Desire and Difference: Hidden in Plain Sight

Emerging from the distant darkness, a glowing young man walks toward the foreground wearing a white shirt and tan pants. He is carrying some sort of stick or staff aloft in the air. Waiting in the foreground is a shirtless young man with his arms outstretched in a peculiar angle.

What is happening here? The image evokes such a strong sense of sweet hungry anticipation.

It turns out the story of this particular image was not hard to uncover. It comes from a film made in 1949 by Gregory J. Markopoulos, a 21 year old gay man. A little bit about the filmmaker before we get to Christmas USA...

Rarely seen and nearly forgotten, Markopoulos' films were once compared to the works of Joyce, Proust, and Einstein. --Kristin M. Jones, ArtForum

Markopolous was born in Toledo Ohio and raised by immigrant Greek parents. He started making movies when he was 12 years old with a borrowed 8mm silent movie camera. His work has been described as "dreamlike, dialogue-free mini dramas, filled with images of myth and symbol, and highlighted by conspicuously attractive young men" and "...shows excessive scenes of homosexuality and nudity [including] closeups, in color and often protracted, of such things as a male nipple, a painted and coiffured male head, a buttock, and two-shots of a facially inert girl and boy." 

How shocking, indeed. [n.b. sarcasm] 

The 1950s and 1960s (and 70s, 80s, 90s, and...) were a horrifically oppressive time for anyone who experienced same sex love and attraction. To that point, observe the quote in To Free the Cinema written by Andrew Sarris:

Markopolous ... is a really nasty, unpleasant person, who really plays hardball, really gets angry, vicious about things, because of this homosexual thing. 

Markopolous responded to his critics by calling them "soulless morons" and asked that his films be removed from American distribution. Markopolous was a gay filmmaker attempting to depict gay people and their lives on screen at a time when being deep within the closet was de rigueur. It couldn't have been very easy for him.

The average man is destroying beauty. The average man no longer looks into another man's eyes. Everyone is afraid . . . sometimes I think the only way to save the United States is by going somewhere else--just as the ancient Greek philosophers fled to Asia Minor and Italy. --Gregory Markopolous

Once hailed as "the American avant-garde-cinema's supreme erotic poet," Markopolous (March 12, 1928-November 20, 1992) nearly vanished from the American consciousness by his own volition. After prohibiting all his films from distribution in 1967, Markopoulos and his lover, filmmaker Robert Beavers, left the U.S for Greece. The couple also refused interviews and demanded a chapter on  Markopolous be removed from P. Adams Sitney's book Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde.

It wasn't until after Markopolous died in 1992 that Beavers allowed his partner's work to be shown in the United States.

Christmas U.S.A is not a primarily erotic film. It contains no nudity (unless shirtless men is considered nudity), no lingering looks at nipples (okay, maybe a couple nip slips here and there), and no depictions of sex (okay, maybe a little suggestive hunger). Instead it offers a look at the painful repression people with same sex desire experienced in the late 1940s and early 50s. There is an equal amount of shimmering excitement of desire. 

As the movie starts, we watch as our main character moves through a dream sequence of a carnival, alone and hidden in plain sight among the rides, freak shows, and passing crowds. In another scene, we see our main character, a clean cut young man, shaving in the bathroom mirror. In another series of dream like images, we see a reflection of himself emerge from the forest like a woodland fairy dressed in a flowing kimono. Two worlds collide when our clean cut boy communicates with his inner woodland fairy on the phone. Desire and difference  hidden in plain sight.

We move on and meet our character's family. A rather worn out looking mother, busy performing the domestic rituals expected of a woman in this era. A prim looking sister, reading a comic book suggesting the traditional roles expected of women. A father in his chair, barely able to contain his fear (or contempt) for his youthful shirtless son.

Our protagonist strips, sits in the tub, and closes his eyes. There is a hint of sensuality and sexuality in the air. The door knob rattles and we are reminded of the fear of being discovered, being exposed, being found out to be homosexual. 

