In Coming Together, Ryan Powell captures the social and political vitality of the first wave of movies made by, for, and about male-desiring men in the United States between World War II and the 1980s. From the underground films of Kenneth Anger and the Gay Girls Riding Club to the gay liberation-era hardcore films and domestic dramas of Joe Gage and James Bidgood, Powell illuminates how central filmmaking and exhibition were to gay socializing and worldmaking. Unearthing scores of films and a trove of film-related ephemera, Coming Together persuasively unsettles popular histories that center Stonewall as a ground zero for gay liberation and visibility. Powell asks how this generation of movie-making—which defiantly challenged legal and cultural norms around sexuality and gender—provided, and may still provide, meaningful models for living.
In Coming Together, Ryan Powell captures the social and political vitality of the first wave of movies made by, for, and about male-desiring men in the United States between World War II and the 1980s. From the underground films of Kenneth Anger and the Gay Girls Riding Club to the gay liberation-era hardcore films and domestic dramas of Joe Gage and James Bidgood, Powell illuminates how central filmmaking and exhibition were to gay socializing and worldmaking. Unearthing scores of films and a trove of film-related ephemera, Coming Together persuasively unsettles popular histories that center Stonewall as a ground zero for gay liberation and visibility. Powell asks how this generation of movie-making—which defiantly challenged legal and cultural norms around sexuality and gender—provided, and may still provide, meaningful models for living.
Coming Together: The Cinematic Elaboration of Gay Male Life, 1945-1979
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Coming Together: The Cinematic Elaboration of Gay Male Life, 1945-1979
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Overview
In Coming Together, Ryan Powell captures the social and political vitality of the first wave of movies made by, for, and about male-desiring men in the United States between World War II and the 1980s. From the underground films of Kenneth Anger and the Gay Girls Riding Club to the gay liberation-era hardcore films and domestic dramas of Joe Gage and James Bidgood, Powell illuminates how central filmmaking and exhibition were to gay socializing and worldmaking. Unearthing scores of films and a trove of film-related ephemera, Coming Together persuasively unsettles popular histories that center Stonewall as a ground zero for gay liberation and visibility. Powell asks how this generation of movie-making—which defiantly challenged legal and cultural norms around sexuality and gender—provided, and may still provide, meaningful models for living.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226634401 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 07/19/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Ryan Powell is assistant professor of cinema and media studies at The Media School at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Picturing the Underground
The Terrain of the Homosexual Underground
In the mid-twentieth-century United States, the figure of the underground was repeatedly deployed to describe two forms of activity in spatialized terms: small organizational meetings held by political dissidents in clandestine spaces and art, music, and film events arranged in out-of-the-way locations such as lofts, old cinemas, apartments, and wilderness settings. The underground operated as both a figure of popular paranoid imagination — a way of imagining invisible groups of others who threatened to destabilize normative civil life from beneath — and as a designation for an actual cultural geographic formation. Underground sites were spaces in which groups came into new constellations of counterpublic formation in private, semiprivate, and appropriated public domains.
A number of key events occurred between the early 1940s and the mid-1960s that changed how Americans perceived their place in wider society. This had particular ramifications for the coalescence of LGBTQ+ social and political life. Primed by the gendered division of labor among soldiers in World War II, many women and men returned from the war after living in sustained conditions of sex segregation. For returning service people, particularly but not only same-sex desiring individuals, this made the prospect of coming back to either begin or resume nuclear family life more challenging.
At the same time, and at least in part as a response to growing sex segregation, a public discourse developed around fears that homosocial contexts might operate as the breeding grounds for dangerous forms of social, political, cultural, and sexual dissidence. During this time, a variety of phenomena fostered the notion of a "homosexual" underclass in the mass media. In a precursor to later paradigms of "outness," official bodies began to register homosexuality as a ubiquitous and often invisible phenomenon that needed to be rendered visible.
The first of these phenomena was the US military's discharge of thousands of personnel believed to be homosexual, officially implemented in 1944 with Regulation 615-360, Section 8. This permitted the government to subject military personnel to psychiatric testing in order to determine if they might be diagnosed as homosexual: a term that at this point was almost exclusively meant to designate a form of psychopathological disease and disorder. With an estimated four to five thousand personnel fired, these discharges had the effect of moving homosexuality into the public eye. It also promoted the notion that homosexuality was something that could be identified through diagnostic psychiatric testing, even if a subject had never participated in same-sex sexual activity. It became conceivable to the public at large that one could unknowingly harbor latent forms of homosexuality that were fully diagnosable to the expert eye.
Another key phenomenon that worked to pedestrianize homosexuality was Alfred Kinsey's 1948 study Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, in which the sexologist reported that 37 percent of the male American population had participated in same-sex activity at some point in their lives. As a result of the media attention given to Kinsey's study (as well as the repeated emphasis on what came to be known as the Kinsey Scale, according to which everyone registers somewhere on a continuum between heterosexual and homosexual extremes), it became possible to conceive of any person as having a history of or a continued interest in same-sex sexual activity. While not necessarily constructing homosexuals as an underclass, per se, the treatment of the Kinsey Report as a scandalous revelation presented same-sex desire as something always potentially underneath the facade of everyday American life.
