Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934 by Laura Horak (review)

If Marlene Dietrich in Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930), Greta Garbo in Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933), and Katharine Hepburn in Sylvia Scarlett (George Cukor, 1936) are the cross-dressed women we know best in Hollywood cinema, they were certainly not the first. For Laura Horak in Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934, the status of these women in film history as early and unique representations of cross-dressing and lesbian desire tells us about common, false assumptions. Far from being rare, always transgressive, and the only code for lesbianism in American cinema, cross-dressed women before Dietrich, Garbo, and Hepburn were in fact given “multiple, contradictory meaning” (2) in American films from 1908 through 1934. Cross-dressing in film, Horak tells us, has a rich and complex history, one that has been ignored or misinterpreted and is now restored in her groundbreaking study.

Based on extensive archival research, Horak’s Girls Will Be Boys demonstrates how crucial cross-dressing was to the establishment of American cinema as a wholesome form of entertainment in the early years, before the practice became associated with sexual deviance in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Through the analysis of a multitude of extant and non-extant films including Westerns, Civil War dramas, adventure films, and comedies, and through detailed readings of many extra-filmic sources, such as reviews, advertising material, novels, plays, and health and sexuality treatises, Girls Will Be Boys also reveals how American cinema constructed not only gender and sexuality but also whiteness and Americanness through cross-dressing on and off screen, how ideas of masculinity shaped American womanhood, and how women participated in cinema’s construction of American white masculinity.

Looking to historicize cross-dressing during the early days of American cinema, Girls Will Be Boys is organized chronologically, with an “Intermezzo” about the changing “codes of deviance” in the 1920s popular culture between Parts I and II, which examine the “first wave” (1908–1921) and then the “second” (1922–1928) and “third” (1929–1934) “waves” of cross-dressed films respectively. With the example of A Florida Enchantment and its different iterations as a novel (1892), a play (1896), and a film (Vitagraph, 1914) in the “Intermezzo,” Horak argues that the 1920s marked a turning point, when cinema made alternative sexual identities visible to the general public by popularizing discourses about sexuality, psychology, and anthropology that were reserved to the elites until then. Before, during the “first wave” of cross-dressed films (1908–1921) treated in Part I, cross-dressed women and girls embodied American ideals through the portrayal of young white boys (“female boys” or “girl boys”) and masculinized young women, mainly cowboy girls and girl spies (“boy girls”). On the one hand, “female boys” or “girl boys” like the ones played by Marie Eline at Thanhouser and Edna Billy Foster at Biograph were borrowed from the stage theater and sentimental literature. They therefore contributed to the motion picture industry’s campaign for greater cultural legitimacy by personifying a Romantic and “sentimental ideal of boyhood” (24): “Female boys were considered more expressive, more beautiful, more innocent, and more vulnerable than boys played by male actors. By modeling and inspiring sympathy, female boys demonstrated that moving pictures could function as a sentimental moral education” (24–5). By 1915, however, the “sentimental boy,” was replaced by Douglas Fairbanks’s “red-blooded boy.” The “female boys” performances were deemed unrealistic, not because they came from the theater, but because the ideal of boyhood had changed and femininity was not a part of it anymore.

On the other hand, cowboy girls and girl spies (“boy girls”) like Gene Gauntier in the Nan, the Confederate Spy series (1909–1910), stood for a “virile national identity” (54) in frontier and Civil War films, which the motion picture producers hoped would appeal to both the working class and the middle class. Supposedly...