Our young protagonist embarks on a journey carrying a candle aloft in the air across town, over train tracks, and under a bridge. He finally encounters a shirtless young man standing motionless with his hands outstretched. The young boy bows before the statue and we are left with the sense that some sort of connection happened. 

Hidden and exposed. Safe and vulnerable. Take the time to watch this 13 minute film with all its subtle details and moments. As far as I know, this is the first positive depiction of gay people in the movies.

The original film was silent. Music, composed by Larry Marotta, was added by someone at a later date. 

Christmas, U.S.A. (1949) from Sbignew Rustaveli on Vimeo.
directed by Gregory Markopoulos

Read more about Gregory Markopoulos here, here, here, here, here, and here.

For more images of vintage men and their relationships (some gay, some straight) visit: Vintage Men: Innocence Lost | The Photography of William Gedney; It's Only a Paper Moon;Vintage Gay America: Crawford Barton; These Men Are Not Gay | This Is Not A Farmer | Disfarmer; Desire and Difference: Hidden in Plain Sight, Come Make Eyes With Me Under the Anheuser Bush, Hugh Mangum: Itinerant Photographer, Two men, Two Poses; Photos are Not Always What They Seem, Vintage Sailors: An Awkward Realization, Three Men on a Horse, Welkom Bar: Vintage Same Sex Marriage, Pretty in Pink: Two Vintage Chinese Men, Memorial Day Surprise: Vintage Sailor Love, Memorial Day: Vintage Dancing Sailors, The Curious Case of Two Men Embracing, They'll Never Know How Close We Were, Vintage Love: Roger Miller Pegram,Manly Affections: Robert Gant, Homo Bride and Groom Restored to Dignity, The Men in the Trees, The Girl in the Outhouse, Tommy and Buzz: All My Love,Men in Photo Booths, and Invisible: Philadelphia Gay Wedding c. 1957. You can also follow me on Tumblr.

Northern Ohio Lunatic Asylum

Hawthornden State Hospital

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog entry about my first visit to a state run psychiatric facility. It was a harrowing experience that continues to influence my work as a psychologist in complex ways.

Recently someone left a comment on my original blog post. Shuko raised some interesting questions that I want to answer in more detail. That will have to wait for a future blog post since I've managed to get distracted (imagine that!). While you are waiting, check out Shuko's blog here. She has a great way of exploring the history around us in both images and words.

I visited Western Reserve Psychiatric Hospital every two weeks when I was a 23 year old case manager. The hospital has gone by several different names including Hawthornden State Hospital, Western Reserve Psychiatric Habilitation Center, and currently operates under the name Northcoast Behavioral Healthcare.

That's a whole lot of names. What surprises me is that there isn't a lot of information available on the internet about this hospital. It's especially surprising that the hospital hasn't been subject to any significant historical research. It seems that one of the precursors to Northcoast Behavioral Health Care found its way into a national magazine. The article was called Bedlam, 1946 and discussed the Northern Ohio Lunatic Asylum. We'll explore the Bedlam of Cleveland in a minute.

Here is an aerial view of Northcoast Behavioral Health (aka Hawthronden, aka Western Reserve Psychiatric Center) as it looks now.

Google Maps

Let's go back in time. The Ohio Department of Mental Health makes a single reference to the Hawthornden State Hospital. They write:

Hawthornden State Hospital, later known as Western Reserve Psychiatric Habilitation Center, operated as a farm for Cleveland State Hospital from 1922 until 1938. It was established as a separate facility in 1941. 

That's not a lot of information. The blurb however gives me an important clue. The property got its start as a farm for the Cleveland State Hospital. This means our first stop in exploring the history is a field trip.

Fenn College field trip, Special Collections, Cleveland State University Library 

It just so happens that in researching the Cleveland State Hospital, the first image I came across was an abnormal psychology class taking a field trip in 1946. Look at those eager young faces peering into a model of the brain and marveling at it's structure--and perhaps wondering what separated them from the patients in the asylum. Do you think as part of their field trip that they got to meet actual patients? I wonder what these young students thought about as they encountered those who were removed from society and kept for treatment in an asylum.

