INVERTED IMAGES

An investigation of the lesbian identity through visual and cultural representation

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1960s film and its effect on the perception of the lesbian identity

Lesbian women are adept at searching out photographs and news items on women who are either openly lesbian or who dress and behave in a manner that leads to speculation about their sexual proclivities. Women who have fulfilled these criteria over the last 150 years – such as Radclyffe Hall in the Victorian era, Marlene Dietrich in the 1950s and Martina Navratilova in the present day – are highly visible and the implicit message in the news articles about them is that it is all right to “be yourself” and be completely open about your lifestyle. As Goffman observed, they ‘come to serve as representatives of a stigmatized category’ (1990, p.38). Unlike ordinary working-class women, authors, actors and sportswomen enjoy status and power, which protects them to some degree from having their identities subsumed by their (perceived) lesbianism. A fertile ground in the search for lesbian representation was the cinema and, in the early days, films ‘[which] … often had as central characters strong and resilient women, played by such actresses as Lauren Bacall, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck’ (Sheldon in Dyer, 1980, p.17) were popular with lesbian women, the actresses being subjected to an endless ‘Is she, or isn’t she?’ guessing game.

In some ways, Marlene Dietrich (fig. 9, right) was the epitome of the ‘mannish lesbian’ in the Radclyffe Hall style, dressing in beautifully tailored clothes and behaving in typical masculine fashion, as when she kissed a woman full on the mouth in a nightclub scene in Morocco in 1931. At the same time, though, she maintained her feminine status with her face always made up immaculately and her blonde hair falling in loose waves. Speaking of Dietrich (among others), Caroline Sheldon wrote that ‘they are all strong, tough and yet genuinely tender. In short, though rarely permitted to hint it, they are lesbians’ (ibid, p .18), although the concept of defining a woman by her sexuality was not yet common in Dietrich’s heyday.

The glamorous days of Hollywood gave way to the two decades of lesbian pulp fiction and the extremely negative representation of lesbian women. With this recent stereotypical imagery as source material and the Women’s Movement and the Gay Rights Campaign still on the distant horizon, film-makers produced two films in the 1960s – The Killing of Sister George (1968) and The Children’s Hour (1961) – which became cult movies among lesbian women. The importance of releasing these films at this particular time cannot be overstated. Television had yet to become a constant presence and purveyor of a variety of opinions in everyone’s living room; universities were only just awakening to the idea of civil and gay rights and the cinema was at its height of popularity as escapism from their daily lives for working class people. The actors appearing in films at this time were still ‘stars’, looked up to and acting as role models for the general public. Instead of the speculation over people like Marlene Dietrich’s private life, lesbian women could now see respected and established actresses such as Beryl Reid and Audrey Hepburn playing the part of lesbians and this gave validation to their lifestyles. Unfortunately, the spectre of Havelock Ellis and his acolyte, Radclyffe Hall, was still very evident in the way in which lesbians were presented.

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Sister George, written by Fred Marcus and directed by Robert Aldrich, was hailed on the sleeve blurb as ‘a classic drama that was ahead of its time’ but in actuality it was regressive and crudely caricaturized the now-common perception of the lesbian character. Caroline Sheldon identified three lesbian stereotypes in Sister George, the first two of which are directly evolved from Ellis’s inversion model – the butch/mannish lesbian who Sheldon describes as ‘often working class and dominant in her relationships with other women’; the neurotic lesbian, ‘often femme or closet’; and the ‘sophisticated lesbian, often an older woman who is rich and successful in a man’s world’. The film never rises above these clichés, either visually or in the storyline. It was advertised with a poster portraying the three main characters (fig. 10, see next page) and the lurid illustration, so reminiscent of pulp fiction covers, gives very clear signals of what to expect.