conversion therapy
by
Douglas Messerli
Harry
Schenck, Edward Warren, and Alice Guy (directors) Algie the Miner / 1912
Finally
in the 1912 film directed by Alice Guy, Harry Schenck, and Edward Warren (I’ve
purposely inverted the usual male-first listings, since Guy was also the
producer) we get a truly early gay film, staring the effeminate Billy Quirk,
desperate to marry his wealthy girlfriend, Clarice Jackson—for god knows what
reason—is told by his future father-in-law that if he can tough it up as a man
in a certain period of time that he can marry his daughter (Mary Foy).
That means “going west,” to learn from rough-neck cowboys how to become a masculine man. The results are quite hilarious as he begins by attempting to kiss the cowboys before they try to take control of him, particularly under the control of a hirsute, heavy-drinking man to whom Algie takes a liking, attempting to help him overcome his alcoholism. Gradually—and so, unfortunately American—Algie is taught how to use a gun, and, more importantly, how to become a miner of gold—the major source of wealth in those gold rush days.
Before our eyes, the swishy Algie becomes
“a man,” discovering with his newfound friend, a gold mine, while protecting
him from others who attempt to intercept it.
Quirk gradually turns the gay Algie into
a figure suitable to Clarice’s father, who is able to return home, now forcing
open the door to his future family’s home in the “cowboy” way, pushing down the
frame and entering the house as a kind of boisterous hero. He has now clearly
become a straight man—in the very worst sense.
It’s a tragedy, celebrated by the family
and the film, as after the earliest version of “Conversion Therapy,” cured
evidently from his homosexuality and rich from his discovery of the goldmine, now a quite brutal masculine, gun-toting,
individual who no woman should truly desire.
Algie has, before our very eyes, been transformed
from a pansy into the kind of being no one should admire. Why he desires the
socially aspiring Clarice is never explained, except perhaps to rid himself of
his natural sexual desires or his dismissal in the world in which he lives.
And
in that sense we might almost feel how he has now lost in his attempt to become
the man whom assuredly enters the Jackson home to claim his bride.
Algie, we immediately recognize, has lost
his soul, and will never again be the loving being he truly was, an engagingly
gay figure who has, by the confines of the writers’ script, been emasculated in
a way that they could never have imagined in 1912.
This is one of the saddest stories I have
ever heard, as the great writer Ford Madox Ford began his The Good Soldier.
If the new miner, Algie has captured his undeserving lover, he has lost his own
being. I’d love to have seen him kiss the cowboys continuously, and we can
suspect that despite his marriage to Clarice, he might one day want to return
to that activity.
Algie
the Miner suddenly transplants an interesting gay male into a world into
which he should never have entered. The gold he was seeking was not in the
glittering rocks, but in the hearts of the people with whom he lived.
In the end, this is a film I cannot quite
forgive.
Los
Angeles, January 13, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (January 2020).
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