GLR March-April 2026

communities. Through staged “photoplays,” documentary record ings, and outrageous satires, these gay filmmakers articulated al ternative visions of queer filmmaking and representation. Cyrus Pinkham was among the earliest of these gay film makers, shooting more than a dozen reels of home movies and a few amateur films in the late 1930s. Primarily recording family events and travels around New York, Maine, and broader New England, he also shot several short films with the assistance of his friends and family. These include Hunting (1937), ADay in a Young Boy’s Life (1937), and Be Beautiful? (1938), which starred his sister as a young maid who dozes off and dreams she is an af fluent woman, maintaining her looks, attending to her busy social calendar, going on dates, and eventually becoming pregnant. In the final scene of her dream, she walks onto a snow-covered front yard with her two children and a swaddled baby in her arms— perhaps on their way to school, church, or the store—before one child pushes the other over. She scolds them by exaggeratedly wagging her finger, but rather than behaving, the children start throwing snowballs. Frustrated by the responsibilities of moth erhood, the woman tosses her baby into the snow before running back inside. The image fades to black, and the maid wakes from her nightmare and resumes dusting. Nothing about this six-minute comedic skit is overtly gay. Yet Pinkham’s depiction of the conventions of femininity, bour geois social and courtship rituals, and the constraints, responsi bilities, and labor of the mother within domestic life reveals a poignant critique of the structure of heterosexual society and evince a gay sensibility—an outsider’s perspective—at work in his filmmaking. This sensibility is also at play in the elliptical in tercourse scene—reclined on a sofa with her male suitor sitting next to her, the woman exhales cigarette smoke, seemingly says “Oh,” blushes, and turns away from the camera, as a clever in tertitle indicates the passage of a year—poking fun at cinematic conventions and modes of propriety. A very different vision of queer filmmaking is offered by Jerett Robert Austin’s Camille (1953)—written about in greater detail by Carl Luss in this magazine’s May-June 2017 issue—an almost all-male drag satire of the 1936 film of the same title di rected by George Cukor, himself a famously gay Hollywood di rector. Austin shot the film between New York, where he lived and worked as a designer, and Cherry Grove on Fire Island, where he vacationed and filmed frequently. The cast and crew were made up of his friends. Austin’s fifty-minute color version of Camille largely fol lows the plot of the Cukor original, itself based on Alexandre Dumas fils ’ 1848 novel La Dame aux Camélias . In 1847 Paris, the titular courtesan mistakes an average society man at the opera for a rich baron, and their chance encounter sets both their hearts aflame. Although she initially pursues the baron for his money, our tubercular heroine eventually lets the man she loves take her to the countryside to convalesce, but his mother inter venes and pleads with her to leave him so as not to soil his rep utation. Camille agrees and returns to the baron to spare her love a life of ill repute, but she is miserable. When he finally learns of his mother’s plot, the man rushes to Camille’s side, but it’s too late; she is already on her deathbed. Austin’s film is remarkable not only for the fact that it was made at a time when cross-dressing was illegal in most juris dictions, but also because its production values are quite im

pressive, featuring elaborate costumes and props and making clever use of its multiple locations—something the film is hu morously self-reflexive about, as when the same staircase is staged with different décor to represent five different floors, and a handmade paper sign on the wall changes from “1-er” to “2 me” to indicate Prudence Duvernoy’s long journey upstairs. With its Franglais intertitles (“Was this woman a fille de joie ormerely a femme du monde ?”) and histrionic drag performers, whose exaggerated gestures and silent-cinema acting poke fun at Hollywood’s melodramatic conventions, Austin’s film is an out rageously campy comedy. It thus can be seen as part of a lineage of satirical drag filmmaking that later includes the Gay Girls Rid ing Club and its early 1960s parodies, like What Really Happened to Baby Jane (1963), as well as Milton Miron’s early 1970s satire of Tricia Nixon’s White House wedding, Tricia’s Wedding (1971), starring The Cockettes. As such, and predating the New York un derground by a decade, Austin’s film forces us to reconsider the conventional historiography of queer cinema. Not far from Cherry Grove, composer-turned-art-dealer turned-filmmaker François Reichenbach realized a different kind of amateur fiction film in New York City, Yonkers, and New Jer sey in the early 1950s. Reichenbach was part of the social circle of gay author Glenway Wescott, his partner, curator Monroe Wheeler, and their close friend and past lover, photographer George Platt Lynes. As such, he was only a few degrees removed from Austin, who was a friend of Wescott’s chum, artist Carl Malouf. Malouf and his partner Jay assisted on the first day of the Camille shoot but were barred from further involvement with the production after Jay got drunk and “did various things.” Whether Reichenbach and Austin crossed paths is anyone’s guess, but as they were both part of the same gay New York arts world, it’s not unlikely.

Publicity poster for François Reichenbach’s Last Spring .

TheG & LR

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