Alfred Hitchcock may not be the first person who pops into your head when you think of a queer ally, but there is a surprising amount of queer representation throughout his filmography – some good, some bad, some wholesome, some problematic. None of his characters explicitly state their sexuality. They don’t say it out loud because, well, they couldn’t say it out loud.
But filmmakers found a way, through what we call queer-coding. Queer-coding is the sub-textual coding of a character in media as queer. Though such a character’s sexual identity may not be explicitly confirmed within their respective work, a character might be coded as queer through the use of traits and stereotypes recognisable to the audience. There are hints and queues within the actors’ performances that give that impression or insinuation that their character is queer without having to say it outright. Some of the most important queer performances in classic cinema are found in Hitchcock’s films, but to understand the queer representation in Hitchcock’s work, we first have to look at the state of cinema at the time.
The American film industry in Hollywood, from its inception, has always been patriarchal and pro-heterosexual. Shocking, I know. Big time executives and producers liked to pretend that we didn’t exist. But, as Neil Patrick Harris’s character in It’s a Sin says, we have always been there. The hyper masculine movie executives were so concerned with maintaining the gender/sexuality binary status quo that they went to ridiculous lengths to ensure nothing ‘unwholesome’ was shown on screen just in case it gave audiences ideas.
Hollywood also had an image problem. Rather than upholding the strict Edwardian ideals of the First World War, Hollywood of the Roaring Twenties brought a string of scandals to the forefront of American and British news. There was the tragic suicide of Peg Entwhistle, who ended her life by jumping off the Hollywood sign. There was the accidental overdose of Olive Thomas, the sister-in-law of silent film royalty Mary Pickford. There was the rape and murder trial of on-screen comedian Fatty Arbuckle. And there was the (still) unsolved murder of bisexual film director William Desmond Taylor.
Hollywood was quickly becoming the centre of attention and it had to clean house. And so, in the 1940s, The Motion Picture Production Code, commonly referred to as the Hays Code after Will H. Hays who spearheaded the code, was born. At its core, The Hays Code lived by the credo that ‘no picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it’. Its censors outlined specific restrictions on things like:
- Crime
- Sex, sexual activities and/or nudity
- Suggestive dances
- Blasphemy or the critique of religion
- Childbirth
- Drug use
- Interracial relationships
- Veneral disease
- Bad language
- Homosexuality
Despite The Hays Code however, Hollywood was full of queer people, both on and off screen. Off screen we have actress Marlene Dietrich, Frankenstein director James Whale, actor Rock Hudson, actress Greta Garbo, to name a few. On-screen we have Louise Brooks’ character Lulu in Pandora’s Box, Marlene Dietrich’s character Amy in Morocco, Peter Loree’s character Joel Cairo in The Maltase Falcon, and Sal Mineo’s character Plato in Rebel without a Cause. None of these characters explicitly state their sexuality – if the censors questioned a film the director and actors could deny it, thus avoiding any cuts or bans – but their queerness on screen is undeniable. As a bisexual person myself, it’s heartwarming to see people like myself in older films.
Queer men on screen during this era were usually depicted in four ways: the ‘sissy’, a flowery, fussy, and effeminate soul given to limp wrists and mincing steps, the ‘artist’, bohemian, decadent men who were interested in traditionally feminine pursuits like interior decorating, the ‘underling’, the servant a little too into his superior – we still have this one, think of Le Feu in Beauty and the Beast and Smithers from The Simpsons – and the ‘sadist’, a man whose cruelty is queer-coded.
Since homosexuality or queerness was seen as a deviation from the norm, characters who are queer were often depicted as villains. Queer-coding villains is a quick and easy way to show that their morals are not in check, which is damaging and problematic to the queer community, and it’s sad that as late as the 1990s, there were film studios who continued to vilified us.
