The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse

Why It's Here

In a brief moment that could be missed by anyone, two women sit together at a table in a Parisian cabaret, where one of them is wearing men's attire. Several elements signify their queerness. The editing of this moment conflates their relationship to that of a man and woman at another table. And wearing men's clothing in cultural establishments like cabarets in European cities at the time was a common element of queer culture. 

Laura Horak writes, "...pairing a cross-dressed  woman with a feminine woman and representing them as analogous to a male-female couple makes clear that they are lesbians or inverts. The couple conforms  to sexologists’ model of same-sex desire as occurring between a masculinized, sexually assertive partner (the “congenital invert”) and a feminine, sexually passive partner. While scholars have explored the ways that butch women make their femme partners visible as lesbian, in this case each partner makes the  other visible."

Laura Horak - Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934-Rutgers University Press (2016) (p. 144).