Meet Frankenstein's Gay Dad: James Whale, the Queen of Hollywood

The year was 1931, and director James Whale had no idea what a monster he was about to unleash — both literally and figuratively.

At that point, Universal Pictures had only enjoyed a single successful horror film (or as Variety called them at the time, a “nightmare picture”). Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi, was a hit; but many within the studio assumed it was a one-off fluke, and audiences would never want more scary stuff. Frankenstein was a chance to prove the doubters wrong.

And looking back, nobody could’ve pulled it off quite as successfully, and with such a unique style, as James Whale. A seasoned theater director, he’d only been in Hollywood about a year at this point, and had barely proven his ability behind the camera. But he brought something special to Frankenstein, and his followup horror pictures: A wry comedy sensibility, with deadpan camp.

Some audiences might not even notice that Whale’s films Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein are, at times, comedic. But it’s not hard to spot, from the outrageously flamboyant mad scientist Dr. Pretorious to the gallows humor of a dancing skeleton in the background. And of course, there’s the daring wickedness of playing church bells as the Bride herself is unveiled.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Whale was especially intent on injecting subtle joking blasphemy throughout his work, because he was so often reined in by religious censorship. (One draft of Frankenstein had dialogue describing the Bible as a fairy tale!) But the Hays Office weren’t even his most formidable opponents during his career — that distinction would go to Adolf Hitler himself.

The life and career of Whale is too monumental to fit into a single essay, of course, which is why I’ve just published a new YouTube video all about him! It’s available to watch now.

What’s new this week

• A brand new video about James Whale, the gay father of Frankenstein.

• A new bonus video on Patreon, comparing the Frankenstein films of the 1930s to Young Frankenstein in the 1970s.

• On this week’s Sewers of Paris, I’m chatting with Wellington Love about the disco anthem that inspired Lady Gaga to write “Born this Way” … and how he got to talk to Gaga about it.

What’s coming up

• For this weekend’s Twitch livestreams, we’re watching Young Frankenstein & comparing the script to what made it on screen. It starts at noon pacific on Saturday and Sunday at http://twitch.tv/mattbaume.

• I’m chugging away on a new video about Wicked and the intense gayness of The Wizard of Oz.

• On Sewers of Paris, a chat with an artist whose graphic novels are the stuff of legends, literally.

Stuff I’ve been enjoying lately

• AnyAustin has a great new video about the accuracy of the airports in the Grand Theft Auto franchise.

• Here is a dog that just really likes to cuddle.

• I’m doing a lot of Oz research right now, which includes an excellent video about the trans reading of the character Ozma, by my friend Terry Blas.

The love that dare not speak its name except by Julie Andrews

Ah, to have a been a young gay man in Paris, 1934. Or at least, a young woman playing a gay man playing a woman. (As played by a woman.)

For the last two weeks, we've been examining the charming 1982 musical Victor/Victoria on my weekly Twitch streams. Starring Julie Andrews and directed by her husband Blake Edwards, it's a real hoot. Julie plays a down-on-her-luck singer who meets a cunning theatrical producer, and the two of them realize that her talent just needs a gimmick: They'll tell everyone she's a man with a shockingly feminine voice, turning Paris upside-down as a drag superstar.

Of course, things get complicated when a quasi-mobster from Chicago wanders through town and falls in love -- but of course, to his chagrin, he thinks he's in love with a man.

It's a cute little gender-bender of a musical comedy, with a few passing gestures towards deeper ideas that are de-prioritized in favor of wackiness and glitz. I hadn't seen it in many years, and one of my first thoughts upon witnessing scenes in which characters attempt to pick apart the essential "maleness" or "femaleness" of a person, and to attempt to decode a person they find ambiguous was: "Oh my God, Julie Andrews is the originator of the 'It's Pat' gag." (Of course, she's not really; if anyone deserves credit, it's Reinhold Schünzel, on whose 1933 film this musical version is based.)

I was also struck by how nicely it fits alongside another movie that I'm researching: Kiss of the Spider Woman. Hector Babenco, who directed that film, said that he was trying to determine what, fundamentally, makes a person a man. And Manuel Puig, who wrote the novel on which the film is based, said that he considered the two main characters to actually be four characters: Each one is both a man and a woman. Aren't we all!

Anyway, now that we've concluded the watch-along of Victor/Victoria, we'll be starting a watch-along of the film with a commentary track by Julie and Blake, and I'm very excited for you to join us for that. That livestream starts this Sunday, September 21, at noon pacific/3pm eastern. And then the week after that, my video about Kiss of the Spider Woman goes live! What a busy time.

What's New This Week

• New Patreon video about the many unusual roles of Raul Julia, before he was Gomez Addams.

• You can still watch the recorded VOD of our Victor/Victoria livestreams.

• On The Sewers of Paris, I'm chatting with the problematic gays of The Problematic Gaze podcast.

What's Coming Up

• Kiss of the Spider Woman video coming Sunday, Sept 28! Then I've got a Frankenstein video in the works for October.

• Coming up on The Sewers of Paris: Going deep on musical theater.

Stuff I've Been Enjoying Lately

• The same year that Victor/Victoria came out, so did Querelle. I like them both, but I happen to think one is more pleasant to look at than the other. See if you can guess which one when you look at the trailer for Querelle!

• Here's an early appearance by Angelina Jolie on Conan. A few weird things about it: It's so strange to see someone who is now at the top of mega-celebrity acting nervous about being on THIS show, of all shows. And what's that at the very end about Alfred's dress???

