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The De-Queering of Historic Figures

The Danish Girl is a fantastic, beautifully acted movie. Eddie Redmayne, in particular, is an exquisite actor, emoting masterfully the first time that painter Einar Wegener tries on a pair of woman’s silk stockings. There’s only one small, minor, almost inconsequential problem: this movie, which bills itself as being a “biographical romantic drama” based on the real-life story of the Danish painter, is almost completely fiction. Many biopics are fictionalized accounts of real individuals, but in this case, the fictionalization serves one major purpose: to de-queer-an ironic endeavor, given the subject-a woman and make her instead into a staunch symbol of heterosexuality.

To begin with, the points of congruence between the movie and real life: is true that Wegner was a painter, moved to Paris, was married to artist Gerda Wegener, and was one of the first people to undergo gender reassignment surgery, eventually living as Lili.

But here is where the similarities end. Now, the glaring “artistic license”: in the movie, Gerda is portrayed as Einar/Lili’s long-suffering wife. In many ways the protagonist of the movie, she is alternatively supportive and dismayed that she’s losing her husband as Einar transitions into a woman. Even at the end of the movie, when she feels drawn to (the fictional character of) Hans Axgil, she still feels a compelling loyalty to her spouse that overrides the attraction. It is a beautiful (mostly?) heterosexual love story, with overtones about wifely duty and dedication. How lovely for straight viewers.

But to depict Einar/Lili’s story this way is approximately as accurate as telling the story of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything-also a biographical romantic film in which Redmayne played the lead the year before-as though Hawking was handicapped not by motor neuron disease but instead was an American with a limp. In real life, Lili was probably intersex, since she wrote in her memoir that during gender reassignment surgery vestigial ovaries were found in her body, or had Klinefelter syndrome (which stems from XXY chromosomes), and she passed more easily as female than male. Gerda, meanwhile, was either bisexual or lesbian, and during their time in Paris, Gerda lived openly as a lesbian and painted lesbian-themed erotica. After 26 years of marriage, Gerda and Lily only separated because Lili’s gender assignment made their marriage illegal in Denmark.

With this in mind, is it so improbable to suggest that Lili and Gerda were in essence “bearding” for each other in Denmark and maintained their marriage of convenience even when seeing other people because they enjoyed each other’s companionship? Even if Gerda was not lesbian (she married Fernando Porta in 1931), the film does her and viewers wrong by completely eliminating her queerness. If there was any emotional turmoil in Gerda and Lili’s relationship, it was Einar’s, not Gerda’s. But audiences aren’t interested in the story of a libertine, pornographic lesbian artist (notice that none of the paintings shown in the movie were Gerda’s lesbian ones) and her intersex beard, however, and so the deeply moving, mostly heterosexual story of The Danish Girl emerged instead, and the rest is Oscar history.

As frustrating as the de-queering of The Danish Girl is, it’s just one more in a long line of examples of the marginalizing of queer history and the queerness of individuals. Take, for example, posthumous efforts to keep Whitney Houston “in.” After Houston’s death in 2012, gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell wrote a bittersweet piece in the UK’s Daily Mail about meeting Houston and her rumored then-girlfriend, Robyn Crawford, in 1991 when they were still a couple. Though Houston spent decades trying to stay in the closet and to out her now is perhaps unfair to those efforts, Tatchell noted that he was not the first to “out” Houston because she had previously been outed by ex-husband Bobby Brown‘s sister Tina, Houston’s former bodyguard Kevin Ammons, and even Brown himself in his 2008 authorized biography.

Nevertheless, the people closest to Houston, who for sure would have known the truth, such as her mother Cissy Houston and music legend Clive Davis (an openly bisexual man who discovered Whitney in 1982), have claimed ignorance about whether the relationship was romantic or not, protecting Whitney’s heterosexual image even in death. This protective de-queering was maintained in the 2014 Lifetime movie Whitney, which shied away from suggesting that Whitney and Robyn had been a romantic couple. Angela Bassett, who directed the biopic, said of Whitney’s alleged queerness in regards to the made for TV movie:

“[Whitney’s sexuality] really wasn’t that important. What was important to me was, they were good friends and they really cared about one another, and that’s a good thing. Now, whatever else you wanna read or tell or say-it’s good, it’s bad-it’s what you put on it.”

