Now this was a rare treat! The Queer Film Festival somehow got their hands on a few vintage silent porn shorts from the 20’s and 30’s, providing a fascinating look at what people found arousing and / or funny back in the day! Add to that some excellent live musical accompaniment by contemporary ensemble Diving for Rocks, and I enjoyed a fantastic evening that tickled my funny bone, perked up my inner history nerd, and… honestly, didn’t really get me hot, but that’s okay. Well done, and I hope there’s more where that came from!
What’s the World Coming To?
We start off with a 1926 farce about changing gender roles. Not pornographic at all, but it does provide some delightfully old-fashioned laughs.
In the next 100 years, the opening reel tells us—so, pretty much now—men will become a lot more like women, women a lot more like men, and marriage will be a quaint old custom observed by very few. Naturally, we start of with a 21st century wedding! The blushing groom looks mincing but radiant in his frilly suit and ridiculous giant hat, ready to be given away by his weeping father. The bride is dressed very plainly, with short hair and minimal makeup, and a rather severe suit and skirt. There’s a bit of slapstick when the bride loses the wedding ring in the groom’s giant poofy sleeves, and while looking for it rips off almost half his suit.
More slapstick follows when, after the honeymoon, the poor househusband suspects his domineering (of course) wife of cheating on him. Chasing a mouse that ran up his trousers, fun with guns (a very long gun wielded by the wife, and don’t think I didn’t pick up on that visual!) and to cap it all off, the groom getting a blueberry pie dropped from a passing blimp right in the face. Because whatever century this is you’ll always have pies in the face, and everyone knows blimps are the only way to travel in the future.
I have to admit, I’m a sucker for retro future history, whether from Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Fritz Lang, or whoever made this little gem. Sure, the issues are played for cheap laughs, but it’s the context that makes it interesting: the movie dates from the height of the Roaring Twenties, a time when society was rapidly changing and a lot of traditions (including about gender roles and marriage) really were being threatened. Whether or not the public really believed men’s and women’s roles would be inverted in generations to come, it was part of the zeitgeist, enough that you could make a whole short reel laughing about it.
Exclusive Sailor
A captain’s secretary and a sailor have a little fun in the captain’s cabin in this 1924 film. They’re discovered by the captain, who joins in. The secretary gets fucked by both men, and the sailor sucks the captain and gets fucked by him. This was all very explicit, with nothing left to the imagination. I’d seen a few gay shorts from around that era (or a little more recent) and there was never any explicit sex or even full frontal nudity. But here? Everybody was letting it all hang out.
PS: Except, not quite. I don’t know what I should read into this, but the men all kept their shirts on. Why? Were male chests more risque than female ones? Did they want the viewers to focus on the women (which raises the question of who was this film’s audience)? Or maybe they wanted to keep the visual cues for the men’s roles (in this case, their uniforms)? Intriguing questions.
PPS: Because speaking of roles, the sex was not equal. Sure, as the title cards explain, the sailor got fucked as revenge and to restore honour, because he was messing around in his captain’s bed. But due to the participants’ relative statuses, the fucking couldn’t have gone any other way. As the ranking officer, the captain was the alpha male and it was his prerogative to fuck all the holes available. The sailor got to fuck the secretary but he couldn’t have turned around and fucked his captain.
Buried Treasure
In this 1925 animated film, we follow the misadventures of Eveready Harton, a guy with a humorously gigantic dick. As you’d expect, the animation quality’s not that great, but it’s a lot of silly fun. Not really queer, though, except for the part where Eveready accidentally butt-fucks a guy while aiming for the lady this guy was fucking.
A Late Visitor
This is the kind of physique short which I’ve seen before, with no sex and no full frontal nudity; the actors wear those little flesh-coloured banana hammock contraptions to just hide the genitals.
A young man living by himself in an apartment makes a late-night date with a friend. No, don’t worry, they’re just friends, and it’s totally not that kind of date! They’re just stripping down for a bit of wrestling, weight lifting and taking a bath together. See? Totally innocent! And it stayed totally innocent when the landlord came in (to see what all the noise was about, I guess), found the visitor hiding under the bed and spanked both men with a hairbrush.
The film quality was very good, which suggests it’s more recent, and raises the question: why is it less explicit than other films a decade older? But they may have been meant for different audiences. Late Visitor and movies like it might have been intended for more public venues, and therefore more vulnerable to censorship.
