The Killer with Something Extra

The Killer with Something Extra IOLENT GAY CHARACTERS dialectics of good versus bad representa- have a long tradition in Ameri- JAMES POLCHIN tions, directing us to the contradictions and can theater. Their presence re- complexities of the particular works. For ex- flects both the homophobia of ample, in his discussion of the many stage V Murder Most Queer: the era in which they flourished and the and film adaptations of the real life murder- growing awareness of gay people as a so- The Homicidal Homosexual ers Leopold and Loeb, he shows how these cial reality. It’s easy to dismiss these figures in the American Theater retellings reflect larger shifts in cultural atti- today as horrible relics of an earlier time. by Jordan Schildcrout tudes about homosexuality and criminality. But there might be more going on in these University of Michigan Press In 1924, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, characters and the plots they inhabit than we 268 pages, $34.50 highly intelligent college students from assume, for both the playwrights who cre- wealthy Chicago families, murdered four- ated them and the audiences who came to watch. teen-year-old Bobby Franks. Their crime and subsequent trial be- Such is the premise of Jordan Schildcrout’s original, well-re- came a national story, and their sexual desires, real or imagined, searched, and immensely readable book. Looking at what he were an unspoken undercurrent of the newspaper reports. We feel terms the “homicidal homosexual” in the history of American this sexual tension in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rope (1948), which theater, Schildcrout asks us to rethink the links between deviant was adapted from an English play by Patrick Hamilton. In both, sexualities and murderous plot lines. While attentive to the two clever college students concoct a plan to enact the perfect threads of homophobia that shaped many of these characters, murder as they gleaned it from their Nietzsche-inspired professor. particularly in the pre-Stonewall years, Schildcrout offers his- But the boys’ murder of a classmate is eventually uncovered, and, torically nuanced readings of the murderous queer from the as in any good murder mystery, the killers are arrested and pre- 1920s to today. His aim is to explore the “forces that create the sumably imprisoned or executed, and social (and sexual) order is homophobic paradigm” making sexual and gender deviance restored. dangerous and destructive. More intriguingly, he also consid- The story is rendered much differently a decade later in Com- ers how queer artists have “rewritten and radically altered the pulsion (1958), a film based on Meyer Levin’s book about the significance of the homicidal homosexual” in more contempo- murder case. The two college-age protagonists are more sympa- rary theater. This is an ambitious task within this slim book, but thetic killers, their crimes part of a constellation of juvenile delin- Schildcrout manages well in balancing history and analysis in quencies that were the mainstay of much of 1950s popular this fast-paced work. culture. The film doesn’t simply end with the murder solved but Beginning with Mae West’s melodrama The Drag (1927), with a dramatic courtroom scene where the killers’ lawyer, played Schildcrout situates the play within the Wales Padlock Law by an earnest Orson Welles, successfully argues against the death passed in New York the same year, which prohibited the staging penalty, showing how the boys’ crime was a problem of social of a play “depicting or dealing with, the subject of sex degener- and psychological factors rather than an inherent moral degener- acy, or sex perversion.” The Drag did both, and added a homi- acy. By the 1990s, the gay director Tom Kalin appropriated the cidal homosexual for good measure. But as Schildcrout’s reading story in his atmospheric film Swoon (1992), creating a love story shows, the many homosexual figures in the play—as well as its between the killers, their crime a mere plot device for the ten- cabaret-style drag ball lifted from the many real balls of the sions in their relationship. In Schildcrout’s careful readings, he era—underscore how the play made non-normative sexualities shows how the meanings of these retellings go beyond the facts a theatrical subject. David Caldwell, the murderer in the play, of the killers and victim, and, like any good murder story, reflect had a failed relationship with the married Rolly Kingsbury, larger themes beyond the murder itself. which quickly turned deadly. While the play’s tension rests on The more intriguing chapters concern the post-Stonewall plays the trope of the spurned lover, Schildcrout argues it is Rolly’s where the trope of the homicidal queer is reinterpreted by gay and duplicitous and narcissistic nature that’s the real problem. In the lesbian playwrights. The camp experimental works of Charles end, David’s violence seems a justified purging of the lies within Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theatrical Company, for example, a heterosexual marriage. The Drag only showed in an off-off were often both praised and ridiculed by his audiences. Ludlam’s Broadway production in New Jersey and never crossed the Hud- Conquests of the Universe, or When Queens Collide (1967) and son for its debut. Along with Mae West’s very successful Broad- Bluebeard (1970) each presented an array of violent and campy way hit Sex, it was the victim of the Wales Padlock Law. West characters that encouraged the audience to root for “queer vil- was sent to jail for ten days and fined $500. Soon after, she went lainy.” Ludlam recounted how some gays and lesbians in the ’70s to Hollywood and found success in film. disapproved of some of his plays because they didn’t present a Throughout the book, Schildcrout asks us to think beyond the “respectable gay image,” adding: “in my plays, people exhibit ter- rible behavior because it’s showing the ridiculous side of life.” James Polchin teaches writing at New York University and is a fre- Such performances filled with monstrous (and often campy) quent contributor to this magazine. queer characters would emerge in popular and experimental per- 40 The Gay & Lesbian Review / WORLDWIDE.

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