Is Chaplin in drag (A Woman, 1915) a queer image, a camp image or simply a critic-proof comic trope that has more to do with whimsy and naughtiness than homosexuality? Silent film is rife with arguably crypto-queer motifs, from the obligatory drag performed by virtually every silent comic, to the groundbreaking kiss between Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers in Wings (1927), to director Frank Borzage's homoerotic studies of Charles Farrell in films like Seventh Heaven (1927) and Street Angel (1928). It's now generally agreed that the dancing men in the Edison short The Gay Brothers, circa 1895, represent the first identifiable homosexual coupling in cinema, but, typical of the confusions around queerness, even this can be disputed by invoking the different view of homosexuality that supposedly existed at the time. These waltzing brothers may have been acting more fancifully than queer.

Between The Gay Brothers and the New Queer Cinema movement and its aftermath are a wealth of queer presences - before and behind the camera and in themes and subtexts. For the sake of simplicity we can reduce this long stretch to a few major archetypes to encapsulate the general trends and show briefly how societal views of homosexuality changed. The sissy was the first archetype and probably the most enduring, remaining an identifiable, often unchanged presence from the silent era to today. In the 1940s, the sissy became the killer queen (or dyke), acquiring power by mutating into threatening pervert, tragic "third sex" or homicidal maniac. Such characters are less noticeable today, replaced by a third queer presence, or actually two related ones: the dying homosexual of the AIDS era and the healthy, well-adjusted gay or lesbian of the New Queer Cinema and beyond.

The Sissy

The sissy holds a special place in cinema history. Just as drag queens radicalized legions of queers at the Stonewall Riots, so the sissy, in his quieter way, was the revolutionary of 1930s cinema, brazenly countering the hetero hero's often foolish attempts to get laid (or at least steal a kiss) with an arsenal of arched eyebrows, rolling eyes and finger-wagging. Sissies were a fixture, indeed a sine qua non, of between-the-wars café society, an instant signifier of everything sophisticated and pleasurable, if also transgressive, about modern urban culture. Astaire-Rogers musicals like The Gay Divorcee (1934) and Top Hat (1935) are unimaginable without mincing queens like Eric Blore, Edward Everett Horton and Franklin Pangborn demonstrating to their often clueless master (or mistress) how to act, dress and even triumph in a heterosexual love affair. Despite his marginalization from the narrative, the sissy displayed instant thrilling power with every appearance. In George Cukor's Our Betters (1933), the standout sissy Ernest (Tyrell Davis), complete with lipstick, rouge and a commandingly effeminate manner, appears at the end like a perverse deus ex machina to help resolve the hapless heteros' romantic confusions. (This role was much remarked on at the time, with Variety calling this "pansy... the most broadly painted character of the kind yet attempted.") The classic comedy My Man Godfrey (1936) broke the sissy's cardinal "look but don't touch" rule when it had the fey Franklin Pangborn lovingly - and lengthily - stroke the beard of Godfrey (William Powell) to see if it was real, an indignity that Godfrey must endure due to the sissy's power.

Clifton Webb in Laura (1944)

Sissies continued to flourish in the decades to follow, but with variations. The 1940s saw the "killer sissy" emerge in the form of Clifton Webb in Laura (1944) and The Dark Corner (1946). In the 1950s, the much-remarked "sad young man" - the tragic homosexual familiar to readers of pulp paperbacks - appeared in films like Rebel Without a Cause (the Sal Mineo character, 1955) and Tea and Sympathy (1956), where even the accusation of "Sissy Boy" (which turned out to be false in the latter film) was enough to nearly destroy the target of such phrases. In the 1960s, sissies continued to make their presence known, often in a kind of leering, sniggering way, as in the Rock Hudson vehicles Lover Come Back (1961) and A Very Special Favor (1965). There, Hudson pretends to be a sissy in order to win over a woman, a dizzying collision of reality and fiction in the case of a gay actor such as Hudson. The 1960s abounded with sissies, but the most notable appeared in the often reviled Boys in the Band (1970), in the persons of Emory ("Who do you have to fuck to get a drink around here?") and Harold ("Michael doesn't have charm. Michael has counter-charm.") Here, for once, the sissies are the main characters, not cracked reflections of their heterosexual bosses or phony sissies a la the Hudson roles. A related phenomenon of "playing gay" - hetero actors dressing in drag - that began in the silent era remains a popular trope, viz. movies like To Wong Foo... (1995) in which straight actors don drag to show their mettle, their range, and their ability to laugh at themselves.

