This year, I’ve been expending much of my writing energy on the first draft of a novel that can best be described as a dark queer romantic comedy about academic power struggles. After reading a snippet last week, a friend asked if I’d ever seen the film noir Sweet Smell of Success (Mackendrick, 1957).
I hadn’t, but upon watching it I immediately understood why they’d asked. The film follows the twisted dynamic between powerful and unscrupulous newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and power-hungry press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), whom Hunsecker hires to keep his sister from seeing a jazz musician. It’s the kind of plot that would do well for either precise and cutting drama or slapstick comedy, though the film leans exclusively on the former. And it happens to be about two men who are pretty much the most unpleasant people in the entire world.
I’ve long taken a strange delight in reading and writing about really horrible people, especially people so awful they could only be meant for each other—Hannibal (Fuller, 2013-2015) isn’t one of my favorite television series for nothing. These books, tv shows, and films that follow charismatic yet often fundamentally unlikeable characters articulate something compelling about the ways in which power is constructed in our society, and the ways we navigate it. These characters, for all their aggressively horrifying nature, often render plain and naked the contours of their desire, which in turn reveals something, I believe, about how desire works.
And guess what? Desire, in these narratives, is often so perverse as to be unmistakably queer. Desire is hunger, a ravenous thing, a too-muchness; desire is something that cannot be caged within the strictures of conventional heterosexuality. Desire is loving a man who, as Hunsecker’s sister tells Falco in Sweet Smell of Success, “makes you jump through burning hoops like a trained poodle” to find your fame.
I’ve said before that this is a newsletter about queer and trans erotics, but truthfully I’ve been nervous to actually write about eroticism itself. There’s something tender there, something personal, something that’s still unfolding in my own journey as I transition. It feels vulnerable, writing about this. I’m not totally sure I want to, really. Maybe queer and trans erotics are something best kept inside our own circles, where they won’t disturb the imaginations of cis and straight people.
But I also don’t think I can silo my writing like that anymore. I’m unwilling to pick off parts of myself and just pack them away, unseen. And so, it is with some trepidation but also excitement that I write this now. It’s a writing that needs to happen.
As to why queer eroticism matters—I think about what trans gay author Lee Mandelo articulates as the “intensities of queer masculinity” that drove Summer Sons, his Southern Gothic novel. Mandelo describes the ongoing project of attending to these intensities as one that’s both personal and political, a utopian worldmaking practice that can serve as a delicious counter-wave to the transphobic, queerphobic moral panics that have been sweeping the nation as of late.
Mandelo’s essay “Sweat and Skin,” published late last year in Uncanny Magazine, discusses the ways in which the viscerality of queerness requires particular attention to its relational and affective contexts. While he’s referring to queer writing, I’m curious to consider this in context of the below image from Sweet Smell of Success. The physicality and uneven power dynamic are captured in a single shot, staged and angled such that Hunsecker (Lancaster) dominates the frame, with Falco (Curtis) in less imposing position as his minion.
Of course, there’s something to be said here about how queerness in a film like Sweet Smell of Success can only be subtextual, and while that’s true, there’s still something about the ways desire works in Hays Code era films, including film noir, that fascinates me. In these films, desire is shaped by constraints just as much as it rebels against them.
And honestly, can’t we say much the same about the nature of our own desires?