DIRECTOR DOUGLAS SIRK WASN’T QUEER, BUT HIS MOVIES WERE
DIRECTOR DOUGLAS SIRK WASN’T QUEER, BUT HIS PRODUCER WAS
Imitation of Life is a queer film not because of representation but because of sensibility, structure, and performance style — the same way All About Eve, Mildred Pierce, Sunset Boulevard and The Red Shoes are queer. Douglas Sirk’s final Hollywood film is a melodrama about race, performance, motherhood, and the American dream, told through two intertwined lives: Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), a white actress chasing Broadway fame, and Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), a Black domestic worker who becomes Lora’s housekeeper and emotional anchor. Within these stories, we have two additional narratives: Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner), Annie’s light‑skinned daughter who attempts to pass as white and Susie (Sandra Dee), Lora’s daughter, who grows up in the shadow of her mother’s ambition. The film tracks two parallel ascents: Lora’s rise to stardom and Sarah Jane’s desperate attempt to escape Blackness, and both trajectories end in varying degrees of failure: Annie’s death and Sarah Jane’s operatic, hysterical grief. And our realization that Lora’s glamorous career and luxurious surroundings create the appearance of a fulfilled life while concealing emotional emptiness and neglect. Susie, raised amid that privilege, likewise possesses all the outward trappings of happiness while longing for the intimacy her mother’s success has denied her. Their lives, too, are imitations: beautiful representations of the American ideal that fail to provide the happiness they promise.
Sirk uses melodrama not for sentiment but for surgical critique. Every glossy surface – Turner’s gowns, cinematographer Russell Metty’s magnificent Technicolor palette, the immaculate interiors — is a lie, a mask covering racial violence and emotional neglect. Both mothers are punished. Lora for ambition. Annie for devotion. Sirk’s cinema is inherently queer because it exposes the performative nature of identity, and Imitation of Life is his most explicit articulation of that idea. Sarah-Jane’s passing-for-white mirrors queer coding, while Annie’s invisibility mirrors queer invisibility. Meanwhile, Lana Turner’s performance is pure camp, always performing Lora, never simply being her. That said, this is one of Turner’s BIG THREE: three movies where she proved herself an actress (The Postman Always Rings Twice in 1946, and The Bad and the Beautiful in 1952 are the other two). Kohner and Moore are marvelous, both receiving well-deserved Oscar nominations for their work in the Best Supporting Actress category.
Imitation of Life is based on the 1933 Fannie Hurst novel, whose other works were filmed as Back Street [numerous times], The Four Daughters [remade as Young at Heart] and Humoresque. It was originally made as an early Code movie in 1934 by director John M. Stahl, with Claudette Colbert, Louise Beavers and Fredi Washington appearing in the Turner, Moore and Kohner roles, respectively. That movie, beautifully done, had minimal queer resonance; its emotional world is domestic, maternal, and conventional, with no diva‑camp architecture.
One has to add that queer producer Ross Hunter also loved lacquered surfaces, couture wardrobes, immaculate interiors and heightened (camp) femininity. Imitation of Life is, therefore, like Magnificent Obsession and All That Heaven Allows, the result of a producer and a director who were very sympatico. The finished movies speak for themselves.
Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue were both in the cast of Imitation of Life, though they never shared a moment on‑screen; Donahue appears only briefly as the lout who beats up Sarah Jane. That same year, the two became a marquee pairing—along with Max Steiner’s swooning score—in the runaway hit A Summer Place. Dee simultaneously scored her own breakout triumph with Gidget, a phenomenon that launched two sequels, both made without her.
Also starring John Gavin, Robert Alda and Dan O’Herlihy.
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