I may finally be too old for a stocking, but there’s one holiday tradition I continue to love, and that’s the airing of classic musicals on television. For a long time now, I’ve been of the opinion that lesbians need to reclaim musicals from gay men — not least because there is such a plethora of gorgeous, talented women in film musical history.

While a list of all my favorite female performances would probably take all day, here in chronological order are ten that I’m hoping to see over the vacation:

1. Ginger Rogers in Shall We Dance (1937)

I love all the Ginger Rogers/Fred Astaire collaborations, so it’s hard to select just one.

But Shall We Dance has one of my favorite Ginger Rogers moments, as the camera dwells in close-up on her listening face as Fred Astaire sings "They Can’t Take That Away From Me." While the song is beautiful, it’s Ginger’s subtly despairing response that really strikes at the heart. (She would go on to win an Oscar for Best Actress, for the non-musical film Kitty Foyle, in 1940).

2. Rosemary Clooney in White Christmas (1954)

This very, very silly seasonal musical is mostly notable for the gay undertones brought by Danny Kaye’s performance (no, really — watch it again). … continue reading

I don’t remember exactly how I came across it, but a while ago I stumbled upon an online list that an organization called the Publishing Triangle had made of the “100 Best Lesbian and Gay Novels of all time." Since I was a literature major, and reading is still pretty much like breathing for me, it was an interesting list. There were the overtly gay-themed novels you might expect — E. M. Forster’s Maurice, for example, and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness — as well as books that I recognized as subtextually gay, even if it’s not quite made explicit: D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (which, somewhat counter-intuitively, is really about men in love with each other), and Henry James’s The Bostonians. One selection, at No. 43, came as a pretty big surprise, though: Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.

I thought about this. Little Women? Really? I mean, yes, Jo March was a tomboy; yes, she had a propensity for dressing up in men’s clothes and swaggering about; yes, the handsome, wealthy, intelligent, kind boy next door was in love with her, and she just wanted to be friends. But it still seemed like a pretty big, and presumptuous, leap to me, to claim it as a lesbian novel. … continue reading

If you’ve ever seen the excellent 1995 documentary The Celluloid Closet, which examines the coded history of gay and lesbian characters in Hollywood movies, you’ll know that it provides enough viewing suggestions to fill your Netflix queue into next year. One movie it mentions (which I finally got hold of recently on DVD) is Young Man With A Horn, made in 1950.

Since the price you pay with gay characters in movies of that vintage is usually that you have to read heavily between the lines — as well as watch the character come to a sticky end — I had been in two minds about renting the movie. But in fact, it turned out to provide an intriguing representation of a fairly clear lesbian character, who — 11 years before The Children’s Hour — not only doesn’t die in the end, but actually has an on-screen female love interest with whom she probably goes off into the sunset. … continue reading