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Popular Culture Review
By the mid-1950s, similar policies existed in state and local
governments. More than twenty percent of the labor force had to sign oaths
attesting to sexual moral purity in addition to loyalty oaths to keep their jobs.
Vice squads raided homosexual bars and gathering places
Amid these repressive policies, a thriving gay and lesbian subculture
retaliated. Henry Hay formed the Mattachine Society in 1951 to begin a fight for
gay rights. Four years later, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon organized the
Daughters of Bilitis for lesbians. All these things were underway in 1953 wiien
Warner Brothers made Calamity Jane, and the film dealt, both explicitly and
subtly, with sexual deviation. Audiences of the 1950s learned to “read between
the lines” to find the subtle gay and lesbian subtexts in mainstream films. For
this reason, the film, though ultimately conservative, was a huge hit in the gay
and lesbian community.
In the end, both The Plainsman and Calamity Jane impart conservative
messages. Jean Arthur’s Calamity suffers for her defiant independence and
Doris Day’s Calam relinquishes her buckskins and her relationship with Katie
for marriage to a man. Both films are products of eras that encouraged social
constrictions. During both decades, marriage and family were the only
acceptable scenarios for independence-minded women. Behaviors discouraged
included dressing and acting like men, dykishness, doing men’s work and sexual
promiscuity. “Good” behaviors included submissiveness, feminine dress, and
monogamous heterosexual marriage.
If these two films shared the common goal of modifying a
nonconformist cultural icon to satisfy contemporary social norms, DeMille’s
was the most successful. Jean Arthur’s Calamity, though strikingly beautiful,
suffers in the end. She is a self-absorbed monstrosity who caused innocent men
to die. Audiences of the 1930s probably thought she deserved her plight of
heartbreak and destitution at the end of the film. Doris Day’s Calamity Jane, on
the other hand, was a less threatening figure. Her tomboyishness has a juvenile
quality, leaving open the possibility that she will grow into a mature and fully
heterosexual woman. She starts wearing dresses and marries. Curiously, though,
she retains her spunk—and her weapon. At the end of the film, when the two
happily married couples start to ride off into the sunset, Hickok discovers
Calam’s pistol. She smirks, “that’s in case any more actresses ride in fi’om
Chicagee.”^^ This “P.S.” could be the film’s acknowledgement that Eric
Savoy’s assessment of Day’s character is accurate. Though officially contained,
Calamity, keeps a smattering of her independent self—^perhaps a fitting reward
for her sacrifices.
Empire State College
Anna Louise Bates