GLORIOUS TECHNICOLOR!

Hey everyone! Welcome to the second edition of this side dish: this time we’ll be looking
at the Golden Age of Hollywood musicals.
I think this is a fitting topic to follow our look at Paris is Burning because a lot of the
inspiration for the people walking in the balls came from these films and the women
who starred in them. Therefore we will be looking at a few of those leading ladies and
the tradition of diva worship.
It is also a fitting topic currently as the 2019 Met Gala (in the next couple days) is
“Camp”, and as you will hopefully gather, a lot of the ideas behind what “camp” is, came
from the same era as the great Hollywood musical.
But first! I’ll be chatting with our Ginger Dior and Gretel, who both take inspiration from
the beautiful costumes and from the strong personalities of this time. I learnt so much
from them, and really enjoyed some of the films they recommended – some of which I
have managed to track down on youtube, so you can check them out yourselves too.
I hope you guys enjoy what I’ve cobbled together, and I hope you feel free to continue
the discussion in the comments about any ideas that have been raised here, or even just
to recommend your favourite film from this time. Also if you have prepared any looks
for this, either inspired by or ripped straight off a Hollywood starlet, I would love to see
them!
Xoxo Pudding
I have with me for this discussion portion our wonderful Ziegfeld girls
Gretel and Ginger Dior.
Ambrosia: What about these camp classics inspires you?
Ginger: I personally take inspiration from the sheer opulence (wink) of the costuming
and sets of these old films, the musical number specifically. My parents would show me
old Hollywood musicals as much as they showed me Disney films when I was a kid, and
there was something that I always found super mesmerizing about the whole sets and
dozens of intricate costumes that would be used for one 5 minute scene. Nothing ever
seemed cheap and no expense was spared.
Gretel: Personally, I've always been drawn to the theatricality and fantasy of old
Hollywood musicals. They were so grand and Beautiful. So many different types of art
coming together (giggity) for these iconic moments. I've also loved the theming on these
films/numbers. Total and absolute glamour. Deemed frivolous by some and art by
others- nothing turns my pussy out like a grand and gaggy musical number.
Such commitment to fantasy. The precision and artistry that went into every element,
the hair, the beauty, the costumes sets and dancing, the score and the songs. I've always
wanted my art to express that same breath of beauty and effortlessness. It was a real
Inspiration to explore glamour as an emotion (take a shot every time I say, Glamouré).
I grew up watching a lot of old musicals, my grandparents helped raise/watch me as a
child and to me, them allowing me and encouraging me to watch old movies was one
of the only "queer" things that was approved by them. For a little gay boy growing up
and being teased at school for drawing ladies and bothered by siblings for playing with
dolls at home or being ridiculed for doing dance. Old movie Musicals were an escape.
An Escape, and the freedom to embrace femininity and frivolity and glamour and
theater and music and drag. No one could tell me shit, alone in my room with my movies
and my little heart full of pride and feeling absolutely myself.
Ginger: It’s really touching to hear you say that. I was lucky enough to grow up in a
household that allowed me to sort of figure out what I wanted to be without parents or
family or friends that tried to
force me into any sort of
gendered expectations. I think
that’s also sort of an extension of
these amazing musicals. Even if
there were just there for comic
relief there were always
characters there who sort of
broke the moulds of their gender
stereotypes…
Ambrosia: This is true for so
many people, you can use the
metaphor of Dorothy leaving
Kansas and taking that trip to Oz.
Gretel: isn't that another reason
to love these? They are pure drag.
Ginger: Characters like
Stonewall Jackson or Genius from
Cover Girl (1944) are great
examples of this. Stonewall is a
woman who works for a fashion magazine but she's surly and butch, and it’s so clear
that she runs the show behind the scenes. Genius on the other hand is this guy who
makes everyone laugh and who everyone adores, yet there isn't a single masculine thing
about him. These lovable characters look nothing like their gender expectations and
you're totally right that they scream drag and queer culture.
Gretel: Absolutely. People think it’s all pin curls and pirouettes. But the golden age was
G.A.Y. WAKE UP PEOPLE.
Ambrosia: Funny you should say that Ginger, I was gonna talk about Bathing Beauty
(1944) as well, where apart from the absolutely amazing ‘aquaballet’ spectacular
extravaganza, most of the musical’s performance elements aren’t really that camp or
that extra and in fact they detract from the more so camp storyline where you have the
male lead Red Skelton playing an effeminate man, husband to the way stronger, fitter,
but glamorous mermaid lady Ester Williams – this (oOoOo) dichotomy that was has been
played out in a lot of camp performances.
Gretel mentioned Esther Williams before we started the discussion and I am so glad
because her films are fab… but people have agreed that most of the Hollywood musicals
had a weak heterosexual plot awkwardly plopped in the middle of irrelevant gay
performance pieces. I find it funny that this was the mainstream entertainment of the
time when so many people were closeted.
Gretel: Esther was pure drag. What queen wouldn't be in awe of this talented star?
Stars of the golden age sang and danced, acted, were great beauties. And this Goddess
was an incredible swimmer. A Mermaid. Everything about her movies screamed gay to
me... except for the ever present hetero romance plot squeezed into EVERY. FILM.