Postwar panic around the specter of homosexuality peaked with the US government's purging of its employees in what has since come to be called the Lavender Scare. Occurring in tandem with Cold War paranoia, prominent government officials came to believe that homosexuals in the US government compromised national security, in that they were susceptible to blackmail and could be forced to spy on behalf of Communist infiltrators. By the 1960s, this purge reached "well into the thousands."
The combination of these three events encouraged a figuration of homosexuals as existing "underneath" in a variety of ways. Psychologically, homosexuality was a pathologized persona existing just below and working in contrast to an otherwise unsuspecting, presentable self. Socially, it might be gathering just beneath the veneer of governmental institutions from the military to the White House and beyond. Homosexuality, as produced in the postwar discourse of panic and paranoia, was amplified as a spatialized figure that spanned the literal and metaphoric. It threatened to poison normative life from below: invisible but also potentially anywhere and everywhere. While this paranoid figuration resulted in the abuse and persecution of male-desiring men, it also ignited the imagination of people across the US, prompting them to imagine what kinds of activity might be taking place around them. Some men began to move from just imagining to carving out spaces and creating networks of contact. The imagination of social possibility did not end once they began meeting, but became central to facilitating the mobilization of large groups of male-desiring men.
During the postwar years, two nexuses of social organization came into being within and through the figure of underground cultural formation. Each of these nexuses fostered new ways of structuring and experiencing sex and gender, though in somewhat different ways. In the first case, underground social/political groups, such as the Mattachine Society, One Inc., and the Daughters of Bilitis, organized around the interests of same-sex desiring participants. In the second case, the same period saw the emergence and expansion of experimental cinema groups, organized around fostering US avant-garde filmmaking and film events. As Juan Suárez has noted, the underground was an important figure for dissident artistic formations both in Europe and America even before the 1960s, evoking "a certain glamorization of marginality, a desire to thrive outside (or underneath) the mainstream." Spearheaded in Los Angeles in the late 1940s by filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, and Curtis Harrington, experimental film culture, like underground gay organizations, quickly came to work as a national (though largely bicoastal) cluster of sites and activities that sponsored non-heterocentric forms of sociosexuality among participants.
These two prominent "undergrounds" are not typically thought about in more than a cursory relationship to one another, and there are many reasons for this. Their goals were different: one sought to advance the freedoms of people at risk of being ostracized and stigmatized as the agents of criminal, pathological homosexuality, while the other sought, first and foremost, to advance challenging new forms and arrangements of filmmaking and film reception. However, if we think of the underground less in terms of culturally located, specific groups and more as a process of sociopolitical world-making taken up among a wide range of individuals and groups, then we can see how numerous strands of postwar social activity start to become legible as key contributors to the postwar construction of social life among male-desiring men, both on film and off. In other words, the increasing mobilization of male-desiring men as a recognizable social constituency not only operated through the prerogatives of institutionalization but also developed within a world of overlapping and layered sites of activity, broadly informed by notions of underground dissidence. The same could be said of the avant-garde cinema culture that showed some of the first censorship-challenging images of same-sex desire in the US — one site of overlap in which these undergrounds spoke to and informed each other.
This chapter considers the place of postwar underground cultural production in the United States between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s and asks how the production, circulation, and screening of films worked as a rallying point for the expansion and elaboration of social and political life among male-desiring men. While a number of conceptual frameworks operated as a means for identification and affiliation among male-desiring men during this period — including camp, homophile, queer, homosexual, and gay — in this chapter I explore the increasing popularization of homosexuality as a discourse during the postwar years in fostering new forms of social formation and cinematic experience. While the concept of homosexuality medicalized individuals and groups as pathological and disordered, it also facilitated contacts and connections, enabling social and political organization. People classified as homosexuals not only suffered at the hands of psychiatrists, the law, and phobic citizens, but also came together as homosexuals. As Martin Meeker has noted, "before people who erotically and emotionally preferred the same sex could organize to confront and challenge their antagonists, they have had to coalesce around an identity and gather themselves into collectivities, into communities, into specific places, and around certain ideas."
The underground functioned as a figurative trope central to the coalescence of homosexual social organization during the postwar years. Quite different from the metaphor of the closet, which suggests a wholly concealed location that renders certain behaviors and interests invisible to society as a whole, the underground signals a shifting constellation of sites between and through which people move and congregate. Whether bikers like the Satyrs Motorcycle Club barbecuing in a state park, drag queens chatting backstage at Finocchio's in San Francisco, or a group of friends out for a night of cruising at the Windup bar in Hollywood, male-desiring men participated in sophisticated networks of underground sociality. Their energy was directed less toward the possibility of inclusion and acceptance within the world at large and more toward developing sites and networks of sociosexual activity on their own terms.