Given that the movie “chronicles the headline-making relationship between the iconic singer, actress, producer and model Whitney Houston and singer and songwriter Bobby Brown from the time they first met at the very height of their celebrity to their courtship and tumultuous marriage,” according to the Lifetime website, it really kind of is important if Whitney married Bobby as a cover for her queerness. If that’s the case, shouldn’t the movie really have been about how internalized (externalized?) homophobia set her on the slow but eventual path to ruin? Isn’t that an even more compelling story?

Tatchell puts it elegantly when he says, “Telling the truth does not besmirch Whitney’s memory. It honors the most important relationship she ever had. What’s wrong is ignoring or denying the one love that made her truly happy. Homophobia contributed to Whitney’s fall.” If only Hollywood saw it that way.

De-queering can also happen in an academic context, where one might least expect it. Go to Bavaria, Germany, and all of the informational literature notes that King Ludwig II of Bavaria was gay. King Frederick of Prussia-one of the world’s greatest military strategists-is famous for having attempted to flee Prussia in his youth with his lover Hans Hermann von Katte, who his father William I executed before him to break Frederick of his “unmanly, lascivious, female pursuits highly unsuitable for a man.” Historians, who often pride themselves on being objective and impartial, are clearly able to acknowledge at least some historical queerness.

Or are they?

Consider the following: as a young girl, the future Queen Mary II of England and wife of William III (formerly of Orange), wrote over 80 passionate letters to courtier Frances Apsley, whom she referred to as her “husband” and “Aurelia.” Mary wrote such things as:

“If my letter has made the effect I wished, dear husband, on your hard heart I may without scruple call you my dearest, dear Aurelia, which though I did in my last letter it was with an aching heart for hear you should reject that name.”

And:

“What can I say more to persuade you that I love with more zeal than any lover can? I love you with a love that n’er was known by man. I have for you excess of friendship, more of love than any woman can for woman and more love than ever the constantest love had for his Mrs. You are loved more than can be expressed by your obedient wife.”

Most scholars have trouble admitting Mary could have been queer as a three dollar bill, so William and Mary remain an idealized royal couple, their union immortalized in the US by the name William and Mary College. Skepticism that a young girl would already be so in touch with her sexual orientation would be understandable, but that fact is not cited among academic arguments for Mary’s heterosexuality. Instead, scholars’ disbelief comes in part because Mary “fell deeply in love with her husband.” (This begs the question of what she wrote in letters to him. Actually, scholars originally thought her letters to Apsley were to William).

Yet when Mary found out she was to marry William, she cried for two days straight, and she cried during the ceremony as well. Mary and William never had children (she miscarried once), and William had a mistress, Elizabeth Villiers (although he also has faced queer rumors over time). It is true that Mary was copying a popular romantic style in her letters to Apsley, and that superfluous expressions of love between female friends during the period were common, but had she written similar letters to a man, they would have been interpreted as love letters without hesitation. Therefore, is it not conceivable that Mary was at least bisexual? Why is there little academic leeway to admit uncertainty?

Coincidentally, Mary wasn’t the only (possible) queer in the family. Her younger sister, Anne, who would ascend to become Queen Anne after Mary, was just as queer if not more so. She, too, wrote soppy love letters to Apsley (they competed for the older girl’s affection), and during her reign, Anne had a tempestuous, emotional relationship with Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough.

Although biographer Anne Somerset‘s 2012 biography of Queen Anne leaves no doubt that Anne and Churchill were lovers, most historians continue to view Anne as “a strong woman of traditional beliefs, who was devoted to her husband” (Anne was married to Prince George of Denmark and had 17 pregnancies, only four of which produced live infants, all of whom quickly died). Then again, when Anne replaced Churchill with her cousin Abigail Masham, Churchill sent Anne a letter accusing her of damaging her reputation by conceiving “a great passion” for Abigail, referred to the fact that Anne had “no inclination for any but of one’s own sex,” and threatened to publish Anne’s early love letters to her as a way of incriminating her for homosexuality. These sound remarkably like the words of an ex-lover, scorned.

The de-queering of history is quietly pernicious. It denies the contributions and achievements of the LGBT community and prevents heterosexuals from seeing the presence of queer individuals in historical events. These are just a few examples of ways in which real individuals have either been de-queered or their queerness omitted or denied, and there are thousands of others. In 2011, California passed the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful Education Act, which mandated, among other things, that the political, economic, and social contributions of LGBT and disabled individuals be included in school textbooks and social studies curricula. Where is a national-level equivalent?

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