Inside ‘Fireworks’: America’s first openly gay narrative film
Narrating over the first few seconds of his film Fireworks, Kenneth Anger proclaims: “Inflammable desires dampened by day … are ignited that night by the libertarian matches of sleep, and burst forth in showers of shimmering incandescence.”
True to Anger’s poetic description, Fireworks is a surreal, cataclysmic exploration of queer desire too blindingly sensual to occur outside of darkness. An unassuming dreamer stirs in the night, sleepwalking through a door titled ‘gents’ to find an alluring sailor waiting in a bar. He gazes at the sailor’s muscles, seemingly enchanted until the sailor responds by embracing him with a brawl. This toxic amalgamation of violence and desire is only heightened as the film takes a nightmarish turn; the dreamer finds himself caught between a gang of sailors who beat him senseless. Stripped of all clothes, we see him writhe and climax in pain - soaked in blood and an ominous white liquid that can only be alluded to as … well. Finally, the film’s titular fireworks explode from the sailor’s crotch. The sailor and the dreamer cling to one another, and we end by returning to the panting dreamer in the night.
The Dreamer
If the plot sounds pretty heavy, you might be even more surprised that the film was released in 1947 - birthed into a tumultuous, post World War II society. Fireworks, with its overt themes of homoeroticism, coincided with a wider cultural paranoia that American society was in moral decline. At the time, homosexual acts were still illegal, and Anger himself was arrested in the mid-1940s as part of a ‘homosexual entrapment’. Dubbed the ‘Lavender Scare’ by historian David K. Johnson, there were even fears that homosexuality had supposedly ‘infiltrated’ the government.
Kenneth Anger
Considering this context, perhaps it is unsurprising to find that after a 1957 showing of Fireworks in LA, cinema manager Raymond Rahauer was arrested under obscenity charges. The case went to court, where prosecutors cited the cinema’s homosexual patrons and the “penis scene” in Fireworks. The verdict? That homosexuality and obscenity were most definitely conflated. Rahauer was found guilty and received a $250 fine.
But this isn’t to suggest that the film was only condemned to infamy. Famed playwright Tennessee Williams said that Fireworks was “the most exciting use of cinema I have ever seen,” while pioneering sexologist Alfred Kinsey - who posited that sexual orientation was a scale - bought the first copy. Later Rohauer’s charges were taken to the California supreme court, where in a landmark case for free speech, they were overturned. According to the court, homosexuality was a subject that could be explored in art.
The Dreamer and The Sailor
If anything, Fireworks had firmly solidified Kenneth Anger’s status in the counterculture. Not least because of its homosexuality, but also due to its shocking depictions of the military and abundance of occult imagery. Almost sardonically, he wrote “This flick is all I have to say about being seventeen, the United States Navy, American Christmas, and the Fourth of July.” Anger also took inspiration from the 1944 Zoot Suit riots in Los Angeles, where white sailors attacked Mexican men. Through an uneasy, phantasmagorical approach, Anger’s filmmaking inverts a national identity in turmoil. Part of Fireworks’ genius is this ability to merge all these explosive elements under the scintillating premise of a dream - a feat all the more impressive considering Anger was only 20 years old on the film’s release.
The Sailors
Anger would go on to echo his use of potent symbolism, homoeroticism and surreal narratives in films like Scorpio Rising (1963), which became the source of inspiration for directors like Martin Scorsese and David Lynch. But Fireworks, complete with its burning broadcast of queer desire, will always retain its revolutionary status as America’s first openly gay narrative film.