Hitchcock was a heterosexual (as far as we know) but he had a lot of queer friends and colleagues, and was exposed to the queer communities in Hollywood and back home in London. While some of the queer representation in his films aren’t great, it’s important to remember that Hitchcock purposefully added queer elements to his films. Nothing in his filmmaking is accidental – he knew exactly what he was doing, whether it be to call out and draw attention to negative stereotypes of queer people, or to celebrate queerness. Hitchcock’s films interrogate the presumed normality of heterosexuality, and they explore the rich, inner lives of queer people who, as we know, are as deep and complex as any other person.
The films that have the most obvious queer representation are Rope, Strangers on a Train, Rebecca, The Lady Vanishes, and Psycho.
I am not exaggerating when I say that Rope is one of the gayest films I have ever seen. The censors must have literally been blind and deaf not to notice the queer subtext of this film. The writer of the play this film was based on was queer, the actors playing Brandon and Phillip were queer, the screenwriter Arthur Laurents was queer. Laurents said in a commentary of the film years later that, ‘What was curious to me was that Rope was obvious about homosexuals. The word was never mentioned. Not by Hitch, not by anyone at Warners. It was referred to as ‘it’. They were going to do a picture about ‘it’ and the actors were ‘it’’.
Rope is not a film about queerness itself, it’s more a story of two characters who happen to be queer. The plot is simple: two men attempt to prove they committed the perfect crime by hosting a dinner party after strangling their former classmate to death. That’s it. Brandon and Phillip have an undeniable sexual chemistry and are coded throughout the film as gay.
Look at the opening scene – the murder scene could have easily been a sex scene. Sex happens behind closed curtains; so does murder. The murder victim screams, as one may do when they orgasm. Brandon and Phillip savour the moment. They’re out of breath, they look at each other. Brandon even lights a cigarette, the Hollywood indicator of ‘we just had sex’, and that’s all in the first five minutes.
Strangers on a Train is less obvious in its queer-coding but queer-coded nonetheless. Bruno especially is queer-coded. When Bruno and Guy meet for the first time, it could be interpreted as a stalker with a plan, or a gay pick-up. When Bruno is teasing his mother, he is queer-coded as a mama’s boy, which was a cue for homosexuality at the time. Hitchcock knew these scenes could be seen as ‘normal’ and/or queer – he even had to cut scenes in the US release of the film to tone down the queerness, which shows you how aware he was of what he was doing.
Rebecca remains one of the greatest Gothic thrillers of cinema, but it’s also one of the first American films to feature a lesbian – who is, unfortunately, the villain. In the 1940s, lesbians were generally seen as threatening to the patriarchy and so they were portrayed as devious and dangerous. God forbid a woman would have no need for a man. Mrs Danvers’ devotion to her former mistress, Rebecca, goes beyond a purely professional one. While you could argue that they were just close friends, it is evident from the way she speaks about Rebecca and intimately uses her personal belongings that the relationship went deeper than that.
As the clip shows, the scene in the bedroom is very sensual and intimate. Unfortunately, Mrs Danvers falls victim to the ‘bury your gays’ trope – this is when queer characters die on-screen because they have to be ‘punished’ somehow. Bury Your Gays is a trope we need to bury.
A positive and heartwarming portrayal of queerness comes in The Lady Vanishes, Hitchcock’s 1938 British mystery thriller. A cricket-obsessed English couple – both men, Charters and Caldicott – provide a lot of the comedy in this film, but their queerness is never the brunt of the joke. They are funny British men who just happen to be queer. While there are some people who claim the men are heterosexual friends in the same way Holmes and Watson are, there is subtext that can be interpreted as queer and that window for interpretation is important. Charters and Caldicott’s dialogue around the heterosexual maid is queer-coded and, most importantly, the bed scene is queer-coded.
It’s quite wholesome, isn’t it? And another thing that makes this a positive queer representation is that Charters and Caldicott aren’t reduced to stereotypes or caricatures of gay men. Whether or not these characters were intended to be queer, they can be read as queer, which is just as valid an interpretation as any.