Killer Queens and Deadly Dykes

Societal fears around homosexuality, negatively energized by the darkness of war, spawned Clifton Webb's murderous homo Waldo Lydecker in Laura. This character was the first to combine the sissy manner - extreme sophistication, verbal command, effeminate gestures - with homicidal urges based on a kind of twisted heterosexual impulse. Only Webb's intensity as an actor could convince audiences that he was in love with Laura and not with Laura's love interest, hunky cop Dana Andrews. Lydecker, who kills one person and nearly kills Laura and her cop boyfriend, spawned many a criminal queer in the decades to come.

Alfred Hitchcock's fascination with homosexuality has often been remarked, and two of his most notable films in this regard are Rope (1948) and Strangers on a Train (1951), both featuring sophisticated killer queers who think they're above the law. Criminal dykes, too, make their appearance around this time. Caged (1950) is a veritable catalog of evil butch women, including vicious matron Evelyn Harper (memorably played by Hope Emerson), whose repertoire includes S&M games like head shaving, and a female crime boss who practically licks her lips when she sees a new "cute trick" walk by. Typical of this era, Harper's sexuality is coded: she's straight on paper (she mentions a boyfriend), but queer on screen.

The "pathology" of homosexuality, dovetailing with the medical establishment's negative attitude toward it, became rife in cinema in the late 1950s and beyond. Crazy queers were the driving force in films like the 1957 The Strange One (with Ben Gazzara as a crypto-homo sadist at a military school), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) and The Sergeant (1968). It's significant that these films share a military or quasi-military setting, the implication being that such all-male environments are in danger of breeding homosexuality, which in turn creates a murderous pathology.

In The Boys in the Band, one of the characters says, "Not every faggot gets bumped off in the end." But that's precisely what happened in the subgenre of the suicidal queer. Two notable films in this realm are The Children's Hour (1962), in which the accusation of lesbianism (not entirely unfounded) ends with a rope suicide; and The Sergeant, in which the title character kills himself after kissing a private. (The queer kiss is yet another subgenre, and a fascinating one. The producers of the 1982 film Deathtrap calculated that the brief kiss between Christopher Reeve and Michael Caine cost the film $10 million in lost revenues due to negative publicity - an expensive smooch by any standard.)

Notorious in the killer dyke genre is the 1992 Basic Instinct, with its central image of an ice-pick-wielding lesbian who may be the thriller writer (Sharon Stone) or the police psychiatrist (Jeanne Triplehorne). Some critics complained that the extensive protests by the gay community were unnecessary, that the film was as nasty to its heterosexual characters as to its queer ones - perhaps a sign of progress. Cruising (1980), despite predating Basic Instinct by more than 10 years, could be called the latter's companion piece, with its portrayal of a queer maniac murdering members of New York's leather community. Both films share something else: charges that, by the end, the audience still can't be sure of the identity of the killer, an indication perhaps of a failed attempt at complexity - or of the confusions that continued to surround cinematic portrayals of homosexuality.

Post-Stonewall Cinema

After the 1969 Stonewall riots, queer cinema changed. That event made positive portrayals possible. Even The Boys in the Band, often pointed to as the ultimate self-hating homo film, has positive characterizations. Some of the "boys" like Larry and Hank appear to be average guys in every particular except one. And directors like John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy, 1969; Sunday Bloody Sunday, 1971) and Bob Fosse (Cabaret, 1972) were among many who showed that homosexuality could be treated in an adult manner and even incorporated into larger stories of human frailty or historical events. A film like The Killing of Sister George (1968), with its unrepentant, garrulous dyke heroine, slightly predates Stonewall but has much of the spirit of defiance that defined that event, showing that Stonewall was more a culmination than a breakthrough.

