The Sewing Circle

“The Barbara Stanwyck vehicle Ladies They Talk About (1933) seemed, on the surface, to be in the vein of tough Warner exposés and crime dramas, with Stanwyck as a bank robber doing time at the women’s wing of San Quentin. However, after an opening sequence so realistically recreating a robbery that censors feared it could be a how-to-primer, the movie lapsed into Midnight Romance fantasy. Instead of grim prison conditions, Stanwyck’s jail time resembled a stay at a health spa, with glamorous inmates, beauty treatments on demand, and a laid-back air. The only grittier touches (besides Stanwyck’s ingrained Brooklyn moxie) were incidental, such as the inmates yelling ‘New fish!’ when Stanwyck first arrives, and a black inmate talking back ferociously to an imperious white prisoner. Another jailbird in this glossy clink is a muscular woman with close-cropped hair and a cigar clamped in her mouth. ’She likes to wrestle!’ Like the other inmates, this one is spared the dreariness of prison grooming, being permitted instead to wear the standard Hollywood Dyke getup of a tailored outfit and little bowtie. ‘Mmmmm . . . . hmmmm!’ air. Later, less expectedly, we see this butch prisoner’s femme other half. The camera pans across the cells to take in after-hours vignettes that never occurred in any real-life jail, including a slumber party in lingerie, an inmate cuddling a Pekingese, and the butch woman doing an exhibition round of calisthenics. Wearing a pair of man’s pajamas and with the cigar still in her mouth, she goes through her paces to the delight of a frilly girlfriend sitting in the bed next to her. ‘You’re just always exercising!’ the femme marvels. Ladies They Talk About received numerous complaints through the Studio Relations Committee about the robbery scene, about the violence and discussion of prostitution. Only in strict Ohio, however, did the lesbianism cause any problem; Roth’s ‘wrestle’ line was cut. So it remained over the succeeding decades, when women’s prison movies were one of the few places onscreen where lesbians were allowed to exist openly. This one is one of the first."

-From Bette & Joan: The Divine Feud by Shaun Considine

“The atmosphere in the Hollywood lesbian community began to change in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This change was a reflection of three important developments: (1) the increased adoption by the general public of the morbidification of sexual relations between women promoted by some sexologists; (2) the rise of the studio system in Hollywood; and (3) the onset of economic problems connected with the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. The effect of the heterosexual backlash and the rise of the companionate marriage in the mid- to late 1920s was to push women who loved women further into the closet. The rise of the studio system meant that, were these women ever to venture from that closet and be caught in an embarrassing situation in public, the news media would not print the story. Hard economic times made these women vulnerable to the demands of the studio bosses who protected them—vulnerable enough, for example, to agree to date or even marry a man in order to appear heterosexual when they actually were not. Hollywood had become, in effect, a company town.

Many lesbians and bisexual women in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s, especially those from Europe, gathered at the home of Berthold (1885-1953) and Salka Viertel (1889-1978). The Viertels were German émigrés who had come to Hollywood in 1928 to work in the film industry. Like Salka, most of the women who gathered at her home were “Gillette Blades”—that is, their sexuality ‘cut both ways.’ Some American-born actresses also fit into this category of actual or apparent bisexuality, while others were lesbians who adhered to the older model of the Boston marriage and lived with their lovers in what was purportedly a platonic relationship.

Following World War II, and with the rise of the Cold War in the late 1940s, the situation of Hollywood lesbians once again underwent a paradigm shift. After Communists, homosexuals were the favorite targets of witch-hunting politicians and bureaucrats, especially those of the House Un-American Activities (HUAC). At this same time, scandal magazines began to print articles that openly identified homosexual stars as such. The tabloid Confidential was directly responsible for the end of Lizabeth Scott’s (1922-2015) career in motion pictures when it accused her in print of ‘unnatural’ sexual activity. Many of the lesbians and bisexual women who were married began spending more time with their spouses, and many who were unmarried rushed to the alter. Some of the homosexuals in Hollywood reacted to this climate of fear by becoming reactionary in their politics and cooperating with those carrying out the persecutions. Barbara Stanwyck (1907-1990) and her ‘beard’ husband (a spouse who is taken by a women who engages in homosexual behavior primarily to help disguise her lesbian activities) Robert Taylor (1911-1969) became archconservatives after World War II. Taylor, who was also gay, was the only actor to ‘name names’ in front of HUAC. Salka Viertel was blacklisted and left the country. The climate of fear and paranoia among Hollywood homosexuals was to last well into the early 1960s."

