This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots that sparked the gay pride movement. 2019 also marks 100 years since the first movie to deal with homosexuality, which caused an uproar back then.
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100 years of homosexuality in film
Many Hollywood stars play homosexuals or lesbians these days, but acceptance of the topic was far from a given before the gay rights movement. A look at homosexuality in films since 1919.
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Different from the Others (1919)
Considered the very first film on homosexuality, "Different from the Others" was directed by Richard Oswald, who urged dropping Germany's Article 175, which made homosexuality a criminal offense. Pandemonium broke out at the film's premiere in a Berlin movie theater in 1919, but it wasn't prohibited because film censorship didn't yet exist. Article 175 was repealed decades later — in 1994.
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The Children’s Hour (1961)
Shirley MacLaine plays Martha, a gay grade school teacher who is in love with her colleague, portrayed by Audrey Hepburn. "The Children's Hour" is director William Wyler's second take on the play of the same name by Lilian Hellmann. The first time he filmed the story ("These Three"), he was forced to give it a happy end. In his remake decades later, Martha ends up committing suicide.
Image: Imago Images/United Archives
Death in Venice (1971)
Luchino Visconti filmed the novel of that name by Thomas Mann. The protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach, a 50-year-old writer — in the movie, he's a conductor however — pines for a young man he sees on the beach and who lives in the same hotel. The film is about the suppression of forbidden passions and about a man's love for a young boy — a taboo subject then and now.
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It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (1971)
Director Rosa von Praunheim knew first-hand what it's like be a homosexual man battling self-hatred and guilt. The film takes a frank look at gay lifestyles, including common-law marriage, leather-clad men in the park and life in a gay commune.
Image: EuroVideo
My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)
A street punk named Danny in Stephen Frears' comedy drama film was the first major role for actor Daniel Day-Lewis. His character and Omar, a Pakistani friend, take over the management of a launderette in mid-1980s London and start a romantic relationship.
Image: Imago/United Archives
Maurice (1987)
James Ivory filmed the story of an unhappy love affair in Britain in the 1910s. College students Maurice (James Wilby) and Clive (Hugh Grant) fall in love. Confessing to being gay would mean exclusion from society, however, so Clive marries a woman, while Maurice falls in love with another man - Clive's servant.
Mike (River Phoenix), a young gay street hustler, is on the road, searching for his mother. Scott (Keanu Reeves) joins him; both prostitute themselves during the road trip. Mike is in love with Scott, who is heterosexual and turns him away. The film rang in the era of New Queer Cinema of the early 1990s — the golden era of gay and lesbian cinema.
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The Most Desired Man (1994)
Macho meets drag queens: in this highly successful 1994 German comedy, actor Til Schweiger plays a womanizer who moves in with a gay man after his girlfriend dumps him, leading to all kinds of awkward situations. Sönke Wortmann's adaptation of a Ralf König comic has even been turned into a musical.
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Brokeback Mountain (2005)
In "Brokeback Mountain," the two cowboys Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal, l.) and Ennis (Heath Ledger) poach, drink and sleep together, but their mutual attraction is a taboo among cowboys, so both marry women. For this neo-Western, Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee won three Oscars and created an unforgettable melodrama.
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Carol (2015)
In "Carol", Kate Blanchett (right) and Rooney Mara play two women who fall in love in New York in the early '50s but have to keep their relationship secret: The sexual revolution, women's liberation and the gay rights movement are not yet on the horizon. Todd Haynes filmed the novel by Patricia Highsmith, who published her work under a pseudonym in 1952 due to the sensitive subject.
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Several events this year commemorate the emergence of the gay pride movement.
The first major gay uprising against police took place 50 years ago, on June 28, 1969 at the Stonewall Inn bar on New York's Christopher Street — which sparked the very first Christopher Street Day (CSD) parade on the first anniversary of the riots. CSD parades are meanwhile a regular phenomenon around the world.
Another anniversary: a hundred years ago, on July 6, 1919, Magnus Hirschfeld, a gay sexual reformer, opened the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. The first of its kind in the world, it aimed to "promote scientific research of sexual life."
That same year, the first feature film to openly deal with the issue of homosexuality was screened in German movie theaters: "Anders als die Andern" (Different from the Others), directed by Vienna-born Richard Oswald. He had already directed films dealing with prostitution, rape and abortion, but with homosexuality a taboo topic, the filmmaker faced harsh criticism even before it was first shown on May 28, 1919, and the audience was up in arms at the premiere.
At the CSD parade 2018 in Cologne, Germany Image: Imago/Manngold/R. Keuenhof
For "Anders als die Andern," Oswald had an important advisor: Magnus Hirschfeld, and the scholar and researcher acted in the film.
In the storyline, a violinist has a relationship with his student and is blackmailed by a male prostitute. In the enusing court case, Magnus Hirschfeld appears as himself, delivering a passionate appeal for the repeal of Paragraph 175, which since 1872 had prohibited sexual relations between men. The film ends with the suicide of the musican, portrayed by actor Conrad Veidt. The trial has made him a social outcast, and he no longer sees a future for himself.
Both Oswald and Veidt had been subject to threats during the filming. Both were Jews, along with actor Kurt Sivers, who played the role of the student. The resultant backlash, mostly from the right end of the political spectrum in Germany, included anti-Semitic screeds.
The film is said to have provoked the introduction of film censorship the following year. Oswald's film was banned, all copies were destroyed, and only fragments survived that were later reconstructed.
Richard Oswald died in Düsseldorf in 1963. "Anders als die Andern" is considered the most important silent film on the subject of homosexuality, and its progressive stance makes it seem modern even today.
Interestingly, not quite a century after its premiere, it was another German director, Roland Emmerich, who filmed the events in 1969 that led to Christopher Street Day. His film "Stonewall" premiered in movie theaters worldwide in 2015.
