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My Queer Cinema: LGBTQ+ Films Coded and Explicit, Volume 1, 1887–1919

Douglas Messerli

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A Sun & Moon title.

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“In this erudite, lively and meticulously researched history, Douglas Messerli offers an invaluable guide to the dawn of world cinema, which turns out to be far more queer than we might have thought. He makes a persuasive case such transgressive elements transformed movies forever.”

— NIK SHEEHAN, director of No Sad Songs, Symposium, God’s Fool, FLicKeR, and other films

“Douglas Messerli’s first volume of his magnum opus calls to mind Jay DeFeo’s mammoth artwork, The Rose, in the book’s monumental aesthetic and intellectual generosity, beckoning the reader into ever more intricate layers of imagery, fantasy, and lingering afterimages that Messerli orchestrates into an ongoing revelation. He has dared a very deep dive into the earliest raptures of the screen surface, illuminating that intricate unconscious, salvaging an unsuspected dimension of sexually marginalized cultural expression in all its contradictions, and anxieties, and unsanctioned joys.”

— EARL JACKSON, Film scholar and historian, author of Strategies of Deviance: Studies in Gay Male Representation

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In Douglas Messerli’s expansive study of gay cinema, he explores a wide range of innocent works such as the nude women who greet one another in a kiss (Eadweard Muybridge) of 1887, the two men dancing of The Dickson Experimental Sound Film of the late 1880s, to the numerous cross-dressing and drag appearances of many silent-motion-picture stars, to the far more complex presentations of LGBTQ figures in works such as Italian director Mario Roncoroni’s Filibus, the early German films of Ernst Lubitsch, and the first openly gay work, Different from the Others, of 1919. What he reveals in this first volume of essays on 180 films is just how various and multiple queer imagery was even in the first decades of filmmaking.