It's not a joke: how are a gangster and a homosexual alike?
They led a double life, were involved in criminal behavior, indulged in clandestine meetings and hid their activities in the shadows.
From the 1930s until the turn of the century, these two figures have undergone an evolution in their cinematographic representation that redoubles their marginality in the figure of the homosexual gangster.
“Experts in film noir respond to a very canonical heterosexual profile that, out of reverence and mythologization, have not been able or have not wanted to see the innumerable queer connotations that pulsate in the great classics,” explains Juan Dos Ramos, author of the essay
Faggot gangsters.
Extravagance and fury in film noir
,
illustrated by Álex Tarazón.
In addition, from today to February 18 this editorial initiative moves to the Cineteca de Matadero (Madrid), in the
Gangsters maricas series
with the screening of
Gilda, Al Rojo Vivo, Los Sobornados, Performance
and
Carretera Perdida.
Below is a chronology of this infiltrated subgenre with its most illustrative examples.
Little César points gun at his longed-for ex-companion in the presence of his beloved in 'Golden Underworld'.
The gangster who understands, but understands nothing
In
Golden Underworld
(Marvin Leroy, 1931),
Edward G. Robinson is a small-time robber who moves to Chicago with his sidekick, who prefers to become a dancer in search of success.
While his friend prospers and falls in love with a dancer, little César Rico Bandello rises in the underworld and spends the entire film trying to get his ex-partner, the only one in whom he would place his trust, to return to his side as the right-hand man of the gang. band.
“Women don't go into business,” he tells her.
Towards the end of the film, Rico has his friend at gunpoint, but the bullets don't come out.
“The desperate look on his face at that moment says it all.
It's almost like a breakup scene, the gangster there loses everything by exposing himself.
That is the great tragedy of Rico: the man he loved has left with a woman,” says Dos Ramos.
An emotional skid that forces him to hide from the police only to end up machine-gunned in an alley under a poster announcing the new show of which she was his secret love.
The Hays code forced the scriptwriters to sharpen their ingenuity, who deployed their own code with which to decipher the true sexual nature of some characters.
Here, Peter Lorre lovingly rubs his cane before an undaunted Humphrey Bogart in 'The Maltese Falcon'Alamy Stock Photo
Humphrey Bogart: a macho besieged by gays
The editor of the novel
The Maltese Falcon
asked its author, Dashiell Hammett, to tone down the homosexual tone.
When John Huston made it into a film in 1941, he took the clues left by the book to display a whole palette of dubious moralities, especially in the trio of blatantly homosexual gangsters who join Humphrey Bogart in the imbroglio of the search for the prized figure of the falcon. , detective with few ethical barriers.
Juan Dos Ramos points out: “Here another of the rules of film noir is fulfilled: that of
faking
the secondary characters to support the manhood of the protagonist detective.
It is a resource that Raymond Chandler himself said was abundant among crime novel narrators.”
Peter Lorre here composes one of the most brilliant roles of his career: that of Joel Cairo, a gangster who does not hide the difference from him from minute one.
He shows up at Bogart's office preceded by a card scented with his gardenia perfume and during the talk with the detective he primly caresses his cane.
The character of the fat gangster (Sydney Greenstreet) always with his gunman friend close to him (Elisha Cook Jr.), whom he loves “like a son,” does not make any secrets either.
When he decides to betray the young henchman, he says: “If you lose a child it is always possible to get another.”
The sexual triangle of 'Gilda' gives more play than many wanted to see.
Gilda
or the love triangle as an alibi
Gilda
(Charles Vidor, 1946), has gone down in history as a great precursor of coming out (that Rita Hayworth glove), but she marks the same thing: that of proposing a possible bisexual love triangle.
All you have to do is look at the starting scene.
Glenn Ford leaves an illegal gambling club in a dive in the port of Buenos Aires after gambling with his fake dice.
A criminal sees his attempt to rob him frustrated by the blow of a cane that hides the tip of a knife.
It is run by a mysterious dapper man, the gangster played by George Macready.
From that moment on, everything is ambiguities and double meanings in the dialogue.
“He is a faithful and obedient friend.
He stays silent when I want him to be quiet and talks when I want him to talk,” Macready says of his cane.
“That's my idea of friendship.”
“His life is very happy,” Ford responds (that “joyful” is
gay
in the original script which, although it is no longer in use, in that sense it served to define something happy or fun).
And they celebrate their newfound friendship by smoking a cigarette and walking together through the port area.
“He who makes his own fate like me, he recognizes his like,” says the gangster before saying goodbye to him.
