[Pride 2021] Pride of Frankenstein

I live less than 10 minutes away from where James Whale was born, the person without whom ‘Universal Classic Monsters’ wouldn’t be a thing. And yet, it took me until I was nearly twenty years old to even hear the name James Whale, let alone realise that the ‘Father of Frankenstein’ grew up a few miles away from where I did. Oh, and that, like me, he was a gay man.

How many queer heroes remain hidden in relative obscurity?

I’m not that far off forty now, proudly married to a man, emotionally stable (most of the time) and owner of my own home (mortgage notwithstanding). From this distance, it seems ridiculous that there was a time in my life where I had to hide my viewing habits. But I know I’m not the only person my age who had their most formative viewing experiences late at night, after the family had gone to bed, with the volume of the TV turned down low.

Gods and Monsters was one of those experiences; a film I knew, instinctively, to be gay, well before a character referred to its protagonist as such. The drama depicts the final days of Whale, the director of several of Universal’s most beloved (not to mention remade and referenced) movies, including The Invisible Man, Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. Gods and Monsters is partly fictionalised; Brendan Fraser’s hunky marine turned gardener turned object of desire is a complete fabrication, although a welcome one (he’s very desirable). But there is a lot of truth in there about Whale himself.

Whale was a more or less openly gay man who fought the odds, working his way up to being, for a brief time, one of Hollywood’s hottest directors. He was born, however, into a working class family in Dudley, in the Midlands of England. 

I have always lived within a half an hour’s travel time of Dudley. Perhaps this is why I feel a particular affinity with Whale and even a sense of local pride. As queer people, we latch on to anyone who seems to be like us, especially those of us who grew up feeling very alone in an era without the internet. When I saw Gods and Monsters on the BBC late at night, I saw another gay man, traumatised by his gayness, who had grown up in the same part of world as myself. It might not sound like much, but we take representation where we can find it, and it was enough for me.

The screenplay to Gods and Monsters presents Whale’s birthplace of Dudley as being in the “North of England”, which, if you’re from London, it is. But ask a Northener about Dudley and they will declare it to be in the South. Ask a Midlander and we will resist such binary oppositions and steadfastly refuse to be either North or South.

We Midlanders seem destined to be born and bred on contrariness.

The ‘Dudley’ which is flashbacked to in Gods and Monsters (as recreated somewhere in Los Angeles) is a Dickensian nightmare of industrial machinery and smog. In fairness, it’s not far off what it must have been like. Dudley is in the heart of the ‘Black Country’ after all, named for the colour of its skies (J R R Tolkien, who lived around here, used his childhood impressions of the area to create the nightmarish Mordor in The Lord of the Rings).

Although most of the factories have closed down nowadays, many Midlanders are proud of the area’s industrial heritage. And you can’t escape the reminders: the remnants are everywhere. My own back garden runs past a canal (it was one of the reasons we bought the house) and my running route takes me through a nature reserve which was once a colliery, quarry and iron works. The undulating ground makes it a varied landscape to jog around and the evocative mounds of furnace slag haven’t shifted an inch for more than a century, since the iron works closed.

Although the Midlands made pretty much everything at one point, we have never been known for having an especially rich filmmaking tradition. Aside from in Peaky Blinders, it’s still rare to hear anyone with a Midlands accent in a film or TV series. So whenever a reference to the Midlands pops up, I immediately jump on it. 

From all accounts (including the one presented in Gods and Monsters) Whale did not have a happy Midlands childhood. How could he, being so ‘artistically inclined’? While this might sound like a euphemism for being gay it was literal in Whale’s case. The son of a blastfurnaceman and a nurse, the young James stood out like a sore thumb. Discovering he had some artistic ability, he scrabbled together money from day jobs to pay for evening classes. When the First World War broke out, he signed up before being conscripted. As shown in Gods and Monsters, he had some traumatic experiences in the war, but must have also found it liberating. He was drawn to projects about the ‘War To End All Wars’, either as a form of therapy or to recreate a time in his life where he felt comparatively free (probably both). Whale actually made his name by staging a production of R C Sheriff’s trenches-set (and homoerotic) play Journey’s End in London. This success led him to Broadway and then Hollywood.

It’s tempting to see this as the now archetypal (and true for many) story of a gay boy cutting all ties with his hometown, moving away to find his place - and greater acceptance - among the bright, cosmopolitan lights of the big city. And the cities don’t get much bigger than in Whale’s case: London, New York, LA. 

But I would argue that although Whale left his birthplace behind, he never relinquished his West Midlands mindset. The subversive sense of humour in his films is very recognisable to me: it’s my own sense of humour and that of my friends and family. We all share an unwillingness to take anything terribly seriously, even when - especially when - things are going terribly. It’s a coping strategy of a kind.

Maybe this is a Midlands thing. It’s definitely a gay thing: why take seriously institutions that go out of their way to exclude you? Marriage, religion, society as a whole… Nothing is sacred in a James Whale film, even death. 

Would the first viewers of 1931’s Frankenstein have realised that we’re supposed to identify with the undead monster and not buy the deathly-dull heteronormative relationship between Henry Frankenstein and his fiance Elizabeth? Most of the Universal monster movies have an insipid heterosexual relationship running through them. And these elements are universally boring.

The Bride of Frankenstein, widely seen as the apotheosis of the Universal monster movies, is quite possibly the gayest film of all time. The James Whale played by Ian McKellen in Gods and Monsters describes it as a ‘comedy about death’, which would not have made for an effective tagline in 1935 but is about as apt a description as you can get. Although not without its pathos (the famous - and much referenced - scene where the Monster makes friends with a blind violinist), the film is mostly hilarious.

