American Gender Exploration & Exploitation

This collection consists of films that dress performers up as characters that are the opposite of their real-life gender identity or who wear clothes associated with the opposite gender, also known as “cross-dressing” or in the past (and is now generally regarded as offensive), “transvestism.”

Early American Cross Dressing

It was common in very early American cinema for girls to dress as boys. This was a common feature in Broadway before cinema and as motion pictures were trying to establish themselves as high brow art, they borrowed tactics and features from already respected art forms like Broadway. This was also done to reflect the ideal form of boyhood; at the time, that was for boys to be small and effeminate.

As Laura Horak writes in her seminal book Girls Will Be Boys, as cinema progressed, cross-dressing in motion pictures began to overlap with American imperialism, its national identity, and its concurrent westward expansion, and wasn’t always necessarily meant to convey queerness. A common trope during the 1910s was women dressing as men and heading out west or to Alaska to perform a secret plot, learn to be an “ideal woman” by having an education and experience in nature, or to expose and highlight the racial and class structures present in society. It wasn’t until the late 1920s did cross-dressing become commonly associated with “sexual inversion” and, coupled with audiences growing weary of the trope, it began to be less common.

There were dozens, if not hundreds, of films made during this time that feature cross-dressing, mostly women dressed as men. However, due to this prevalence and the trope being used for comedy and for the reasons outlined above, only a handful of these films actually have a queer reading of them.

Mid-century Drag

As the technology for filming became cheaper and easier to maneuver, amateur and underground filmmaking took off. This gave rise to clubs like The Gay Girls Riding Club, the works of Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey, Kenneth Anger, and George Markopolous, and films like Behind Every Good Man and Glen or Glenda.

Films

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse

American Gender Exploration & Exploitation

Early American Cross Dressing

Mid-century Drag

Films

1910s

1920s

1930s

1950s

1960s