-Excerpt from Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay Histories and Cultures by Bonnie Zimmerman and George Haggerty

"Anita Berber was born into a middle-class family with artistic leanings. Her father, Felix, was First Violinist of the Municipal Orchestra, and her mother Lucie was a dancer and aspiring actress. After her parents’ divorce, Berber lived with her grandmother. In 1913, she attended a modern dance school where she learned rhythmic gymnastics. She later studied traditional ballet in Berlin.

Germany from the end of World War I until the rise of the Nazi party in 1933 was a time of both economic instability as well as artistic creativity. The art world embraced Expressionism, and the cabaret scene exploded with risque performances thanks to a loosening of censorship laws. By the age of 20, Berber was performing nude in many of these cabarets.

In 1919, Berber married the wealthy screenwriter Eberhard von Nathusius. They divorced after she fell in love with a lesbian bar owner, Susi Wanowski, who became her manager as well as her lover.

Besides dancing in cabarets, Berber also made more than a dozen appearances in film, including a role in the 1919 silent film Different From the Others. This film is often considered the first sympathetic portrayal of homosexuality on screen. The movie was a direct challenge to Germany’s laws against homosexuality, and the Nazis later banned it.

Berber’s bisexuality and her overall defiance of traditional gender norms were often the subject of the tabloids. Berber reportedly had a brief liaison with a young Marlene Dietrich, the Hollywood star known for her sexy androgynous style.

In 1922, Berber married the dancer Sebastian Droste and the two of them created a book of poetry and photography titled Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy, which they also performed in various nightclubs. They both struggled with alcohol and drug addiction, most notably cocaine, and their performances and poetry often included references to drugs.

Berber and Droste’s performances continued to shock and outrage the public. She was jailed for several weeks after personally offending the king of Yugoslavia with a nude dance performance. As a result they were both banned from performing in European venues for several years. Reports of scandalous behavior followed Berber wherever she went. She was often seen around town with her pet monkey draped around her neck. There were reports that she visited restaurants naked but for a sable coat. After Droste was jailed for fraud (he also stole Berber’s furs and jewelry), Berber met and married American dancer Henri Chatin-Hoffman in 1924, two weeks after they met.

In 1928, Berber collapsed during a performance at a Beirut nightclub. A few months later she died from tuberculosis, most likely the result of years of drug abuse. Following her death, an unflattering and largely fabricated biography emerged, which shaped Berber’s legacy for decades. More recently she’s been seen in a new light, thanks to LGBTQ+ and feminist studies. Berber was an early performance artist at a time when that label didn’t even exist.

"Of all the people Barbara Stanwyck was close to, her most consistent relationship was with her very loyal, sometimes live-in girl Friday, the prototypical actress-turned-publicist Helen Ferguson. The two never defined their relationship, but if Stanwyck’s marriages to men were described as lavender, the Stanwyck/Ferguson’s union may very well have been of the Boston variety. Ferguson was by Stanwyck’s side for the bulk of her career, from the Hollywood heyday to the 1960s, when Stanwyck started portraying a series of pioneering women on television shows like Wagon Train and The Big Valley.

In the book, Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Popular Culture, Luca Prono states that in the 1960s, 1970s, and even into the 1980s, Stanwyck was seen as a cultural and personal template for lesbians. 'Stanwyck acquired the status of icon within lesbian communities,' Prono writes. 'Stanwyck was a woman whose screen persona challenged respectability because of the strong and independent women she embodied in the 1940s.'"

"Stereotypical images, like all aspects of culture, change and evolve over the years. Queer women in classical Hollywood films often appeared as spinster aunts or prison matrons, but by the 1970s, they were often being represented as vampires, a trope that turned same-sex love and affection into something cruel and monstrous. By the twenty-first century, a wide variety of openly queer people and queer "looks" has made it more difficult for the mass media to create new stereotypes, but traces of the old ones can still be discerned."

