Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934

While written for an academic audience, Girls Will Be Boys provides a fascinating analysis of the role of cross-dressed women and lesbians in early film. This is highly readable, even for the lay person. To my surprise, cross-dressed women were outright common in the early silent era, often utilized as part of a Strong Pioneer Woman archetype (and actually fed into white eugenics propaganda), and no bearing on the woman's perceived sexuality. It was only in the 1920s when lesbians became a "known" thing due to controversial movies and books, and that's when coding came in: i.e., a woman in pants must be a lesbian. More blatant depictions of lesbianism in the early 1930s sent censors into a tizzy, and so anti-perversion wording was added show more into the famed "Code" that dictated Hollywood productions for decades to come.

The book is sometimes redundant but I never found it outright slow. Some of the small details were especially intriguing. I was well aware of the term "pansy" for a wimpy boy in modern times or a gay man historically, but I had no idea that lesbians were dubbed "violets" after some coding used in the movie The Captive. I also didn't know that in the 1920s, "bisexual" literally meant a person possessing two sexes, and not someone attracted to men and women.

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in LGBTQ history and/or early Hollywood. show less