Beryl Reid in The Killing of Sister George (1968)

Soon after AIDS appeared in the early 1980s, an "AIDS cinema" could be identified. Films like An Early Frost (1985) and Parting Glances (1986) established the template for the genre, which mostly portrayed the plight of white middle-class queers in a mournful, sometimes maudlin way, a resurrection of the "sad young man" syndrome of 1950s paperbacks with the added inflection of a terminal disease. Perhaps the major work in the genre was Philadelphia (1993), a film criticized in some quarters for its reluctance - seeming to hark back to an earlier, more repressed time - to show the physical attraction of the two male leads.

Following the AIDS drama, and in many ways an answer to it, were the sunny queer comedies of the 1990s, a backlash that coincided with shifting attitudes towards the disease from incurable to manageable. Films like Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss (1998) and Trick (1999) are typical of the genre, with robust, well-scrubbed young leading men, an upbeat musical motif and a coy attitude toward sexuality that makes them palatable to a wide audience while also reassuring queer viewers that there was life after AIDS. These films appear to have been key in opening the way to the tidal wave of queer television shows like Boy Meets Boy and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy that have become a cause celebre.

On a more ambitious note was the New Queer Cinema, so identified by critic B. Ruby Rich in the early 1990s to define a group of more sophisticated, politically minded queer films that were making the rounds, including Poison (1990), Swoon (1992), The Living End (1992), and The Hours and Times (1991). Unlike other film movements, this one had no manifesto, no rules and no particular canon, making it in essence not a movement or a genre but, perhaps more accurately, a trend. These films frequently featured one producer, Christine Vachon, and most came from the independent scene, making them less answerable to corporate or mainstream interests. This links them to some of the earlier mature treatments of homosexuality like Midnight Cowboy or Cabaret, though one of the lures of the New Queer Cinema was the lack of polish exhibited by those earlier films, as if truths were more easily located in a rougher, less predictable format. Featuring complex characters with flaws and foibles, and sophisticated stories, the films showed a world far removed from the screaming sissies, tragic homos, and killer dykes of the late, and in some ways lamented, Old Queer Cinema.

Gary Morris edits the incomparable Bright Lights Film Journal, a GreenCine favorite and "a popular-academic hybrid" (for a fun read, check the list of banned words). He's also written for both San Francisco alternative weeklies, Images and other publications.

Where to begin. For one thing, as Gary writes, "interpretations in this realm are always debatable." Our recommendations won't be necessarily limited to, say, films with gay protagonists or films made by gay directors; but at the same time, space does limit us from open-armed though perfectly legitimate definitions like Dmetri Kakmi's when he writes of queer movies in Senses of Cinema, "I interpret Cukor's 1939 classic The Women, which boasted an all female cast, as a gathering of bitchy backstage drag queens all competing for the affections of their unseen men."

Can't argue with that. But to hit the highlights without repeating titles Gary's mentioned, what follows are some clear favorites among GreenCiners, going by lists and ratings. Gary has, in fact, covered the pre-Stonewall era so very well, we'll simply mention one documentary to supplement his choices, The Celluloid Closet (1996). Based on the book by Vito Russo (and if you read Kakmi, you'll notice he has a few bones to pick with it), Closet chronicles the portrayal of gays and lesbians on screen, delighting particularly in the homosexual subtext of Hollywood films when the Hays Code was in full force.

To the recs, then, sliced up in all but arbitrary categories:

More Landmarks

The same could be said of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Derek Jarman; and of Pedro Almodóvar and François Ozon.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972)

It's odd, isn't it. The milestone is probably Robert Towne's Personal Best (1982), which was quickly followed by John Sayles's Lianna (1983), a film many lesbians expected to hate - but didn't.

Lukas Moodysson's Show Me Love (1998)