"Jean Arthur herself had no children, and despite her marriages (the one to Frank Ross and an earlier one-day marriage to Julian Ancker), her sexual tendencies were ambiguous. Fellow actor Patsy Kelly overtly acknowledged (in an interview) Arthur's lesbianism, while Agnes Moorehead did not contradict an interviewer who grouped Arthur with actresses who 'have enjoyed lesbian or bi-relationships.' Moorehead simply said that, like most women, Arthur was 'emotionally intricate'. Arthur was rumored to have been romantically involved with Mary Martin, gossip that seemed validated by a 1966 novel, The Princess and the Goblin, allegedly a roman á clef about their relationship; it was several years before its author, Paul Rosner, acknowledged that the story was wholly imagined, though he did draw on his own impressions of the two women in writing it. Speculation about Arthur's sexual orientation was revived by Donald Spoto's biography of Marlene Dietrich, Blue Angel, which cited Arthur and Martin among the 'charter members of America's creative lesbian community', while Hadleigh's book assumed Arthur's lesbianism or bisexuality 'as a given'."

"If one were to try to place Joan Crawford on Kinsey's Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale (where 0 is exclusively heterosexual and 6 is exclusively homosexual), she would probably rate about a 2 ("predominantely heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual"). At this time, lesbian experimentation was sometimes seen as just a way of expressing freedom and lack of inhibition. 'At least you can't get pregnant,' Joan joked many years later, when the subject of lesbianism somehow came up at a luncheon."

"During her Paramount days, Marlene Dietrich verged from the norm for an affair with Kay Francis (known lesbian), and since that time has been involved in similar experiences, although less known."

"A 1915 Supreme Court ruling opened the way for censorship of film along many fronts, including sexuality. The Court ruled that movies were a for-profit business and therefore not protected by the right to freedom of speech spelled out in the First Amendment of the Constitution. Within a few years of this ruling, several states began to pass censorship laws that addressed obscenity and 'inappropriate' topics for film. But it was not until 1931 that the film industry began policing and censoring itself through the Production Code and the Hays Censorship Office. Reference to homosexuality, gay and lesbian characters and themes, and even words like "pansy" were out. Thirty years later, in 1961, the Production Code changed once again and homosexuality was permitted official visibility provided it was portrayed with 'care, discretion, and restraint.' Despite these cautions, words such as 'fag, faggot, fruit, dyke, pansy' were freely admitted on the big screen. By 1968, the Production Code was eliminated completely and homosexuality was, for the first time, fair game for filmmakers."

-Excerpt from Media Messages What Film, Television, and Popular Music Teach Us about Race, Class, Gender, and Sexual Orientation by Linda Holtzman

"After World War II, homosexuals had become a more visible minority in American society. Upon completing their military service, many gay men and lesbians headed straight to New York and San Francisco instead of returning to small town life. Gay bars and hangouts, open for business in many major cities and some smaller urban areas, offered their patrons a place to socialize and be part of a community.

Consequently, increased visibility fueled society's intolerance toward homosexuals or, as they were more commonly referred to, fags, dykes, queers, deviants, and sex perverts. As the American public became more vocal in expressing their hatred, fear, and ignorance, the oppression of homosexuals became more widespread and extreme. Homosexual bars were subject to constant raids. Gay men and lesbians were continually harassed and interrogated by the police, and unjustly imprisoned by the judicial system. At the time, legal grounds for recourse were limited because homosexuality was illegal under state sodomy laws and public support was virtually non-existent. Even the American Civil Liberties Union wouldn't take an official stand on gay rights until 1967.

The United States government also did its part to promote homophobia. As part of their Cold War campaign to protect the country from "subversives," homosexuals were classified as a serious threat to national security. In the early 1950s, a Senate subcommittee recommended the purging of all government-employed "sex perverts" because of their emotional instability, vulnerability to blackmailers, and "corrosive influence" on other employees. In 1953, Congress enacted a ban that would remain on the books until 1990 which prevented gay and lesbian foreigners from entering the country. The next year, President Eisenhower issued an executive order prohibiting the employment of homosexuals by the federal government. Consequently, thousands lost their jobs and were dismissed from the military, while others were put under surveillance by the postal system and the FBI."

-From The Prime Time Closet: A History of Gays and Lesbians on TV by Stephen Tropiano