Culture Slut: Why Gloria Swanson isthe Ultimate Gay Icon, Part One
Words: Misha MN
Make it stand out
What becomes a legend most? This is the question I asked the last time I wrote about overlooked Gay Icons, and it remains the question I ask myself daily. When Blackglama first launched its record breaking advertising campaign, they collected stars as if they were Pokemon cards and displayed them for all the world to see, to be impressed by their reach and connections. The original cloutbombing. What do they all have in common? What connects Bette Davis, Gisele Bunchen, Diana Vreeland, Ray Charles? What becomes a legend most? Of course, the correct answer was that they all wore Blackglama fur coats, the finest mink American dollars could buy, but a more subconscious answer was that all of these icons of industry shared that inimitable quality that made them stars in the first place. If you look at a catalogue of stars, surely stardom can become quantifiable? No. Stardom is more esoteric than that, and the qualities of Icons are even more mysterious.
The Blackglama archives are in fact a great place to start when looking for Gay Icons that may have fallen out of favour for today’s youth. Gloria Swanson, Judy Garland, Racquel Welch, Marlene Dietrich, Maria Callas, Joan Crawford, Julie Andrews, are all incredible performers from yesteryear that set the gayboys hearts racing, but do they still matter?
These days we all know the Holy Trinity of Beyonce, Madonna and Britney, of Gaga and Taylor Swift and Ariana, and all the other pop girlies the gays worship - but queer culture has always been about the curation of history and shared references. Common experience binds more than just admiration. Bops are fun, but is anyone going to write a think piece about Charli XCX’s impact on the Monkeypox scare of 2022 forty years from now the same way we can look back on Elizabeth Taylor’s AIDS activism in the 1980s today?
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This is not to say I don’t believe in the power of a pop diva - my love of Cher, Madonna, and countless others speaks to the contrary - but I think there is a deeper quality to true Gay Icons, something more than gowns and gumption. As was famously said of right wing pundit Katie Hopkins on Celebrity Big Brother, a Gay Icon is more than just a bitch in a sparkly dress. There is something about Gay Icons that touch the culture, that create moments of power and recognition for their audiences.
Shirley Bassey in a moulting feather boa singing about choosing a life on the stage instead of settling down and getting married speaks to generations of queers for whom heteronormative life goals were never an option. Shirley Bassey is a Gay Icon. Taylor Swift, singing Bad Blood for the 700th time on the multi million dollar Eras tour, is not. Taylor is someone gays like, but in my opinion, not an icon. Yet.
Let's focus on an Icon straight from the Blackglama archive, an incredible actress whose personal style and cinematic presence has left an indelible mark on camp history. Born in 1899, Gloria Swanson (yes that’s her birth name) sweet talked her way into the early days of filmmaking, getting herself hired as an extra in 1914 and quickly working her way up and becoming a leading actress in silent films. She joined up with famous director Cecil B DeMille in 1919 and went on to make some of her most famous films, Male and Female, where she famously posed with a real lion on her back in a dungeon (with DeMille holding a pistol behind the camera should the lion start, ahem, chewing the scenery), and Beyond The Rocks (1922), playing opposite the world’s most famous lover, Rudolph Valentino.
“Queer culture has always been about the curation of history and shared references.”
Swanson became the most bankable star of her era, even starting her own production companies and making the films that she thought would serve her best. Her wardrobe was legendary, the most glamorous furs and couture garments, and her beauty was unmistakable. Her eyes, her nose, her mouth, each one alone could have dominated a lesser face, but for some reason they worked in a unique harmony on hers. She began to fade from public consciousness a little in the 1930s and 40s, her brand of intense pseudo-exotic glamour falling out of favour for more feel-good escapist romantic fantasies and then proud stoic heroic home dramas, but she returned in the 50s in a big way.
Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard came out in 1950 and Swanson set the world on fire. She plays the notorious Norma Desmond, a silent film star that became a recluse in her Hollywood mansion - a sinister spider woman, terrified of ageing and being forgotten. When a hapless young screenwriter stumbles into her life, she sees her chance at making a comeback and begins an affair with him.
Swanson is magnetic, titanic, volcanic, every word you’ve ever heard describing a career defining performance from an actress. Furnished with one of the greatest screenplays ever written, her pronouncements are still eminently quotable. “I am big, it’s the pictures that got small,” is a perennial favourite, as is “We didn’t need dialogue back then, we had FACES!” Her affair with a younger man was considered so ominous that the camera had to pan away whenever the couple came in close for a kiss. Norma’s love rival is the young beautiful secretary who also has dreams of being a screenwriter and links up with our hero, clearly the wholesome, natural alternative to the overpowering ageing demon goddess locked in the mansion.
The film is full of meta references, casting a huge star from the silent era as a parody of herself, mentions of the actors she knew and things she had done (“Valentino danced on this floor!”), and even in her final unhinged moments on screen; “OK Mr DeMille, I’m ready for my close up!”
In one scene she invites old friends over for bridge, and they are in fact real figures from Hollywood history, Buster Keaton the silent comedy star and Hedda Hopper, the famously vicious gossip columnist, not to mention the fact that her butler (and former husband!) is played by Erich von Stroheim, one of the great German directors of the 20s. There is nothing Hollywood loves more than Hollywood, the act of feeding into its own legends, which is why there will always be films about people who make films, who put on shows, who are great actors. From Busby Berkeley’s 42nd Street (1933) to John Cassavetes’ Opening Night (1977) to Paul Verhoven’s Showgirls (1995), a star’s traffic on the stage will always be relevant. Show business is enamoured with show business.
When audience perception and all the elements from reality converge with dramatic storytelling, rumours are born, and then rumours become part of the legend. After this film came out, it became the accepted narrative that Swanson was a bitter diva, someone who lost everything and lived in a fantasy world until she was rediscovered, when in fact that was completely untrue.
Swanson was always decidedly modern, indeed her nowness, her vitality, was one of the things that propelled her to stardom in the first place. After her film career started to slow down she pursued many of her other passions, her production company, her radio career, her personal life. This confluence of rumour, assumption and legend came together to create a revisionist history of her stardom (and it’s decline), much like Ryan Murphy’s Feud does for the relationship between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford (not as dramatic as you’d think), and in Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood, which imagines an alternative history of Hollywood where barriers are broken and intersectionality was allowed to flourish in the movie industry.
Good stories last longer than reality ever does, which is why legend is more important than fact. Today, the amount of people who think Anna May Wong actually did win an Oscar just because it happened on a Ryan Murphy show is shocking, especially considering it was pretty much a niche-interest drama to begin with. Even connoisseurs love claptrap if it’s entertaining enough - good stories last longer than reality ever does, which is why legend is more important than fact.