Ginger: I personally worship Kay Thompson. Her filmography may not be the largest,
so I'm mostly basing this off of her appearance in Funny Face. So funny face is one of
my favourite movies of all time for a myriad of reasons. The Givenchy fashion
photoshoot, the musical numbers, and of course Kay Thompson's character Maggie
Prescott. In this film role, Thompson is a powerful badass magazine editor who is
charming and effervescent, yet she gets shit done and essentially gets everyone their
happy ending. Despite not appearing in very many films, Thompson worked at MGM for
years arranging and composing music for many of their films. She also acted as a voice
coach for MGM stars like Judy Garland, Lena Horne, and Frank Sinatra. She also went
on to write the phenomenally gay kids book series Eloise. She was known for being
extremely eccentric and charismatic while being a working woman who wasn't afraid of
being fabulous. Thompson was someone who was hyper feminine, and also completely
took charge of her life and career in a way that women just didn't in this time period.
Ambrosia: Yes! I read that about her too! Funny face is such a good film! When I saw
the Think Pink intro I knew it would be good.
Ginger you mentioned Marlene Dietrich as a rightfully worshipped diva, and gay icon,
would you expand on that?
Ginger: So essentially Morocco is a 1930's film set in the 1920's staring the lovely
Marlene Dietrich. Dietrich plays a nightclub singer. In one of her numbers she literally
comes out in a full men's tuxedo in the freaking 1930's. If that wasn't enough, she kisses
another woman from the audience on the mouth after taking a flower from the
woman's hair and giving it to a man in the audience. This scene is unparalleled in pure
genderfuckyness for this time period. For a woman to kiss a woman, for a woman to
give a man a flower, for someone adorned in a tuxedo to give a man a flower, are all
huge ways that this scene absolutely fucked with not only gender stereotypes, but
fucked with the heteronormativity of the 1930's (a time where is was certainly not okay
to fuck with heteronormativity). While this film is few years earlier than the classic age
of MGM that we're discussing, it is just impossible to talk about queerness in old film
and not bring up this example.
The scene is certainly worth
the watch if you haven't seen
it.
Ambrosia: That’s beautiful,
thank you for that! So final
question! What films would
you encourage everyone to go
away and watch to really get
the full fantasy?
Ginger: One film that I think
everyone reading this should
go out and watch is Stage Door.
This film is literally about a
house full of aspiring actresses.
Obviously there is a plot and
story, but you don’t watch this
movie for all that. You watch
this movie because of the pure
chemistry between all of the
amazing women who are
featured. Lucille Ball, Ginger
Rogers, and Katherine Hepburn are just a few names who make this movie as
charismatic and wonderful as it is. Speaking of Hepburn, she delivers one of the most
heart wrenching performances that I’ve personally ever seen. This film is the epitome
of the smart and witty women that gave the films of this time the air of elegance,
intelligence, and bad-assery that is so blatantly missing in today’s cinema.
Ambrosia: Thank you both! I would like to thank Gretel and Ginger for joining
me and helping me compile this lil document. I will make sure to make sure
anything mentioned is linked at the bottom of the doc for your pleasure.
For the next part, I’ve compiled some info on the idea of Camp and Diva
Worship.
CAMP
Camp is a slippery thing that has managed to acquire so many definitions from the many
academics who have analysed it. Similar to another Polari (London slang popular with
gay men) word “Drag”, Camp’s origin is unclear, some say it came from the French verb
se camper which means “to strike an exaggerated pose” (similar to how one origin of
the term Drag is from the act of dragging long skirts across the stage floor), others say
it is a an acronym for “Known As a Male Prostitute” (similar to Drag being seen as
shorthand for “Dressed As a Girl”).
Susan Sontag’s 1964 Notes on Camp (which is the inspiration for the 2019 Met Gala) is
a popular analysis of camp, and as such, has followed the term into the mainstream. She
evaluated camp as a dismissal of high culture, a “sensibility” which views the world
apolitically in terms of style. This camp style, she observes, oozes “artifice and
exaggeration” and satisfies a taste for the extravagance without taking itself too
seriously. That makes some sense, however (just like the Met Gala,) Sontag only makes
a passing acknowledgement of the “peculiar” relationship between Camp and
homosexuality.
Another analysis: Andrew Ross’s 1988 Uses of Camp saw camp as a response to “the
massive reorganisation of cultural taste that took place in the sixties” (essentially the
Pop movement). He was concerned with how Camp came to function as the
“rediscovery of history’s waste”. Sontag and Ross’s essays document the phenomenon
of “mass camp”, the heterosexual appropriation of camp style and taste from a
homosexual social environment. “Mass camp” can be considered a “safe” taste for
media now out of fashion, appreciating something so bad that it is good and detaching
it from “unsafe” subcultural affiliations.
This mainstream “mass camp” appreciation of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical today
is in contrast to its appeal during its heyday, when the MGM musical epitomised the
best of show business, MGM in the public mind even stood for “More Great Musicals”.