Context is everything, isn’t it? Who was watching these shows, and where, and when? That’s what I’d love to know more about.
PS: about the landlord. I have the feeling his appearance (dark hair, goatee) is supposed to represent a particular ethnicity (Jewish or Eastern European, maybe?). I wonder how many other jokes and shoutouts are going over my head.
Le ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly
Check it out, we’ve got bisexual porn fanfic! Yes, before Harry/Ron, before Kirk/Spock, it looks like porn writers used opera as their source material. But hey, why not? Inspiration’s where you find it, after all. And now I’m imagining whole fields of research studying porn spinoffs of popular culture. Or is that already a thing? It totally should be.
So, Madame Butterfly. If you’re familiar with the opera (or if you’re like me and had to look the plot up on Wikipedia), you know that it starts with Pinkerton, a US naval officer, marrying a young Japanese girl (Butterfly), then going away for three years. What happened in those three years? Well, if you believe this 1920 French film, Butterfly missed her husband terribly, but was comforted by her maid. And by “comfort” I mean “cunnilingus”. Fun fact: at first I thought Butterfly was played by a guy in drag, which would make the scene not just queer, but genderqueer. Then she opened her robe and I was like NOPE, that’s a lady!
Pinkerton, while at sea, gets seduced by his manservant, who’d wanted him for a long time. There’s a bit of sucking and fucking, all one-way (Pinkerton, as the higher-status male, only gets sucked and does all the fucking).
They go back to Japan, and Pinkerton has a threesome with the two Japanese girls, with his manservant watching and jerking off. This may be one of the oldest money shots in the history of cinema.
PS: The men still don’t take their shirts off.
PPS: This film has a page on Wikipedia, which describes a longer story with one more character. So the version we watched was incomplete?
Lot in Sodom
Oh boy, this is a weird one! I’d probably need to watch it a couple more times to really unpack it, but here goes:
Briefly, this 1933 film is a retelling of the story of Lot in Sodom: meeting the angel—just one in this film—confronting the mob, escaping, and Sodom’s destruction. The people of Sodom are all beautiful smooth shirtless young men, who spend much of their time wrestling with each other and lounging around, while Lot looks like a stereotypical Jew, with a large nose, dark hair and a beard (extremely fake hair and beard, by the way, it looked more like cheap wool). The angel is equally beautiful, but tends to cover up with a black cloak. This didn’t stop him from being lusted after by the scary, predatory-looking Sodomites.
The mob scene was interesting; since I guess they couldn’t afford that many actors, so they used double and triple exposures to simulate a crowd. It looked very surreal. Man, people back in the day really had to work to suspend their disbelief, didn’t they? But that’s probably not fair, I bet this technique was pretty experimental back then. A similar effect was used to show Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt: in addition to the expected fade-in, we saw a several small transparent salt pillars swirling around her, foreshadowing the transformation.
Also, it’s possible I missed some of the intertitles, but I don’t remember Lot offering his daughter (again, just one in this film) to the mob.
Speaking of effects, though, Sodom’s destruction was pretty neat. It was clearly only a model, but a decent-looking one; something passed by at the very top of the screen (it kind of looked like a sword, and if that was the intent, kudos), dripping sparks and burning oil, reducing the model to cinders in moments.
There’s more to this film, though. Interspersed through the action near the end were several odd Bible verses, plus some imagery that had nothing to do with the story of Sodom. For instance, quoting from Solomon’s Song of Songs (“Place me like a seal over your heart”, Song of Songs 8:6, and a few other verses from the same book), plus one Latin line: “Mulier templum est” (“Woman is a temple”, thank you high school Latin classes), paired with an image of a small marble shrine, disturbingly superimposed on an image of a snake. So, a snake entering the temple that is a woman? Do I want to touch this metaphor with a ten-foot pole?
So here’s the question: what was this movie’s purpose? The only one I can think of is as a Bible-based lecture on the evils of homosexuality, paired with a lesson on how the love of a woman is so much more awesome than gay sex. But honestly, I have no idea. For all I know it might have been a huge satire of Biblical fundamentalism. Or, this imagery might have just been a normal part of everyday background homophobia. I need to judge the movie as a product of its time.
PS: this film is in the public domain, and available as a torrent That version has a musical score and a bit of voice synching!