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The Sewing Circle

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sally_sparrow

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I have been wanting to incorporate my love of old films, obsession with old actors/actresses, and my sexuality into something, and after reading a book of the same title "The Sewing Circle", I decided to create this thread.

The Sewing Circle refers to the group of lesbian, bisexual, or bi-curious Hollywood ladies. Actresses such as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Tallulah Bankhead, Claudette Colbert, and Katharine Hepburn... Also, old Hollywood films that portrayed lesbian characters or had lesbian moments. More recent films and actors/actresses can also be shared, but I am going to focus on older films. Hope you enjoy.

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Mädchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan & Carl Froelich, 1931)
 
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“In a hundred years of movies, homosexuality has only rarely been depicted on the screen. When it did appear, it was there as something to laugh at, or something to pity, or even something to fear. These were fleeting images, but they were unforgettable, and they left a lasting legacy. Hollywood, that great maker of myths, taught straight people what to think about gay people… and gay people what to think about themselves.” (The Celluloid Closet, 1996)
 
 
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Introduced in 1930, the Hays Code restricted Hollywood's output for 38 years. Parts of it were inspired by a social backlash against the anything-goes culture widely believed to dominate the early industry, in which stars like Louise Brooks, Tallulah Bankhead and Dolores del Rio barely bothered to keep secrets and frequently appeared in films that traded on their reputations as sexually assertive women with wide-ranging appetites. “My father warned me about men and booze but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine,” said Bankhead, who had a turbulent and poorly concealed affair with writer and bit-part actress Mercedes de Acosta. The code would go on to constrain the lives of other stars, though several continued to rage against it and get away with as much as they could. In the Fifties, the purges organised by Senator Joseph McCarthy, most famously against Communists, also targeted gay, lesbian and bisexual people and drove some out of the industry permanently.
 
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Like her lover Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck was an earthy bisexual known as "Hollywood’s most well-known closeted lesbian…that everybody knew.” Clifton Webb called her his ‘favorite Hollywood lesbian.’

She was eventually forced into marrying bisexual Robert Taylor. The studio even drove the couple to San Diego to see the judge. Taylor refused to kiss his bride for photographers; she returned to her Northridge ranch and he, home to his mother. He called her "The Queen” and she called him “Junior.” They were rarely together, and proudly showed reporters their separate bedrooms. In his spare time Taylor flew planes with a homosexual co-pilot and long-time buddy. During their surprisingly contentious divorce, Taylor told friends she was a lesbian, they didn’t have sex, and never slept together.“

-Hollywood Death and Scandal Sites: Seventeen Driving Tours with Directions by E.J. Fleming
 
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“Marlene Dietrich’s cross-dressing, one of her biographer’s suggests, ‘not only capitalizes on an aspect of the actress’s bisexual nature; it also enables women in the audience to love her and simultaneously establishes…an identification with men.’ Among the extraodinary roster of Dietrich’s lovers over a long and gallant career were a number of women, including the Berlin music-hall performer Claire Waldoff, playright and screenwriter Mercedes de Acosta (who also had an affair with Dietrich’s rival Greta Garbo, and Edith Piaf."

-From Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life by Marjorie Garber
 
sally_sparrow said:
Sandy.. I'm honored. I've been lurking in your thread for quite some time :D Thank you for stopping in and sharing.
Click to expand...


Okay, lay on your back, I'll get on top, then I'll be honor. Damn it, mean on her. No wait, I"ll be on you.


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I've a dirty mind, instead go back on topic




Clara Bow and Marceline Day pictured on the set of The Wild Party, directed by Dorothy Arzner.

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Dorothy Arzner – pioneer movie director

“Players sometimes complain of the poor parts that are given to them. That’s nonsense. Players draw toward themselves exactly the parts that represent the kind of thing that they have become in pictures. Poor parts gravitate to poor players.” — Dorothy Arzner, maverick movie director, in 1931.


Dorothy Arzner, the trailblazing lesbian film director who defined Golden Era Hollywood - The Telegraph

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“Similar to the transformation of the homosexual pansy to asexual sissy, the sexualized mannish women of the pre-Code era were transformed into asexual tomboys or cold maiden aunts. Lesbian-film theorists Patricia White and Rhona Berenstein have argued that another method for hinting about lesbian desire in Code-era films was to keep the lesbian character offscreen altogether."

-From Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America by Griffin Benshoff
 
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“A good example of a historical queer response to a film from this era occurred with the exhibition of The Uninvited (1944). The film drew so many lesbians to it that several pundits actually commented upon it. Although the film had been passed by the Production Code Administration (as well as by other state and local censor boards), it quickly became obvious that queer viewers were flocking to it because they ‘had been previously informed of certain erotic and esoteric elements in this film.’ While no character in this filmic ghost story is explicitly homosexual, its emphasis on female relationships lays a groundwork for a lesbian reading. Most pronouncedly, the character of Miss Holloway (Cornelia Otis Skinner) is a rather butch matron who rhapsodizes over the dead Mary Meredith, recalling her beauty and how 'the two of us dreamed and planned our lives, what we would do together.’ Even though Mary never appears in the film and is reported to have been married to a man before her untimely death, the evidence suggests that a sizable number of filmgoers were reading an implied lesbian relationship between Mary and Miss Holloway. The era’s film critics also picked up on the film’s lesbian subtext: 'Cornelia Otis Skinner is quite chilly as a Mrs. Danvers by remote control,’ wrote Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, comparing Miss Holloway to another of the era’s quasi-lesbian characters, Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca (1940).”

-From Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America by Griffin Benshoff
 
Alla Nazimova

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The woman who coined the term "Sewing Circle". She had an incredible life:

She was a Russian Jew who grew up in foster care who came to America, performed on Broadway, and posed as a wife to a friend and fellow actor of hers to keep the press from outing him, despite still being married to a guy in Russia. She eventually divorced both and moved to LA where she acted, and was also a screenwriter and producer.

She created the term sewing circle because she (a raging bisexual who preferred women) had shit tons of parties where Hollywood’s LGBT community would hang out and hook up. She was a huge fan of Oscar Wilde and made the film Salomé based on his novel of the same name. For Salomé, nearly all of the cast was LGBT as a homage to Wilde. She also dated his niece, Dolly Wilde.

She was as openly gay as a person could be in the 20s-40s and lived with her partner Glesca Marshall for the last 16 years of her life.

The woman is an icon and there is so much more to her life story than this brief description.
 
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