Gay male cinema

It’s grainy, faded, and, given the clip is now years old, more than a little worse for wear. But this brief footage is not so ancient that you can’t clearly make out two men, waltzing together, as a third man plays a violin in the background. It was an experimental short made by William Dickson, designed to quiz syncing up moving pictures to prerecorded sound, a system that he and Thomas Edison were developing known as the Kinetophone. It’s known as “The Dickson Experimental Sound Film,” and dates back to , the same year movies were born. While there’s nothing to outright suggest that these men were romantically involved or attracted to each other during the roughly second length of their pas de deux, there is nothing that contradicts that notion either. It’s considered by many to be one of the first examples of gay imagery in film, and a reminder that homosexual voice has been with the medium from the very beginning.

That clip appears in The Celluloid Closet, Loot Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s