“Everything is a sign for the
queer
eye ,” says Juan dos Ramos.
“They are in the port, a
cruising
area par excellence, surrounded by criminals and sailors.
The gangster appears on the scene raising his cane as a symbol of an erection.
He soon offers this man, with whom he wants to flirt, a meteoric career in the underworld.
The love triangle dynamic is also a lot of fun.
This gangster is aware that Glenn Ford is a heterosexual
hottie
and he brings Gilda on his arm as a subterfuge so that the three of them end up together.
And so that there are no moral doubts, the villain dies skewered by his own staff: the penetrator is penetrated.”
James Cagney pays all his attention to his gangster mom, completely ignoring the explosive Virginia Mayo in 'Red Hot'.Alamy Stock Photo
James Cagney and the Oedipus complex
For
Red Hot
(1949), James Cagney wanted to play a sensitive thug who we see cry or allow himself to be lulled to sleep at the knees of his mother, the matriarch of a criminal gang in eternal mourning for her husband.
When she dies, the protagonist transfers his affections to a police officer infiltrated into the gang.
As the author of
Gangsters Maricas deduces:
“The false criminal partner begins to take his place.
She expects from him the protection and firmness that she found in his mother.
It is with him that she has the most intimate scenes, with whom she wants to share the loot, while he systematically despises the vase woman who has been scripted for him (the explosive Virginia Mayo).
After the major disappointment in love that involves the revelation of the law enforcement agent's true identity, of course, the gangster's outcome is dramatic and violent, worthy of a madman, the only possible portrait for a
faggot
.
There is an eagerness to dismantle a type of masculinity and I think Cagney was very aware of what he was doing,” he jokes.
If he is homosexual, he is depraved
From 1934 to 1967 the Hays Code (promoted by Republican leader William H. Hays and which ensured morality on screen) forced directors and screenwriters to be bold.
As Dos Ramos explains: “They used certain notes such as putting a flower in a big guy's buttonhole, gentlemen who go to the theater a lot, who wear perfume... To this we must add the use of narrative ellipsis to resolve certain situations that suggest encounters. sexual.
The Hays code allowed for some relaxation if homosexuality was perceived as a brushstroke that underlined the monstrous nature of the gangster, too.”
Howard Hawks gave the world his most violent fantasies of male domination (in this case, Robert Mitchum) in 'The Frontiers of Crime'.Alamy Stock Photo
However, some productions revealed a particularly twisted catalog of sexual perversions.
This is the case of Howard Hughes, the magnate and producer.
The
playboy
did not hide his bisexual voracity.
For
The Frontiers of Crime
(1951) he had two
sex symbols
, Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum.
The queer gangster in this case is played by Raymond Burr, a strong gay actor who had created a false biography by chaining marriages and who would later succeed in the series
Perry Mason.
In Borders of Crime,
Burr transforms
into the alter ego of Howard Hughes to unleash the most perverse fantasies of domination on the heterosexual male embodied by Mitchum.
In the final scene, after the protagonist sneaks onto the bad guys' ship, the villain Burr delights in giving orders to his men to beat him up, strip him of his shirt, tie him to a mast, beat him with the buckle. of a belt and finish the torture by locking him in a steam-filled engine room whose sweat openly emulates that of a sauna.
A bondage
party
only tolerated because the good guy wins and ends up hugging the girl.
And finally he came out of the closet
Probably the pioneering film about the openly homosexual gangster is
The Bribes
(Fritz Lang, 1953).
The opening sequence presents the mature Alexander Scourby, wrapped in silk pajamas in bed with a handsome and attentive young man in a bathrobe standing next to him, dialing his phone calls and lighting his cigarettes.
Later we will discover that he has a daughter, but no sign of a wife.
Does not matter.
“The relaxation of the Hays code made it possible to meet the realities of the street and the demands of a public in search of stories that reflected more real situations,” deduces Dos Ramos.
The very violent Fante and Mingo, one of the first underworld couples whose gay love is reciprocated, in 'Special Agent'.
In this context, for example, the ruthless couple of gay gunmen in
Special Agent
(Joseph H. Lewis, 1955) was born, which perhaps because it was a B movie, allowed itself greater license.
“I can't eat more salami,” says one of them.
“That's all there is,” the other responds.
“The police will even look for us in the closets,” they venture before meeting a tragic end.
Although the first film that would finally give us a liberatedly queer crime lord was British.
The Gangster
(1971) is also a turning point because it features, for the first time, someone who was already a superstar in such a role: Richard Burton.
In it we see Burton and his lover Ian McShane enter and leave the bedroom in a bathrobe (although the kiss that was filmed was left out of the final cut).
