The Queer Joy of Doris Day

The classic Hollywood star embodied a certain type of pure happiness all too rare in the movies or in real life

It’s no secret that Doris Day, who passed away at age 97 in 2019, was one of those stars of old Hollywood destined for immortality. Though she hadn’t appeared in a new film since 1968’s With Six You Get Eggroll and had been largely out of the public eye for several decades, her screen performances from the 1950s and 1960s were (and are) still perennial favorites among legions of fans, symbolic of a certain kind of stardom, a certain kind of all-American innocence. Given that she is currently the TCM Star of the Month and given that this is Women’s History Month, I thought it might be worth exploring why this is so in a little more detail, focusing in particular on her appeal to a certain demographic: the gays. 

It’s something of a truism that Day, like many other female stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, is something of a queer icon. What makes her queer idolization so striking, and in some ways unusual, is that she’s so unlike many of the other divas that gay men typically idolize. As a singer, she lacks the sort of brazen harshness of an Ethel Merman, and as an actress she seems to lack the steely spine and icy bitchiness of a Bette Davis or a Joan Crawford. However, when Day died there was an outpouring of grief from many in the gay community, with headlines acknowledging that her death marked the passing of a gay icon. 

Certainly, as many of the obituaries noted, some of her queer appeal can be attributed to one of her most iconic roles, that of Calamity Jane in the film of the same name. It is, arguably, one of the queerest films in the Day canon, or indeed in all of classical Hollywood. Not only does it feature Day in a delightfully gender-bending performance (though, as film scholar Robert J. Corber notes, the film ends up domesticating her, taming her queer energies in the service of the gender ideology of the Cold War), it also includes her singing the queer anthem “Secret Love.” If ever there was a song from a 1950s musical that was designed to become a queer anthem, it was that one. 

There was also the fact that she was unashamed of her friendship with the closeted gay man Rock Hudson—even appearing with him on television when it was clear that he was dying from AIDS. This was quite a risky move for someone with a reputation like Day’s. Though Day and Hudson had become one of the most iconic screen couples, it would have been very easy for 

There’s more to Day’s queer appeal than Calamity Jane and her friendship with Rock Hudson, however.  

To begin with, I think it’s important to point out that her appeal to queer men is, in some important ways, the exact opposite of what makes stars like Davis and Crawford so alluring: namely, her unabashed joy and her unself-conscious embrace of her own beauty. Day was one of those people that the camera truly seemed to love, whether it was her glorious blonde hair or her radiant smile. Even before she starts singing, you can’t help but feel yourself buoyed by her screen presence. It’s a species of glamour, I suppose, but not of the same type that attended other screen blondes like Lana Turner or Marilyn Monroe. Turner was the personification of the movie star while Monroe, as everyone knows, became the epitome of male sexual desire. Nor was it the sort of icy allure of a Grace Kelly or an Ingrid Bergman, both of whom exuded class, gentility, and just a hint of worldliness. Nevertheless, it’s too easy to say that Day had a virginal appeal (even though that’s how almost everyone refers to her these days). To my eye, there’s always just a touch of knowingness in her glance, a suggestion that she understands what’s going on and that she’s inviting us in on the joke. One sees it particularly strongly in her sex comedies with Rock Hudson, which were some of her finest efforts: though Rock is supposedly the one in control, you always have the sense that Day’s characters are the real heroes. 

It was when she started to sing, however, that Day really seemed to shine. There was a richness to her voice that’s hard to put into words, but there was also something inherently uplifting about it. Just listening to Day sing, you get the feeling that, despite the troubles outside, everything is going to be just fine, if only for the duration of the song. 

So great was her power as a star that she could elevate even relatively lackluster material. Take, for example, On Moonlight Bay, one of her early musicals. By the time the film was made she had already established herself as one of the biggest stars of Warner Brothers and of Hollywood in general, and the film was unsurprisingly a smash success (so much so that it produced a sequel, By the Light of the Silvery Moon).

 Having just recently seen it for the first time, I must admit to being a bit underwhelmed. In addition to being positively drenched in nostalgia, the film focuses far too much on the exploits of Marjorie’s younger brother Wesley (in both its hysterical nostalgia and its over-reliance on irritating child stars, it bears a striking resemblance to MGM’s Meet Me in St. Louis). However,  Day has an on-screen power that’s impossible to deny. In fact, she outshines her co-star Gordon MacRae to an extraordinary degree, and there were several moments in the film where I found myself thinking that I would have been just as happy if it were all about her without that pesky romance plot. There’s even a moment in which Day dances by herself in the snow, her body caught up in the joy of such self-expression; it’s a reminder that, when it came right down to it, she could carry a scene all by herself. 

What’s queer about all this, you ask? To begin with, Day begins the movie as a tomboy—she first appears dressed in a baseball uniform—but gradually feminizes herself in order to appeal to her love interest. Furthermore, it’s no secret that there has long been a strong relationship between the Hollywood musical and gay men, both because the over-the-top (and sometimes downright ridiculous) nature of the genre lends itself to camp irony and because the musical, to an extraordinary degree, opens up all sorts of spaces for gay desire and gay fantasy to have free rein, in a way that heterosexual culture, particularly the conformist culture of the 1950s, could never allow (for an excellent explication of this phenomenon, I highly recommend Brett Farmer’s book Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, and Gay Male Spectatorship). This is true even in a film like On Moonlight Bay which, like all musicals of that age, is primarily concerned with heterosexual courtship. Any time that Day decides to sing—whether that’s while she’s writing a love letter or enduring the irritating courtship of yet another fumbling suitor—the entire film seems caught up in her vocalization. It’s joy: pure, simple, unadulterated. 

It’s important to remember that, at the time many of Day’s films were released, the US was, to put it mildly, not the greatest place to be gay. Though a gay rights movement was in its infancy—the Mattachine Society was founded in 1951 and the Daughters of Bilitis in 1955—and while books like Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar were in circulation, for the most part postwar American society saw homosexuality as a problem to be corrected, an affliction that could potentially damage the very fabric of society itself. Faced with a world that saw them as a problem, it’s no wonder that many of them saw in Day’s beauty and her voice a solace and a balm. 

Let me be clear, however. I don’t mean to say that Day’s musicals are mere escapism; such an explanation is far too simplistic. Instead, I want to suggest that there’s something almost transgressive about how uplifting her persona is, how truly radical it is to have a star seem to embody—in her appearance, in her voice, and in her demeanor—the essence of pure joy. Certainly, there would be those queer viewers who would see in Day’s fluffy, sunny persona the key ingredients for camp appropriation. After all, some queens no doubt noted wryly, there’s no way that Day is quite as virginal as she pretends to be. However, it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to think that there were just as many who simply lost themselves in the pure feeling of the moment, allowing themselves to experience, if just for a bit, a happiness too often denied them in the real world. 

For me, as I’ve written elsewhere, Day is thoroughly intertwined in my imagination with my many memories of my late grandmother, with whom I often watched Doris Day movies. Though my grandmother never “knew” about my queerness—in the sense that we never explicitly talked about it—I sometimes wonder if she didn’t see in her queer little grandson someone who could take as much joy as she did in those movies of yore. When Day died, I remember sharing my sadness with my grandmother, who was just a year and a half younger. Now that my grandmother, too, has passed away, watching Doris Day is not just an experience of queer joy, it’s also a reminder of those many days watching her on-screen with my grandmother.

You can’t get much gayer than that.