And now we come to…Psycho! Psycho has been a focus for queer film historians for years for two interconnecting reasons: Norman’s effeminate manner and crossdressing as his mother, and Anthony Perkins’, the actor who plays Norman, own sexuality.
Anthony Perkins’ story is sad one.
Perkins was born in 1932 and raised in New York. His first film, The Actress alongside Spencer Tracey, performed poorly at the box office and so he took to Broadway for a while, where he was praised for his performance in Elia Kazan’s play Tea and Sympathy where he plays a ‘sissy’, an effeminate queer-coded man who is cured by the right woman – this storyline would sadly become part of Perkins’ own life story. Perkins was a marketed as a heterosexual Hollywood heartthrob and sex symbol for years, starring in films with Audrey Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Sophia Loren, and Jane Fonda. He even lost out on a role in the Marilyn Monroe film Some Like it Hot and West Side Story because the casting directors thought he was too masculine.
It was not until he starred in Psycho in 1960 that he was able to show his range as an actor. Despite Psycho’s success, it led Perkins to being typecast as an effeminate villain, which he quickly grew tired of. Fleeing Hollywood, and the ridicule he faced as a gay man in America, he made a few films in Europe before returning to Hollywood in the late 60s.
His personal life throughout his acting career was difficult. One of his long-term male partners, Tab Hunter, said that ‘beneath his boyishness, there was a lot of tension’, and Alan Sues, who worked with Perkins during the Elia Kazan play, believed that Perkins had to face a lot of backlash from Paramount over his sexuality, which led him to be as brooding as he was. Typical of Hollywood, the tabloids were obsessed with his dating life, which he tried hard to keep private, partly because he was gay and partly because he was a genuinely private person.
After his relationship with Tab Hunter ended (bearing in mind he had exclusively same sex relationships until his late 30s), he dated Grover Dale, before the pair mutually decided to separate because they were convinced their homosexuality was obstructing their happiness and wanted to start their lives over with women.
Perkins began going to gay conversion therapy with psychologist Mildred Newman, who queer composer Stephen Sondhiem described as ‘completely unethical and a danger to humanity’. She convinced Perkins that his homosexuality was the result of the very real sexual abuse he experienced as a child by his mother – which possibly influenced his portrayal of Norman in Psycho. Soon after his conversion therapy, Perkins married Berry Berenson. Though they remained married until his death, their friends thought the pair were mad for sticking it out because Perkins was gay. The couple had two children together, so perhaps Perkins was bisexual or repressing his homosexuality, but we’ll never know for sure.
In 1990, after a nurse secretly took a blood sample from him during an unrelated checkup, it was discovered that Perkins was HIV positive. Rather than telling Perkins, the nurse sold the story to The National Enquirer – Perkins only discovered he had aids when he saw the magazine in line at the grocery store. He died two years later at the age of 60, from aids-related pneumonia.
In a statement prepared before his death, Perkins said, ‘I chose not to go public about (having AIDS) because, to misquote Casablanca, ‘I’m not much good at being noble,’ but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of one old actor don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. I have learned more about love, selflessness and human understanding from the people I have met in this great adventure in the world of AIDS than I ever did in the cutthroat, competitive world in which I spent my life.’
So, from this we can see where his personal life may have influenced his performance as Norman Bates in Psycho, which remains his most famous role. Psycho was pioneering in exploring the idea of people not being what they seem on the outside. In fact, this in itself can be seen as queering since the term was often understood as ‘deviating from the norm’ – Psycho queered the idea notion that America was a place where normal was defined as quiet, safe, small town life, free from the darkness that lurks in modest roadside motels.
Norman is never shown as being explicitly queer in the film, though his sensitive and effeminate manner was shorthand for being queer. He has no relationship outside his mother, whom he keeps alive in part of his psyche which manifests in cross-dressing and murder. Being a ‘mama’s boy’ was shorthand for queerness in the 50s and 60s, so we pretty much know Norman is queer from the outset. We also know that homosexuality was literally considered an illness until the 70s, so coding Norman as queer was shorthand for showing his mental and moral derangement.
