Don't Drop The Soap, Girls

I got sucked into TCMs gay-a-thon last night. I watched three women-in-prison movies in a row. I guess if you're looking for gay imagery, that's where to find it. I didn't realize it was the gay-a-thon until after I laughed my ass off watching Ladies They Talk About with Barbara Stanwyck. She had gone to prison for armed robbery and one of the other girls was showing her around. While they were in the restroom, they notice a manly looking woman smoking a cigar. Lillian Roth, the experienced inmate, quips direly, "Watch out for her - she likes to wrestle." In another scene, the Lesbian is working out and her fluffy little girlfriend is lying on the bed admiring her muscles.

It's so cool to see stuff like that in old movies. I realize that homosexuals have it much easier now, but there is something sexy about keeping it subtle.

The second movie was Caged with Eleanor Parker as a young, nearly innocent girl who was sent to prison for helping her husband rob a convenience store. Agnes Moorehead plays a pragmatic, yet sympathetic prison warden, and Hope Emerson plays the brutal, sadistic prison matron from whence all other Gigantic Lesbian Prison Matrons sprung. I didn't see any outright homosexuality - even Hope Emerson claimed to have a man on the outside (a fact with which she taunted the inmates). But the implications were all there.

The third was So Young, So Bad. It's a sexy little movie about a girls' reform school. Rita Moreno blew me away. She was practically a baby in the film, but she was incredible. Hers was the stand out preformance for me along with the Lesbian girls, Jackie and Jane played by Anne Jackson and Enid Pulver. Anne Francis was good too as a seductive, blonde bad girl. She must have driven men crazy way back when.

So now after having stayed up all night looking for gay bits in movies and allowing Jethro to service me afterwards, I'm tired. But it was fun.