Cinema and cinema culture offered a fertile ground for the gathering of male-desiring men. Going to, making, and exhibiting movies brought men together in basements, bars, rented movie theaters, apartments, and homes and at special event screenings in art theaters. This chapter explores the place of cinema in the underground world-making activities of male-desiring men during an era when "homosexuality" became a central feature of popular discourse in the United States. At the same time that popular magazines were locating and exploring the features of US homosexual culture, these underground networks themselves were growing, resulting in more complex and enculturated forms of togetherness. The cinemas of the homosexual underground imagined ways of living and being in the world that both echoed the growing collectivizaton of people around models of same-sex desire and imagined mechanisms for inspiring new forms of collectivity, bridging the distance between the imagined and the possible.
Yet, the history I want to recall here does not only describe an emergent group of people coming into visibility through selfre-presentation. It is just as much, if not more, a history of the role of movements, industries, technologies, spaces, and locations in both imagining and bringing into being new social contexts and formations as well as revitalizing and repurposing old ones. In order to elucidate the terrain of the homosexual underground, this chapter considers three areas: avant-garde film shown at art theaters and "private" screenings, mail-order homoerotic physique films viewed in homes and at special events, and amateur/home movies made and screened among groups of friends in homes, apartments, and bars. These films act as documents of participation in cultures of same-sex desire at a time when these cultures, and the films they made, risked bringing participants up against the persecution of the law, family, and the medical/psychiatric establishment. At the same time, they also act as affective repositories that demonstrate how male-desiring men produced, shaped, and participated in particular currents of feeling.
The homosexual underground is a spatially centered cinema; this is a key facet of how these films articulate the complicated relationship between alienation, sexual endeavor, and sociality. Over and over, these movies use the movement within and between certain kinds of space to dramatize how male-desiring men might end up: tragically alone, coupled with another man, or aligned with a group of male-desiring men. They use a variety of spaces — from on-location urban sites to exotic "fantasy" sets — to position male-male desire as a worlded experience. That is, space in the homosexual underground film becomes a means for asserting that male-male desire is capable of claiming a whole domain. Even when characters are shown as isolated and alone, they are rarely figured only in close-up, but rather shown as part of an environment. In the homosexual underground, male-male desire is thus pictured as having the weight and significance that comes with the spatialized constitution of characters placed in the world and thus, at least theoretically, capable of acting upon and changing that world.
This chapter considers the role of space and location in a set of films made in and around Los Angeles and Southern California. It begins by looking at how homosexual discourse fostered certain forms of social and political contact among male-desiring men starting in the mid- to late 1940s and goes on to explore how this in turn fostered certain practices of underground filmmaking and cinema-going culture. It then establishes the relationship that existed between dominant and independent forms of filmmaking, looking at three case studies: the avant-garde trance film Fireworks (Kenneth Anger, 1947), the early films of the Athletic Model Guild, and the work of the filmmaking collective the Gay Girls Riding Club. Each of these studies considers how these films undertake negotiations with mainstream film tropes as a means to advance inventive elaborations of underground spatiality.
Across Town: Three Sites in Underground Los Angeles
In December 1945, with his mother's permission, twenty-two-year-old Bob Mizer began taking photographs of muscular men, naked save for posing straps, at their family-owned rooming house under the company name Athletic Model Guild. Located at 1834 West Eleventh Street in the Pico-Union neighborhood of Los Angeles, the 1898 craftsman house offered ample space, inside and out, for Mizer to work with his models, store his equipment, and set up a lab to develop prints. Following the commercial success of his individual photographs with a network of in-the-know customers, as well as his release from six months at the Saugus Prison Farm for sending his photographs through the US mail in 1947, Mizer launched the first issue of his magazine Physique Photo News in May 1951 (permanently renamed Physique Pictorial in November of that same year). From this point until his death in 1992, Athletic Model Guild operated as a boarding house for models and actors, a screening venue, a distribution hub for AMG's films and magazines, and a photography and movie studio, serving an international audience. Subsequent to his mother's passing in September 1964, Mizer began running the house as a compound that accommodated models.
Between 1945 and the rise in gay visibility in the late 1960s and early 1970s, thousands of men around the globe saw their first overt images of same-sex sexual and romantic desire between men thanks to Mizer. From his corner of Los Angeles, he generated inexpensive, fantastical visions of male-male desire that posited his studio space as a utopian oasis of homoeroticism.
One May afternoon in Los Angeles, 1948, three men met during a lunch break at an industrial office where one of them, Harry Hay, worked as a secretary. Hay, an actor and Communist Party organizer, and Bill Lewis, Hay's coworker, were speaking to their friend Chuck. Chuck, in town for a brief visit, was a secretary in the State Department in Washington DC and was clueing them in to the sudden spate of firings of suspected homosexuals from the State Department. Concerned about this spike in persecution, Hay began planning for more formal meetings to discuss tactics of political and social mobilization. Proposed and provisional names for this group included "Society's Androgynous Minority" and the "International Bachelors' Fraternal Order for Peace and Social Dignity" before the name Mattachine was settled on for the group's first official meeting in November of 1950. The inspiration for the name was the Mattachinos of the Italian Renaissance, masked jesters who were able to use their concealed identities as a means to stage criticism and challenge the dominance of monarchal power.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Picturing the Underground
2 The Cinematic Authoring of Gay Life
3 Toward a Gay Mainstream
4 Liberation Porn
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography
Index