Queen of Outer Space — the inspiration for a scene in my play Drag Queens in Outer Space. I thought it was undiscovered camp; it seems that it may have been conceived as camp from the start. The story was by Ben Hecht (Hollywood royalty) — but the actual screenplay was by Charles Beaumont. (It was then touched up by Ellwood Ellwand and director Edward Bernds -- both of Three Stooges fame). I think Beaumont is the key; I looked him up — now I want to know everything about him. His mother dressed him up in women’s clothes (duh!) and he died of Alzheimers at age 38. That should be quite enough; but one must also mention that his real name was Leroy Charles Nutt, and he wrote many famous episodes of The Twilight Zone. He also wrote a story for Playboy (1955) called 'The Crooked Man,' about a world in which heterosexuality was strange and homosexuality was normal. He was — as you may have guessed — undoubtedly gay (i.e. there’s no personal information about him on Wikipedia). Sontag would have labeled this film ‘intentional’ camp — which she says doesn’t work (but in the hands of Oscar Wilde or John Waters, it does). ‘Unintentional’ camp is so lousy it’s funny by accident. I think what we have here is a film that was supposed to be a comedy (Hecht was a comedy writer). I mean what a riot: a woman is in charge of the universe! (What could be a loonier than that?) Well Leroy Charles Nutt — a homo of no little talent — took this and turned it into lines like “How could a bunch of women invent a gizmo like that? And even if they invented it how could they aim it? You know how women drivers are!” Yes, that is actually a line from this movie, which might be simply repulsive, if only Nutt wasn’t making fun of sexism. The direction of this movie makes it seem like it's unintentional camp -- the director just doesn’t get it. Nutt wrote from a gay perspective -- the straight men in this movie are far more ridiculous than the women, they run around ejaculating in a typically bone-headed way: when the dumbest of the space explorers Patrick Waltz sees a 'hot chick' he remarks: “Mike, how’d you like to drag that to the senior prom!” A straight man could not have written that line. Only a gay man would understand the fundamental absurdity of a kind of self-aggrandizing masculine posturing that so deeply insults women. I feel Leroy Nutt, and the dresses his mother put him in, and even the hints of his advancing Alzeheimers — in every word of this screenplay; Queen of Outer Space is just that close to being a feminist document — just as I think my play was (or certainly was intended to be). It’s a near miss only because the leading roles are played by women. Zsa Zsa Gabor is the star (not the queen of the title but Tallea — her foe), and she said in her memoirs that her gay friends tittered when she suddenly confesses (in the film)— “I hate that queen!” — a line I couldn’t resist, and incorporated into my script. I also incorporated — no stole — (let’s face it, I can see now that I owe a lot to the unsung L.C. Nutt) the scene in which the ‘iron-jawed’ Eric Fleming rips the mask off the queen of outer space revealing her terrifying scars — “Radiation burns! Men did this to me! Men and their wars!” (But Leroy and I both stole this from from Marlene Dietrich in Witness for the Prosecution who pulls back her hair and crows — ‘Would you like a kiss, Ducky?” revealing her terrifying scars to the eternally submissive and somewhat inept Tyrone Power.) The dramaturgical core of Queen of Outer Space (and the scene in my play) — is that the queen who rules over men with a sadistic fury is to be pitied, not scorned, for she is not only physically scarred but emotionally scarred — by her tragic inability to love men. This is indeed what shocks the crew members of this dinky little spaceship that falls off course onto another planet. No, it is not so much the dense dried Venusian foliage, or the horror of the ‘Baker Disintegrator’ (is that really what it’s called?) but merely the tiniest hint of the revolutionary notion that these women might actually hate men. Early on a furious female hurls herself at one of the space guys saying ‘I hate you!” This foreshadows Valerie Solanas, author of The SCUM (The Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto; she also shot Andy Warhol. (SCUM is quite a good book. I rarely mean anything I say. In this case, I do). In the hands of a closeted screenwriter like Leroy Charles Nutt, viewed by a 50s audience, there was no hope people would see the central dilemma of this tortured queen — who banished men from her life because they are heartless, but truly needs them — as anything but a critique of feminism (which didn’t, remember, even exist in 1958). In --Drag Queens in Outer Space — in contrast — I cast men in drag, in a play written by a flaming fag (me). I was trying to make people understand that the central thesis of Queen of Outer Space is fundamentally sexist — that, sadly, the only way we can imagine women as powerful is if we also imagine that lust for power as caused by a tragic failure of romance. Was Hillary in despair after Monica? Or a lesbian? Or perhaps she just eats children? She couldn’t possibly have been in any way actually a competent leader. When we imagine women as tragic and evil we are imagining them as gay men. I do wish I could go back in time and be at Lee’s Palace, doing the play again. I think most of all I miss 'The Space Ballet,' which was basically just Leonard Chow, God love him, fighting off space demons in a miniskirt with his powerful ray gun that didn’t shoot anything. Leonard’s sweet charm as Judy Goose is forgotten — like so many who died of AIDS. In Drag Queens on Trial, this Asian actor was framed as an indigenous drag queen — something that probably wouldn’t be allowed today. (Judy's motto was: ‘Born on a sled, downhill from there!’) I remember how afraid we were back then; back when there really was something to be afraid of. I think it is to our detriment, that we have forgotten what that means.
