The Cursedness of Queer Shame
In the opening sequence of the 1919 German film Different from the Others, a famed violinist named Paul Körner (Conrad Veidt) sits at a table with a newspaper, reading of three suicides of young men. This headline brings to him an equally grim mental response — the image of the procession of queer history, in the flesh — down the damp corridors of time. Men and women marching together in their period-piece garb. What looks at first like a slit of light, a gleam of hope from the glory of a forgiving God, is in fact the blade of homophobia — the “sword of Damocles” that is §175, the legislation that outlawed homosexual behavior in Germany. Many of the figures pictured in Körner’s mind were exiled or jailed for their identities and faced violence due to the nature of their love.
Different from the Others was an Aufklärungsfilme, or, enlightenment film, a genre of film popular in Germany during the 1910s. These films aimed to raise awareness of society’s problems — the plights of the downtrodden and overlooked.
As Richard Dyer explains in Now You See It,
“Afklärungsfilme are sometimes described as social reform tracts and sometimes as pornography, and it is clear that, though developed originally as a label for films with a high liberal moral purpose, it was an umbrella term under which films with titles like Hyenas of Lust and The Road to Damnation could find shelter. What unites them all are the use of the story form to deal with social issues, the way they recognize personal and especially sexual issues as social matters, the combination of a declaration of moral purpose (however hypocritical or opportunistic in some cases) with the depiction of social ills, and the general orientation to treat the subject matter, whatever it might be, as a ‘problem’.”
These films were made with good intention, although the narrative of the film is driven by exploitative tragedy. Look at the poor homosexual. Look at what society has done to him. Deeper down, somewhere, between the lines: He cannot help himself. He is cursed by his desires — his way of life. Different from the Others ends with the almost Mapplethorpian tableau of Körner’s deathbed after his own suicide. Veidt was a gaunt, effetely sinister man. He would go on to star in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in the following year, but in Others, he is the quintessential cinematic specter. Ghost white even before his death, Körner is a movie monster. A tragic one, treated more like a Frankenstein. A man who loves another man. Lecherous. Vampiric.
Dyer adds, “He would have made a good Dracula, in one interpretation of the role: the man doomed to live by performing despicable deeds of seduction, thus attractive because seductive, sinister for the deeds, and tragic because he is in the grip of a compulsion.”
The words different from the others can read as a proud declaration. Of young queer quirkiness. A phrase one could imagine stitched onto a patch, or emblazoned on a button, worn by a member of a high school QSA. To be different is a gift, because difference is — to heterosexual hegemony, the scariest thing imaginable. But when one grows up queer and alone in that queerness, that difference is magnified. Difference becomes a deformity. A source of quiet shame. In my early teens, I grew into my queerness in a society blighted by what was sanitized for news stations and mainstream concern as “bullying,” but was in fact a culture of queer-bashing, one that was encouraged from a young age. Young kids constantly feeling cursed by what they could not change. Suicides would mar the illusion of a progressive society. They saw us as monsters.
For a long time, I felt the crushing weight of absence surrounding me. An absence of queerhood. For whatever reason, I felt the need to carry this weight with me. Years ago, I saw the same procession Körner did. To watch Different from the Others today is to feel yourself in quicksand. What moment in time is this? The passions and the fears that are enacted on the screen in the 1910s — these were ours. That corridor still lives within the recesses of my soul. I cannot speak for the others who occupied that cinema. They perhaps saw just a brief, low-resolution frame projected before them. But I gazed through a snowstorm of silver halides and emulsion and found myself in a place I thought I had managed to forget.
