“The season’s most provocative lesbian sequence was in Cecil B. DeMille&rsqu

“The season’s most provocative lesbian sequence was in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932). The film, adapted from an 1895 British stage play, depicts the conflict between a Christian community and the powerful Roman state, headed by Nero (Charles Laughton). Nero’s right-hand man, Marcus Superbus (Fredric March), falls in love with a young Christian woman, Mercia (Elissa Landi). Though he tries to bring her around to the Roman way of life, her faith eventually inspires him to face the lions with her. Despite the film’s Christian message, it was packed with eroticized, violent spectacle, including gorillas and alligators attacking nearly nude women in chains, a battle between Amazons and Little People, and packs of lions attacking and eating Christians. Reprising the bacchanalia in Manslaughter (1930), female same-sex desire is embedded in the sexual excess of ancient Rome. There are no female inverts, although some of the men are sissyish, particularly Nero. The first potentially lesbian moment occurs when Nero’s wife, Empress Poppaea (Claudette Colbert), bathes in a pool of asse’s milk. After slipping off her robe and lowering herself into the milk, Poppaea invites a female slave to join her. The camera modestly looks away, panning to two cats lapping milk from the edge of the pool. This look away suggests that a sexual encounter might occur; the lapping cats intimate oral sex.”

-FromGirls Will Be Boys Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934 by Laura Horak