The Gays of Future Past: Different from the Others (1919)

This week I watched a movie that really got my film geek juices flowing! It's that perfect junction between film and history that makes me want to sit down and write a blog post. Aren't you lucky?

The film is Different from the Others (1919) and the fact that I was able to see it at all is a miracle. Different is credited as one of the first films to sympathetically depict homosexuality. It was co-written by and stars well-known German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and was intended as a sort of PSA against the German law Paragraph 175 which made it illegal for men to bonk men.

In the film, famous violinist Paul Korner (Conrad Veidt one year before he would rocket to fame in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and many years before he would be immortalized playing Major Strasser in Casablanca (1942)) falls in love with starstruck pupil Kurt (Fritz Schulz) and soon the two are inseparable.

This comes to the attention of call-boy turned blackmailer Franz (Reinhold Schunzel... which sounds like a tasty German breakfast pastry) who threatens Paul with exposure of his illegal lifestyle if he doesn't cough up some marks.

Hirschfeld appears as himself to explain to Paul (and the audience) that there are many facets of human sexuality- and that homosexuality is as natural and as moral as heterosexuality... IN 1919!!! ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO!!! We've literally been trying to explain this to everybody since men wore spats!

Different was assumed lost because once the Nazis took power every available copy was burned along with Hirschfeld's entire Institute of Sexual Research library in Berlin. But luckily a copy was found in the Ukraine in the 1970's so now we can see this unique attempt by a film to try and sway public and political opinion. It's like the Philadelphia (1993) of 1919.

The film that exists is just a fragment. There are numerous title cards and still photos to explain what we can't see. But what is here is remarkable. There are no passionate makeouts or man-on-man sexfests. The passion and longing are kept to glances and touch- and the good ol' indicators of homosexuality are refined culture, effeminate hand gestures and hands on hips... and kicky silk dressing robes.

I was struck by how similarly gays are filmed in some recent releases: The effeminate, bookish out gay kid in Love, Simon (2018); the longing glances that make up for any actual gay sexual activity in Bohemian Rhapsody (2019) (and if the trailer for Rocketman (2019) is any indicator, there will be lots of gay eyeball-only action for Taron Egerton too); the one-night hand-holding that takes the place of more carnal intimacy in Boy Erased (2018). 

While we do have Call Me by Your Name (2017), God's Own Country (2017), and Todd Haynes to put the sex in gay sexuality, it feels to me that there has been some neutering of the gay experience in popular Hollywood product.

It is ironic that a movie that was made when being gay was literally illegal, shares so much in common with gay movies made in today's more permissive culture.

We're here. We've been here. Get used to it.