Despite this, says the author of
Gangsters Maricas,
“it is a film that retains its appeal.
Furthermore, he adds a layer to the genre that only European tradition could give it: while American film noir is more prefabricated in its aesthetics, here the dandyism that Oscar Wilde preached appears.
Gangster clothing is essential, and the British cultivate that very well.”
Richard Burton was the first big star to play an openly gay crime lord in 'The Gangster.'
Burton's character is based on one of the Kray twins, famous real figures of English organized crime.
With an impeccable appearance, tough guy appearance and openly homosexual, Ron Kray has become a pop culture icon.
So much so that we have even seen everything from a biopic,
The Krays
(1990), starring the Kemp brothers of Spandau Ballet, to an interpretive pirouette by Tom Hardy playing both twins simultaneously in
Legend
(2015).
Which brings us to the next point: the inevitable meeting between the figure of the gangster and that of the music star.
The 'glitter' gangster
This evolution of the
glitter
gangster was given to us
by Performance
(Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, 1971).
An aggressive gangster hiding from his own band, James Fox, and a rocker in the middle of a creative block, Mick Jagger, transmute into each other.
In the middle of this
trip
(literally, in the middle of a mushroom trip), Anita Pallenberg (the then-girlfriend of another Rolling Stone, Keith Richards) tells the thug camouflaged under makeup and a wig that her musician lover is “a woman-man who his demon has abandoned him.”
We also see the criminal sleep with an androgynous
groupie
to whom he murmurs in the middle of the act: “You look like a little boy.”
The imaginary performance of Jagger dressed as a gangster, with the ambiguous and plump members of the underworld rioting around him, is so impossible that one can only applaud its existence.
With the mutual fascination between Mick Jagger and an escaped member of the underworld, an inevitable meeting occurred in pop culture: that of the gangster and the rock star.
To all this we must add the more than open homosexual nature of the boss who pursues the protagonist: a bald, hairy, average guy, who we see receiving hustlers and looking through bodybuilder magazines surrounded by his gang of weirdos.
It is, in the words of Dos Ramos, “a miracle of a movie.
Not only for equating the figure of the pop star with the American gangster who made headlines in the golden age, but also for developing all those new masculinities that sexual liberation brought in the late sixties and the opening of minds that psychedelic drugs brought about. ”.
Divine, more divine than ever, playing the underworld boss in the imaginary city of Rain City in the film 'Concerns'.Alamy Stock Photo
If we talk about transcending identities and genders, we cannot ignore the first (and almost only) male role composed by the
drag queen
Divine, muse of John Waters: the egomaniacal, authoritarian and misogynistic gangster of
Concerns
(Alan Rudolph, 1985).
Despite her few appearances, she stands as the undeniable hook of the film, composing what Juan Dos Ramos calls, “a postmodern gangster, above all clichés.”
David Lynch twists everything
When we talked about the fact that the term fag, or gay, or
queer gangster
is never black or white, but rather occupies a wide range of grays, we did not have the palette of very dark tones that David Lynch uses.
In two of his masterpieces,
Blue Velvet
(1986) and
Lost Highway
(1997), he confronts us with villains of unorthodox sexuality, extravagant and terrifying.
In the words of Dos Ramos, “it probably responds to Lynch's devotion to classic film noir.
When you grow up seeing these types of more ambiguous characters always presented as depraved and with a tortured inner life, you don't separate the criminal part from sexual orientation.
I imagine David Lynch watching those films as a young man and sensing that not only are they evil, but they have a dark, almost indescribable sexuality.
Something that he appropriates and enhances.
The portrait he paints in these two films may even be homophobic, but it serves to make his characters even more sinister in search of a brutal aesthetic impact.
Let's think of Dean Stockwell's character in
Blue Velvet, a sinister
crooner
heavily made up, with a smoking cigarette holder and frilly shirt, who establishes an electrical connection with the twisted Dennis Hopper.
They share drugs, abysmal glances and extort money from the
femme fatale
(Isabella Rossellini) under the gaze of antihero Kyle MacLachlan.
The scene, of course, leads to an unleashed Hopper leading away the kidnapped couple and exclaiming “Let's fuck!
“I’ll fuck anything that moves!”
From there, he subjects them to a trip at the end of the night in which, without stopping inhaling amyl nitrite from a canister (the drug known in the gay world as poppers), first he wants to prick her breasts and then She covers his face with kisses with lipstick and ends up beating him.
Dean Stockwell singing 'In dreams', by Roy Orbison, to the unleashed Dennis Hopper in 'Blue Velvet'.