• Here is a relaxing video of an opossum (not a possum!!!!!!) eating an ice cream cone.

They're not even TRYING to hide the gay subtext

When I told people I was working on a video about the gayest moments from the X-Men movies, the usual response was "oh geez, how do you even choose?" There are, it turns out, a lot of them. (That video is now live, by the way!)

But I think my favorite is in X2, the second film. Bobby Drake (a character who has since come out as gay in the comics) is visiting his parents, and awkwardly delivering the news that he's a mutant.

"This is all my fault," his mother says, echoing lines like the mom in Edge of Seventeen who asks her gay son, "what did I do wrong?"

"How long have you known you're ..." she asks, echoing the scene in the indie gay film Get Real when one kid asks another the same question, only swapping "dodgy" for "mutant."

And of course, there's the memorable line, "have you tried NOT being a mutant?" I love that one, because it's not even the first time something has parodied it; a few years earlier, when Buffy's mom learned the truth about her, she asked, "have you tried NOT being the slayer?"

The X2 scene's subtext is so blindingly obvious that everyone knew exactly what they were doing when the filmed it. According to Shawn Ashmore, who plays Bobby, they referred to it as "the coming out scene," and he speculated that it might insinuate even more about Bobby Drake -- in fact, he said in one interview that he'd be interesting in returning to the character and having him come out as gay.

So will we get a gay Iceman in the movies? Well, it's been ten years since Shawn gave that interview and it hasn't happened yet; and Disney doesn't seem particularly eager to add anything gay to their superhero movies, so I'm not holding my breath for anything official. But there's nothing stopping the fan from deciding that he's been queer this whole time. After all, we'd know better than some heterosexual in a suit in Burbank.

What's New This Week

• New video about what makes X-Men so gay is now live!

• We watched a bunch of fun behind-the-scenes X-Men clips on Twitch last weekend.

• On this week's Sewers of Paris, I'm chatting with writer Anthony Olivera and actor JP Karliak about what it's like to be a part of bringing X-Men stories to live.

• I've been dogsitting a lot lately, and I'm posting pups in my Instagram stories, if you like to look at pictures of dogs having a fantastic time.

What's Coming Up

• I'm already chugging away on the next YouTube video -- it's about the incredibly troubled production of one of the greatest gay films ever made, Kiss of the Spider Woman.

• On the next Twitch livestream, we're watching 1982's Victor/Victoria.

• I've got some very fun British guests on an upcoming Sewers of Paris.

Stuff I've Been Enjoying Lately

• Here's a fantastic side-by-side comparison of Airplane! and the movie that inspired it, Zero Hour.

• I think I've shared this before, but here's Judy Garland's first appearance on Carson. She shares a story about the Vaudeville performer Hadji Ali that is a real show-stopper.

• Have you ever seen a binturong? They're one of those animals that moves like it's a theater student doing an improv exercise.

Magneto was right

The gay subtext of the first two X-Men films is so obvious it’s barely even subtext. You have characters who are rejected and outcast from mainstream society … a secret enclave where they can find others of their kind … forbidden loves … a government that pursues them … and when one reveals himself to be a mutant, a mom who asks, “have you tried NOT being a mutant?”

As Tim Rogers once said, “if it was any more on the nose, it would be … a nose.”

I’m in the middle of researching a new video about the queerness of those movies, and I’m digging up a lot of fun details (and a few details that are very much the opposite of fun!) about just how gay the films were by design. Marvel had long been engaged in a funny sort of dance with queer content, going back to the creation of the Northstar character in the 1980s. Writers John Byrne and Chris Claremont always envisioned the character as gay, but it wasn’t until the early 90s that Northstar could actually come out. And even then, Marvel’s PR department was furious. Byrne recalled doing an interview about the character, saying, “I talked to them for a half hour, with the PR person there, ready to put her hands over my mouth if necessary. … When the article came out, my quote was cut down to four words: Superheroes are outsiders, generally."

Eventually, Marvel would get a little better about that sort of thing…on paper, at least. To this day, the films remain conspicuously straight. In the comics, Bobby Drake — the teen who is asked if he’s tried not being a mutant — came out in 2015. But in the movies, we’re still waiting. (Though his character DID date a character played by Elliot Page, before Elliot came out as a trans man, which I suppose you could argue lends at least SOME queerness into the on-screen relationship? A stretch, I know, since actors aren’t their characters.)

At any rate, those first two X-Men films from 2000 and 2003 are unambiguous in their exploration of queer life. Ian McKellen himself said that he took the role of Magneto because the parallels intrigued him! I’ll be diving further into the making and the gaying of the X-Men for my upcoming video, so stay tuned for more!

What’s new this week

• A new Patreon bonus video about the weird sodid history of ex-gay cures. Lots of very suspicious cuddling!

• On The Sewers of Paris, I’m chatting with William Lucas Walker about his time writing for Frasier and Will & Grace, among many other shows.

• I popped by the TrekCulture podcast to talk about visions of the future and powerful ladies!

What’s coming up

• X-Men video coming your way later this month!

• I’ll be at WorldCon in Seattle next week, hosting a talk about George Takei, joining a panel about gay TV history, and hanging out at a table to sign books and chat.

Other stuff I’m enjoying

• I’m obsessed with how WILDLY tonally inappropriate this disco version of the MASH theme song is.

• Please enjoy Uhura doing a fan dance. Good for her!

• Here is an adorable video of cats causing (miniature) train derailments.