It is also ignorant of what camp meant for the queer people at the time. The camp style
was perfected by the Freed unit at MGM, known in the business as “Freed’s Fairies” for
the large number of gay men on the creative team (the MGM wardrobe department
also included queer fashion designers Walter Plunkett, Irene Sharaff, Gile Steele and
Adrian). The Freed unit helped to elevate the studio to leading creator of musicals but
also distinguished the MGM brand, so the camp style was accepted by the people higher
up because of the corporate strategy of product differentiation.
The style enabled queer artists and workers at the studio to mark their labour because
it was recognisable as camp and therefore queer by those “in the know”. The musicals
could offer escapist family entertainment seemingly committed to wholesome values
through plots and numbers, centred on the heterosexual couple. But they could also
deliver a camp affect for the audience who did not align themselves with those values,
and who could take great pleasure in the visual strategies that the style used to poke
fun at this narrative of “heterosexuality” in response to the era’s oppression and
censorship of homosexuality.
Camp allowed homosexual men and women to undermine the social categories that
served to marginalise them, and became a form of communication/sign language. Just
as “gay” at the time meant both “excessively joyful” and “homosexual” but only to those
in the know, and the use of terms such as “friend of Dorothy” and “Good Judy”. Many
academics such as Moe Meyer, George Chauncey, Michael Bronski and Esther Newton
used these experiences to define camp as a “style” and “strategy” of queer parody, a
definition which in contrast to Susan Sontag and Andrew Ross’s makes it fundamentally
queer and political.

DIVA WORSHIP
Daniel Harris observed that “Diva worship provided effeminate men with a paradoxical
way of getting in touch with their masculinity… a bone-crushing spectator sport in which
one watches the triumph of feminine wiles over masculine wiles”. The tough “broad”,
the bitch, or the vamp get their way over the enemy: the straight man. The Broadway
divas are exaggerations of certain feminine traits, showing feminine assertiveness and
toughness in their performance. Just like a drag queen. In fact, the camp icon Mae West
got her act from New York drag queens, borrowing heavily from the 1920s camp to
create her temptress persona and look, impersonating a flamboyant woman with sly,
tongue-in-cheek extravagance, with material full of double entendres. A drag queen
could try to “do” Mae West, but Mae West already “did” drag queens.
Another revered leading lady, Ethel Merman was a relic of the bygone vaudeville era
and represented one face of camp: the garish, tacky appreciation of outdated and
obsolete pop culture. In a weird way Ethel Merman tried to capitalise on her new found
gay audience in the 80s and released versions of her show tunes with a disco backing
track, just slapped them right on there – really bizarre, and probably to blame for killing
disco.
Judy Garland’s musical diva image was nurtured by gay men. Judy Garland was adored
as a camp icon for the intensity of her performance not the ironic worship of kitsch,
such as of Ethel Merman who represented the diva from the bygone era clinging onto
glamour. Apparently Judy Garland was considered to have a lack of glamour, she had an
emotionally powerful voice but an unorthodox body according to the studio’s standards
“all chest and legs”, and therefore her physical nonconformity with the glamour of the
time was a lot of the time, structured into her image in her films and in her dialogue. In
addition to her favourable non-conformity Judy Garland’s image was of an emotional
wreck, tortured by substance abuse and stage fright, but once pushed on stage sang up
a storm and basked in the adulation of her audience. She performed on “the knife edge
between camp and hurt” which communicated a feeling shared particularly by gay men
of the time. Drag queens do Judy Garland as an homage.
In Philip Core’s book Camp Rules, he describes Camp as a “disguise that fails” (an idea
that I think we can extend to drag). It has usually been the gay audience member who
queers the musical, who finds or invents a gay narrative to the spectacle presented to
them, no matter how heterosexual it appeared to be. The musical became a spectator
sport for the gay community and the diva became the star player.
FURTHER WATCHING &
LISTENING
SPOTIFY PLAYLIST
Listen to some classic lipsync-worthy bangers you diva wannabes.
LINKS TO FILMS ON YOUTUBE:
Ziegfeld Follies (1946) – Featuring everyone really, highly recommend!
Invitation to the Dance (1956) – Dance numbers with Gene Kelly, hunk of the time.
Duchess of Idaho (1950) – Featuring Ester Williams, so some similar swimming
numbers to Bathing Beauty.
Pin up Girl (1944) – Featuring Betty Grable, some good visuals, some of the songs are
cut out though, gross.
Hit the Deck (1955) – Featuring, Ann Miller, Jane Powell and Debbie Reynolds.
South Pacific (1958) – Featuring Mitzi Gaynor
ICONIC SCENES:
The Staircase scene from Ziegfeld Girl (1941) – Featuring Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr,
and Lana Turner.
Bathing Beauty (1944) aquaballet - At one point there’s fire. Completely unnecessary,
completely gay.
The Big Show - Cover Girl (1944) – Gorgeous!
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) – Imagine being one of the lamp ladies with your
back to the camera. Sad.
Singing in the Rain (1952) fashion segment
Cover Girl (1944) fashion segment
Funny Face (1957) fashion segment
Lovely to Look At (1952) Fashion segment
Gucci ss2019 Campaign - A lot of scenes listed above feature.