The main character is neither Frankenstein nor his Monster. Even the titular Bride only gets about four minutes of screentime, appearing right at the end like a catwalk reveal on Ru Paul’s Drag Race (no wonder several queens have emulated her lewk on the show). The protagonist is really Dr Pretorius, an original creation not in Mary Shelley’s novel, who presents Dr Frankenstein (played, as in the first film, by queer actor Colin Clive) with a Faustian pact. Pretorius’ proposal that they make new life together is conveniently timed to interfere with Frankenstein’s marriage plans. Before release, 15 minutes was cut from the film showing Pretorius and Frankenstein using the organs of Frankenstein’s fiance to complete their Bride. In the finished film, Elizabeth gets to live, restoring some of the heteronormativity. But, to be honest, it’s too little too late. By The End, we’re left with the impression that we’ve just had a very queer experience indeed.

As Pretorius, queer actor Ernest Thesiger, queens it up in every scene, just as he did in The Old Dark House, the film Whale made after 1931’s Frankenstein. Some of the dialogue is even the same: in both Dark House and Bride, Thesiger’s characters boast they have a predilection for gin. At the time of the films’ release, this would have been read as the character having feminine traits (gin = Mother’s Ruin). The recent resurgence in gin’s popularity - particularly among gay men - makes this dialogue feel thrillingly modern.

Also thrillingly, for a Midlander eager for representation like myself, James Whale set The Old Dark House near Shrewsbury, a town on the edge of the West Midlands. Boris Karloff also appeared in that film, as a monstrous, guilty family secret living in the attic, an even more Freudian presence than his more famous role as Frankenstein’s Monster. It doesn’t take a giant leap of the imagination to make the connection between Whale and all of his monsters: they’re all outsiders, the misunderstood black sheep of their families who yearn to make some kind of meaningful connection with someone like themselves.

There’s so much to say about the gayness that permeates the Bride of Frankenstein and it shocks me that so many critics, even recent critics, attempt to downplay it. Leaving aside that most of the principal actors and many of the people behind the scenes were queer themselves, some argue that Whale never consciously intended Bride or any of his other films to be read in this way. Even his own biographer, James Curtis, found little in the way of gay stuff to comment on. Was he just trying to protect Whale’s legacy or was he watching different films to the ones I’ve been watching?!

As for Whale’s home town of Dudley, how keenly is his legacy felt there? I went for a walk there recently to see for myself.

A memorial sculpture to Whale was unveiled in 2002. It’s an eye-catching monument: iron reels of film featuring Karloff’s face sitting atop a concrete plinth. But I can’t help feeling it gets overlooked by many. I have visited this place numerous times over the years but even I was oblivious to the memorial’s existence until very recently. 

Locating it within sight of a multiplex cinema is appropriate considering Whale’s profession and the cinema is only half a mile outside the town centre, but surely a more central location would be more appropriate for someone of his stature? Why not actually in the centre alongside the town’s other famous son, Duncan Edwards, a footballer who died the year after Whale?

And although the sculpture is inscribed with the names of his most famous horror movies, there’s no information about the man himself. In comparison, Duncan Edwards’ statue (which is a figure of Edwards, not an abstraction like the Whale sculpture) is accompanied with a list of his achievements, an epitaph and, crucially, ‘Born in Dudley’. The only text on Whale’s memorial is his name and (some of) his most famous film credits. There’s nothing to identify him as being born just down the road, in adjacent Brewery Street, and certainly no mention of his being a trailblazing gay film director. Duncan Edwards also gets Dudley’s main road named after him. Will Dudley Council be doing the same for James Whale next time a new road is built?

In 2012, Dudley Museum staged a small exhibition about Whale. The only article to appear in the local press about it went some way towards educating people about Whale’s influence on the horror genre but declined to mention anything concerning his sexuality. 

The nearby Black Country Living Museum, which brings history to life with period buildings and characters (it’s like Disneyland for history buffs), has included Whale as part of special exhibitions but is yet to install anything more prominent or permanent, and I don’t recall them ever mentioning his gayness.

In 2019, a young filmmaker born in Dudley announced that he was making a short dramatic film about Whale. And although the project was put on hold due to the pandemic, writer-director Daniel Titley has said that he still intends to complete his film, entitled ‘Still Alive’, based on the premise that Whale is not as well known as he should be. In an interview with the local press, Titley made a point of acknowledging Whale’s gayness, so hopefully this will make it into the finished film.

In the meantime, I wonder how many of Dudley’s queer kids realise that someone like them, who lived just down the road, is responsible for some of the most famous and influential films ever made. How many walk past that memorial and have no idea who James Whale even was?

On my recent walk around the neighbourhood where Whale was raised - one of the most deprived in the Midlands - I could not find anything to link to Whale. None of the buildings were of the period where Whale lived there, presumably because they were all torn down after being declared unfit to live in. Even the pub - now closed down - dates only as far back as 1925. Whale was born in 1889.

We’re used to having queer history hidden or obscured. Sometimes it happens by accident, sometimes by conscious design. Fortunately, the works of queer filmmakers endure even if their lives fade in the memory. But is that enough?

It’s been 90 years since James Whale directed Colin Clive to camp it up, screaming “It’s alive!” as he brought Boris Karloff’s inanimate corpse back to life. I believe we owe it to the next generation of queers to do whatever we can to keep alive the memories of those who came before us. And if an impoverished gay boy who scraped together the money he needed to realise his creative potential, who went on to become the toast of the movie world, isn’t someone worth remembering, someone to be proud of, then I don’t know who is.