Nikki Mayeux

The Children’s Hour, Queer Erasure, and All the Things That Don’t Have Names

[cw: mention of suicide in film]

When I was seventeen, one of my greatest introverted only-child pleasures was renting a fat stack of VHS's from the "independent" and "classic" sections of my neighborhood Video Joe on a Friday night and staying up until three A.M. watching them all by myself in my room. This was one of the few ways I could access stories outside of my white suburban Evangelical bubble, especially queer stories. I saw Hedwig and the Angry Inch this way, and Rocky Horror, Pulp Fiction, Cabaret, Boys Don't Cry. But nothing ever struck a chord in me quite like a little-known 1961 film based on a Lillian Hellman play called The Children's Hour, starring Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine.

In the film, set in the 1930's, MacLaine and Hepburn are childhood best friends who run a girls' boarding school together. Looking for attention from her grandmother, a student tells a lie about the women being lesbians, which ruins their professional and personal lives. But the Shakespearean tragedy occurs when Martha (MacLaine) confesses to Karen (Hepburn) that although the rumor was a lie, the suggestion was true—she was in love with her and always had been. She confesses this in a climactic coming-out scene in the parlor of the school, first screaming at Karen to listen to her and then shrinking from her touch as though she were coated in poison.

MARTHA: "You're afraid of hearing it, but I'm more afraid than you. You've got to know, I've got to tell you—I can't keep it to myself any longer. I'm guilty … I lie in bed night after night praying that it isn't true, but I know about it now. It's there … I can't stand to have you touch me, I can't stand to have you look at me! It's all my fault, I've ruined your life and I've ruined my own. I swear I didn't know, I didn't mean it … I feel so damn sick and dirty I can't stand it any longer."

Now, almost one hundred years after the setting of the film and sixty after its production, most contemporary viewers feel unsettled by this scene. We are uncomfortable with the depths of Martha's shame over her queerness. We want to recoil from her even as she recoils from Karen's hand on her shoulder. Twenty-first century films don't tell this story about queer femmes anymore—Martha's story—even if they're set in similar historical eras. They tell Carol's story, or Heloise's. The despair and the selfflagellation here, it's … embarrassing.

What does it say then, that teenage me connected more deeply to this near century-old narrative than I did to any hopeful story of queer liberation in technicolor? What does it mean that I saw myself in Martha but not in Sally Bowles, or Magenta? I understood Martha when she watched Karen achingly from across the room. I understood her when she hurled herself out of the closet like an exorcism. And yes, I understood her when Karen finds her body hanging from the tree outside the window. I watched The Children's Hour alone in my bedroom at age seventeen and knew in my bones that I was Martha, and that the best I could hope for would be a tidy life tinged with secret longing. Her despair was not melodrama to me—it was a warning.

Fifteen years later, I'm happy to be living a life that is neither tidy nor secret. It is rich, complex, and queer as hell, through a series of small humanist miracles that lead me out of religion and into myself. At some point, I stopped fearing Martha's fate would be my own, but I never stopped understanding her, and I never ever forgot her.

While researching The Children's Hour recently for a workshop, I ran across a clip from a 1995 documentary called The Celluloid Closet, about LGBTQ+ representation in cinema history. In an interview, MacLaine reflects flatly, "We didn't do the picture right." She explains that if the film we released today there would be a rightful outcry about Martha's characterization, and says that it never even occurred to the filmmakers to envision anything other than abject misery for her. "No one questioned [the scene], or what that meant, or what the alternatives could have been under the dialog … This subject matter wasn't in the lexicon of our rehearsal period. Audrey and I never talked about this."

Hearing that really fucked me up, y'all.

I thought about it for days after. I'm still thinking about it. This story that was so formative for me, the scene that was so pivotal, the confession that could have been ripped straight from my own throat … and they never even spoke about it? They never said the words?

But that's what erasure feels like. It's the phantom pains of a thousand betrayals that you'll never hear about, in rooms where you aren't present. It's all the parts of yourself that you can't love because you can't name them, so you become your own ghost. It's no one even considering what the alternatives could have been.

The Video Joe near my childhood home is a Family Dollar now, has been for well over a decade. I wonder where all the inventory went when it shuttered, and if that VHS copy of The Children's Hour made its way into anyone else's hands before its eventual, statistically likely demise in a south Louisiana landfill. I've re-watched that coming out scene many times, but never the whole film. Sometimes things serve you best in your memory, and I like to keep Martha there. I try to protect her. And in more ways than I am able to give language to, I try to live for her.

Nikki Mayeux is a queer ex-Evangelical writer and educator from the strangest city in the Deep South, New Orleans. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans and works in special education advocacy. She also performs public storytelling and produces SANCTUARY, a performance series uplifting stories of religious trauma and deconstruction. Her work has been featured in Infection House, Dinner Bell, Room 220, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, Ordinary Time, is available at Tilted House. nikkimayeux.net • @nikki.mayeux