I also wonder if any of them were aware of the abuses that were going on at the hospital they were visiting. This class visited the same year that Life magazine published the article Bedlam, 1946. Look at the pictures in the article. The broken and abused people being "cared" for by the hospital in 1946 are far removed from the fresh faced college students pictured above.

Demons of Sixth Grade: Red Circles of Incineration

Image from National Geographic

I grew up fearing a demon. I wasn't alone. Many of us learned, whether in school or through the news, that this demon was out to get us. The demon was different than us. They didn't believe the same as we did. They wanted to hurt us, hurt us so much that they had these horrible weapons pointed in our direction. The demon was called the United Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

A specter of nuclear war hovered right outside my young mind. I didn't know why the USSR was the demon. No one ever took the time to actually teach me anything at all about the USSR. I just knew I was supposed to be scared. I also knew that I wasn't supposed to like "those" people.

My knowledge of the USSR? Minimal. Really none. My eighth grade history teacher, known for coming to class in a Elizabethan period outfit, skipped the lesson on the Soviet Union to "punish" us. He was mad, for some reason now faded from my memory, and refused to teach us. "This will be important stuff to you some day," the teacher said. "You'll be sorry you didn't get the lesson. We'll sit here in silence today."

Yeah. My public school wasn't the most progressive experience. I've come a long way from Center Junior High School. Hopefully they too have come a long way.

We have new demons to fear now. The process, however, is still the same. The xenophobia and ignorance is still the same. Children raised in the world since the World Trade Center came down have been taught by fearful adults to enact xenophobic fears toward people in Muslim countries--and people of the Muslim faith who are our neighbors in our own country.

The cycle continues. Someday a new demon will rise and replace our fear of Muslim people. When we turn our eyes away from the Muslim world they too, might turn their eyes away from us. They'll grow fearful of another demon as shall we. 

We seem to be unable to find our way out of this cycle of fearing that which is different. 

You can find this same xenophobia in the movie Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie. Narrated by William Shatner, Trinity offers up stunning visual imagery of the destructiveness of the weaponry. It provides an engrossing and terrifying spectacle of destruction. The movie fails to question why the bomb was really developed. Maybe the horror is enough. The demon unleashed from the atom speaks for itself.

I wish the documentary moved beyond "othering" those outside of the United States. The same tired old xenophobia is laced through the movie. The bomb was developed, as suggested in the movie, to end a terrible war with Japan. It also makes allusions to needed to protect ourselves against the danger of another more ominous other, the Soviet Union. The most haunting image of all was at the end of the documentary. Horses raced onto a mock battle field, faces and eyes covered with gas masks. Riding the horses were similarly masked human soldiers. When the mask was removed we saw the rise of a new other--the Chinese tested their own nuclear bomb.

The horrifying cycle continues. German. Japanese. Soviet. Chinese. Muslim. We can't seem to find a way to see the other as part of ourselves. 

Click here to watch the movie. 

We hardly ever talk about nuclear war now. Now we fear terrorist acts. Dirty bombs, suitcase sized nuclear destruction, or biological warfare. Destruction can come in an envelope loaded with anthrax, or as demonstrated yesterday in Aurora Colorado, can come while sitting in a movie theater. These are the new staples of fearful living.

When I was in sixth grade people were afraid of nuclear war. People were terrified. I was terrified. I remembered that terror last night when I watched the documentary

Man would unleash the destructive power of the demon locked within the very fabric of matter and plunge the world into the atomic age.

My sixth grade teacher Mr. Joe Smith, taught me about this demon within the walls of my classroom at Zellers Elementary School. He'd just come back from a workshop on teaching children about nuclear war. He put a map up on the board. Our school was ground zero. He drew circles around the school. The first circle represented the area that would be totally incinerated. Another circle represented total destruction. Some rubble might remain but every living thing would perish. The circles continued. Everything I knew was destroyed. Incinerated. Burned. Dead from radiation.

I had a vague notion about the people who had these terrible weapons pointed at my school. I didn't know why. Mr. Smith hadn't been taught to teach us about that. The cycle of fearing the other was passed on to me. No reason to know anything about the other (as then, of course, they would no longer be the other).

