

The fear of homosexuality emerged in several films of the late 1950s ... the pressure to conform, to hide any secret sensitivity out of fear of the word queer, was a popular subtext. (Russo, 1981: 108)

Hollywood also reflected a conservative association of homosexuality and lesbianism with "red" subversion:

Several films of the fifties make an interesting set of connections between feminine clothing and capitalism versus masculine clothing and Communism ... At the same time that hardness in women is identified with Communism, softness is men becomes the correlative symptom. (Bell-Metereau, 1983: 101)

Although representation of homosexuality was expressly forbidden by the PCA "in every statute" (Russo, 1981: 30), there were many ways for lesbians and gays to get around this. Gay men involved in Hollywood production found ways to encode subtexts in the films they made, including the use of an underground gay language:

In late 1933 the Hays Office sent out memos to several studios announcing that pansy was now a forbidden word. A few months later Raoul Walsh's Sailor's Luck opened and, in a bathhouse scene, James Dunn pointed at a lisping attendant and said to his seafaring buddies, "Hey, fellas, etgay the ansypay!" To which the ansypay replied by saying, "Hi, sailors!" and wiggling five fingers. (Russo, 1981: 40)

Indeed, lesbian or gay reading of popular film is often argued to require the involvement of gays in the production of the text in order to effect or read appropriate recognition codes, but a lesbian presence could be inferred from stylistic markers associated with extant subcultures included by the film's producers:

The burden of proof for a lesbian analysis frequently depends upon the interpretation of style. (Becker et al, 1985: 301)

This kind of requirement would leave lesbians with considerably fewer options than gay men, however, since there were few identifiable lesbians working in Hollywood film production: only one director (Arzner) and two stars (Dietrich and Garbo) seemed to be widely implicated in lesbian gossip. However, gay audiences were clearly also capable of appropriating cinematic imagery without pointers to gay involvement in production. Babuscio described the analogising of gay knowledges to popular modes of cinematic performance and representation. For example:

The experience of passing is often productive of a gay sensibility. It can, and often does, lead to a heightened awareness and appreciation for disguise, impersonation ... and the distinctions to be made between instinctive and theatrical behaviour. The experience of passing would appear to explain the enthusiasm of so many in our community for certain stars whose performances are highly charged with exaggerated (usually sexual) role-playing. (Babuscio, 1984: 45)

It is less clear what would constitute a specifically lesbian aesthetic unless, perhaps, crossdressing as signifier of female autonomy is cited — and Arzner, Dietrich and Garbo are all associated with crossdressing.

In the field of lesbian literary studies, although work has also generally been dominated by a search for an codifiable lesbian aesthetic in lesbian-authored high literary texts, it has also been argued that lesbian readers do re-signify popular texts. Lesbians "resist 'heterotexts' by privately rewriting and thus appropriating them as lesbian texts" (Zimmerman, 1993: 139). Anecdotal evidence such as that gathered by Whitaker (1985) further suggests that lesbians used similar strategies to re-appropriate the moving image. Critics such as Russo (1981: 170) and Weiss (1992: 64), as well as some unknown lesbians referred to by Sheldon (1984: 16), saw even such pathologising representation of role-playing as that in The Killing of Sister George (1968) as recognisable and re-appropriable by lesbian subcultures.

[Some lesbians] enjoyed some of George's outrageous anti-establishment behaviour (particularly the incident with the nuns) ... or spoke of the character played by Coral Brown as a turn-on (Sheldon, 1984: 16)

A majority of lesbians probably do balk at such alarming images, however (Sheldon, 1984: 12; Florence, 1993: 131). The cost of such lesbian visibility in terms of social exclusion, or even internalised self-hatred, was heavy. The popularity of the compromise figure of the tomboy with many lesbians may thus be partly due to the overwhelmingly stereotypical and tragic representation of lesbianism as such in popular films up to the 1960s, as well as to the invisibility of lesbianism in popular films of the PCA period. Those lesbians who did not simply reject popular forms wholesale inevitably sought ways to access their pleasures by identifying a rebellious and gender-ambiguous female image; but one which did not carry the heavy stigma of pathological inversion. The tomboy seems to have appealed to heterosexual women by offering a nostalgic flight from the restraints of adult femininity, but with a reassuringly normalising resolution. This figure may, however, also have provided a gender-unstable, homoerotic, yet non-stigmatised point of entry for a clandestine lesbian pleasure in popular cinema.

