LGBTQ+ Changemakers in Film and Television | by Mel Hopper

Acting, musical theatre and the like have always been stereotypically queer career paths. Having to pretend to be someone you’re not to fit in with a society that doesn’t accept you probably helps build skills like that. LGBTQ+ people have been working behind the scenes of films for as long as films have been around. Here are a few short stories about lesser-known but nevertheless important parts of LGBTQ+ film history.
 

Dorothy Arzner - The butch lesbian director who made her mark on old Hollywood
 

1920s Hollywood, like just about everywhere else in the 1920s, was a rather sexist place. In particular, female directors were unheard of. Well, aside from Dorothy Arzner. She originally studied medicine and worked as an ambulance driver during WWI but decided to get into the film industry after visiting a movie studio. She started as a typist but quickly worked her way up to being a screenwriter and then an editor. She directed her first picture in 1927, a silent film called Fashions for Women. In 1929, she directed Paramount’s first talking film, The Wild Party. During the production of this film, she had technicians rig a microphone to a fishing rod, creating the first-ever boom mic in the process. 

By the time she retired from Hollywood in 1943, she had made twenty films. She was the first woman to join the directors guild of America and the first woman to direct a sound film. She was also a butch lesbian. She presented in a very masculine fashion, wearing suits or straight dresses. Some theorize this contributed to her success as a director as she would stand out less. She maintained a 40-year-long relationship with the dancer and choreographer Marion Morgan. She was also romantically linked with various other actresses. Her films often included strong female characters and promoted community among women, while examining the damage caused by heterosexual marriage.
 

Dirk Bogarde - The gay actor who sacrificed his Hollywood heartthrob persona to pursue what he truly wanted

The 1961 film, Victim, brought about a turning point in attitudes towards homosexuality in the UK. It was one of the first films to portray a gay man in a positive light. It made light of the issue that with homosexuality still being a crime at the time, 90% of blackmail cases involved the threat of being outed as gay. It ruffled quite a few feathers in the British Board of Film Censors and was refused a seal of approval from the Hays Code. It was also responsible for changing the attitude of the UK public towards homosexuality for the better. 6 years after its release, in 1967, the sexual offenses act was passed, which partially decriminalized homosexuality.

One of the people behind this was Dirk Bogarde, the lead actor. He started his career in the late 40s as an attractive Hollywood heartthrob. However, by the start of the decade, he had grown tired of being a matinee idol. He accepted the offer to star in Victim, despite knowing the damage it would do to his box office appeal. Allegedly in 1965, Dirk said in an interview “For the first time I was playing my own age. At Rank, the fixed rule was that I had to look pretty. Victim ended all that nonsense.”

For four decades, he lived with his partner Anthony Forwood, and while he never claimed their relationship was anything other than platonic, to do so would have cost him his entire career. In Victim, he wrote the scene where his character, Melville Farr, admits to his wife that he is gay. A lot of the other cast members of the film were also gay or had been affected by the homophobic laws of the time. Sylvia Syms, who played Melville’s wife had lost a family friend to suicide after he was accused of being gay and believed that this was a story that needed to be told.

For Dirk, this was the start of a new era of roles he played. He shifted to much grittier stories than he had before that delved into the shadier side of human nature. Some of his films from this era include Death in Venice (1971) and The Night Porter (1974).

Anders als die Andern - The 1919 film that was way ahead of its time

While Victim was a ground-breaking movie, it wasn’t the first one with such a plot. That honour goes to a film made in Germany in 1919 called Anders als die Andern, or Different from the others. It features a gay violinist who falls in love with one of his students. An extortionist threatens to out him as gay. Unfortunately, the scandal eventually goes public and he commits suicide. 

The film’s sympathetic portrayal of homosexuality caused quite a stir and incited a cultural debate. Conservative Christians and antisemitic groups protested the film vehemently, claiming they were looking to protect young people. Some were a bit more upfront with their antisemitism and claimed that Magnus Hirschfeld and Richard Oswald, the cowriters, were promoting the Jewish vice of homosexuality with the film. These protests caused Germany to reinstate its censorship laws and by 1920, the film could only be shown for private educational viewings.

The original film has been lost, with all copies having been destroyed because of the ban. However, Hirschfeld was able to sneak some of the film into his later film, Gesetze der Liebe (Laws of Love). This film made it into the Russian State Film and Photo Archive, and eventually, this shortened version was released to the public.
Aside from Magnus Hirschfeld himself, there were a few other queer actors from the time involved in the film. One of these was Anita Berber. Known for being scandalously androgynous and addicted to narcotics and alcohol, she was involved in relationships with both men and women and was part of the Berlin lesbian scene. She was also arrested once for insulting the king. 

Another of these was Karl Giese, Hirschfeld’s partner. Outside of this film he worked as an employee for Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft and eventually moved to Paris with Hirschfeld to live with another of his partners, Li Shiu Tong, in a polyamorous relationship.

The film itself ends with Hirschfeld, who plays a doctor, delivering the following speech to the protagonist’s lover:
“You have to keep living; live to change the prejudices by which this man has been made one of the countless victims. ... You must restore the honor of this man and bring justice to him, and all those who came before him, and all those to come after him. Justice through knowledge!”
 

What I’ve written here are heavily abridged versions of the actual stories. If you want to find out more about any of them, I’d recommend looking at the articles I linked. You can find quite a few other good ones just by having a look around Wikipedia. We’ve always been around, and with the internet, it’s easier than ever to find out more about groups that were historically silenced.

Mel Hopper is a Data Fellowship apprentice at Multiverse based in London but works remotely from Bath.  This article has been written to celebrate LGBT History Month.

Resources:

• A potted history of LGBT characters on British screens (inews.co.uk)
• The Real LGBT Stars of Old Hollywood (filmschoolrejects.com)
• Arzner, Dorothy – Senses of Cinema
• Why Dirk Bogarde was a truly dangerous film star - BBC Culture
• Anita Berber - Wikipedia
• Different From The Others : Richard-Oswald-Produktion, Filmmuseum München : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
• Different from the Others - Wikipedia