In
Lost Highway,
the gangster played by Robert Loggia does not appear as outrageous, but he is equally disturbing.
After forcing his trusted young mechanic (Balthazar Getty) to get into his car to make her involved in an accident, he tests his chances by inviting her to watch porn.
In a parallel with
Gilda
(a film of which Lynch is a declared fan), he then tries to capture the young man by introducing him to a beautiful blonde, Patricia Arquette.
“Loggia introduces Arquette the same way the casino gangster introduces Rita Hayworth to
Gilda:
she first probes the boy, but sees that he's not going to get anything.
And one day he appears with the stunning girl at his side.”
Times change, depraved impulses remain.
If you are a man, you will like it
Quentin Tarantino has said it many times: “Gay subtext always makes a movie better.”
In
Reservoir Dogs
(1992) he materialized it in the romantic background that unites Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) and Mr. Orange (Tim Roth).
After everything in the robbery has gone wrong, Blanco spends half of the footage cradling a dying Orange in a pool of blood in the hope that, at least, the crony he has grown attached to will survive being shot in the head. stomach.
They are an example of what Juan Dos Ramos has called “super love.”
We are not talking about a gay nature in its literal sense, but about the bonds generated by these men who live in hypermasculine environments, in constant danger, always afraid of not knowing who to trust.
"They face such critical situations together that they develop other emotional dynamics in which women have very little weight."
Above the puddle of blood left by Tim Roth, beats an unexpected romantic impulse from Harvey Keitel in 'Reservoir dogs'.Alamy Stock Photo
Something that is also manifested in
Lock & Stock
(Guy Ritchie, 1998), where everything plays in favor of an overflowing and testosterone-filled camaraderie, faggot jokes abound and the figure of women is conspicuous by their absence.
“They are guys who get horny with each other talking about their men's things.
"It's almost like a filthy gay sex movie, filmed in some unsanitary basement in East London, with the explicit scenes cut out."
The Sopranos:
homosexuality is not forgiven
The sad end in
The Sopranos
of Vito Spatafore, one of Tony Soprano's most faithful gangsters, reveals the Italian-American gangster's complexes in the face of any alternative that challenges his manhood.
This subplot is based on the real case of John D'Amato, better known as Johnny Boy, boss of the DeCavalcante family, the most powerful in New Jersey.
Her own wife leaked that they went to swinging clubs and that her husband had a particular propensity in those meetings to give herself to other men.
He was shot to death by soldiers from his own ranks in 1992. In the investigation into his death, an informant slipped that “no one is going to respect us if we have a homosexual boss discussing La Cosa Nostra issues.”
The armed mobster from 'The Sopranos' Vito Spatafore, in the foreground, meets a very violent death at the hands of his own companions when his sexual inclination is discovered.
In the soap opera, Vito Spatafore goes from respectable thug to disowned when he is discovered flirting, dressed as the Village People cop, in a gay nightclub.
His immediate self-exile brings her a fleeting illusion of happiness with a regular gay guy.
Although he longs for his misdeeds and returns asking for forgiveness from the gang and proposing that his wife have another child, taking refuge in a temporary homosexual alienation caused by medication.
But the mafia does not forgive.
Spatafore is found dead in a hotel with a baseball bat stuck up his rectum.
“The choice of such a graphic and beastly ending responds to the scriptwriters' need to reinforce that monolithic and traditional thinking of the Italian-American man, inheritance of attitudes from the old Sicilian mafias, where probably only violating the
omertà
[the law of silence] is a greater sin than being homosexual,” concludes Dos Ramos.
Goodbye faggot gangster?
The gangster models (faggot or not) became obsolete at the turn of the century.
In the era of hypertechnification and advanced dystopias, his figure could take any form, from a villainous algorithm that steals and extorts using artificial intelligence to the incarnation of an Elon Musk-type megalomaniac, kingpin of the stratospheres.
Or, more vulgarly, that of bankers, politicians or football club presidents.
In any case, with the taboo of homosexuality practically dismantled on screen, the concept of 'faggot gangster' no longer has a clear meaning for the future.
The author of this essay concludes: “Sexuality ends up being irrelevant when you have power.
Another thing is to explore
queerness
in this new scenario in which the patriarchal system has collapsed, new models of masculinity proliferate in the media and LGTBI achievements draw a new framework in which to place fictions.
In this new reality, the faggot gangster is no longer going to be something so rare or so sophisticated.
Likewise, the modern heterosexual man has appropriated behaviors and actions that were previously unthinkable because they were considered feminine.
So if we say goodbye to the macho, we also say goodbye to the faggot gangster.”
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