This is not to say that all lesbians read subtextually. The assimilationist attitude overdetermined The Ladder's film reviews, for example. Britain's roughly equivalent political organisation, the Minority Rights Group, and its publication, Arena 3, seems to have taken up a broadly similar stance on discretion, assimilation and the avoidance of sub-cultural lesbian stylisation or "stereotypes" (Groocock, 1994: 92-98). Weiss (1992: 66) stated that attitudes towards popular culture in The Ladder's reviews were generally negative. But it would not seem that its reviews were by any means consistent in relation either to popular culture or to crossdressing. It was often sympathetic to butch characters in lesbian pulp fiction, such as Bannon's novels (Zimmerman, 1990: 9; Grier, 1976: 203; Uszkurat, 1993: 26). Film reviews were by no means overwhelmingly negative either. The following reviews of Club des Femmes (which originally appeared in The Ladder's forerunner, Vice Versa) and Therese and Isabel (negative attitudes towards which latter probably reflected) rather nicely sum up assimilationist attitudes:

The role of Alice [in Club des Femmes] was portrayed with admirable good taste. One could not help but admire the character of the quiet, self-contained lesbian who bore such great affection for her girlfriend, yet forebore ... to enter her girl friend's room to keep her company in the evenings. Possessed of great beauty, both spiritual and physical, [the role of] Alice was handled in a sane, intelligent manner rather than furnishing the usual subject for harmful propaganda or mere sensationalism. (Lisa Ben, 1960, The Ladder, April, 4:7, p.8-9)

On the other hand the European art-house/soft-porn aesthetic of Therese and Isabel did not go down well at all:

A movie has been made from Violette Leduc's Therese and Isabel. It is worse than the book, ... see it if you must, but you have been warned. (The Ladder, Dec-Jan, 1968-1969, reprinted in Grier, 1976: 121)

Another important result of The Ladder's humanistic and aspirational approach was that it tended to deal with texts pretty much at face value. That is, its reviewers either approved or disapproved of preferred readings offered by dominant film texts, but did not recognise any potential for resistant reading. For a film to be of interest to lesbians, therefore, it had to be lesbian-authored, or at least to deal overtly with the theme of lesbianism. Setting aside a post-modern critique of authorship and authenticity, there was, in any case, virtually no lesbian-produced cinema which could be seen as in any way culturally analogous to lesbian-authored literatures. Maidens in Uniform (1931) has sometimes been offered as an early candidate, since the scriptwriter identified as lesbian, but even so the evidence does not support a view of lesbian control over its collective production (Dyer, 1990: 30-32). There were, however, a number of films made in Europe between the 1920s and the 1950s which treated lesbian themes relatively openly and sympathetically. Besides Maidens, these included Club des Femmes (1936), and Olivia (1950). They represented an intra-feminine desire between conventionally-feminine-styled women in professionalised, all-women, environments. As such, they were generally acceptable to assimilationists (Ermayne, for example, described Club des Femmes as "The best of its kind made to date" in The Ladder, 4:7, 1960: 5 — but it is not clear whether this film was viewed in the censored form exhibited in the US, from which "all intimations of lesbianism were cut." (Faderman, 1991: 103 quoting Time, 25 Oct, 1937, pp.26-28).) The Haunting (1963) with its elegantly stiff-upper-lipped lesbian heroine was also recommended by The Ladder (Jan 1964: 23).

Such conventionally-styled and tastefully restrained representations were few and far between, however. It would not, in any case, seem at all evident that a clear dichotomy between cinematic representation of lesbianism as intra-feminine desire or as identification with masculinised female figures can actually be drawn in practice. As Weiss (1992) pointed out, representations of same-sex desire in same-sex environments (which were more acceptable to assimilationist and feminist lesbians) usually also made iconic reference to inversion (visually signified by crossdressing). Furthermore, films in which women wore trousers frequently also represented an attraction (usually based on mis-identification) between two women. The two modes were often effectively difficult to distinguish:

[There was during the 1920s and 1930s] an inconsistency or confusion of visual codes . . . lesbianism pertained primarily to desire ("object choice"), but also surfaced as gender inversion. These images of crossdressing and gender inversion on the one hand ... and a feminine-identification involving a female object choice, on the other, were concurrent images in the cinema, and the former never entirely gave way to the latter. (Weiss, 1992: 17)

The wearing of trousers by female characters had seemed to provide a suitably visual means (for the visual medium of cinema) of encoding a sub-textual working-through of heterosexual spectators' conflicts and anxieties concerning the masculinisation of women during World War II:

The popularity of the tomboy reached its peak in the years after the Second World War. A number of these films showed women participating in the masculine realm, often dressed in appropriate male attire, but reduced the threat of such women by placing them under the tutelage or control of a man. (Bell-Metereau, 1993: 96)

If it was by the wearing of trousers that many urban lesbian sub-cultures effected mutual recognition (by deploying a subcultural knowledge), as Faderman argued (1991: 125-6, quoted above), then it seems logical to assume that similar visual codes might also be deployed to effect clandestine lesbian readings of popular film.

