Sapho Kiss: Queer Reproduction in Early Cinema

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1896 ‘the Nethersole kiss’ revolutionized the stage kiss and made legitimate-stage actress Olga Nethersole a household name. This article considers Olga Nethersole’s queer influence on the early erotic genres of the kissing film and the ‘stag’ film, arguing that she originated the mainstream Sapphic tropes of the twentieth century. Leaning on foundational texts by Shelley Stamp, Charles Musser and Linda Williams and drawing on recent work by Susan Potter and Russell Sheaffer, this article intervenes in the presumed ‘male only’ discourse of ‘stag’ during the early silent film era (1896–1907). Using original archival research including newspapers, catalogues, scrapbooks, and other ephemera such as erotic ‘French’ postcards, I reconsider a cluster of films that engage Nethersole’s onstage and offstage ‘character’, including The Kiss (Edison, 1896), Something Good – Negro Kiss (Selig, 1898), Sapho (Lubin, 1900), The New Kiss (Edison, 1900), Sapho Kiss (Lubin, 1900), In a Massage Parlor (American Mutoscope & Biograph, 1902), The Seven Ages (Edison, 1905), A Modern Sapho (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1905), and Under the Old Apple Tree (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1907). I demonstrate that these films constituted a racialized Sapphic authorial discourse that produced queer pleasures for early audiences by engaging Nethersole’s scandalous stardom. As a progenitor of early erotic screen genres, Nethersole must be contextualized in relation to the spectrum of erotic entertainment at the turn of the century from the ‘unobjectionable’ to the pornographic. In this context, I demonstrate how the intermediality of early cinema, so often understood through the heterosexualized metaphor of ‘birth’, is better understood as a form of queer reproduction.