I was terrified. Maybe for the first time in my life.

I did something when I got home. I went home and sent away for a list of addresses of potential pen pals. I wanted to learn about those people who had weapons pointed at my school. I also sent away for information from organizations like SANE and FREEZE. I was far too young to actually volunteer to do anything, but I felt like I needed to do something. These bombs were pointed at my school and going to burn me up. They were going to burn  my family up, and everyone else, too.

I did not fully understand why I took these steps. I hadn't really thought about any of this until today. Looking back, it was the beginning of my superpower as a psychologist--a superpower that I wouldn't fully understand until decades later when I was working on my doctoral degree.

It was all there when I was sitting in my sixth grade classroom. With a red circle of incineration drawn over my head, I was launched on a path toward learning about connection. There under the fear of nuclear incineration, I found the need to make the other part of me, and to let the other make me part of them.

Can you make yourself vulnerable enough to find yourself in the other?

Relationships Lost and Found: Tiger Eyes--A Review

One of the things that I really like about Twitter is the possibility to connect with all sorts of different people. Somewhere along the way I started following my favorite young adult author, Judy Blume. Somewhere along the way she started following me. Look what happened yesterday.

Who gets a personal invitation from Judy Blume to see a movie? Who would turn it down? Certainly not me. Last night I put my party boots on and headed down into Boston from my undisclosed location in the Merrimack Valley to attend the screening of Tiger Eyes at the Boston International Film Festival.

Tiger Eyes, a young adult book written by Judy
Blume in 1981 and the first of her movies to be brought to the big screen, is about a young girl trying to cope with the murder of her father. Her son, Lawrence Blume wrote the screen play and directed the film. Willia Holland stars as Davey and Tatanka Means stars as Wolf, the young man who who helps Davey find strength from loss.

Despite the Boston International Film Festival playing an unfinished version of the film that lacked surround sound and the rich deep and moody color the directer intended, the movie was lushly filmed and used the landscape surrounding Los Almos New Mexico as a silent-yet-powerful character in the film.

What is rendered on the screen is a spare yet moving meditation on the solitude of grief and the redemptive power of connection. The film holds a few masterful moments that telegraph to our hearts and minds the experience of grief. Close to the beginning of the movie we are presented with a character's wish to rise up in a hot air balloon and never come down. Shortly thereafter Davey is alone, cradled by a New Mexico canyon, and calls out for her now dead father. The aloneness an isolation of death and loss are hauntingly personified in these two scenes.

The separation and isolation build in the movie and come to a sharp point before pivoting in a Native American ceremony with Wolf (Tatanka Means) and his father Willie Ortiz (Russell Means, Tatanka's real-life father). The ceremony teaches us that no one is left alone in this universe and that it is vital that we are not alone as we are social beings. Wolf's father says "if a person feels disconnected, he or she might fail." The movie starts to unwind itself and carry us to the ending as relationships move from contraction to expansion toward an emotionally satisfying ending. No one fails.

Blume's books are dense. She packs in many different facets of the young adult experience. The movie adaptation of Tiger Eyes is no different. In 92 minutes we are exposed to death, grief, teen drinking, teen relationships and dating, rebellion, angst, and more. I found myself wishing for a simpler more spare story line. The other issues presented in the movie, while important and well done, distracted me from the elegant beauty of relationships lost and found.

I think, perhaps, my wish of a more spare movie reflects my more adult tastes. I got to thinking about how young adults interact with media--short bits of information. I wonder if that was Lawrence Blume's intention of the movie--to present short bits of information to a young adult audience in their own language. If that's the case, it was pure genius.

In the movie, Davey sings one of my favorite Cole Porter songs at a high school talent show. When I drove home after the movie back to my undisclosed location in the Merrimack Valley I pulled up my very favorite version of the song. Annie Lennox sang it in 1990 for Red Hot + Blue, one of the first projects of the recording industry to raise funds for HIV/AIDS. It's worth listening to while you think of your own experiences or relationships lost and found.

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