Whitaker's interviewees (1985) tended to confirm that lesbians, like their gay counterparts, could read lesbian subtexts in(to) popular film texts. However, whilst Babuscio referred gay recognition codes to iconic Hollywood divas such as Bette Davis and Mae West, lesbian commentators appear to have cited a different style altogether. Sheldon's remarks on the type of films which were popular with lesbians of the 1930s and 1940s closely parallel Faderman's account of the origins of lesbian bar culture during the postwar period:

[L]esbians' interest in the cinema seems to be oriented towards those exceptional films made in Hollywood during the late 1930s and the 40s, when the needs of patriarchy/capitalism to make war and money demanded that women be oriented away from home-making and into industry to replace men sent away as cannon-fodder. These films often has as central characters strong and resilient women ... (Sheldon, 1984: 17)

In the 1950s, the tomboy seemed to offer lesbians a similar form of recognition:

More recently, the cow-girl films [Annie Get Your Gun (1950), Calamity Jane (1953), etc] ... enjoy some popularity. (Sheldon, 1984: 17)

Fantasy identification with androgynous, or even male, characters has been widely noted as a strategy used by lesbians to engage with Hollywood texts in the 1920s and 1930s. Crossdressing comedies and stylised dramas such as Sylvia Scarlett, Queen Christina or Morocco are referred to again and again in what little literature exists (Russo, 1981: 14-15; Koch, 1982: 51-3; Sheldon, 1984: 17; Studlar, 1991: 4; Weiss, 1992: 30-50; Straayer, 1992: 38-39; Olson, 1994: 66). In relation to the 1950s, the western tomboy figure, and even the cowboy, also come up surprisingly often (Sheldon, 1984: 17; Whitaker, 1985: 107, 116; Bell-Metereau, 1993: Olson, 1994: 58; 80-95; Modleski, 1995/6). There is also more recent evidence of lesbian interest in western iconography refracted through a lesbian craze for Country and Western music in the late 1980s linked to the popularity of kd lang [sic]. Western iconography has been identified as a significant factor in the lesbian appeal of films such as Thelma and Louise, or Salmonberries (Johnson, 1993; Ainley and Cooper, 1994; Tasker, 1994: 182; Thynne, 1995).

The dominance of discourses of mannishness during the 1950s, combined with the structural imperatives of the visual relay identified by feminist film theory, might very well have been expected to promote a lesbian form of male identification in popular film. The anecdotal evidence does not seem to suggest, however, that lesbians identified fully with male characters any more than they did with negative stereotypes of lesbianism. Lesbian sub-textual strategies do not necessarily imply a sutured identification with male or masculinised characters or spectatorial positions. That is, they do not imply a mimetic identification. On the contrary, it seems that lesbians attempted to insert themselves into the cinematic visual relay with a marked degree of self-consciousness about the 'lack of fit.' Indeed, this often seemed sufficient to invoke an impression of "watching the effect" of the IMR upon the (lesbian) self as the lesbian spectator (Whitaker, 1985: 110). It has to be remembered, though, that Whitaker's interviews are anecdotal and do not constitute formal "sociological or psychological studies" (Whitaker, 1985: 106) — the interviewees, although all college educated women (106), were not necessarily familiar with the precise usage of terms such as 'identification' in film theory and "some of the women use 'identify with' in a way that could be interchangeable with 'love'" (107). Some of the interviewees did, however, clearly mean quite specifically to articulate identification with male or masculinised characters — and the western genre is specified surprisingly often in this context:

ROMAINE: To the extent that I identified with film characters, it would be with Robin Hood, male characters, cowboys ... (in Whitaker, 1985: 107)

EA: ... I always identified with cowboys in the westerns . . . (Ibid: 110)

ROMAINE: I identified with cowboys too, and paid no attention to the sex differences ... I identified with male characters even after adolescence, and maybe still do ... (Ibid: 110)

LULU: From westerns I incorporated into myself a strong silent image. Enough that I'd like to get rid of some of it. (113)

J A MARQUIS: I've thought about it. I was identifying with men. At age eight, nine or ten and on, when it came to Elvis Presley, I didn't scream, or drool ... I wanted to be Elvis Presley. (Ibid: 113)

These little tomboys empowered me to think of myself as a hero. They were strong and smart like the movie cowboys and gangsters I emulated . . . (Olson, 1994: 58)

Again, these lesbians seem to be articulating identification with this figure in terms of an idealised fantasy of proactivity offered by the image rather than in terms of desire for the woman as 'other'.

