My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them

Marlene Dietrich (1901): Falling in Love Again

47 Marlene Dietrich Falling in Love Again Walter Holland Iwas drawn to things German from an early age. My family had German heritage, but my real attraction was something more mired in the tragedy of World War II. The decadence and brilliance of the ’20s in Germany always held my interest. In the von Sternberg films with Marlene Dietrich, I got a taste of the deep, shadowy, restless world where beauty flirted with criminality, where life and death, goodness and sin were depicted in glittering silver and black. I knew the Weimar years had held “depravity,” “sexual depravity,” that was legend in the books my father bought about the prewar years. 48 Dietrich seemed to represent the mysterious European glamour I had read about, the romanticized concoction of artists such as Kafka, Mann, Lang, or Murnau. She carried a world-weariness on her young shoulders, and in her husky voice and cabaret ballads , I detected the allure of stranger things to come, my own inevitable collision with troubling desires and conflicting wishes. The Blue Angel, which I saw on late-night TV, suggested a sadness that made love appear dangerous, foolish, and humiliating. I intuited even then that I felt little attraction to women, but I knew Dietrich wouldn’t care. She would recognize me, shrug me off with just a stare and a knowing smile. It made no difference in the game of survival and hers had been a life of live-and-let-live. Recently I started reading Marlene’s autobiography in German and found my fascination with her renewed by her impassive tone of voice and her insistence that she was “made” and “created” solely by the vision of one man, Joseph von Sternberg, never a love interest, but a man who found her a medium for his ideas. She has reminded me of that unique relationship between gay men and female actresses as well as the female characters they have created to represent their innermost desires and thoughts. Marlene, herself, was known for her bisexuality, and in that I found a clue to her allure for me. In Morocco, when she stoops to kiss a young, pretty woman on the lips, tipping her silken top hat, her outfit that of a dandy, I remember feeling a moment’s shock as I stood, a young boy of twelve, in the basement of our house in Lynchburg, Virginia. How could a woman do that to another woman? What did it mean? Hers was a sophistication far beyond my upbringing in the American South, tied up in exotic locales, cabaret bars far beyond Monument Terrace in Lynchburg with its confederate statue and tobacco warehouse. From the moment I heard the famous lyrics to her song in The Blue Angel—“Falling in love again / Never wanted to. / What am I to do? / Can’t help it”—I knew that they were meant for me, for the young man who late on a winter’s night would walk across a Mar lene Dietr ich 49 three-mile campus in upstate New York to spend ten minutes groping a fellow male student in the quiet of his room, our underwear pulled to our ankles, fear and elation trembling through our bodies as I exploded on his knee, and then barely look back as he implored me to stay and have some tea. I knew that the love she sang about was dangerous. I knew it would be, after my Catholic upbringing, a compulsion. And, as Dietrich sang “I was made that way” later in the song, I knew exactly which “way” that was. I knew the life she was preparing me for. Marlene struggled with her home country, a country ruled by conservative forces. She took the side of the Allies during World War II, was called a traitor by Germany, and dealt with ill feelings in her native Berlin, but she returned anyway to show her solidarity , not with the fascist Nazi forces but with the suffering people. This sense of divided allegiance and betrayal in the face of great intolerance and violence, I felt, somehow related to my own experience many years later during the Reagan years in the United States and the advent of the AIDS epidemic. It took a certain courage for Dietrich, who became an American citizen, to renounce the political policies of her former country but not its people. I was made...