His dialogue in his scene with Marion – ‘we’re all in our private traps. Clamped in them. We scratch and claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it we never budge an inch’ – is something the queer community can relate to and empathize with.
While we do see him peaking at Marion when she showers, the scene can be interpreted in multiple ways – he is bisexual and attracted to Marion, he is queer and genuinely curious about the opposite sex, he yearns for a female body of his own and admires and is jealous of Marion’s. Perhaps they’re all true to some degree and they became tangled together in Norman’s psyche.
Even the language Norman uses when confronting ‘mother’ is queer-coded: she states, ‘I will not hide in the fruit cellar. You think I’m fruity, huh?’. Hitchcock knew what he was implying with that dialogue – he could’ve used countless other words, but he chose fruity, which has long been associated with the queer community.
Mother’s house, too, is decorated in a Victorian style, harking back to a more conservative time where sexuality was not the proper thing to be discussed. It’s also decidedly Gothic, a mode of storytelling which often conflated the idea of the monstrous with queer identity. The house perhaps represents the suppression of Norman’s queer desires.
The explanation given to the audience for Marion’s murder is that when Norman felt attracted to Marion, the ‘Mother’ personality became jealous and killed her. His crossdressing as his mother is seen as a way to preserve her memory and keep her alive, but the allusions to the trans community are hard to ignore. The knife is also a phallic shaped murder weapon, that penetrates Marion’s body in the same way the penis does during sex. And he was going to murder Lila in the same way. We need to remember that what goes on in our minds is beyond our conscious level; our subconscious is filled with thoughts, feelings, images, associations, that we’re not fully aware of, so perhaps Norman specifically chose the knife because of what it represented in his subconscious.
Norman spent most of his life isolated, unable to emotionally confide in his mother, so it’s not surprising that he attaches his negative emotions and desires to his mother’s persona. Norman has intense amounts of self-hatred and likely internalized homophobia, so taking on his mother’s persona is a manifestation of his mother’s constant disapproval and a way to remove any reminders of his queer sexuality – maybe Norman wasn’t attracted to Marion at all and this is what frightened him, unleashing all this psychological damage he has done to himself by suppressing his queerness, in the persona of his mother.
It’s also interesting to note that the other characters in the film don’t confirm to traditional conventions of heterosexuality. When we first meet Marion, she is having an affair with a married man; though he is on his way to divorce, this was still a taboo issue in the 50s and 60s. And while their heterosexual relationship is quote-on-quote ‘normal’, their morals are not.
Marion’s heterosexuality doesn’t prevent her from stealing the money from her boss. Being straight doesn’t make you a good person, much in the same way that being queer doesn’t make you a bad person. People are complex, they’re deep, they’re layered. A person’s sexuality is only a part of who they are.
Sam, too, is interesting because in the final act of the film he takes on a passive role, usually prescribed to female characters. At the beginning of Psycho, he is the stereotypical ‘manly man’, but by the end he is reluctant and passive. When he distracts Norman at the motel while Lila investigates the house, Hitchcock frames Sam and Norman as almost mirror images of each other – physically they look similar. One, both, or neither could be queer, or a murderer. And that’s the point – you cannot tell who someone is just from looking at them. Marion’s sister Lila, on the other hand, is assertive, intuitive, and brave. She’s the one who follows up on Marion’s disappearance and recruits the cops, she’s the one who questions the people who live near the motel, she’s the one who investigates the house and finds mother! She takes on the active role usually prescribed to men, showing that gender expectations are constructed and, quite frankly, silly.
So, Psycho can be read a number of ways, but I personally think viewing it through a queer lens is one of the most convincing.
Written by Victoria Brown | BanterFlix Website Editor & Resident Disney Queen