The western Johnny Guitar is frequently cited as a camp classic which "features a butch Joan Crawford and an even more butch Mercedes McCambridge in a series of confrontations that keep present-day gay audiences howling" (Russo, 1981: 103; see also Bell-Metereau, 1993: 87; Olson, 1994: 58). Bogus (1994) also recalled identifying with cowboy characters in black-cast films (made for the new urban black audiences in the 1920s and 1930s, copying Hollywood themes and presentations, with white-backed production, but all-black casts). The word signifying a "mannish" black women in the US in the 1920s and 1930s was "bulldagger." Bogus (1994) associated this term with Bill Pickett, a real-life black cowboy who became a legendary rodeo performer before starring in early black-cast Westerns.

Once we had seen that movie, we talked about Bill Pickett, and we talked about his exotic life, and we said "bulldogger" whenever we could. (Bogus, 1994: 34-35)

Identification with male characters is, however, articulated far more equivocally by some, and rejected outright by others:

DAGMAR: I did try hard to like male characters because I thought I was supposed to, but I found most of them nebbishes. (Whitaker, 1985: 109)

ANNA MARIA: I always worried about it ... I was always really pushed to resolve in some way what just would not fit, and so I found it hard to identify with male characters. I had to change them in some way. (Whitaker, 1985: 110)

FANNIE: I was very confused. I knew I wasn't an Indian, Superman or a cowboy. I was Lois Lane and Wonder Woman a little. (Whitaker, 1985: 112)

One of the seven (out of nine) of Whitaker's interviewees who did articulate her identification with male characters pithily explained this preference:

ROMAINE: ... Women characters were all boring ... (Whitaker, 1985: 107)

It is particularly interesting to note (given the emphasis of lesbian historians such as Nestle (1987) and Davis and Kennedy (1986) on butch-femme roleplaying as fundamentally sexual) that, among Whitaker's interviewees, those who most strongly articulated desire for the feminine star also articulated considerable ambivalence towards masculinised identifications:

You're attracted by these women and yet you don't fit in ... At times I'd identify with a character. Other times I'd float outside the situation, sort of watching the effect this attractive woman was having on me ... or sometimes I'd be Katherine Hepburn. And I might be sort of behind Spencer Tracy but I wouldn't be Spencer Tracy ! ... (Interviewee in Whitaker, 1985: 108-110)

None of the interviewees articulated identification with male stars in terms of this as offering a position from which to desire 'the woman' but solely in terms of their pleasure in the fantasy of autonomy and untrammelled activity.

ROMAINE: The cowboy archetype meant being strong and independent, not needing anybody, and moving around a lot. Being free and living with nature were especially important. As a child, independence was something I needed to feel. I had to feel free of society -- an attitude I now see as alienated in many ways. (Ibid, 1985: 110)

Bogus also made it clear that it was the representation of skill, independence, and capability in the character of the "bulldogger" which appealed to her black lesbian contemporaries (Bogus, 1994: 34-35). She does not mention sexual desire in this context. A black lesbian interviewee of Whitaker's, on the other hand, reported finding cowboys too "clean cut" (116). She articulated a preference, instead, for outlaw figures and for "smut." Again, there is a dislocation of sexual desire from specifically gendered identificatory practices. She seemed quite indifferent to the gender of the star, as long as they signified as rebels and "outsiders:"

Gene Autry was the dullest. I would identify with the cowboy who got away with the money and the girl, or who died in the street ... [In Anna Lucasta] Eartha Kitt ... ran away from her family and did what she wanted to do. I can relate to that as far as being lesbian ... (Ibid: 116)

The following anecdotal evidence from Whitaker may throw further light on the rather fragmentary processes by which lesbians seem to have engaged with popular film and, like Bogus' commentary, it also identifies cinema as having had a function in forming lesbian identity. Rather than referencing fixed identifications, there appears to be a process of trying out gendered roles to find a workable compromise with dominant representations that more or less 'fits':

JUDY: It wasn't film that told you it was okay to love women.

ANNA MARIA: No, but it did give me the context in which to play out all these ideas, fantasizing romantic encounters and playing one of many roles, always switching around when it got too hot in one seat. I eventually worked out something acceptable to me. (Whitaker, 1985: 110)

Anecdotal lesbian accounts of film spectatorship seem to concur rather strikingly with theoretical feminist accounts of the significances of lesbian deployments of masculinising iconography which are outlined at the start of this chapter. The constant emphasis on the physical activity of the crossdressed icon also seems to effect a spontaneous echo to Mulvey's (1981) theorisation which posited the instability of gendered identifications in Hollywood film, by reference, precisely, to the compromise figure of the tomboy. The tomboy icon always seems to refer itself to a struggle against the restrictions of femininity rather than directly to masculinity as a mimesis. It evokes female autonomy, skill and motor pleasures (which have, of course, an erotic component) which dominant discourses make available — and even enforce as the presentation of masculinity — but which conflict with a conventional presentation of femininity within the heterosexual order. It thus enables some refusal of patriarchal modes of feminine performance without binding lesbians over to the category of masculinity.