21. Night Nurse (1931)

Directed by William A. Wellman
Written by Oliver H.P. Garrett and Charles Kenyon
Starring Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Blondell, and Ben Lyon

Barbara Stanwyck’s gratuitous undressing feels more perfunctory than sexy. I mean, she’s just getting changed. But the male gaze doesn’t care, so long as there’s some skin. In one early scene, rather than share a bed with a life-size model skeleton, Stanwyck’s Lora curls up under the covers with Miss Maloney, a fellow nurse played by Joan Blondell. Holding Maloney close, Lora’s beatific expression reveals a kind of Boston marriage-like intimacy: tender and indeterminately erotic, or maybe not erotic at all. Sixteen or seventeen years ago, weeping in my dorm room after watching Heavenly Creatures for the first time, I longed to be Pauline Parker. She could love and experience the world in ways that I, as a boy, couldn’t. It’s hard to put into words. That’s one reason we have the word queer, right? To name something that resists definition. Lora takes a chance on a gold-hearted bootlegger, who knows some guys who can take care of things. A drunk mother conspires with her chauffeur to starve her kids for their trust fund money. Lora unveils her power move: a silent stare, arms akimbo. The mother confesses the obvious fact she’s a dypsomaniac, a word I’ve only really encountered in overwritten lit fic and Foetus Interreuptus’s album Thaw, which, along with The Faint’s Danse Macabre, I bought in 2001 at Digital Ferret, the goth record store right off of South Street. That same year, a friend of mine was at a house party with the shop’s reputedly skeevie owner. At one point, so the story goes, the skeevie owner said something like, “Anyone who’s not giving me a blow job can leave.” My friend left. A number of young women stayed. 2001 had a lot going on. I dressed in drag that Halloween. At a party, I made out with a young woman from my college while my friends stood around us and cheered. I think the woman got embarrassed and ghosted. I left soon after. Still in drag, I stood outside the dorm and smoked cigarettes with the security guard. We did this pretty regularly. I told him about crushing on the woman from the party, even though I was sure nothing would come of it. The security guard shrugged. “Women,” he said. I offered him another cigarette before he had a chance to ask. Dude never flinched at my leopard print skirt or blonde wig, in part because he was a cool guy, and in part because this was art school, and he had probably seen everything.