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| An image from the pivotal 1919 feature Different From The Others |
"Somebody, your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour--and in the oddest places!--for the lack of it." - James Baldwin
Have you seen the new trailer for Love, Simon? If not, check it out below cuz it's all kinds of sweet and heartwarming, really makes me hope the movie itself is awesome!
Love, Simon will be released on March 16th by 20th Century Fox. This means it will be the first time (with the exception of 2009's Bruno) one of the seven major American movie studios (which also include Disney, Warner Bros., Universal, Sony/Columbia, Paramount and Lionsgate) will have released a movie with an LGBTQA+ lead since Rent in November 2005. Yes, it's been nearly thirteen years since one of these massive studios released a motion picture with a queer lead character. Think of all that's happened in the LGBTQA+ community in that timespan, most notably the legalization of gay marriage in the United States. It's bonkers Hollywood hasn't done more with LGBTQA+ storytelling, especially given how prominent such characters are on all sorts of television shows ranging from prestige dramas to superhero programs.
The lack of LGBTQA+ protagonists in mainstream American cinema is a stunning matter just taken on it's own merits, but it becomes even more shocking when one remembers that this community has been here, queer and telling people to get used to it since the earliest days of cinema. And when I say earliest days of cinema, I mean going back as far as 1895! That was the year a feature, whose title is simply given as Dickson Experimental Sound Film, featured two men dancing closely in a manner evocative of how male/female partners typically intimately dance. Though apparently never distributed properly, it is now widely regarded as the very first piece of queer cinema.
This short piece of cinema may have been the first to acknowledge LGBTQA+ individuals, but it would be far from the last. Twelve years later, no less than George Mellies produced a short film entitled The Eclipse, or The Courtship of The Moon And The Sun that once again saw Mellies traveling to the cosmos after his groundbreaking 1902 endeavor A Trip To The Moon. Just like in that earlier work of his, the Earth's moon figures heavily into the story at hand as the Moon and the sun (each with human faces) engage in a romantic courtship of sorts. Interestingly, notes for the project from Mellies himself do note that he saw the Sun and the Moon as a hetereosexual couple, the fact that both characters are portrayed by men here who act overtly romantic to one another makes it clear why it's seen today as a landmark early depiction of same-sex relationships.
1912 saw another formative early pioneer of the art of cinema try their hand with queer subject matter. The filmmaker in question would be Alice Guy-Blanche (who directed the project alongside
Harry Schenck and Edward Warren) and the film was called Algie The Miner, a nine-minute long movie centering on a miner named Algie (played by Billy Quirk) whose penchant for wearing flashy clothes and giving cowboys kisses makes it clear he's about as straight as a rainbow. He must prove, over the course of a year, to his female fiancee's father that he's a real man so he sets off into the wilderness with Big Jim to learn how to be a more conventional masculine man.
As far as general queer representation goes, Algie The Miner is a mixed bag, mostly because the entire story of this short revolves around Algie learning to shed his more effeminate traits and adhere to what was thought of in that Western era as more conventional male behavior. However, Billy Quirk is frequently amusing in the role and there are moments of thoughtfulness such as when Algie use a pair of guns to intimidates two thugs to leave Big Jim, an action coded as "masculine" and then immediately afterwards reaches for his trusty hankerchief, an action coded as "feminine", the sole sign in the short that Algie's personality could be complex enough to balance personality traits attributed to both men and women. Even with keeping its flaws in mind, kudos to Alice Guy-Blanche and company for making a short film at the dawn of the 20th century with a lead character like Algie.
So far, this discussion on the very first pieces of queer cinema has been all about the dudes but 1914 would introduce the world to the first feature film to focus on a Lesbian romance. This movie was called A Florida Enchantment and dealt with a woman named Lillian Travers who transforms into a man. In her new form, she finds herself attracted to other women. Interestingly, though that makes it sound like they painted an external heterosexual coat of paint on a queer experience of finding yourself attracted to people of the same gender, actress Edith Storey plays Lillian Travers in both her female and male form, making it impossible to ignore the queer nature of the project (the blackface that transpires in the film is similarly unfeasible and unlike the Lesbianism, is thoroughly unsettling).
For the rest of the decade, queer leads or representation in world cinema were scarce, with A Florida Enchantment being the last American film of the decade to feature queer subject matter (An Adventuress would break this dry spell in 1920). Luckily, foreign cinema at least delivered a trio of pieces of queer cinema, the first of them being the 1916 Sweden movie The Wings, which features an both an explicitly gay character and a bisexual character in it's cast. Though featuring the first (as far as I know) example of bisexuality in the artform of cinema, a large chunk of The Wings has been lost, though it's important accomplishments in terms of on-screen representation are far from forgotten.
The last two pieces of queer cinema of the decade emerged from Germany. The first of these two titles was I Don't Want To Be A Man, featuring a female cross-dressing lead whose antics involve her realizing the different ways men & women are treated in society and she also falls in love with a man she meets, whilst dressed as a man, at a party.
Finally, we come to perhaps the most profoundly important of these early pieces of queer cinema, the 1919 German movie Different From The Others. If queer characters had been obscured under cross-dressing and magical seeds up to this point, this Richard Oswalt directed feature was loud and clear about both it's lead character being gay and it's intentions to be seen as firmly against anti-homosexuality laws in place in Germany in this era. Proving to be controversial in its initial release, Different From The Others was eventually banned from being publically screened in October 1920. Though attempts were made by the Nazi's to wipe the film out entirely, the feature has endured to this very day and is now seen as a landmark for both queer cinema and film as an artform itself.
Turning one-hundred years old next year, Different From The Others stands out at as one of the earliest examples of queer representation in an artform that was, at the time still in its nascent stages. Queer cinema would become more prominent in the years to come, though it's sad to think how, a century after Richard Oswalt's feature film debuted, queer cinema still struggles to get any presence in mainstream cinema in America and most other countries on the planet. These earliest pieces of queer cinema show that the LGBTQA+ community is ingrained into the very fabric of society and that to deny the very presence of such individuals is to deny individuals who were there at the dawn of cinema itself.
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